"When I do not want to say things in real life I often say them here." — Mimi Smartypants
When Abraham Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe, he reportedly said “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war.” It’s impossible to overstate the impact Uncle Tom’s Cabin had on mid-19th Century America, indeed the world. Lincoln was dead on. Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a barn-burner, even today. What a […]
We’re not riding in the annual El Tour de Tucson today. We rode it last year; afterward, the consensus of our riding group was that it’s too dangerous, what with inexperienced riders weaving in front of you and inexplicably stopping, jersey-clad poseurs whizzing by right left and in between, hit & run road ragers mowing […]
“If God had not intended for us to eat animals, how come He made them out of meat?” Sarah Palin, Going Rogue. Good question, Sarah! Now you’ve got me thinking . . . If God had not intended for us to burn books, how come He made them flammable? If God had not intended for […]
Update (11/19/09): more than two months with no response. Time to ramp it up a notch: The Honorable Gabrielle Giffords November 19, 2009 U.S. House of Representatives 1728 Longworth House Office Building Washington, DC 20515 Dear Congresswoman Giffords, I mailed the attached letter to the US Air Force Chief of Staff on September 16, 2009 […]
Snagged from Facebook, five minutes ago: I’m currently struggling through Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a book I realized I had never read. The hardest part, for me, is the depiction of white attitudes toward blacks in mid-1800s America, and the language used to convey those attitudes. And then I remember growing up with whites who still […]
The Chocolate War, by Robert Cormier Stories for and about adolescents follow certain established conventions. Brave young boys and girls stand up to social and peer pressure, buck conformity, and do the right thing. They look bullies in the eye and the bullies back down. The bad guys lose. The good guys experience adversity but […]
“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” – William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984) The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet, by Reif Larsen The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet is an engrossing, impossible-to-put-down story of discovery and redemption, told by a child prodigy, a master cartographer at the […]
“Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.” — Humphrey Bogart (as Rick Blain), Casablanca (1942) The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (2008) Something about this movie bothers me. No, it isn’t that it plunges me into shame, anger, despair, horror, and sadness. No, it isn’t […]