I think the book I spotted being sold as we finished the Labor Day Mackinac Bridge Walk was Mighty Mac: The Official Picture History of the Mackinac Bridge. But I’m not sure. We were tired, and thousands of people were streaming over the bridge behind us from St. Ignace to Mackinac City. Earlier the governor had jogged over across the five-mile-long span, the Detroit Free Press reported. Very impressive. The walk left me wanting to read the children‘s book Mackinac Bridge: the story of the five-mile poem by Gloria Whelan illustrated by Gijsbert van Frankenhuyzen.

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Routes Affected: 1U Pontiac-University, 4 Washtenaw, 7 South Main-East, 8 Pauline, 9U Jackson-University, 12UL Liberty-University, 12UM Miller-University, 14Geddes-East Stadium and 16 Ann Arbor-Saline Road.

Go to AATA Changes Starting 8/24/08

The World Trade Center towers were not the first of New York’s skyscrapers to be hit by an airplane. On July 28, 1945, the Empire State Building withstood the impact of a U.S. Army Air Corps B-25 bomber. Fourteen lives were lost, but the steel structure remained standing after the unarmed trainer plane slammed into the building’s 79th floor. The accident was ruled by authorities to be caused by pilot error, after Lieutenant Colonel William F. Smith Jr., a decorated veteran of World War II and experienced pilot, apparently lost his way in the dense fog that had enveloped Manhattan that Saturday morning in July. Read all about this, and other interesting Empire State Building history, in John Tauranac's The Empire State Building : the making of a landmark. For you artsy readers, check out American photojournalist Lewis Hine's Lewis W. Hine : the Empire State Building.

olympics

If you are heading to Beijing to support our atheletes, you might want to check out this blog site before packing your bags. Globespotters offers urban advice from reporters who live there.

Beijing Basics are for smart travelers who plan ahead - with information from airports, getting into town, using the subways, to finding an English-speaking doctor.

If your travel plans include other equally exotic locales such as Mumbai, Bangkok, Moscow or Istanbul, you will be glad you did you homework. Travel safe.

New York Times Logo

The New York Times is offering a new service called "My Times" (http://my.nytimes.com) (currently still in beta phase). It's basically a customizable news page composed of various widgets that draw news from the New York Times or various RSS feed sources. If you're into this sort of thing, you should probably check it out.

Of special interest is the "Journalists' Pics" section. Here you'll find a variety of New York Times writers (neatly categorized by their areas of expertise) who will share with you their suggested sources. Blogging and the like is influencing traditional journalism more and more, so it's pretty interesting to see what sort of blogs traditional journalists read.

If you're not into this sort of thing (or don't even know what I'm talking about) but would like to learn more, then the library can help. We offer a variety of computer classes. In particular, there's a class on blogging on Feb 4th and RSS on Feb 20th.

tase

It's time once again for Lake Superior State University's 2008 Banished Words List and it is what it is. A varied list this year reflecting the surge in Post 9/11 authored wordsmithing. How many words can you put in one sentence?

Economist 12/22/2007 cover

If you've never read the annual holiday edition of The Economist, you're missing a rare treat. In addition to the magazine's typical insightful reporting and commentary, this edition includes several special reports on as sundry topics as professional poker to Mao Zedong's management style. Here are just a few articles that I enjoyed from this year's issue:

* Why humans' hunter-gatherer era wasn't quite as idyllic as we think
* The political sensitivity and power that comes from the Census
* China's attempts to encourage panda sex, and why we should care
* The political implications of electing a Mormon president.

Has your interest been piqued? Want to check out this issue of The Economist in its full-text glory? You're in luck! You can access it online in General OneFile, one of our great research databases. After you get into the database, just click the "Publication Search" link and search for The Economist. You will need to login to your aadl.org account to follow the database link.

Today, the Federal Communications Commission has given media companies a bit more freedom. On party lines, the Commission voted to allow businesses to own both newspapers and television or radio stations in the same city. So what does this mean? It means that MediaNews Group, owners of the The Detroit News could start buying up Detroit television stations, if they so choose.

Now that the potterdammerung surrounding the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows has subsided, its publisher, Scholastic, has some debriefing to do. Despite some pretty extensive security, a bonafide copy of the book was released on the peer-to-peer file sharing network BitTorrent several days before the book.

The leaked copy consisted of a digital photograph of every page of the much sought-after volume, a fact that may help Scholastic track down the culprit. Nonetheless, the event is making book publishers wonder if they, like the music recording industry, should worry about internet piracy. Their concerns may grow as the market for ebooks increases, as they may prove just as easy to copy as digital music files.

What do you think? As books are increasingly being digitized, should book publishers be worried about pirates?

world

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has released a summary of the Climate Change 2007 report. The report details how climate change will affect every region of the earth. The full 1,572-page report will be available on the IPCC web site.