Category: today’s top story

The “sets themselves don’t look terribly different. The thing that’s different, of course, is that you mostly have to wear those funny glasses in order to see 3-D…. There is possibly one set that will come out made by 3M where you don’t have to have the glasses. The problem with that one is that it actually means you have to sit in a certain position in order to see it.”

In negotiations for a new contract to replace the one that expired last August, management and musicians remain far apart on the issue of pay. For now, everyone has agreed to keep playing through MLK Day, just before the orchestra leaves for a Miami residency. Observers think a strike or lockout is unlikely.

“A full-fledged 3-D television turf war is brewing in the United States, as manufacturers unveil sets capable of 3-D and cable programmers rush to create new channels for them. Many people are skeptical that consumers will suddenly pull their LCD and plasma televisions off the wall.”

“Eric Liebetrau, managing editor, said in an e-mail message that Nielsen and Kirkus were ‘in the process of working out an arrangement with an acquiring company to continue the publication of the magazine’.”

After the Tesco across the street from a bookshop started selling titles at a hefty discount, the shop’s manager outlined its plight to the chain’s chief executive. Now the supermarket “has three signs in its books section advising customers that a wider range of titles are available across the road … where specialist booksellers are also on hand to advise.”

As national ambassador for young people’s literature, the Newbery Medal-winning author of “Bridge to Terabithia” “will travel the country to speak to children, parents, teachers and librarians. The main advice she’ll be giving adults: Read aloud to your children.”

“Many years from now, when this decade has been picked-over and pulverized and smoothed out, defined by a few inevitably glib reference points and given its final shape, when it has been reinvented and remembered as something simpler (something we would not recognize), when it has been vivisected and stripped of everything that meant anything these past 10 years, how will this first decade of the 21st century be remembered?”

“McNally-Robinson was celebrated as a rare success story in the independent book world, expanding when other stores were closing, and even being named 2009 Bookseller of the Year by the Canadian Bookseller Association.”

“[His] macro-headed, somberly expressive, astringently probing and hardly ever flattering caricatures of intellectuals and athletes, politicians and potentates were the visual trademark of [the magazine] for nearly half a century.”

Researchers “have begun to explore the strange impulse to put off until tomorrow what could be enjoyed today. Why, for instance, is it so hard to find time to visit landmarks in your own backyard?”