Week-ends and odds

Just a quickie before I leave my internet connection in Washington - a few snippets.

Check in with Grace and Victoria's Hurricane Katrina Direct Relief blog. It's updated continuously based on "word from the ground" and has lots of innovative ways you can help the folks who are trying to re-build their lives.

Those of us who are near-sighted will appreciate this little tid-bit from The Times of London this morning. Now available (though probably not in the US until the 23rd millennium) are contacts that you only wear at night the squeeze your eyes into the right form so that - voila! - next morn you can see without any sort of lenses. This lasts about a day. Kinda like wearing a retainer for your eyes. A great way to avoid lasik surgery or wearing glasses or contacts all day. Oh, by the way - the British call near-sighted "short-sighted," which might be confusing. I don't know about you, but I know a lot of people with perfect vision who are short-sighted, if you get my drift.

Oooh! And another little nugget from The Times about digging up (literally) an old mystery from Conan Doyle's past. Seems most of the idea behind The Hound of the Baskervilles came from the young editor of The Daily Telegraph Bertram Fletcher Robinson, who died rather mysteriously (and conveniently) after the book was published. The game's a-foot, as it were.

The Guardian had a good interview with Judi Dench last week. Read it here.

And I must salute the great director and film editor Robert Wise, who died last Wednesday. We have those iconic opening sequences to West Side Story and The Sound of Music, thanks to him.

That's it - gotta go. Flying home to Atlanta now. Have a relaxing Saturday!