"The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter." —Mark Twain
Unsolicited opinions on books, movies, TV shows, consumer products
My give-a-shit meter is close to zero. I’m in a rage slump, kind of like a manic-depressive on the down cycle. Something will set me off again, probably sooner than later, and I’ll be back to normal, ranting and raving about injustice, racism, and stupidity. Ooh, did I just feel a rage twinge there? So how ’bout them Duggars? […]
The body turns in the stream. Where the new bridge crosses the Ganga in five concrete strides, garlands of sticks and plastic snag around the footings; rafts of river flotsam. For a moment the body might join them, a dark hunch in the black stream. The smooth flow of water hauls it, spins it around, […]
You Can’t Read That! is a periodic post featuring banned book reviews and news roundups. YCRT! Mini-Rant From a long editorial titled The Erosion of Free Speech on a conservative think tank’s website, I learn that more than 300 students and professors at Valdosta State University in Georgia signed a petition demanding the withdrawal of the American Library Association’s […]
You Can’t Read That! is a periodic post featuring banned book reviews and news roundups. YCRT! Banned Book News I linked to an earlier story on this in a previous YCRT! post, but here’s more on the censorship of an 85-year-old Tintin comic in Canada. After a single parental complaint, a Connecticut school superintendent overruled teachers and […]
Oh boy, Fox News again. Last Thursday Donna and I drove to Davis-Monthan Air Force Base so she could renew her military identification card. The pass & ID office was packed, and Fox News was playing on the TV in the waiting room. Yes, military members skew conservative. Yes, many of my colleagues feel Fox News is “their” […]
“Hell is the absence of the people you long for.” — Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven Station Eleven Emily St. John Mandel There are so many post-apocalyptic science fiction novels, but few are this well executed. Station Eleven is on a level with A Canticle for Leibowitz and Margaret Atwood’s Maddaddam trilogy. Set in a […]
I’ve been a devoted but critical fan of Jon Stewart. For all the laughs, I thought he pulled more punches than he landed, particularly when he’d exchange softball pleasantries with agents of evil like John Yoo and Mike Huckabee. I scratched my head over the “Rally to Restore Sanity” he and Stephen Colbert put on in Washington DC a couple of years […]
“A low sound, barely audible at first, made him turn his head. For a moment he seemed almost puzzled. The sound was faint but growing and unmistakable, like distant thunder. It was engines, wide open. They were as if headed towards him. He could hear them, full and unwavering, suddenly very close, almost overhead, roaring […]