Tomorrow Wednesday, October 16 at noon in the Cumberland Room the Plateau Pluckers will perform.
Come sing along and laugh with this ukulele band as they play good ole familiar tunes from country to rock to ole time music!
The band is mostly ukuleles, but they have violins, guitars, harmonica, bass, percussion and anything else they can throw in.
On Wednesday, Oct. 23, in the Cumberland Room at noon the Dulcimores of Fairfield Glade will perform a selection of songs celebrating Appalachia on the most American of instruments, the dulcimer.
Great New Books
Polostar by Neal Stephenson
Stephenson is a towering talent whose discursive writing style meshes smoothly with the complexity of this plot and its characters. A winner of literary awards for speculative fiction, he depicts real life with details right out of the tomes of history and science.
His first volume of “Bomb Light,” a new series about the coming of the Atomic Age, introduces Dawn, a.k.a. Aurora, a smart, spunky teenager whose perils-of-Pauline life places her alongside the icons of early 20th-century history: Bolsheviks in Russia, Bonus Marchers in Washington, and physicists at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair.
She plays polo, as taught by her cowboy anarchist cousins in Montana, assembles a tommy gun to help her Leninist dad in Leningrad, and survives water torture in Siberia. Fair means or foul, she’s a survivor ready for the next installment of Stephenson’s exciting new series.
The Waiting by Michael Connelly
At the start of Connelly’s unputdownable sixth crime thriller costarring Renée Ballard (after Desert Star), the LAPD detective’s badge and gun are stolen from her car while she’s surfing.
In the process of getting them back, she uncovers evidence that an extremist group is planning a terrorist attack in Malibu and enlists her friend Harry Bosch — still recovering from cancer — and the FBI to thwart it.
Meanwhile, Ballard handles a number of high-stakes cases as leader of the LAPD’s cold case unit. First, her team of volunteers finds a DNA match that opens the door to solving a string of sexual assaults, dating back 20 years, by the “Pillowcase Rapist.”
Then Harry’s daughter, Maddie, a patrol officer, joins Ballard’s team after stumbling on some explosive evidence related to the 1947 Black Dahlia killing, “the most famous unsolved murder in the history of Los Angeles.”
Framed: Astonishing True Stories of Wrongful Convictions by John Grisham
“Framed,” which looks at 10 miscarriages of justice involving a total of 21 defendants, is cowritten by Grisham and Jim McCloskey, the founder of Centurion, which since the early 1980s has been dedicated to freeing people who have been wrongly convicted.
The authors relate stories that utterly boggle the mind. In the book’s first essay, the police, lacking hard evidence, keep adding suspects until they’re claiming seven men (some of whom don’t know each other) committed the crime together.
The authors spend little time on the processes that eventually freed the wrongly convicted people; they focus instead on the processes by which the police railroaded the defendants — lying to them, coercing confessions, manufacturing proof of guilt where none actually existed.
For regular readers of crime nonfiction, the book confirms what the reader already knows: people are sometimes deliberately put behind bars for crimes they didn’t commit. Readers unfamiliar with the genre — those, perhaps, picking up the book because Grisham’s name is on the cover — will be shocked and outraged, which is precisely the response the authors were looking for.
Library Laugh IWhere do typists go to get a drink? The Space Bar.
Stingy Schobel SaysWe all know we’re supposed to turn off the lights when we leave a room. But no matter how many times you ask people in your household to do it, they leave them on.
Consider investing in an easy-to-install home-occupancy sensor. It’s set up by the door and tracks the entries and exits. It’s smart enough to know how many people are in a room, and if there are no people, it automatically turns off the lights.
Over time, it can save up to 30% of your electricity costs.
Library Laugh IIWhy do bees hum? Because they don’t know the words.
Libraries=InformationKeep corn cobs far, far away from your dog. Corn cobs can be deadly because they do not break down in your dog’s stomach. In fact, because of their shape, they can cause obstruction, and their sharp edges can tear the lining of the digestive tract.
Keep corn cobs away during outdoor dinners, but don’t forget to keep them out of your fall decor as well. And if you compost, be sure to break the cobs up into very small pieces before adding them to the pile.
Fall Foliage BonusDon’t spell “part” backwards. It’s a trap.