Postcards

Postcard apps are getting better. Many send real postcards from smartphone images; with this app, though, postcards are created so quickly that you can spend more time taking the perfect photo. Name: Postcard on the Run Available for: Android and iPhone What it does: Helps you turn smartphone camera images into real postcards that can be sent anywhere in the world. Cost: The app is free, but mailing the postcards starts at $1.49. What's hot: Don't sweat it if you don't have a person's mailing address.

Nowadays, it's easy to become too dependent on wireless communication gadgets. Apostcardaday.blogspot.com reminds us of times when life was simpler. What's hot: Readers get to view a postcard each day from a different part of the world from the collections of Sheila Milne, of Dover, England, and her father. Some listings add notes about the card's significance or a quotation from its back. Scroll down the right side of the home page to find an archive by destination or topic, or click on the interactive map to see recent postcards by geography.

Rest easy, Philadelphia. Daniel Bloom of Juneau is facing the long Alaskan winter surrounded by the warmth of your postcards. For reasons that even he finds difficult to understand, Bloom called The Inquirer to complain that weather maps in newspapers in "the lower 48" omitted Alaska altogether or positioned it in the Pacific Ocean off Los Angeles. For reasons that even I find difficult to understand, orders were given that Bloom's complaint was to be duly noted on the pages of this, a generally serious and respectable publication.

From the mouths of kids: A thoughtful and sensitive reader wrote a letter to the editor this week suggesting a way America could get around this anthrax mail problem. Mike LaRosa is just 11, but despite his young age - or perhaps because of it - he proposed a remedy that is impressively straightforward. Send more postcards, Mike said. The young man was talking about Christmas cards, and his special concern is postal workers and their potential exposure to spores lurking within sealed envelopes.

The park in "Postcards from Paradise Park" is a place for trailer homes, and it's where a pompous ad exec winds up after losing his wife and his job. If this sounds familiar, it may be because "Postcards" follows the same general arc as "Lost in America," Albert Brooks' comedy about a big-shot ad man who also hits rock bottom in a mobile home. "Lost in America" was a mini-classic, anticipating and defining the kind of midlife issues that "Postcards" also explores, though not as memorably.

In Pennsburg, Montgomery County, nostalgia costs 50 cents. Stacked neatly on three racks inside Heimbach Bros. Do-It-Yourself Center on Main Street, it comes in postcards of the Shady Nook, Knight's Covered Bridge, the Teen-Canteen: places that disappeared years ago but live still in the minds of local residents. "They cover the full gamut of history very well, from old buildings to industries to the churches," said local historian Vic Stahl, 91. "I think that's the prime purpose behind it. To keep those things alive.

Picture postcards of places in Bucks County that still exist or have long vanished will be on display Saturday through Nov. 30 at the Mercer Museum, Pine and Ashland Streets, Doylestown. "Greetings From Bucks County" includes postcards that date from 1900 to 1960. It also examines the origins and art of the postcard. An opening celebration will be held from 1 to 4 p.m. Saturday, when visitors can bring old postcards for appraisal, make a novelty postcard, hear a talk about themes in postcard collecting, and see and discuss early views of Yardley.

Lavender crocuses peeking through fresh snow. A majestic, centuries-old tree. A historic barn shrouded in early-morning fog. These are the scenes of Bucks County captured by photographer John D. Sikora of Yardley in his 2000 calendar. "The advantage to [photographing] Bucks County is the river and canal and the whole dynamics between the western and eastern regions - from the cliffs and rocks to the flat land," Sikora said. "In Montgomery County, you don't have that dramaticness.

Helene Meier knew where to turn when she saw the notice in her apartment building that described a dying child in England who was trying to collect enough postcards to find immortality in the Guinness Book of World Records. She knew her sixth graders at St. Elizabeth's parish school at 23d and Berks Streets would jump at the chance to write postcards to a leukemia victim named David at an elementary school north of London. The principal, Sister Denise Ware, decided to get the whole school involved with the project.

Residents are so fed up with a 48.9 percent school tax increase that they are mailing postcards to their district's state legislators in protest. Members of the Pemberton Borough Home and School Association are going door to door, asking residents to sign postcards addressed to State Sen. Robert Singer and Assemblymen Melvin Cottrell and Joe Malone. The postcards - 250 of which have already been mailed - ask the officials for relief from an increase that will cost the owner of a typical home $650 more a year.

Recognized as one of the world's preeminent fiber artists, Lenore Tawney (1907-2007) also had a magical touch with paper. Her collages, assemblages, and postcards are being displayed side by side with her fiber-art pieces at the University of the Art's Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery in one half of the two-venue exhibition "Lenore Tawney: Wholly Unlooked For. " It's a tandem effort with the Maryland Institute College of Art, which is showing Tawney's drawings, weavings,...

Thirty-four years and what looked like a century ago, I traveled inside what was then known as Red China. With official United States recognition approaching, the People's Republic opened its doors. Having studied in Taiwan, I received a limited visa and missed the Great Wall and other sites. After teaching Chinese culture for 30 years, I returned in November. What we saw on my return was more contemporary than I anticipated, and being there was inspiring. Here were 12-lane highways intersecting modern, crowded cities; stores with merchandise aplenty; and a fashionably dressed, vibrant people.

February, the most fleeting month of the year, will offer four sales featuring paper ephemera, including autographs; historical and political correspondence; postcards and greeting cards; and a bird's-eye view of Manhattan by Currier & Ives. The autographs, including signed books and photographs of theatrical figures, such as Spencer Tracy in Army uniform, will be included in Freeman's sale at 2 p.m. Feb. 12 of books and manuscripts. The sale is being billed as a prelude to Freeman's much bigger sale on April 4 and 5, which will offer two major collections.

As we were leaving the temple of Angkor Wat a boy who looked to be about 10 years old sidled up alongside us. It's hard to guess someone's age in Cambodia, where the people are slight, even by Asian standards. His little legs matched our stride as he walked with us and offered to sell 10 postcards for a dollar. After touring Asia for two months, we've grown accustomed to aggressive hawkers, so we usually put on our game face and stoically work our way through the throngs selling everything from T-shirts to ginseng to who knows what.

William B. McNamee told his grandson a secret about memory, even as he was losing his own memory to Alzheimer's. One day, we'll be strangers . . . but you can remember the way we held hands when the wind moves through your fingers. McNamee, an orthopedic surgeon from Drexel Hill, died in 2003. Six years later, as Matthew Ross Smith drove along the Schuylkill - with a hand out the window in the early-spring breeze - his grandfather's words came back to him. Thus was born the Spaces Between Your Fingers Project, which offers people across America a chance to connect by tracing their handprints on postcards.

While I'm away, readers give the advice. On people who see therapy as an admission of weakness: I'm a guy. I'm also someone you might have met at a Mensa meeting years ago when I was kind of an elitist, arrogant toe rag. Going to a therapist is something I just would not have done; so much of my self-worth was wrapped in being smarter than people that admitting I needed help thinking through something would have been unthinkable....

Postcard apps are getting better. Many send real postcards from smartphone images; with this app, though, postcards are created so quickly that you can spend more time taking the perfect photo. Name: Postcard on the Run Available for: Android and iPhone What it does: Helps you turn smartphone camera images into real postcards that can be sent anywhere in the world. Cost: The app is free, but mailing the postcards starts at $1.49. What's hot: Don't sweat it if you don't have a person's mailing address.

Nowadays, it's easy to become too dependent on wireless communication gadgets. Apostcardaday.blogspot.com reminds us of times when life was simpler. What's hot: Readers get to view a postcard each day from a different part of the world from the collections of Sheila Milne, of Dover, England, and her father. Some listings add notes about the card's significance or a quotation from its back. Scroll down the right side of the home page to find an archive by destination or topic, or click on the interactive map to see recent postcards by geography.

ST. ANDREWS, Scotland ? So, let me see if I've got this straight? I'm staying in a dormitory room at St. Salvatore's Hall that dates back to at least the Stone Age. And sleeping on a bed that I'll fall out of if I roll over. Without a television to call my very own, even though if I had one it would only get maybe two channels remotely worth trying to watch. There's no bathroom, either. My living quarters only contains a sink. The good news is, the communal bathroom/shower that you're sharing with who knows how many others is right next door.

ST. ANDREWS, Scotland - OK, so I'm a little more than halfway through my 2-week sojourn across the British Isles, and my tummy is beginning to think that maybe my throat got slit. And it's perfectly understandable. I've experienced this before. It's not pretty. There are many, many things to like about this country, most of which have to do with trying to hit a little white ball around gorse bushes and over burns, through 40 mph winds. It's what they probably do best over here.