News

Season's greetings

“It's Christmas in July at Sears Holdings Corp. On Sunday, while most of America was recovering from Fourth of July fireworks and cookouts, the Hoffman Estates-based retailer launched an online boutique called Christmas Lane at Sears.com and Kmart.com. It also set up Christmas décor shops at 372 Sears stores …,” the Chicago Tribune reports. “Sears typically waits until Nov. 1 to unveil its holiday merchandise, said Sears spokeswoman Natalie Norris-Howser. But with the recession putting a crimp in spending, the retailer is hoping to attract holiday shoppers early.”

Dogs: good listeners

In Britain, students at one primary school are being encouraged to read to dogs to improve their literacy, because the animals don't laugh at mistakes, The Daily Telegraph reports. “Recent research has shown that children who read to pet dogs learn more quickly than those who read aloud to adults. One school has been running a pioneering scheme that involves dogs like Yorkshire terriers, Labradors and Shetland sheepdogs being brought into the classroom. The reading sessions last for 45 minutes and the seven- and eight-year-olds are now much improved, according to teachers at the school …” Martin Ford, the teacher who helped introduce the program at St. Michael's Primary School in Bournemouth, said: “The children always looked forward to their sessions and it certainly helped with motivating them to read both at school and at home. There was also a real sense of ownership and pride from the children toward their dogs.”

Monkey grammarians

Monkeys recognize “bad grammar,” Victoria Gill of BBC News reports. “In the journal Biology Letters, researchers said that cotton-top tamarins are able to spot if the order of syllables in a word is ‘wrong.' They familiarized the monkeys with two-syllable terms, and recorded their reaction to words that were not consistent with that syllable pattern. The team says the work illustrates how many animals use patterns that have become intrinsic to human language.” In primates, this ordering is vital for learning, said Prof. Marc Hauser. “As a child learns to use the past tense,” he said, “they may generalize and use a suffix wrongly, but they will never generalize in the wrong direction. You never hear them say ed-walk, instead of walked.”

Hemingway was Argo?

“Up till now, this has been a notably cheerful year for admirers of Ernest Hemingway – a surprisingly diverse set of people who range from Michael Palin to Elmore Leonard,” John Dugdale writes in The Guardian. “Almost every month has brought good news: a planned Hemingway biopic; a new, improved version of his memoir, A Moveable Feast ; the opening of a digital archive of papers found in his Cuban home; progress on a movie of Islands in the Stream . Last week, however, saw the publication of Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America (Yale University Press) which reveals the Nobel prize-winning novelist was for a while on the KGB's list of its agents in America. Co-written by John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr and Alexander Vassiliev, the book is based on notes that Vassiliev, a former KGB officer, made when he was given access in the 1990s to Stalin-era intelligence archives in Moscow.” Hemingway's cover name was Argo.

He got the good seat

Astronaut Buzz Aldrin has no regrets about being the second man to walk on the moon – 40 years ago this month – but admits that at the time he had made a strong case for why he should have been the one to take history's “giant leap for mankind,” Christian Wiessner writes for Reuters. “In the lead up to the flight, Aldrin said he assumed that in keeping with previous NASA extravehicular activities like spacewalks, as the junior crew member he would be first down the ladder to take mankind's first steps in the lunar dust. … In the end, the decision came down to logistics. The lunar landing craft's hatch was located on Armstrong's side. It would have been too cumbersome, and perhaps even dangerous, for Aldrin to have climbed over his mission mate, so Armstrong went first.”

We can hum, sing it

“As odd as it may seem,” writes Guy DuHamel of Delta, B.C., “I take great exception to your piece regarding the Academy Award for best song [Social Studies, July 8] and singling out It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp from the movie Hustle & Flow . Both my wife and I can in fact hum and sing the song and did so as we read your piece. Hustle & Flow was an incredible film … and the song was pivotal to the film.”

Thought du jour

“Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen of them.”

– John Steinbeck