MBO AT CALENDAR CLUB

Barnes & Noble Announces Sale of its Interest in Calendar Club

The bargains are proving irresistible, but this one must be a record. Management at the specialty chain Calendar Club -- which contributed $113.5 million to Barnes & Noble revenues last year -- has bought the company from B&N for . . . wait for it . . . just one million dollars in cash, and six million in notes.

Calendar Club operates stores in malls and outlet centers, ranging from a seasonal table to superstores where games, puzzles, novelty gifts, and music boxes are sold in addition to calendars. They also have an e-commerce website, www.Calendars.com

Barnes & Noble will continue their working relationship with the management-owned company after the handover has been completed.

Big change at Wellington's Dominion Post

BREAKING NEWS: Dominion Post Editor steps down to head NPA

Tim Pankhurst has resigned as editor of the Dominion Post newspaper to become head of the Newspaper Publishers' Association, the industry's lobby group in New Zealand.

He steps down after seven years at the helm following the merger of the Dominion and the Evening Post. He also takes on the job of head of the NZPA - the New Zealand Press Association - which is co-owned by Fairfax Media and APN News & Media. Plus, he takes over as head of the National Advertising Bureau.

Quite a challenge, as any newshound would admit.

Phonetic Alphabet

The other day, when I was in a travel agent's office, I was fascinated to listen to her spelling my name on the phone: Delta, Romeo, Uniform, Echo, Tango, Tango. It's a clever way of helping to prevent confusions and misunderstandings, and a practice I normally associate with airline pilots.

A friend reminisces that it was used in the old days by telephone operators, too, when putting through calls on those old plug-in switchboards that involved a bewildering web of wires. (She's actually quite young, so please don't think she is pictured in the charming old scene above!)

However, I find from a recent thread of discussion on the Maritime History discussion list Marhst-L--which is sponsored and administered by the Marine Museum of the Great Lakes, with assistance from Queens University at Kingston, Ontario--that the phonetic alphabet is maritime in origin, and closely connected with flags.

A page on the Naval Historical Center website explains it all.

The practice began in the early 1900s, it seems, and has been adapted as the decades slipped by. Back in 1913, A was Able, then became Affirmative, which reduced to Affirm and finally became the much more gutsy sounding Alfa. Similarly, Boy for B evolved through Baker to Bravo, Dog for D to Delta (one wonders when it will change to Dubya!), and E for Easy to Echo, while Fox for F became the much more bouncy Foxtrot. In the same spirited vein Watch for W eventually became Whiskey. As for R, using Roger (which also means "understood") proved too confusing, and so became the sexy Romeo.

'Slumdog Millionaire' Wins Best Picture

Breaking news from NYTimes.on line is that Slumdog Millionaire won the top prize at the 81st annual Academy Awards ceremony, as well as awards for directing, adapted screenplay, original score, film editing, original song, sound mixing and cinematography.

Kate Winslet won the prize for best actress for The Reader.

Sean Penn won the prize for best actor for Milk.

New Voices of 2009

In February last year Waterstone's picked 12 new writers, predicting their names would dominate the literary landscape for years to come. As Kate Saunders observes in her commentary on the list in Times Online, the company's crystal ball is in pretty good nick - the list included several future prizewinners, including Aravind Adiga, then unknown but now a Man Booker prizewinner.

Spy Mouse, who has read the Ashworth and the de Witt books, is particularly chuffed that these works are included, while I am particularly pleased to see an entry from Serpent's Tail. More than ten years ago, I met the two young women who started this press, and was struck by their dedication and enthusiasm.


Herewith the list:

Black Rock by Amanda Smyth (Serpent's Tail)

The Vagrants by Yiyun Li (Fourth Estate)

A Kind of Intimacy by Jenn Ashworth (Arcadia)

The Earth Hums in B-flat by Mari Strachan (Canongate)

Ten Storey Love Song by Richard Milward (Faber & Faber)

Ablutions: Notes for a Novel by Patrick de Witt (Granta)

The Street Philosopher by Matthew Plampin (HarperCollins)

Guernica by Dave Boling (Picador)

The Piano Teacher by Y.K.Lee (HarperPress)

An Equal Stillness by Francesca Kay (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)

The Rescue Man by Anthony Quinn (Jonathan Cape)

Days of Grace by Catherine Hall (Portobello)

Endangered languages

My announcement of the UNESCO program to retrieve and save languishing languages -- vital because they are the special voice of the people -- inspired a guest blog from Jacqueline Simonds of Beaglebay Books:

Your post on endangered languages reminded me of a conference I attended in Albuquerque. There was one of those breakfast presentations (I am a horrid troll before my coffee is fully assembled, do breakfast presentations are pure torture). They presented a native woman who proceeded to turn a bunch of grumpy school folk into happy parrots.

The language was Tewa, the original speech of the Pueblo. Blue Water was the last living speaker. After she had fun embarrassing us all trying to say simple things, the 94-year-old described how she was putting in 13 hours a day in a sound studio, speaking Tewa so the University of NM could capture it before she passed away. Then she told us 2 creation stories, alternating English with Tewa. It was fabulous.

Not long after, she was killed in a car crash. But not before receiving a National Heritage award. http://theelderlies.wordpress.com/2008/11/09/esther-martinez-nonagenarian-tewa-linguist-2008-honor/

I think of her whenever I hear that language is dying.

Gold Rush in California

Back in the days when I was a freelance travel writer, it was a standing joke in our family that I could always sell a story about Sacramento, California. There are plenty of fascinating places in the world, but editors (and readers) seemed only interested in that historic but unlikely capital of the goldrush state. So I explored the replica village, roamed thoughtfully about Sutter's Fort, took the mountain trail to Lake Tahoe, rode buses and boat, and wrote, and wrote. I accumulated so much goldrush knowledge that I ended up writing a novel, called Promise of Gold.

Now the real story of goldrush San Francisco is in print, authored by the eminent maritime historian James Delgado. The University of California Press has just released Gold Rush Port: The Maritime Archaeology of San Francisco’s Waterfront, which is as much a history of the port of San Francisco during the 1849 Gold Rush as it is a study of the challenges (both physical and bureaucratic) of maritime archaeology today on the San Francisco waterfront.

Saving endangered languages

Half of the 6,700 languages spoken today are in danger of disappearing before the century ends, a process that can be slowed only if urgent action is taken --or so UNESCO reports.

As they point out, languages are what human use to interact and express the ideas, emotions, knowledge, memories and values that make up a people's intangible cultural heritage; language is essential to the special identity of individuals and groups. Safeguarding endangered languages is thus a crucial task in maintaining cultural diversity worldwide.

An interactive online resource illustrating the problem is the Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger. Freely available, this facility aims to provide speaker communities, policy-makers and the general public with state-of-the-art knowledge, continually updated.

With the help of a dictionary

Times Online reports that the identity of one of Europe's most notorious drivers has finally been pinned down.

He racked up dozens of speeding fines and parking tickets, but they could never find him. Prawo Jazdy left a trail of multiple identities across the Irish police data base -- identities that drove a bewildering variety of cars.

When the total reached fifty, the police decided to take a firm stand -- to reach an unexpected and embarrassing outcome. A traffic division official had a brainwave, consulted a dictionary, and solved the mystery -- the name the booking officers had recorded was not a name at all.

"Prawo Jazdy" means "Driving Licence" in Polish.

Are teens ready for romance?

Back when I was teaching at a girls' boarding school, I took all kinds of eccentric steps to foster a love of reading in my 13- and 14-year-old students, including buying boxes of pulp fiction (mostly sf) from a local used book store. We would sit outside on fine autumn days, read the books, and decide whether they were worth keeping, or were better tossed in the bin. The idea was to assess quality, and I was surprised how quickly and easily the girls developed a facility for criticism.

At the same time, I noticed that most of the books I confiscated from girls who were sneakily reading in class were Mills & Boon (aka Harlequin), so we started reading and critiquing those, too. However, I hit a snag when I asked the head of department to stock M&B in the school library. She was shocked, shocked, shocked, though the school inspector urged her to consider it seriously. "Never!" she said.

Now, I have decided I was right. Undoubtedly inspired by the roaring success of Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series (you heard about it first here), Harlequin is launching a romance-for-teens series this coming April.

To help get input from teens, the publisher has set up the online Harlequin Teen Panel -- "hosted by none other than BFF Quin," they say (who on earth is she?).

Teens need to get parental sign-off before they can participate, but once a membership is approved, the panel will send participants free books and invitations to enter sweepstakes.

Excellent idea, say I. I can attest that it works. One of my reluctant readers became addicted to one of the books in my boxes, the first of the wonderful Anne McCaffrey Dragonflight series. As long as she was at school, she and I borrowed each other's books, and then she went on to an innovative career in film.