When Jesse Jackson was running for president in the 1988 Democratic primaries, I was twenty years old and excited to vote for him. I grew up in Washington, DC, where everyone was familiar with politics, whether they wanted to be or not.

After years of listening to the bland and meaningless promises of congressmen, senators and presidential candidates, I was excited when Jackson came along and actually had something to say. The man seemed to stand for something. He was eloquent, he cared about people, and he believed that government had a responsibility to improve peoples lives in whatever ways were practical and feasible.

Okay, since no one asked, today I’m going to write about motorcycles. This is a blog, after all, so I don’t always have to write book reviews.

The first bike I ever owned was a 1978 Honda CB 750F. I was twenty-two years old, sharing a car with my brother, and traveling around Washington, DC mostly by bicycle. I wanted a cheap way of getting around when I didn’t have the car. My friend told me he knew someone who was selling this bike for nine hundred dollars. “That’s a good deal,” he said. So I bought it.

Are you a voracious e-book reader looking for free Kindle books? Check out the new Free Books Page at JustKindleBooks.com . You can browse by category, genre and sub-genre. The list of books changes daily, so check back often.

Ben Fox from Shepherd.com recently asked me to write about five of my favorite books in any genre. You can check out my list of the best books from the golden age of American crime and noir and perhaps discover something new.

Archivists preserve cultural artifacts and do their best to make them accessible to future generations. These artifacts traditionally included books, articles, images, music, legal documents, letters, and just about any other item that contains important or meaningful information.

Until a few decades ago, these artifacts were primarily physical. Preserving them required good storage conditions and good handling practices. Making them available meant providing an index, such as a card catalog, to tell people where they were stored, and a physical space, such as a library or museum where people could physically access the items. Most items also included some kind of metadata, such as the plaques beside museum paintings that tell you the artist’s name, the title and date, and a few sentences about the subject or style.