October 7, 2014

Stephen Colbert: The Great Ebola Conspiracy

Stephen Colbert explains--with helpful clips from Fox News--how the CDC is spreading disinformation to help Obama destroy America.

http://thecolbertreport.cc.com/videos/ayvbym/a-rare-correction---no-ebola-outbreak-in-the-u-s-

October 6, 2014

John Oliver: Civil Asset Forfeiture

Once again, John Oliver knocks it out of the park.

October 5, 2014

Here's the URL for a slightly better version....

I've added in a bit of shoulder that was cropped in the first version.

Direct link (remove hash symol): http:#//s29.postimg.org/wc9rhuw47/Turtleman_at_Campfire.jpg

... which points to this slightly better version:

October 4, 2014

"I'm not a scientist..."

"... I'm a turtle."



GO, ALISON GRIMES! Defeat the Turtleman! Woo-hoo!

October 3, 2014

Think about this for a second.

America's new security apparatus must be allowed to read your private emails and texts to keep America safe, we're told.

At the same time, a man with a knife in his pocket can dash through the unlocked front door of the White House and run amok for awhile.

Just take a moment and let that sink in because, frankly, it's breathtaking.

National security? Not so much. Spying on and exerting control over the citizenry? Well, they've got that task covered backwards and forwards.

September 23, 2014

John Green: The Need for Clean Water in Ethiopia

John Green, one of the two brothers of the VlogBrothers YouTube channel, discusses the need for clean water in Ethiopia. He's started a fundraiser through Water.org, with a goal of raising $100,000 by October 1. If the $100,000 goal is met, the Gates Foundation will match donations dollar-for-dollar, which would provide sustainable, clean-water solutions for 8,000 Ethiopians.

September 23, 2014

I must've been about 10 or 11 when I started to love reading.

My parents had a set of shelves in the family room that were filled with books. On afternoons after school, I started to look through them out of boredom and opened a few that seemed interesting. There was a big, overstuffed bucket chair by the shelves, so reading was easy; before long, I was completely absorbed. Three titles in particular made a big impression. The beautiful prose in Updike's Rabbit, Run was absolutely entrancing. Crime and Punishment took me inside another human being's head in a way that I'd never known was possible: the guilt! And Catch-22 showed me shocking truths about life in a sometimes-crazy world that made my jaw drop: I can still remember being utterly stunned when an Italian wartime prostitute was pushed out of a window to her death and no one really cared.

In addition to the novels, I also found a copy of Strunk & White's The Elements of Style on those same shelves. I devoured it and read it several times.

Quite honestly, one of the biggest favors my parents ever did me was having copies of those books around. I strongly urge any parents of young children reading this to be sure hard copies of great novels are visible somewhere in the household. Don't hide them away in your bedroom. Put them in the living room or family room. Kids have a way of getting into things on their own and if good books are around, there's a real chance that they may stumble into a lifelong habit of reading great literature.

September 16, 2014

REVIEW: *The Imperfectionists* by Tom Rachman

The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman. 272 pp. Dial Press, 2010.
My rating: 5 stars out of 5

Note: This review DOES NOT contain spoilers. Read away with no worries!

The Imperfectionists is stunningly good. Over the course of eleven chapters, Tom Rachman takes us into the hearts and minds of a variety of characters, each of whom has some connection to an English-language international newspaper based in Rome. It's a diverse cast of characters, ranging from the newspaper's publisher, to the editor-in-chief, to a corrections editor, to a faithful reader. Each chapter presents one facet of the overall enterprise, yet is complete and perfect enough to stand on its own as a short story.

The characters are beautifully drawn; some of them are the most memorable characters I've come across in years. For example, there's the hilariously inept Winston Cheung, an insecure 24-year-old who's trying out for a stringer position in Cairo. So nervous that he can't take notes during his first interview with a Palestinian official, he winds up padding his story with lengthy asides about the official's goatee and a passing ice-cream vendor--and includes this all-time great example of purple prose:

"As he spoke, the yellow Egyptian sun shone very brightly, as if that golden sphere were blazing with the very hope for peace in the Middle East that burned also within the heart of the Palestinian undersecretary for sports, fishing, and wildlife."

Then there's Ornella de Monterecchi, the newspaper's most faithful reader. Like a modern-day Miss Havisham, this well-to-do elderly lady is hopelessly stuck in the past. She spends her days reading the paper and, unfortunately, requires a full two days to get through each daily edition--yet refuses to skip ahead. Rachman writes:

When it was the 1990s outside, she was just getting to know President Reagan. When planes struck the Twin Towers, she was watching the Soviet Union collapse. Today, it is February 18, 2007, outside this apartment. Within, the date remains April 23, 1994.

She doesn't own a television and each day her maid enters the house with the day's newspaper hidden in a plastic bag, to be filed away in a cabinet for reading at some point in the distant future.

But as wonderful as many of the human characters are in The Imperfectionists, the main character of the book is the newspaper itself. At the time of the novel, the first decade of the 21st century, print journalism was being supplanted by the Internet and the slow death of print journalism serves as the novel's backdrop. In fact, in some ways, The Imperfectionists is as much an elegy as it is a novel.

This isn't to say that Rachman romanticizes the newspaper business; far from it. All of the faults of the never-named Roman newspaper of his novel are laid bare, from the grimy carpeting beneath it all to the inept management at the top. Published typos and errors of fact abound. It's a messy operation, on its way out, yet we can't help but admire the audacity of it all: on a daily basis, a band of highly-intelligent individuals come together and make sense of the world, more or less, on twelve pages of newsprint.

This peculiar trait of the newspaper--being full of flaws yet worthy of admiration--extends to the characters, as well. Like the paper they are connected with, many of them are broken, malfunctioning, and on the way out. They are, indeed, imperfect. Yet Rachman does such a wonderful job of bringing them to life that we read their exploits with both sympathy and delight.

This is a superb novel, written with wit and precision, and not to be missed. It's hard to imagine how Rachman could've done better. For being one of my best reads of 2014, I give it five well-deserved stars.

September 15, 2014

The Narcoleptic Squirrel Song

~zzzzzzz~ "I'm up!"

|

September 10, 2014

REVIEW: *Boy, Snow, Bird* by Helen Oyeyemi

Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi. 308 pp. Riverhead, 2014.
My rating: 2 stars out of 5

Note: This review CONTAINS SPOILERS. Major spoilers (big plot twists, for example) are set off by warnings preceded by double rules (=====).

Boy, Snow, Bird was the most trying novel-reading experience I've had in years. Oyeyemi is a talented writer; she can pen an evocative scene or phrase with enough magic in it to stop you in your tracks. Yet in Boy, Snow, Bird she mishandles basic aspects of plot and characterization to such a degree that I was left feeling that the publisher did her a disservice in putting this book into bookstores in its current state.

If you were to believe the publisher, Boy, Snow, Bird is a modern reworking of the Snow White story. That's a bit of a stretch. Yes, there are a few minor tie-ins to the fairy tale, but they are slight and easily missed. Yet one can easily understand why the dust-jacket blurb writer promotes the book based on this connection: the novel's plot is so anemic it would be hard to describe the book in an appealing way otherwise.

In a nutshell, here's the story: Boy, the main character, is a young woman at the novel's start, living in New York with her abusive father, a rat-catcher. She runs away from him and starts a life in a small town in Massachusetts, where she marries a man who has a porcelain-skinned daughter named Snow from a previous marriage. Boy has a daughter with her new husband, and this child--named Bird--is born dark-skinned, a consequence of her light-skinned husband's African-American ancestry. For reasons that are never made clear, Boy sends Snow off to be raised by relatives, which engenders some ill-will (note "wicked stepmother" tie-in).

That's about the entirety of the plot. From that point on, the novel meanders aimlessly in its small-town setting. About a dozen forgettable minor characters are introduced who have little to do and are poorly drawn. Since one of the book's main characters, Snow, is sent away, what little of her we know we learn mainly through her letters. Despite the fact that the novel takes place in 1950s America, and has characters with different skin tones, you would think racism and racial identity would be a major theme in the book. Yet the book doesn't contain any memorable scenes of racial interaction and has little to offer in terms of the characters' reflections on race. Odd.

At one point, I found my hopes rising as Oyeyemi introduced some magic involving mirrors and the two sisters, the dark-skinned Bird and the fair-skinned Snow. Both of them, it comes out in their correspondence, have experienced an occasional inability to see their own reflections. But as she does several times in the course of this novel, Oyeyemi plays with this magical idea briefly, then just lets it drop, for whatever reason.

===== MAJOR SPOILER IN GRAF BELOW

Finally, Oyeyemi wraps up the novel with a plot twist that is as bizarre as it is disappointing: Boy's rat-catcher father, we learn, is transgender, having undergone a sex-change operation prior to Boy's birth. In the novel's concluding paragraph, Boy is beginning a road trip with Bird and Snow to locate the rat-catcher. If this sounds intriguing or edgy in my retelling here, I can assure you it's neither in the novel. It feels contrived and inept, and judging from the reviews on GoodReads, has offended many readers.

===== MAJOR SPOILER IN GRAF ABOVE

What saves the novel, to a degree, are Oyeyemi's occasional shows of serious talent. I can think of no better example of this than the novel's opening paragraph, where Boy describes her relationship with mirrors:

Nobody ever warned me about mirrors, so for many years I was fond of them, and believed them to be trustworthy. I'd hide myself away inside them, setting two mirrors up to face each other so that when I stood between them I was infinitely reflected in either direction. Many, many me's. When I stood on tiptoe, we all stood on tiptoe, trying to see the first of us and the last. The effect was dizzying, a vast pulse, not quite alive, more like the working of an automaton.

No two ways about it: that's a superb opening for a novel that purports to rework the Snow White story.

Oyeyemi can also be funny. At one point in the novel, the character Bird recounts how a family friend described her behavior as a child in a newspaper column:

A six-year-old girl of my acquaintance won't touch canned tuna fish because she believes it to be the flesh of mermaids. Words cannot adequately describe her solemn, speechless anger as tuna salad is served and consumed. It's the anger of one who knows that this barbarism will go down in history and the sole duty of the powerless is to bear witness.

Sadly, such bravura moments are few and far between and cannot erase the book's flaws of weak plotting and forgettable characters.

I give Boy, Snow, Bird two stars out of five. Readers with a particular interest in magic realism may find it worth their while. Most other readers, however, may do better to take a pass.