Turn off your cell phones! Enjoy this 30 second Librian Ninja episode.

POSTED BY THE BOOKHOUND

What I wanted was Steak. What I got was Tilapia. Although not as spectacularly colored next to the haricot vert (a green string bean with French attitude) that would accompany it; the price was too good to pass up. So this led me to wonder- are rising food costs changing the way we eat? I don’t remember eating Tilapia as a child, yet to be sure, it graces the plates of my family often enough to be mentioned.

Fish might just be the new steak, (you know- like flying monkeys are the new dog…), so I’ve done a little internet ‘fishing’ myself, and have found a modicum of proof, so read up on Tilapia’s role in our current dietary culture on SeafoodSource.com.

In honor of our delicious (and affordable) friends- the BookHound offers you ‘How to Cook Fish‘, by Myrtle Reed. Fish- it’s what’s for dinner. And what has been for dinner since this beauty was published back in the late 19th century!

Chock full of little yummies, this’ll give you a fab retort when everyone is standing around whining, ‘what’s for dinner?’ In a snap, you can tell them that they can choose one of TWENTY FIVE different ways to have their whitefish. Seriously.

Fan of eel? Lucky- you have forty-five recipes at your disposal!

Pretty soon- you’ll forget all about that filet mignon, and head straight for your local fishmonger.

You know what they say…’Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish; and you have fed him for a lifetime”…give a man ‘How to Cook Fish’, and he’ll soon have a party in his mouth.

We have rescued this culinary classic and re-published it in both large or small print. Or you can read it for free online at Gutenberg.org.

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A couple of excerpts from a great article by Nicholas Carr I read in The Atlantic flying to American Library Association show in Anaheim last week (yes, on paper…). The article is discussing how “gathering information” online is changing our brains in a way unprecedented in history thus far.

The whole articles is available here: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/google

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“Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.”

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“As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”

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“We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.

* (illustration from Bouncing Stars Artist Journal)