clipped from www.suemonkkidd.com

Sue Monk Kidd was born and raised in the tiny town of Sylvester, Georgia, which is tucked among the pinelands and red fields of Southwest Georgia, a place she has lovingly referred to it as "an enduring somewhere." Her writing has been deeply influenced by place, and she mined her experiences of growing up in Sylvester as she wrote The Secret Life of Bees, her first novel.

Her most powerful awakening, however, still lay ahead of her. While in her early forties, Sue's explorations and study took an unexpected turn into feminist theology. The result was The Dance of the Dissident Daughter, published in 1996 by Harper SanFrancisco. This bold and highly successfully memoir had a groundbreaking effect within religious circles, evoking an astonishingly passionate response.

In 1997 she began writing her first novel, The Secret Life of Bees, and worked on it for the next three and a half years. Published by Viking in 2002, it became a genuine literary phenomenon. A powerful story of coming-of- age, race-relations, the ability of love to transform our lives and the often unacknowledged longing for the universal feminine divine, the novel tells the story of a fourteen year old Lily, who runs away with her black housekeeper in 1964 in South Carolina and the sanctuary they both find in the home of three eccentric beekeeping sisters.

The Secret Life of Bees has sold more than 4.5 million copies, spent over two years on the New York Times bestseller list and been published in more than 23 languages. It was awarded the 2004 Book Sense Paperback book of the Year, nominated for the Orange Prize in England and chosen as Good Morning America's Read This! Book Club pick. Taught widely now in college and high school classrooms, The Secret Life of Bees is fast becoming a modern classic. It has been produced on stage in New York by The American Place Theater and is being adapted into a movie.

clipped from www.observer.com

BEE MOVIE
Running Time 82 minutes
Written by Jerry Seinfeld, Spike Feresten, Barry Marder and Andy Robin
Directed by Simon J. Smith and Steve Hickner
Starring Jerry Seinfeld, Renée Zellweger, Matthew Broderick

Bee wise. Bee smart. Beehave, my heart. Apologies for the bee in my bonnet, but I’ve just seen Bee Movie, and I’m bee-sotted.

You have to laugh. You also have to go away from Bee Movie with a revitalized respect for bees. (I’m talking furry, sluggish bumblebees who mind their own business, like the ones pictured on bear-shaped honey jars and tuna fish cans, not their nasty, worthless cousins, hornets, wasps and yellow jackets.) I have shared my garden peacefully with these miraculous critters for years. I know how harmless and wrongly feared they are. But I didn’t know they were so vital and lovable until Jerry Seinfeld saved their reputation for posterity. Bee Movie is bee balm for the masses.

clipped from shobha448.vox.com

PAPILLION

For Deena Muzzi...Copyright ©2008  Shobha Nayar Pandit

Linked with permission.

I sometimes wish

I could for a day
Be a butterfly .....

A splash of colour,
A wave of joy,
For the lives I touch.....

To wipe a tear,
Heal a wound,
Reach out and caress
Hearts lonely and careworn.....

I sometimes wish
I could for a day
Be a butterfly -
Just a willow-the - wisp papillion
Eternal in Transcience.

clipped from www.thewest.com.au

Aussie behind success of Pixar studios

The Pixar facility is magical.

Open the doors and inside is an atrium large enough to park a Boeing 747.

Two male Pixar employees, aged in their early 30s, are engaged in a fierce game of table tennis.

The facility also has a swimming pool.

If the stress gets too much for the employees and it's too cold for a swim, they can take part in a pilates or yoga class or work out in the Pixar gym.

There isn't a dress code, although most are dressed in shorts, jeans and t-shirts.

A guy in his mid 20s with ginger curly hair and a goatee glides past on a scooter while talking on his mobile phone.

"I almost got hit by one this morning," laughs Brian Green, a 39-year-old father of four from Melbourne who realised a childhood dream in 1997 when he left Australia with his wife to work for Pixar.

Pixar, as the leader in animation, attracts the most talented animators from around the globe.

Pixar was ramping up production on A Bug's Life and Green was thrown in the thick of it, charged with creating modelling, rigging and shading for the film about a misfit ant recruiting bug warriors to save his colony from grasshoppers.

It has been an incredible journey for the Australian, who grew up in Melbourne in a home without a TV set.

Spring no sooner peeks around an April cloud when the cabbage butterflies are on the wing, searching out broccoli and cabbage, nectaring on dandelions and Luminaria flowers. Actually, cabbage butterflies are not much of a pest at all compared with cabbage root maggots. So I prefer to think of them as an ideal study population for home-bound entomologists. There are lots of them, they fly right in your yard, have a really long season, and  qualities as interesting as any of the more exotic insects.

The sex of cabbage butterflies can be readily determined. In addition to the dark spot at the outer "corner" of the forewing, upper (dorsal) side, females have two dark spots mid-wing, one above the other; males have only one. So right away you can study the proportion of females versus males over the season. There is also a tendency for early individuals to have much lighter markings than later ones, which only adds interest to the study.