I get up and work out in the morning and watch "The Daily Show" with John Stewart (best political news show in the US ;p) and this morning Quincy Jones' daughter, Rashida Jones, was on talking about her new movie, "Celeste and Jesse Forever," and when she first sat down, this was her exchange with John Stewart:

STEWART: "You have, it's such a beautiful and unusual name Jones tell me about that?"

JONES: "Weirdly, it's Welsh."

STEWART: "Is it really?"

JONES: "It is."

STEWART: "Interesting!"

JONES: "For a long time, I thought, because my father is an African-American, that it was, maybe, a slave name, that happens, sometimes. But it's Welsh! We're Welsh!"

STEWART: "I spotted the Welsh in you from "

JONES: (laughing)

STEWART: "Look how excited you are to be Welsh!"

JONES: "I know!"

and I found from watching this that, besides being an actor and writer, she's also created a comic book - she's now my favorite celeb!

An idiot on the Romney campaign t old a reporter for the London Telegraph that Romney would restore the unique relationship between the US and the UK and that the Obama White House failed to understand the "Anglo-Saxon heritage" the US and the UK share.

Let's excuse the obvious gaffe that Obama DOES have plenty of British Isles heritage and Irish specifically. How could anyone have missed Obama's rock star visit to Ireland ?! Many African-Americans DO have British ancestry also. Web and radio news are rightfully full of the anti-African American sentiments of this statementbut they're missing the equally prejudiced anti-Brit ignorance it betrays.

Nothing wrong with Germany, I have known and dearly loved many wonderful Germans but the Angles and Saxons were German and aren't the Brits Brits, not Germans?

DNA research has shown that British people are British, that British DNA has been in Britain since about the end of the last ice age or over 10,000 years, which predates the coming of the Anglo Saxon tribes (who contributed a bit of DNA to Britain) and the rise of the Celts in Europe (who also contributed a bit of DNA to Britain) by thousands of years. The differences between English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh peoples are historic, cultural and political, not genetic and they are not German or strictly speaking, European, they are British. (If you're Irish and you don't like being lumped in as "British", sorry, I just mean in the genetic context as in descended from peoples who migrated to the British Isles after the last Ice Age and I do know that Ireland is a separate country and not part of Britain or the UK) (would the right word for this be "Briton"?)

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/pf/1590652.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryan_Sykes#Blood_of_the_Isles

The pseudo-scientific idea that the English were "Anglo-Saxon" and that Scottish, Welsh and Irish people were "Celts" became very popular in the Victorian era and was used to justify discrimination against "Celts," including a once-popular belief that "Anglo-Saxons" were descended from Cro-Magnons and "Celts" from Neanderthals. We now know that we all have some Neanderthal DNA.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/05/100506-science-neanderthals-humans-mated-interbred-dna-gene/

Many great things have come from the Britain and Ireland. What's wrong with Brits being Brits and what's wrong with Welsh, English, Scottish and Irish heritage? I'm personally pretty proud of all of mine, as I would be of German heritage if I had it, which so far I've found that I don't.

What do you think?

Reproduced with kind permission from David Western's Portland Lovespoon Blo g, 2012 David Western, all rights reserved

Wooohooo!! I'm going to interrupt the flow of the Eisteddfod lovespoon blog to vent some of my excitement about the advance copy of my newest lovespoon book, "History of Lovespoons" which I just received from the great folks at Fox Chapel publishing!!!

With an exhaustively researched section on the history, myths and symbolism of the lovespoon, this book will hopefully debunk much of the fanciful twaddle that appears on many commercial sites. Historical lovespoons from Wales and continental Europe show in rich colour what lovespoon carving is all about! I received wonderful support from many museums throughout Wales, Sweden, Norway and Germany and the beautiful spoons they allowed me to show here are worth the price of the book many times over! This is a chance to see some spectacular collections without leaving your armchair!!!

The book also goes into great detail explaining the symbols found on historic and modern lovespoons. There is even an entire section which explaining the meanings of various spoons part by part. (The photo here shows a beautiful old 3 bowl spoon from the fabulous collection of the National History Museum of Wales at St Fagans.)

Concluding with a lovely gallery of modern work by some of the top lovespoon carvers from around the globe, this is a great opportunity to see what is going on with lovespoon carvers throughout the globe. With spoons by Alun Davies, Mike Davies, Sion Llewellyn, David Stanley, Adam King and Ralph Hentall, there is no doubt that a wonderfully wide range of styles and techniques will be on show!! The lovespoon is a versatile thing and the design possibilities are virtually infinite, so I am super- excited to be able to highlight so many lovespoon carvers whose work I admire so much! Its an absolute treat to have them all here in one place!!

Ceri's out of town until Sunday, working south of us in the fine town of Eugene, Oregon, hasn't been able to get wifi to do the blog and has become saturated with sufficient guilt to ask me to fill in. Poor, trusting foo -- oops, soul.

Eugene, Oregon

Follow the whole nine yards here (a 95 part series) :- Half Marathon Blog

For details of how to sponsor Ceri, see this post

I'm proud to report that he's still at it, even on the road and he'll give us reports on exactly how much running he's done there. Eugene is a gorgeous place for a run and, of course, the "running capitol of the world," home of the invention of the waffle-soled running shoe and Nike, hometown of author Ken Keseyand the University of Oregon:

Reprinted with permission from David Western's Lovespoon Blog , 2012 David Western, all rights reserved.

Laura here - Dave let me have a whirl at the blog this week. After Jen's lovely "Tree of Life" design , Chris' inspiring "Celebrate Your Roots" theme, and David's beautiful integration of them both with the addition of some of his fantastic knotwork, it's about time I start contributing something, anyway, I think. I believe when Dave left us last week, he mentioned I'd be trying to come up with some kind of "magic" to lend to the overall form of the spoon. Hmm. No pressure, though... Ha.

I wish I could just come back with something as finished and beautiful as everyone's done so far, but, well.... I like to think I'm not completely insane. Realistically, I knew it was probably time for a step back. After the initial discussions with Dave, my task was to go away and work on a general framework that would include 4 balls in a cage made of roots, growing out of a bowl, then reaching up to form a handle that would include Jen's tree of life with some stuff Dave was going to build up around it, and possibly some other element topping it all off. In the midst of this discussion, Dave had also sent over a rough sketch showing me that we were on the same page with our thoughts of an underlying very organic root/vine framework - whatever shape it may be. We talked about this very modern, organic look, but also talked about "Celebrate your roots" hinting at tradition. Before I even had a chance to get to my drawing board, Dave came back with the lovely rosette we saw in last week's blog, so I had that to keep in mind, too. I asked him its size, which helped me start thinking scale, and right away, to be cautious about letting the size get away from us.

So, with all these thoughts in mind, I taped together two large pieces of tracing paper, some print-outs of the rosette at different sizes, and sat down at the drawing board. Hmmmm.

....

Well, I had to start somewhere, so I started with the bowl. I think I drew about a dozen bowl shapes, but finally arrived at one I liked well enough at least to move on. Then, I started drawing some roots growing out of it, coming together to begin to form a cage. I had lots of thoughts about caged balls, definitely about how the cage will be organic and irregular, and NOT with straight bars, like a normal cage, and I thought about proportions of all the parts and all the mechanics of it.... then started to draw it, when I quickly realized that drawing something organic really can't be sketched - because nothing is left to the imagination like you can do with regular and geometric shapes. So I'll really just needed to draw an example, not necessarily a final drawing here. So I drew roots up from the bowl to the base of the cage, then erased them and drew them again, then erased and re-drew, ..... several times... And about now, I also became overwhelmed with questions, many coming from the compulsive planner in me, and suddenly I was stuck. So here's the beginnings of a root cage coming up from a bowl just to give Dave an idea for the direction I had in mind, but I really haven't even begun to draw in the complexity of the cage that I have in mind, though it may give you an idea of where I'm going with it:

It's probably less obvious here because I've erased about 20 versions, but I was lost in the details. I needed to get back to the overall framework, but how to get on with that? Hmm... then all the questions kept popping up in my head again, like - Who would be carving what parts, because that could affect proportions a lot, and did Dave have any great desire to carve the caged balls? - that could be REALLY fun, so if he wanted to do it, I didn't want to take it from him. And what dimensions could we work with, and how small did he think we could get this rosette, with it still big enough for him to be comfortable carving it, because I was mapping out some proportions and it could get really big? and did he have something in mind for the top of the spoon, because I couldn't really think of anything? And did he have some kind of wood in mind, because this will be a big one, and could we get a big enough board? And who would carve the bowl? And I shared an idea I had for keeping the design unified by having each of us take a couple passes building out the root/vine/foliage framework - so what did he think of that? And did he have thoughts for any other elements he'd want to include? And who would carve first this time? I think I even mused over a rough schedule.... I'm sure there was more... Dave patiently indulged my incessant questioning, and, after some discussion, here are the resulting framework sketches I sent him - keep in mind, the circle is the rosette you saw last week, the bowl is smooth and solid, the narrow part above it is a root cage with 4 balls, and everything else (for now) is an unspecified density of loose, organic roots/vines/foliage:

You may notice, these are all symmetrical. I did actually try some asymmetrical shapes, but didn't come up with any that were good. I don't know if that's because I just couldn't come up with any (sometimes you just don't have the muse for these things, when other times you do), or if perhaps I just still had that "roots" hinting at "tradition" idea that Dave mentioned still in my head. Regardless, I asked Dave if any of these appealed to him, and he liked the second one, so that's what we'll use. Progress! Yay!

So - Next, he was beginning to have a flurry of ideas for more elements to build around the rosette, and he'd need a cleaner, more refined version of the frame to work with, so I sent him one - and I thought it might be useful to also see the rosette in different sizes and positions. I'd printed it out, now, in sizes ranging from 4.5 to 7 inches, looking at it in relation to tools, etc., and decided it looked too small any smaller than 4.5 inches, and probably looked best between 4.5 and 5 inches, depending on what else he'd put around it. Anyway - So here's some of that thought process, in pictoral form.

That's a 6" ruler there, to give you some perspective... Then, to try out different sizes, in different places....

Oh, and I sent him a nice, clean blank one, too, so he can place the rosette exactly where he wants it.

I think the next step is to actually build out some detail here in the bottom half, while Dave plays a bit more with these ideas he's got to build more around the rosette, and then we'll hopefully have two parts we can start to figure out how to integrate soon. I can see us getting very carried away with this one... this is going to be fun!!! You'll definitely want to get lots of tickets for your chance to win this one!

Once again, as part of this year's WCE , we've secured a booth at this year's Wordstock , Portland's book and publishing festival.

The last time we were at Wordstock was 2010. That year, Welsh authors Chris Keil and Niall Griffiths
appeared on a panel on Welsh writing in English and Chris delivered a well received workshop on writing dialouge. Their books were featured at the AmeriCymru booth and they were there with Welsh author Peter Griffiths and Welsh-American author Lorin Morgan-Richards .

As every year, Wordstock takes place at the Portland Convention Center, on the east side of the Willamette River and very easy to get to by public transit - there's a trolley/train station right there next to the convention center. Thousands of people attend and there are booths from publishers and writers and many book and literature related business and organizations and individuals as well as several stages and areas for readings, lectures, workshops, seminars and other events going on over the four days of Wordstock.

So far this year we've confirmed Jen Delyth , who will be there signing copies of her book Celtic Folk Soul: Art, Myth & Symbol , and we're working on confirming more authors.

And we'll be there, bringing Welsh literary goodness to Wordstock!

Today I was editing the Quincy Jones page on Wikipedia and adding him to the list of Welsh Americans and I discovered another incredible African American musician who is of Welsh ancestry, fellow Portlander Esperanza Spalding .

Esperanza Spalding is a young, very beautiful woman with an incredible voice and incredible musical ability.

Esperanza Spalding performing "Little Fly"

Esperanza Spalding "Black Gold"

Esperanza Spalding, "Wild is the Wind"

For those of us not in the UK, or who don't own a tv, this is a brilliant, hilarious ad campaign from BBC Wales on the 2012 6 Nations (I couldn't find one for Ireland - if someone finds one for Ireland, put it up!)