Help for New Year health promises!

We all start out with the best intentions – then the reality of a plate full of vegetables gets in the way!   Yet let us not admit defeat before we even start! Like many of you out there I intend to lose 5kgs this year (just like last year).  The library has a large selection of print resources to help us on our way to remove those rolls you can rest your arm on and these great electronic health resources that are accessible 24/7 :        

Health Source

Health and Wellness Resource Center

 Unlike a lot of health information on the internet, that will have you diagnosed with the plague, all information is derived from trusted medical sources.  These easy to use resources cover all health and wellness topics.  Yet please note the information provided in this database should not be viewed as a mean for self-diagnosis or a substitute for professional medical advice, treatment or diagnosis.

You can access  many other useful premium websites from home with your library card number and PIN, or at our community libraries.

New Year Resolutions

Made to be broken, the stuff of underachievement but still we make them. There is one I can make which I think I can achieve – read more books!

I searched our catalogue for the keyword resolutions and this jumped out at me – The happiness project. Hmmm I might resolve to read it.

Are you making resolutions? Is 2011 going to be the year you read War and Peace, Proust or the collected work of Jane Austen?

Last year librarians set themselves some reading challenges that took them out of their comfort zone – Christian fiction and cyberpunk for example.

What challenges have you got in mind this coming year?

Denis Dutton

Professor Denis Dutton – philosopher, academic, skeptic and creator of intelligence on the web ( Arts and Letters Daily) has died in Christchurch.

Denis made an enormous contribution to the intellectual and cultural life of Christchurch and internationally. He had a critical success with his 2009 book The art instinct: beauty, pleasure and human evolution . He was also involved in founding Climate Debate Daily.

My personal experience of Arts and Letters Daily when it first began was overwhelming. I found such online riches that I had to give up reading it because I would never get anything else done. When there is so much dross on the internet and other media it was refreshing to find the best written, most intelligent news and reviews laid out from around the world.

Go to Arts and Letters Daily now and you will see the most tanatalising array of story teasers – “Martin Peretz is a born belligerent.”, “Fat Kat had a knack for guns, drugs, and gangs; also, it turned out, for being a prison librarian” , “Happy birthday to the suit, now 150 years old. The uniform of capitalism was born out of revolution, warfare and pestilence.” and so on.

Appropriately Denis Dutton lives on via the internet – you can view his talk at the famous TED conference in February 2010.