Overall though, having read them in reverse order, this seems like a bit of a dress researsal for the later Scavenger and Engineer trilogies, which cover the same ground only better.

If you haven't read Parker before, it's probably best to skip over this trilogy and go straight on to the later ones.

Me
The funeral/interring went off fairly okay, with a bit of mucking around. People were a bit late due to traffic problems,. and there was some messing around afterwards, but no family feuds kicked off or anything.

Web
Pics. Ugly aeroplanes.

"The Birds" without the birds.

"Historietas": sensational Mexican Comics. (MeFi)

Politics. Coins and conservatism.

The Left and child support.

Terrorphobia compares the terrorist scare to the communist scare. Suggests that even when the media and government stop promoting it, the self-sustaining panic will last for decades.

In fact, despite huge anxieties about it at the time, there seem to have been no instances in which domestic Communists engaged in anything that could be considered espionage after 1950. Moreover, at no time did any domestic Communist ever commit anything that could be considered violence in support of the cause-- this despite deep apprehensions at the time about that form of terrorism then dubbed "sabotage." And as all significant terrorist violence within the United States since 2001 has taken place on television-- most notably and persistently on Fox’s 24-- the same was true about domestic Communist violence during the Cold War. FBI informant Herbert Philbrick’s 1952 confessional, I Led Three Lives: Citizen, "Communist", Counterspy, at no point documents a single instance of Communist violence or planned violence. Nonetheless, violence became a central focus when his story was transmuted into a popular television series that ran from 1953 to 1957 (reportedly one of Lee Harvey Oswald’s favorites).

However, even though the domestic Communist "menace" had pretty much settled into well-deserved oblivion by the mid-1970s, surveys repeating the Stouffer questions at the time found that fully 30 percent of the public still considered domestic Communists a great or very great danger to the country. Those who found them to be of no danger had inched up only to about 10 percent.

UK nurseries provide too much fruit and veg, not enough calories and fat:

'Nurseries are applying the principles of adult healthy eating to the food they are supplying to young children,' said Sarah Almond, a consultant specialist paediatric dietician who has analysed the results of a trading standards study into nursery food.

'We expected the study to show nurseries were serving children food that was too high in calories, fat, saturated fat and salt, and low in vegetables and fruit. Instead, we found that the majority of nurseries had gone to the other extreme and appeared to be providing food that was too low in calories, fat and saturated fat and too high in fruit and vegetables.' This situation was putting children at the risk of developing nutritional deficiencies, she said.