To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
A screengrab from a video in which Jesse Jackson, Jr., says he’s not candidate number five or client number five or whatever enumeration was on the tapes of Rod Blago. Are those Classics Club editions over his right shoulder?
I think so!
I have more than he does, though.
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More bicyclist violence:
Three people were critically injured when a bicyclist rode by and opened fire, Kansas City police said.
How soon until we can just inter the two-wheeled menaces?
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OPINION SHAPER: Health-care industry better as private enterprise
UPDATE: Another article lost to time.
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I like Royko; I liked some of his other books (Dr. Kookie, You’re Right and Like I Was Sayin’, for instance). This book, however, isn’t the best of the lot, although it’s supposed to be The Best of Mike Royko.
The book contains columns from across the decades and papers for which Royko wrote, so it’s really got the historical summary course thing going on. Worse, the selection of the pieces probably reflects as much the decisions of the compilers and the times in which they lived rather than Royko; after all, these selections don’t tend to overlap the columns in the books he compiled. As a result, Royko comes across a little more straight ahead Democratic pundit than he probably was, although his views did skew that way. His columns, though, have more humanity and sticking up for the little guy against the big guys than the collection’s selection ultimately identifies.
Of course, I’m not a true Royko scholar; that’s just what I get from his books.
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This book collects five novellas from Charles Dickens: A Christmas Carol, The Chimes, Cricket on the Hearth, the Battle of Life, and The Haunted Man. Unfortunately, a collection of five Dickens novellas is harder to read than a single, thick volume of Dickens because one of the weaknesses of Dickens’s writing is the narrative voice setting up the story. In each case, each narrative takes something like five to ten pages to talk to you about the setting, in many cases before introducing a single human character that you can identify with and get into. Once you get over that threshold, you’re in pretty good shape.
I like Dickens stories, as one can surmise with my recent spate of them (Hard Times this year, and Great Expectations and Oliver Twist last year). In most cases, the stories are pretty optimistic and offer chances for redemption for most of the characters and a comfortable sentimentality as well as encouragment that man can thrive in a pre-electrified society that the Obama economy might bring us.
That said, of the five in this book, I enjoyed A Christmas Carol and The Cricket on the Hearth the most. The first is very familiar, of course, so I didn’t need the Cliff Notes to know where it was going. The second offered a very understandable and accessible dilemma, as a middle-aged man who characterizes himself as slow has reason to suspect his attractive younger wife is having an affair.
The Chimes and The Battle of Life both offer stories, but the characters didn’t involve me as much. In the first, a runner, that is, a courier, envisions life without him or something. In the second, a pair of sisters, a good man, and a wastrel are involved in love, loss, and a melodrama.
I didn’t really care for The Haunted Man because I was not invested in the characters and only sort of got where Dickens was going with the gimmick. A successful professor can be freed from a very painful memory, but loses the capacity for joy, too, but also acts as a carrier for the same effect and alters the lives of those whom he appreciates and for whom he feels affection.
I have this book in the Walter J. Black classics edition; of all the Classics Club I have, I’ve only so far read the Dickens books I have from them. I guess that indicates my predilection for Dickens, or at least my present preoccupation with classic fiction.
Final assessment: Worth a couple days/weeks of your time if you’re into that sort of thing. I am, it was to me.
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In Johnny Gilbert’s voice: "This… is…. Gérard Depardieu!"
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Read this piece at Ace of Spades HQ about how nobody can make Obama prove he’s an American citizen and thus eligible for the presidency and about how no one seems to care that Hillary Clinton is textually barred from serving as Secretary of State (because she, as a legislator, voted to increase pay for that position).
Once the incoming administration has finished rendering those obscure bits of the Constitution obsolete, wait until they get into the choice bits. If we’re going to start the pool, I think they’ll nullify portions of the first amendment first, because if they reinstate the Fairness Doctrine or otherwise impede freedom of the press, religion, and assembly, they won’t trigger an uprising.
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Consider it a sequel of sorts to this post, but KSDK reports, with a basic understanding of the possessive form of it:
Metro could eliminate 28 of it’s 60 existing MetroBus routes. The transit company has listed 22 routes on it’s website that may be eliminated next spring.
The second phase of likely cuts, including all service outside Interstate 270, will take place in the summer of 2010.
What does that really mean?
We’ll have to vote down the tax increase that we already voted down in November on the Spring ballot and maybe one more time before Metro does whatever it deems necessary, noting that cutting highly paid consultants or senior admin staff won’t be necessary.
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Everyone sing:
“Midwest Hemorrhoid Treatment Center. Don’t suffer in silence.”
Put it into your head-based jingle rotation along with Frederic Roofing for more fun.
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Instapundit links to a piece from a book about higher education or something, and the author relates a story about a faculty member teaching a graduate level course on technical writing wherein the faculty member gets in trouble for having a potty mouth:
“I will no longer tolerate,” the chair writes in his letter to my friend, “what can only be described as your insensitive, vulgar, and obscene language in the classroom.”
The colleague’s intent in a graduate-level, academic tech writing class (i.e., not a vocational training workshop) is not just to teach students how to type memos, but rather to challenge students to consider how they know what they know as tech writers. This can be achieved while they expand their knowledge of their field, which exists right in the oily hinge, right in the fishy craw of the intersection of higher education and the corporation. Given the mess such a collision must be, he and I agree, some form of institutional critique is vital, and this sort of three-dimensional, reflexive analysis can, over time, only make students better tech writers. To know your context is to know your work.
Like many of his grad students, the complainant is his age, and already works as a tech writer. For much more than his salary.
Oh, give me a break. The “ends” of which academic types, particularly in soft sciences, of technical writing is to deliver correct and useful information to people who need it. Take it from a technical writer. Any time spent on institutional critique and three-dimensional, reflexive analysis is a waste of time unless you want to become a professor of technical writing somewhere since the whole expertise on Dickens’ view of male/female relationships isn’t working out.
You want to teach a technical writer something, teach him or her how to suss out information from the misanthropes on the development team, how to actually freaking open the software or somewhat understand the thing they’re writing about, and how to make a good business case that documentation isn’t a waste of time and saves money on help desk calls and whatnot. But teaching them how to approach their jobs as though they’re academics ain’t it.
Nor is teaching them that swearing is professional in any way shape or form. The tech industry already skews to younger people who have already developed the habit of f-bombing everything in sight to show their intensity and passion instead of, I don’t know, showing quiet competence. I hate to see that taught in the universities as good institutional technique.
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A good tax proposal doesn’t stay defeated for long:
The tax would finance an $80 million system which would allow members of police, fire and other emergency service agencies to talk to each other. The tax would raise about $15 million a year, Tim Fischesser, executive director of the St. Louis County Municipal League, estimated today. Currently, the county has a patchwork of radio systems using different frequencies. Often personnel from different agencies at an emergency site cannot talk to each other by radio.
On Nov. 4, voters defeated a 1.85-cent county use tax that included money for the radio system. The communications commission made its request for the 0.1-cent sales tax on Nov. 21. The county’s Blue Ribbon Commission on facilities needs discussed it this morning.
The shamble of bureaucracies is only slowed by the will of the people.
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Commentary in the Washington Times entitled “Nostradamus Redux“:
Mr. Celente’s accurate forecasts include the 1987 stock market crash, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the 1997 Asian currency crash, the 2007 subprime mortgage scandal that he said would soon engulf the world at a time when Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, a macroeconomist and expert on the Great Depression, told us, “the worst is behind us.” In November 2007, Mr. Celente also told UPI a massive devaluation of the dollar was coming and that some Wall Street giants were headed for total collapse. He called it “The Panic of 2008.”
“Worse than the Great Depression,” Mr. Celente opined. Beginning with a sharp drop in standards of living, and continuing with an angry urban underclass that threatens a social order that allowed the mega-rich to continue living behind gated communities with summer escapades to luxurious homes on the French and Italian Rivieras or to bigger and better and more expensive boats from year to year.
This time, Mr. Celente’s Trends Research Institute, which the Los Angeles Times described as the Standard & Poor’s of pop culture, can see a tax rebellion in America by 2012, food riots, squatter rebellions, job marches and a culture that puts a higher premium on food on the table than gifts under the Christmas tree.
I really ought to stop talking about loading up on guns and liquor and start doing it.
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This is a novelization of a sequel to a movie based on a video game. The only way it could be more geeky were if there was a comic book in its lineage somewhere (yes, I know the game series has a comic book based on it, but that’s not directly in this book’s pedigree, so it doesn’t count).
The book follows the movie, wherein Lara Croft seeks vengeance on the murderers of a couple of childhood friends and to prevent a scientist who’s into selling bio-weapons from acquiring Pandora’s Box and all that it holds. It’s a pretty quick bit of reading and really did make me want to watch the film, its predecessor, and a raft of other titles from King Solomon’s Mines/Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold, Romancing the Stone/Jewel of the Nile, Firewalker, and the host of other Indiana Jones knockoffs.
Unfortunately, though, the book does do some in-filling of character development, and it might overdevelop a character and make him to sympathetic for his ultimate fate. Much of that doesn’t serve the actual story well as it makes the end a bit shocking.
But a nice bit of filler between the heady novels in my queue.
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Attention country and western singers:
I understand the lure of the Christmas album, and that backlist sales for such can go on for years and years, providing you with a steady, albeit low, income even once your waning popularity relegates you to performing at state fairs and store openings.
However, in your zeal to cash in on the reason for the season, note that steel guitars do not belong in Christmas songs.
I am talking to you, Alan Jackson and Trace Adkins.
Thank you, that is all.
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Read this first: Of Bibliophilia and Biblioclasm:
In 1936, George Orwell published a little essay entitled Bookshop Memories. In it, he recalled his time as an assistant in a second-hand bookshop, a time that was happy only when viewed through the soft-focus lens of nostalgia. Irony might be defined as disgust recalled in tranquillity, and Orwell’s essay is nothing if not full of irony. He was glad to have had the experience, no doubt, but more glad that it was over.
Not much has changed in the three quarters of a century that have elapsed since Orwell’s experience as a bookseller. Second-hand bookshops the world over still tend to be inadequately heated places, Orwell says because the owners fear condensation in the windows, but also because profits are small and heating bills would be large. There is a peculiar chill, quite unlike any other, to be experienced between the stacks of second-hand bookshops.
I love to browse because navigating Web sites and menus does lose the tactile pleasure of the experience, which also explains why iTunes has not replaced a collection of records, CDs, and audiocassettes. When everything you own is just another node in your content tree, is it really the same as really having it?
(Link seen on Neo-Neocon.)
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This book, the last in the Travis McGee series, represents the most existentially maudlin entry in the series. Not that there’s anything wrong with that; I rather like the wistful tone taken in some of the books, but this one hammers it pretty hard.
It’s a pretty pedestrian plot as far as McGee novels go. Hired by a rich man to find his stolen yacht, McGee finds it with the bodies of two American teenagers and a daughter of a Peruvian diplomat/drug trafficker aboard. Suddenly, people connected with the case begin dying, and McGee has to survive long enough to figure out if it’s to cover up for the crime or as revenge for the crime that he’s being targeted.
I’ve read this book before, and as I purchased this latest copy of it, I misremembered which one this was. I thought it was the one where his wife died, but that’s earlier in the set and probably not as melancholy.
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You put money on the Iran/Israeli conflict as the next nuclear wars? Pakistan/India’s odds are increasing even as we speak.
MUMBAI DAY 3
Mumbai Attacks Highlight the Cancer That Is Pakistan
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Roberta drew my attention to the Selexyz Dominicanen, a book store built into an old Dominican church.
It’s giving me ideas for the library in my castle, when I build it.
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Happy Thanksgiving, you say?
Well, it’s just as well since the T-72s I ordered from Omen Wannabi, a Somalian e-mail contact, haven’t come yet.
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