As the left column of this page touts, I've written a book, "Fat Boy Thin Man," and will be releasing it within weeks. 

Yesterday, I sent out a Facebook notice for the book's group page, and you, of course, are most welcome. Last time I checked, 145 friends had signed up, which I'm most grateful for. (Yes, I've been checking regularly. I'm like that.)

Here's the FB link.

A friend tipped me off to the blog of Dr. Joe Wright, writer-in-residence for the William B. Castle Society of Harvard Medical School, and I'm glad she did. The jumping off point for this post is Jamie Oliver, the young-ish chef cum nutritional crusader from Britain.

He makes several points, many of them really cogent. Such as...

Tim Weiner, a longtime j-star, wrote the New York Times's obituary of Alexander Haig. It is impressively illuminating, entertaining, and well-written.

I would consider myself a success if I could grow up to be like Dan Phillips of Huntsville, Texas.

Joe Romm makes a point I love in an essay today at Climate Progress. 

It does not do to call those on the other side of the climate-change question "skeptics." As he says, they are not skeptics at all — their minds are made up. 

Tom Friedman's column yesterday was filed from Costa Rica, perhaps the globe's best example of how to prosper without exploiting native resources.

You're no doubt familiar with Costa Rica's many wonders, both natural and governmental. In a country roughly the size of West Virginia, it has rainforest, an active volcano, and both Caribbean and Pacific shores. It has decades of stable, democratic leadership, a literacy rate above 90 percent, and protects more than a quarter of its land for conservation.

Well-read readers may recognize the headline as the title of Paul Hawken's 1993 book, which I recently read for a book group started by fellow members of Sustainable Arlington, a group committed to helping the town become more ... sustainable. We met to discuss it a week ago; here are some thoughts from my notes:

As I continue to read "Naturalist," EO Wilson's biography, bolstered by my exposure to him during the closing session of GreenBuild, I find myself increasingly convinced that everything he says is considered, wise, and valuable.

Certainly, this is hagiography, but at least I see it as such, and for today, I'm sticking with it anyway. You can judge as you wish.

In his GreenBuild appearance, while talking about water and food scarcity, both of which are worthy topics on their own, he paused for this blanket statements:

I once said in print that Jean-Luc Ponty was the greatest jazz violinist alive, and a friend who was a more seasoned music critic blanched at my boldness — who was I to opine so broadly? He was certainly right — I'm nowhere near the authority on such a matter. But I also felt that not only was it a defensible opinion, but who was anyone to say otherwise, definitively? No objective standard exists to settle the point.

When I embarked on my piecemeal reprise and commentary on "Cradle to Cradle," the important 2002 book by Michael Braungart and William McDonough, one of my background assumptions was that I would cruise through the book in order. But I ran across something last night that made me want to jump ahead.