New 7 Wonders

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution ran a story on January 7th, 2009 about online voting for the 'new' 7 wonders of the natural world . This voting is being organized by a group that conducted voting last year for the 'new' 7 manmade wonders of the world. This time, voting is being limited to wonders that are natural.

The current phase of the voting is involves scaling down the nominees from over 200 to 77 for the next phase of the voting. The process seems to be well thought out, as each nominee must have an official sponsorship committee to be eligible to move into the next round.

A list of the winners of the 7 manmade wonders is available here . Note that the closest the USA came to getting an entry was the Statue of Liberty, which made the semifinal round.

Glancing at the nominees for the natural 7 wonders, I was interested to see how many I had not heard of, and that some things I had expected to be on the list were not, such as Arches National Park in Utah . (Although another arches park in Libya is present.) US located nominees include Lake Superior , the Grand Canyon , Niagara Falls , and Buck Island Reef in the Virgin Islands . Note that Lake Superior and Niagara Falls are shared with Canada.

It does appear that you have to provide your email in order to vote.

JWF

Making a comeback

Thanks to Sarah Hey at Stand Firm for highlighting this opinion declaration by Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal. Ms. Noonan happily shares her conviction that reading books will come back in style! She refers to several titles she's read this year. I was touched by the last sentence in her declaration:

that all can change, that a life—and a world—can be made better all of a sudden, out of the blue, unexpectedly. But you have to be listening. You have to be able to hear.

Ms. Noonan was referring to "Mother Teresa's Secret Fire" by Joseph Langford. This is a title I was not familiar with.

I went to GALILEO and selected Book Index with Reviews . Here I read the reviews, clicked on the link to World Cat and the link to EBSCO (which has access to digitized articles from thousands of magazines). WorldCat let me know the closest library that holds this title. The EBSCO link brought me an interesting article about this title.

Book Index with Reviews in GALILEO is the place to go for information about a book someone mentions - to use this source at home get the current password for GALILEO from your Georgia librarian.


-kls