Graphic novelist Jared Manninen

Bona Fide Books is offering a three-week class, “An Organized Mess: Making Graphic Novels” at its office in Meyers. The three-hour sessions will be held on April 16, 23, and 30 from 1-4pm. The cost is $119 for the series, and those 15 years and older are invited to attend.

Class instructor Jared Manninen is a graphic novelist and co-founder of Makoto Press. Manninen was an artist for years before publishing his first graphic novel, the recently released Gruesome Tales to Tickle Your Terror Bone. In this class, students will learn the process of creating graphic novels. Through practical application and discussion, students will explore script writing, illustration, lettering, scanning and printing. Other topics include contemporary comics history, self-publishing and graphic novel resources.

The class is geared toward people who want to write and draw black and white books, but anyone who is interested in the medium is welcome. Class size is limited, so early registration is recommended. Register for the class by calling 530-573-1513 or send an email to erin@bonafidebooks.com. For more about Jared Manninen, go to his website.

A book launch for Gruesome Tales to Tickle Your Terror Bone will be held April 15, 7pm, at Bona Fide Books in Meyers. This event is free and open to the public – come find out what graphic novels are all about.

With April being National Poetry month, Lake Tahoe Community College plans to put on its first poetry slam.

Poetry slam is a modern form of self expression.

The slam, to be hosted by Grand Slam champions Matt Blesse and Denise Jolly, is slated for April 26 at 7pm. in the LTCC Teaching and Learning Center.

Up to 10 competitors may participate. The entry fee is $5, but the winner will go away with a cash prize.

The event, which is free and open to the general public, is organized by the LTCC Writers’ Series.

Other slams with Blesse and Jolly are scheduled at Sierra College in Truckee on April 28 and Sierra Nevada College in Incline Village on April 29.

John Steinbeck dropped out of Stanford to write his first novel “Cup of Gold” – a swashbuckling Caribbean pirate romance which he completed at Tahoe’s Cascade Lake just prior to taking a job at the state Fish Hatchery just east of Tahoe City.

There he met and wooed his first wife, terrorized visiting females, bragged of his sexual exploits, shot holes in the ceiling with a revolver, and got himself fired — never to return to Tahoe for the remainder of his long career.

Yet Tahoe is just as much “Steinbeck Country” as Salinas or Monterey because this was the place Steinbeck first struggled to learn and master the lonely craft of writing.

Author Scott Lankford will present a public lecture titled Steinbeck at Tahoe: Hatching his First Novel on May 31 from 7-8pm at the UC Davis Tahoe City Field Station (also known as the Historic Fish Hatchery) at 2400 Lake Forest Road, Tahoe City.

The Boys & Girls Club of Lake Tahoe is celebrating its 20th anniversary on April 27 with guest speakers and special observations to honor club supporters from the past 20 years.

The BGCLT opened its doors in 1991 as a nonprofit organization dedicated to establishing youth development programs for the community of South Lake Tahoe. In 1993, the club became a chartered member of the official Boys and Girls Club of America while offering programs for students in grades K-12.

BGCLT promotes the social, educational, health, leadership and character development of children in the area and has been a place for 15,000 kids to learn and grow during the past 20 years.

The organization relies on a combination of funding sources, including private and business donations, an annual giving campaign, corporate sponsorships and grants from the federal and state governments and private foundations. Additionally, the organization hosts a fundraising golf tournament at Edgewood Tahoe every fall and uses the proceeds for various club expenses.

The BGCLT facility has recently completed the first phase of renovations to coincide with its 20th birthday. Phase I improvements included new paint along the exterior and interior walls and a new hand-carved wooden sign. Phase II will include a facility clean-up, new carpets and new furniture.

The 20th anniversary event begins at 5pm at the old Al Tahoe Elementary School in South Lake Tahoe, 1100 Lyons Ave.

It’s one thing to approach a building project with environmentally responsible intentions, however it’s quite another thing to have the entire home built according to the exacting standards of LEED, an internationally recognized green building certification system.

The latter is exactly what an Incline Village builder/Realtor couple accomplished with the construction of the first LEED registered home on Lake Tahoe’s North Shore, which is now on the market for $2.3 million.

Jeff Miller, president of Advance Design and Construction Inc. and K.J. Miller, a Chase International Realtor, put together a “Green Dream Building Team” with more than 20 national and local manufacturer and trade partners.

“The building techniques we utilized on the Green Dream Home are the future for residential construction, energy conservation and respect for the environment that are fast becoming a major consideration for home buyers” Jeff Miller said in a statement.

Located on Mill Creek Road, just a short walk to Incline beach, this 3,748-square-foot, four bedroom, 4.5 bath home is a living textbook of sustainable materials and building practices. Green technology is evidenced in the home’s framing, roofing, foundation insulation, as well as its heating and cooling systems, plumbing, windows and doors and even the paints and stains. The home has an energy monitoring panel which allows the home owner to see exactly how much energy he is consuming on an hourly, daily and monthly basis.

“The state of Nevada now requires a home energy audit form be filled out in order to sell a home in this state. With a LEED certified home, this is a no-brainer,” K.J. Miller said.

The exterior. Photos/Matt Walco/Lake Tahoe Digital Productions

Living area of Incline Village house.

An open kitchen offers connection to the living area.

By Paul McCutcheon

You might not realize it, but if Fluffy or Skippy are listless, disobedient and getting sick all the time, chances are your pet doesn’t have some mysterious disease –- he or she may simply be stressed out.

A lot of people think that stress is something that only affects humans, but it’s a very real threat to the health and happiness of their pets, too. Better pet care will result when pet lovers and veterinarians understand that stress is the underlying cause of every form of health problem a dog or cat can have.

Stress, combined with diet and other environmental concerns, can present serious –- but unspecific –- symptoms that can worry both the pet and the pet owner.

It is important to distinguish between acute stress, immediate and intense, versus chronic stress, a real drag on wellness that results from a long-standing cause of stress. The best way to support your pet’s present and future wellness is through stress prevention. Tune into the kinds of stress that affect your pet and stress-proof the ways you look after their daily needs. For instance, boredom and loneliness are probably the most damaging stress factors in a pet’s life.

Tips for pet owners who want healthier, happier pets include:

* Think Before You Adopt -– It’s critical to ask yourself serious questions about your lifestyle and future before you adopt a pet. In that sense, you can better choose an animal whose needs are similar to your own. By being honest with yourself about your personal circumstance, you can ensure that your pet won’t face a stressful future and inevitable health problems.

* Establish Your Role — You need to see your role and your veterinarian’s role in a different way. While you are in the best position to influence your dog or cat, your veterinarian can be a good coach who provides you opinions and advice that help you make better choices regarding the care and feeding of your pet.

* Watch Their Diet – Just as processed foods are being blamed for an increase in obesity for people, causing a wide variety of health problems, processed food is a danger for pets, as well. Look into switching over to a new trend in pet food, raw foods. They can be found in pet specialty shops and grocery stores in the refrigerated section. They are also known as “fresh” foods for pets, so ask your store managers about them. They provide a balanced diet with none of the dangers associated with processed food, which makes up the majority of the pet foods available at pet stores and supermarkets today.

There is a new holistic way of caring for your pet that incorporates a combination of different approaches to health care — traditional, indigenous, energy-based, and recent developments in Western science all contribute to this new method. There is a direct relationship between the emotional health of a pet and that pet’s physical health, just as there is in humans. When we’re stressed out from work or family issues, our immune systems suffer. We lose sleep, and we are far more susceptible to the bug that’s always going around. We’re mammals, and so are dogs and cats.

What makes us think they are any different? The truth is, when we’re stressed out, so are our pets. Just as pets can sense anger, fear or illness in us – which explains why pets try to comfort us when we’re sick – they can also sense our stress.

By addressing the stress in our own lives, we can help keep our pets stress-free and prevent many of the common illnesses that plague them, making them happy and healthy companions for a long time to come.”

Paul McCutcheon is a veterinarian and founder of Toronto’s East York Animal Clinic, serving 5,000 patients, and a former director of the American Holistic Veterinary Medical Association and the Human-Animal Bond Association of Canada.

Grant applications for the Innovative Community Grants Program will be accepted until April 21 by the Placer County Department of Health and Human Services.

The Innovative Community Grants Program aims to support the various groups and natural networks in Placer County that are currently providing assistance in keeping people well and preventing the need for intensive mental health services, as well as determining whether, given additional support and resources, communities can develop effective and long-term solutions to fit the specific mental health needs of their own populations.

Grants will be awarded in amounts from $50,000 up to $100,000 per grantee. This program is funded through the State’s Mental Health Services Act.

For additional information including an application, call (530) 889.6701.

By Dirk Johnson, New York Times

CHICAGO — Locked in a climate-controlled vault at the Newberry Library here, a volume titled “The Pen and the Book” can be studied only under the watch of security cameras.

The book, about making a profit in publishing, scarcely qualifies as a literary masterpiece. It is highly valuable, instead, because a reader has scribbled in the margins of its pages.

The scribbler was Mark Twain, who had penciled, among other observations, a one-way argument with the author, Walter Besant, that “nothing could be stupider” than using advertising to sell books as if they were “essential goods” like “salt” or “tobacco.” On another page, Twain made some snide remarks about the big sums being paid to another author of his era, Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science.

Like many readers, Twain was engaging in marginalia, writing comments alongside passages and sometimes giving an author a piece of his mind. It is a rich literary pastime, sometimes regarded as a tool of literary archaeology, but it has an uncertain fate in a digitalized world.

“People will always find a way to annotate electronically,” said G. Thomas Tanselle, a former vice president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and an adjunct professor of English at Columbia University. “But there is the question of how it is going to be preserved. And that is a problem now facing collections libraries.”

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Sandra Leigh Evans Hall of Steamboat Springs, Colo., has been hired to be executive director and CEO of the North Lake Tahoe Resort Association.

Hall will start in May.

Hall has served as the executive vice president of the Steamboat Springs Chamber Resort Association since 2000, where she managed a $1.2 million budget, 11 full-time and seven part-time employees. Hall also created a Local Marketing District in 2005 that successfully passed a 2 percent lodging tax for the purpose of paying minimum revenue guarantees to major airlines for winter and summer service into Yampa Valley Regional Airport.

Prior to that, she served as the director of Community Development and Public Relations at the Steamboat Springs Chamber Resort Association, where she grew membership from 300 to 800.

Hall also has experience in the national biking arena, as well as creating detailed transportation proposals, two issues North Lake Tahoe has also undertaken.

By Sharon Begley, Newsweek

Imagine the most mind-numbing choice you’ve faced lately, one in which the possibilities almost paralyzed you: buying a car, choosing a health-care plan, figuring out what to do with your 401(k). The anxiety you felt might have been just the well-known consequence of information overload, but Angelika Dimoka, director of the Center for Neural Decision Making at Temple University, suspects that a more complicated biological phenomenon is at work. To confirm it, she needed to find a problem that overtaxes people’s decision-making abilities, so she joined forces with economists and computer scientists who study “combinatorial auctions,” bidding wars that bear almost no resemblance to the eBay version. Bidders consider a dizzying number of items that can be bought either alone or bundled, such as airport landing slots. The challenge is to buy the combination you want at the lowest price—a diabolical puzzle if you’re considering, say, 100 landing slots at LAX. As the number of items and combinations explodes, so does the quantity of information bidders must juggle: passenger load, weather, connecting flights. Even experts become anxious and mentally exhausted. In fact, the more information they try to absorb, the fewer of the desired items they get and the more they overpay or make critical errors.

This is where Dimoka comes in. She recruited volunteers to try their hand at combinatorial auctions, and as they did she measured their brain activity with fMRI. As the information load increased, she found, so did activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a region behind the forehead that is responsible for decision making and control of emotions. But as the researchers gave the bidders more and more information, activity in the dorsolateral PFC suddenly fell off, as if a circuit breaker had popped. “The bidders reach cognitive and information overload,” says Dimoka. They start making stupid mistakes and bad choices because the brain region responsible for smart decision making has essentially left the premises. For the same reason, their frustration and anxiety soar: the brain’s emotion regions—previously held in check by the dorsolateral PFC—run as wild as toddlers on a sugar high. The two effects build on one another. “With too much information, ” says Dimoka, “people’s decisions make less and less sense.”

So much for the ideal of making well-informed decisions. For earlier generations, that mean simply the due diligence of looking things up in a reference book. Today, with Twitter and Facebook and countless apps fed into our smart phones, the flow of facts and opinion never stops. That can be a good thing, as when information empowers workers and consumers, not to mention whistle-blowers and revolutionaries. You can find out a used car’s accident history, a doctor’s malpractice record, a restaurant’s health-inspection results. Yet research like Dimoka’s is showing that a surfeit of information is changing the way we think, not always for the better. Maybe you consulted scores of travel websites to pick a vacation spot—only to be so overwhelmed with information that you opted for a staycation. Maybe you were this close to choosing a college, when suddenly older friends swamped your inbox with all the reasons to go somewhere else—which made you completely forget why you’d chosen the other school. Maybe you had the Date From Hell after being so inundated with information on “matches” that you chose at random. If so, then you are a victim of info-paralysis.

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