My friend Brad, a Marine in Iraq, e-mailed me a PDF a few weeks ago describing how we can "win in Anbar." The pdf is now all over the internet, and according to one source, the attribution in the document to "CPT Travis" refers to Captain Travis Patriquin, who, according to the source, was killed by an IED in December 2006.

Even though the plan in the PDF is a bit disjointed in places, I submit that it's far superior to the current Bush Administration plan that has produced highly questionable results.

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Separately, as many of you know, our 2006 holiday letter quoted a poem about Giant Sequoias that was written by my great-great grandfather, Laurel P. Venen. A friend, Judy, got our letter, did a little on-line research, and found a copy of the posthumously-published book of Venen's poetry that contained the Sequoia poem. Judy purchased the book (from a bookseller in Oregon) and just gave it to me yesterday. Judy, by the way, has a black belt in library sciences.

As Judy knows, I already had one copy of the book, but the copy she just purchased and gave to me was **very** special. It was meticulously inscribed by my great-grandmother, Etta Venen Hartman (who published the book in 1926) to a man who had lent Etta his bible in 1948 at a hotel in Oregon. Etta was giving the man the poetry book as a "thank you" for the loan of the bible.

What a treasure.

One more wonder of the internet age: if this was 1990, someone wanting to find this book likely would have been required to write or call 50 or 100 booksellers to track it down. It's not a rare and valuable book that would have been easy to find in catalogs, etc; it's pretty obscure and likely would have been very, very difficult to find.