Coding club?

We aren't anywhere near Christmas but here's a simple tutorial to make a Christmas tree using CSS.

http://www.cssviking.com/css-christmas-tree#comment-2483

Cssviking.com originally posted this in 2012 but it would make a good exercise for coding clubs.

.ctree {
    background-color: #FFFFFF;
    border: 1px solid black;
    margin: 15px;
    height: 350px;
    position: relative;
}
.ctree .trunk {
    border-color: brown transparent;
    border-style: solid;
    border-width: 0 14px 300px;
    bottom: 0;
    left: 50%;
    height: 0px;
    position: absolute;
    width: 0;
}
.ctree .branches {
    border-bottom-left-radius: 50% 20px;
    border-bottom-right-radius: 50% 20px;
    border-color: green transparent;
    border-style: solid;
    border-width: 0 100px 120px;
    bottom: -270px;
    height: 0px;
    left: -100px;
    position: absolute;
    width: 0;
}
.ctree .branches.middle {
    border-bottom-left-radius: 50% 15px;
    border-bottom-right-radius: 50% 15px;
    border-width: 0 80px 100px;
    bottom: -176px;
    left: -80px;
}
.ctree .branches.top {
    border-bottom-left-radius: 50% 12px;
    border-bottom-right-radius: 50% 12px;
    border-width: 0 60px 80px;
    bottom: -100px;
    left: -60px;
}
.ctree .band {
    background-color: transparent;
    border-color: white;
    border-style: solid;
    border-width: 6px;
    border-radius: 103px;
    clip: rect(152px, 260px, 260px, 82px);
    margin-bottom: 15px;
    height: 200px;
    right: -50px;
    margin-left: -165px;
    position: absolute;
    bottom: -110px;
    width: 200px;
}
.ctree .middle .band {
    bottom: -92px; 
    clip: rect(162px, 260px, 260px, 95px);    
    right: -50px;
}
.ctree .top .band {
    bottom: -77px; 
    clip: rect(172px, 260px, 260px, 110px);    
    right: -50px;
}
.ctree .star {
    border-color: yellow transparent;
    border-style: solid;
    border-width: 0 30px 21px;
    -moz-border-end-style:dashed !important;
    display: block;
    height: 0px;
    left: -28px;
    position: absolute;
    top: -10px;
    -moz-transform: rotate(35deg);
    -ms-transform: rotate(35deg);
    -webkit-transform: rotate(35deg);
    transform: rotate(35deg);
    width: 0px;
}
.star:before {
    border-color: yellow transparent;
    border-style: solid;
    border-width: 0 9px 21px;
    -moz-border-end-style:dashed !important;
    content: '';
    display: block;
    height: 0;
    left: -22px;
    position: absolute;
    top: -14px;
    -moz-transform: rotate(-35deg);
    -ms-transform: rotate(-35deg);
    -webkit-transform: rotate(-35deg);
    transform:rotate(-35deg);
    width: 0;
}
.star:after {
    border-color: yellow transparent;
    border-style: solid;
    border-width: 0 30px 21px;
    -moz-border-end-style:dashed !important;
    content: '';
    display: block;
    height: 0px;
    left: -34px;
    position: absolute;
    top: 3px;
    -moz-transform: rotate(-70deg);
    -ms-transform: rotate(-70deg);
    -webkit-transform: rotate(-70deg);
    transform: rotate(-70deg);
    width: 0px;
}

On What Matters

"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted."

William Bruce Cameron, "Informal Sociology: A Casual Introduction to Sociological Thinking," 1963. 

Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction

Did you know there is a Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction?

The prize is given to works that depict lawyers in society and their power to effect change. 

James Grippando's Gone Again won last year's award. 

Mother Mother by Koren Zailckas

Violet Hurst's family is a vortex of toxicity. Nearly everyone is a narcissist, liar, or addict, an abuser an enabler, or some combination.

After a drug-fueled night that Violet has trouble remembering, she is sent to a mental health clinic. Her mother, Josephine, insists that she has tried to hurt her brother, Will.


Though she can't remember the incident, Violet thinks she has been framed. She does not believe she would intentionally hurt Will.

What happened that night is slowly unfolded through the eyes of two of the novel's characters, William and Violet. 

Rose, who ran away from home before the incident, has her own emotional problems. Though readers never get her point of view, she blames her mother for pressuring her to have an abortion--a decision that has left her emotionally scarred. 

Trapped in lock down, Violet has a hard time discerning what is happening at home. She tries to contact Rose because she thinks her sister is on her side.  

Violet's yearns to be emancipated from her psychopathic mother, Josephine. This wish becomes even stronger when she learns the depth of her mother's deceit.

This is a novel by talented writer who writes with confidence and dark humor. While its a great read, it may not be a great Mother's Day present. 

"With Time Their Wings Fade" by Erika Swyler

This story combines loneliness with magical realism, the uncanny, canning, and longing.

El has lived with almost unbearable loneliness--visiting almost no one for twenty years in a house so far from town. Mercy is the only one who visits because she sells her canned vegetables for her in town.

Anyone, who longs for something, will identify with this woman. 

In this story, El has a stack of unused diapers in her closet and jars of tomatoes and other vegetables. Never having had the children she expected to have, she ends up with a cache of diapers.

She buries sparrows and bluebirds in unused diapers when they accidentally hit themselves against her glass window. They seem to do that frequently even after her strange house guest, a boy covered in dust, arrives.

The descriptions in this story are wonderful. The sparrow weighs less than "a breath of dust."

The boy, too, is made of dust:

"The cat was on the doorstep. Behind her was a child, brown, a layer of dirt covering every inch of his skin, making it velvet. His eyes were like his skin; soft, dark. A quick tilt of his head brought to mind hiccups or a sneeze. Four or five, she figured him, and without a stitch on but the dirt."

He appears to have wings that will not wash off:

Where skinny shoulder blades should have ended, they began, two shadows sprouting from the child’s back. Clouds, wings made of dust.

The wings are uncanny yet Mercy, El's only friend, tells her not to mind his strangeness. Children do not feel different until someone tells them they are different. 

The boy brings more and more children to the house--two little girls and a boy. El and her husband, Davis, a mason, contact the Sheriff but no one has reported missing children.

The mysterious boy clings to El's legs. He is mostly non-verbal but seems wiser beyond his years. He says "not yet," when she asks him his name. 

El finds homes for the other children; these children bring brightness to the people who have led dull lives like Mercy and Jeanne. 

The story tells readers that grief , like the uncanny wings, fade over time. 

Even though El loses Davis, she finds this unnamed boy who takes his rightful place beside her.

https://catapult.co/stories/fiction-with-time-their-wings-fade

Dark Matter by Blake Crouch

Dark Matter is an unforgettable novel with a horrifying premise. Kidnapped at gunpoint by an unknown assailant, Jason Dessen is forced to drive to an abandoned power station. He is given a drug that knocks him unconscious.

Later, Jason wakes to find that his assailant has hijacked his life.  Jason finds himself questioned by a room full of strangers. 

Years ago, Jason had abandoned his scientific research to become a professor at an average university and have a family. Waking up in this aberrant world, Jason realizes that none of the life he knows and loves has ever happened. 

In this parallel world, Jason pursued scientific research. He ended his relationship with his girlfriend before she had his son, Charlie. 

Using a device (a "box") his alternate self created, Jason escapes. He hopes to find his previous life, even if it means looking for one life among infinite lives. While taking a trip through the multiverse, Jason is met with danger, heartbreak, and surprises.

The novel asks several philosophical questions that are chilling in their implications. Overall, this is an entertaining thriller, even if there are a few quibbles and unanswered questions.  

Dark Matter will soon become a feature film. 

If you like Dark Matter, you may also like Connie Willis' Cross Talk, Audrey Niffennegger's The Time Traveler's Wife, or Ursula LeGuin's The Lathe of Heaven. 

Lariat Reading List

Lariat Reading List

This past Thursday I attended the Lariat Adult Fiction Reading List Author Section at the Texas Library Association conference. Authors Benjamin Ludwig, Matt Goldman and Lisa Wingate were there.

Each of the presentations was warm, funny, and inspirational. Ludwig who has won many awards for Ginny Moon said he wanted to write about a kid looking for her own voice. 

Ludwig is a teacher and he comes across many kids who don't speak in class because of their troubling circumstances. 

For reasons that make sense only to her Ginny tries to get her biological mother to kidnap her from her foster family. 

The second presenter used to write television screenplays for Seinfeld but has since turned his attention toward murder mysteries. 

His mystery, Gone to Dust, features Nils Shapiro who is faced with an enigmatic situation--a body covered in vacuum dust.

Goldman admits that one of the main reasons he added this detail to his crime novel was he hope to baffle fans of CSI.

Though he no longer writes comedies Goldman makes his characters relatable and quirky.

Before We Were Yours has been on the New York Times best seller lists since August 2017. Lisa Wingate explained that she first ran across the story of Georgia Tann while watching a history documentary. 

Wingate brings the character of Rill and the other "river rats" to life as only she can. Since Rill is the oldest, she feels responsible for the plight of her siblings. She feels doubly devastated when she and the others are taken to the Tennessee Children's Home Society.

The story of these siblings and the later generation that reconnects with them is a rare achievement.

For more books on the Lariat Reading list, please go to,

http://www.txla.org/Lariat

From Marrying The Hangman

“To live in prison is to live without mirrors. To live without mirrors is to live without the self. She is living selflessly, she finds a hole in the stone wall and on the other side of the wall, a voice. The voice comes through darkness and has no face. This voice becomes her mirror.”

— Margaret Atwood, from Marrying The Hangman in “Selected Poems II: 1976-1986″ 

Manhattan Beach

Manhattan Beach tackles many topics--the Brooklyn Naval Yard, racketeering, the meaning of family. 

In the "shadow" world that Dexter Styles inhabits, Styles is the top of the food chain who can indifferently make people disappear. Eddie Kerrigan is different. When given the order, Styles regretfully shoots Kerrigan.

For every gangster, though, who thinks he is at the top, there is someone else more omnipotent. 

In Dexter's case there's the mysterious Mr. Q and his sons and even someone much closer to home that can change the landscape of Dexter's world.

But this novel is not simply about gangsters. Manhattan Beach is also about the incredible sacrifices families makes for their loved ones.

Mrs. Kerrigan gives up a career she loves with the Ziegfeld Follies to raise her daughters, one of whom is severely disabled.

Eddie Kerrigan chooses to make another sacrifice; one that leaves his favorite daughter, Anna, bereft and angry. 

Anna had always been close to her father. She was his accomplice at twelve when he meets Dexter Styles at his Manhattan beach house.

That incredible meeting is forever seared in Anna's mind and will alter the course of her father's life and her own.

Despite resistance from the top brass, Anna works in the Naval Yard, choosing to dive and repair ships. 

Later, she will make an even riskier dive that will take her to the heart of the mystery of her father's disappearance.

Boy's Life by Robert R. McCammon

"The truth of life is that every year we get farther away from the essence that is born within us...People lose their way, for one reason or another. It's not hard to do, in this crazy world of mazes...you don't know its happening until one day you feel you've lost something but you're not sure what it is...When I was twelve years old, in 1964, Zephyr held about fifteen hundred people. There was the Bright Star Cafe, the Woolworth's, and a little Piggly-Wiggly grocery store...My hometown was probably a lot like yours."


Cory Jay Mackenson of Boy's Life

Shift by Jennifer Bradbury

Imagine this scenario.

 Chris has just returned from a cross country bike trip with his best friend, Win. He goes on to orientation at Georgia Tech but his best friend never checks in at Dartmouth.

As it turns out, the two got separated at the end of their tension-filled journey. Chris assumed Win went on to Seattle where he was to meet an Uncle. Except the uncle was fictional. That's one of many lies Win told. 

Win also claims to be broke when he actually had $19,000 in cash on hand.

The FBI come to Chris's college and expect him to know where his friend went.  Only he has no idea. Everything he thought he knew about his friend and his life has just shifted.

That's the conundrum Chris finds himself in Jennifer Bradbury's 2012 novel, Shift.

When the boys go on their road trip, for the first time, they feel cool. Win's father is rich yet he doesn't feel supported or loved. The bike trip gives him purpose.

Girls respond by sending both of them postcards. Some of the postcards, however, are signed "Tricksey." 

Chris does not know who the mysterious Tricksey is though its pretty easy for readers to guess. 

One of the best scenes has Win wrestling with Chris, reminiscent of the wrestling match Jacob had with the angel in the Bible.

This is a novel about new starts and about saying goodbye. A powerful debut.  

Additional Jennifer Bradbury books:

Wrapped.

A Moment Comes.

River Runs Deep.

http://www.jennifer-bradbury.com/

All sorrows

All sorrows can be borne if you put them in a story or tell a story about them--Isak Dinesen.

One solution

Here's what happened in Florida. According to a  Sun Sentinel article by Skyler Swisher, the killer,

"fired more than 100 rounds in a roughly three-minute span, killing 17 and wounding 15 others."

Right after the incident, there was the usual hand-wringing. What can be done? Why is this happening?' 

Gun rights advocates say, of course, its not the gun but the wielder of the gun who is at fault. In this case, however, it wasn't a handgun, it was a high-powered rifle that could fire 100 rounds in three minutes.

Here's a partial solution to a complex issue. Ban the AR-15, the weapon Cruz used. Make it as difficult as possible to obtain weapons that can fire that many rounds that quickly because it isn't a defense weapon.

No one fires that many rounds to defend themselves unless they are in a war. 

Printz Awards

The Michael L. Printz awards are given each year to outstanding young adult literature. 

In 2017, the Printz prize went to John Lewis' March (Book 3). 

This year's award went to Nina LaCour's We Are Okay.