Emancipation Proclamation

From the Writer's Almanac

It was on this day in 1862 that President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring slaves in rebel states free as of January 1 the following year. The war was not going well and the emancipation of the slaves was meant to build morale in the North. Lincoln waited for a Union victory before he announced it. The Union Army beat back the Confederates at Antietam, the bloodiest single day of the war. Five days later, on this day in 1862, Lincoln read the Emancipation Proclamation to his Cabinet. By the end of the war, more than 500,000 slaves had fled to freedom behind Northern lines. About 200,000 black soldiers and sailors, many of them former slaves, served in the armed forces. They helped the North win the war.

A few months before he died, Lincoln said, "[The Emancipation Proclamation] is the central act of my administration, and the greatest event of the 19th century."

Poem: "Frederick Douglass" by Robert E. Hayden from Collected Poems of Robert Hayden. © Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1966.

Frederick Douglass

When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful
and terrible thing, needful to man as air,
usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,
when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,
reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more
than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:
this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro
beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world
where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,
this man, superb in love and logic, this man
shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues' rhetoric,
not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,
but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives
fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.

Family Emergency Plan

Make sure your family has a plan in case of an emergency. Before an emergency happens, sit down together and decide how you will get in contact with each other, where you will go and what you will do in an emergency. Keep a copy of this plan in your emergency supply kit or another safe place where you can access it in the event of a disaster. Click here.

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Bicycle Lore

H.G. Wells said, "Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race."

OF GNOMES AND IGNOMINY

OF GNOMES AND IGNOMINY

Here's a quiz to tell if you've gone too far

INVASIVE SPECIES Gnomes can be fetching, but you must resist or risk letting them overwhelm your tasteful garden.

If you garden long enough, eventually you may begin to fear you have gone "over the top." By over the top, I mean that something about the garden is too much, too busy, too cutesy, too silly or just "too too."

It's always easier to tell when someone else's garden is over the top. It is not so easy to look at your own garden with clear, unbiased vision. There is always that struggle between object or plant lust and good taste that tends to play havoc with one's judgment.

It is especially easy to go over the top with garden ornaments, although I have seen some people achieve over-the-topness with plants. You know that look, when it's more of a botanical exhibit than a garden, not that that is necessarily a bad thing if that's what one intended.

I've also seen some gardens go over the top in a single swoop. This takes special effort. I recall a garden that had a life-size golden bull surrounded by a shrine and another garden in which the objects were more anatomically correct than one would wish. And, of course, all those Italian gardens with statues of gods and goddesses cavorting are intrinsically over the top and proud of it.

Sometimes you can get a gut feeling when you've gone over the top. This happened to me when I acquired a gnome. I told myself it was a particularly suitable garden ornament because it was cast from a mold of an antique English gnome and had very detailed features. It was very, very expensive, so surely it must have been in good taste.

The trouble was that it became one of those "nose under the tent" things. Nomads have a saying that once the camel has his nose under the tent, he will eventually move in with you. Or, in more familiar terms, once the dog has his head on the bed, you can expect more of the dog to follow, and before you know it you are sleeping with a wheezing, smelly beast who snores like a chain 3aw. But I digress.

Once I got one gnome, others followed and not always with such refined features. Then I commissioned a wonderful artist to do a gnome house. Fortunately, before things went too far, a branch fell and knocked the head off my original gnome, so the spell was broken and I regained my senses. The gnomes were banished.

Still, there are an awful lot of ornaments around my garden. Some are true art, such as the cat by sculptor Georgia Gerber and the original pieces by talented potters Margie Adams and the late Susan Nebeker, whose work I will always treasure. But other so-called decorative items -- such as the banner we bought in Hawaii and later discovered was made in Minnesota -- do not come with such respectable origins.

So how do you tell if your garden has gone over the to] in terms of ornaments?

Here are 10 questions to ask yourself.

1. Have you named the faux critters in your garden?
2. Do you have something really far out, say a shrine to your late pet?
3. Are you unable to edit out that is, remove some of the objects before you add things?
4. Does your garden have a polka-dot effect rather than a calm sense of unity?
5. When you buy something you love, do you get the potato chip syndrome (you can't stop at one)?
6. Do you feel the need to rationalize (as in, he was a very special gnome)?
7. Do you have just two pink flamingos? (Two are over the top; a flock is brilliant.)
8. Do you think the word restraint only means something to do with handcuffs?
9. Do the ornaments distract from your plants rather than accent or complement them?
10. Do your ornaments lack any theme or consistency; that is, are they a hodgepodge of different materials and subjects?

If you answered yes to most of these questions, all I can say is, you are having a lot of fun.

Freelance writer Dulcy Mahar: The Oregonian, 1320 S. W. Broadway, Portland, OR 97201

LORDS OF THE GOURD: THE PURSUIT OF EXCELLENCE

LORDS OF THE GOURD: THE PURSUIT OF EXCELLENCE

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Acclaimed Filmmaker Mark Lewis' Newest Documentary Follows Passionate Gardeners In the World of Competitive Pumpkin-Growing, Where Size Really Does Matter -

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The extreme gardeners who enter their giant pumpkins in the Cooperstown Pumpkin Fest weigh-off every year have one ambition: to grow a world-record holder and enter the halls of gardening glory. These gurus of the gourd nurture their fruits through harsh weather, floods, animal attacks and even vandalism to produce magnificent pumpkins of monster proportions.

Some say it's a hobby, others call it a sport, but most agree it's an obsession. LORDS OF THE GOURD: THE PURSUIT OF EXCELLENCE, which follows several single-minded competitors as they approach the 2006 event, airs Wednesday, September 5, 2007, 9:00-10:00 p.m. ET on PBS, with an encore broadcast Monday, October 22, 2007, 10:00-11:00 p.m. ET (check local listings).

Growing giant pumpkins is a passionate pastime -- and serious business. "I consider it gardening at its finest," says Cooperstown competitor Joe Pukos. The costs are high, the sacrifices many and the competition cutthroat. Most contenders will leave with nothing but a pile of pumpkin pulp to show for the countless hours of preparation. The successful will score generous prize money and possibly lasting fame as the man or woman who nurtured the world's weightiest pumpkin.

To read the rest of the story click here.

Visions of Earth

Check out these photos on National Geographic.

Click on photo to enlarge.

Latvia—A long exposure blurs sea and sky into a minimalist backdrop for a crumbling Soviet-era military building near Liepãja. More than a decade after Moscow withdrew its forces from Latvia, such ruins litter the Baltic coast.

Photograph by Martin Roemers, Panos Pictures

Film of 'Kite Runner' Novel Sparks Safety Concerns

Film of 'Kite Runner' Novel Sparks Safety Concerns

Listen to this story... by Kim Masters

Morning Edition, September 20, 2007 · Khaled Hosseini's best-selling novel Kite Runner opens as a film in November. But it is already causing concern in Afghanistan and in Hollywood for its depiction of ethnic tensions in Afghanistan and harsh portrayal of life under the Taliban.

[The interview discusses the safety of the children who starred in the film. Ahmad Jean, the father of Ahman Khan who plays the role of the boy who is sexually assaulted, says that he had no idea his boy would be playing such a role. He says the filmmakers only told him that the movie was about flying kites in Kabul.

He says that the victims of such a crime would be stigmatized in his society and even playing the role of a victim would put his son in jeopardy. The film will not be released in Afghanistan, but DVDs will eventually get there. He feels he may need to leave Kabul.]

More from the BBC

Kite Runner flies into controversy

By Charles Haviland BBC News, Kabul

Book-lovers and movie-goers are eagerly awaiting the release this November of the film version of a much-loved novel, the worldwide bestseller, The Kite Runner. But it is running into controversy in Afghanistan, the country where most of it is set, and among Afghan diaspora communities.

The film version has been shot in one of Afghanistan's main languages, Dari, and using ordinary Afghans in many of the roles - including the three principal children, who were chosen from among 2,000 in Kabul schools.

That is a brave move aimed at achieving maximum authenticity. But it has created unforeseen hitches.

11-year-old Ahmad Khan Mahmidzada, the boy who plays Hassan, and his father Ahmad Jaan.

The father says it was only after arriving in Kashgar in western China - where the film was shot for security reasons - that he learned of the rape scene, and that he wanted to withdraw his son from it.

"When I told them I would not let Ahmad Khan take part in this film, they said: 'We won't film that scene'," he says.

Ahmad Khan is the perfect actor for Hassan - like the fictional boy, he is always smiling.

But, like his father, he is uneasy about the film in which he is starring.

"They didn't tell me about the story of this book," he tells me in English, recalling the audition and the casting.

[Amad Jean:] "My own people from my own tribe will turn against me because of the story."