I found this article amusing, boring, and interesting all at once.  I mean the piece is about "podiums."  What a dull topic.  So the Amish make podiums for a high-tech classroom?  Does this REALLY merit a story in Newsday?  The Amish have been doing wood-working for years and this is really just an extension of that.  On the other hand, the piece was interesting in just illustrating how Amish and English can team up to create a business (much like Lovina and I divide duties on the Amish Cook column).  So, if you really want to read about Amish-made podiums click here.

I've commented before how our country goes into these periodic diatribes against people who don't speak English (these days it's stamping out Spanish), but THEN a generation or two passes, times change, and society laments the loss of the very language they once tried to exterminate.  The US government spent a gazillion dollars trying to exterminate the Native Americans and their tongue, but today we wistfully wish their culture had been preserved. Louisiana spent massive resources at one time to assimilate the Cajun French only to today fund programs to preserve the few settlements left where people speak it.   Pennsylvania Dutch/German language speakers were once persecuted and encouraged to abandon their language and culture.  Now with the language virtually vanishing at least one college professor is undertaking an effort to record the dialect before it disappears.  Click here to read.