A note to our readers

The holiday edition. Print readers got a different note. They also had all the content this morning. Problems with Blogger prevented that today. We just posted the editorial now. But there's good news for those who read online and we'll get to that in a moment.

What's in the edition? You've got headlines that cover a number of events you may have missed. You've got a heads up to an Anais Mitchell concert in NYC on December 7th. Where are the people singing and writing songs about the world today? Well one of them will at be The Living Room in NYC on the seventh of December. If you're in the area, you should check it out.

The centerpiece of this holiday weekend edition is our "Five Books, Five Minutes." It's not "five minutes." It's the longest book review we've ever done. (And for those readers who count lines as opposed to content, be advised that two participating elected to cut out two long responses. Translation, don't complain to Dona via e-mails if you're a reader who counts how many lines each participant gets.) Reader Gerald advised in an e-mail that when he reads "book reviews" he expects to receive a "Cliff's Notes summary." Well Gerald, that's not what we do here. Folding Star used to offer book chats at A Winding Road. (And did a fine job of it.) What we do here is use the books as sounding boards to explore topics.

Considering that book reviews, true book reviews, seem an impossible task for most publications, we're sure Gerald can find book reports that summarizes the plot from a variety of sources. But that's not what we do.

For every reader who isn't Gerald, we went way over the alloted time early on. At one point, that issue was raised when we'd been way over the allotted time and it was decided that this being a holiday edition and the book discussions being so popular we could make it the "big" piece for this edition.

On all of the above (and in choosing the highlights from other sites) the following participated:

The Third Estate Sunday Review's Dona, Jess, Ty, Ava and Jim, Rebecca of Sex and Politics and Screeds and Attitude, Betty Thomas Friedman Is a Great Man, C.I. of The Common Ills and The Third Estate Sunday Review, Kat of Kat's Korner (of The Common Ills), Cedric of Cedric's Big Mix, Mike of Mikey Likes It!, Elaine of Like Maria Said Paz and Wally of The Daily Jot.

In addition, we thank Dallas for hunting down all links. We thank Maria for allowing us to repost her entry, we thank Kat for the same as well as Mike, Elaine and C.I.

"Woah, woah, woah!" you say. "What about the TV review?"

The TV reviews are written by Ava & C.I. When we finally got the editorial posted, the issue of tonight's 60 Minutes was raised. Since we'd written the editorial, we'd seen the segment. Did we want to add to it? (Lesley Stahl addressed the corruption of the FDA's approval process when belief triumphed science.) We thought the segment was incredibly strong. But the participants regrouping were only six (see signature at end of the note). Dona and C.I. pointed out that we'd all put in time writing the editorial, that it would bear everyone's name, and to now add additional information without the input from all but wouldn't be fair.

"So what about the TV review?"

Here's where you're lucky. Print readers got one version of Ava & C.I.'s review, online readers get another. When there were repeated problems logging in and posting, some of us began distributing the print edition. Ava and C.I. continued to attempt to get the entries posted. We'd saved them outside of Blogger so there was no panic of losing them. And the saved versions are what readers of the print edition received.

The review Ava and C.I. wrote was interesting and made the same points. It wasn't laugh out loud funny. Since nothing was posting and they were getting bored, they decided to take another crack at their review. (The editorial took longer than expected and, when we wrongly thought we were just a few moments from being done with the online edition, Ava and C.I. waived the time they'd planned to spend on a polish so we could start posting.)

"TV Review: Kenny & Faith let their hair down" shares the same opening paragraph, makes similar points, but that's all that the two version share. Ava banged her hair during attempts at postings and made the comment to C.I. that her hand was throbbing which led to them making jokes about Kenny Chesney's hand and arm movements in his TV special. Inspired, they rewrote everything but the paragraph.

Print readers could read this edition early this morning. Online readers have had to wait for content to come up here. But the plus is they could read a hilarious review. (We'll put this review in next week's print edition.)

As always, we hope there's something in this edition that makes you think, makes you laugh or bothers you. If you want bland there are plenty of alternatives.

-- Jim, Dona, Ty, Jess, Ava and C.I.