Oh, and in case there's not enough stuff around here to read, check out some pieces I wrote for ironminds. You can read them here and here.
It's Banned Book Week again, and the Harry Potter books are (again) on the list. Not big news, but it brought to mind this story, which got forwarded to me in an email that obviously thought the quotes therein were real. Getting the outraged email was actually funnier than just reading the story ...
Just in case this journalism thing doesn't work out, I think I'll send in an application.
Happy Cthulhu week! Watch out for mad Arabs ...
Q: How many Lovecraftian protagonists does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: Just one - but are you sure he should turn it on?
I really don't get this. I don't understand their thought processes, I don't understand their publicity-grubbing ways, and I really don't understand their hatred of Harry.
The only thing I can understand is their motivations: the typical rationale behind such activities is a desire to "please God by getting rid of things that don't please God." What absolutely confounds me is the thought process that leads to the belief that tossing Disney videos, Harry Potter books and items containing "witchcraft things, the paranormal" on a bonfire is the way to meet this goal. If you don't literature dealing with fantasy themes, fine; don't buy it. (And just to make sure you're never offended, don't get anything by Christian authors and scholars such as, say, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien or Stephen Lawhead.)
So what do you think about book burning?
It's nice to know there's a scientific reason I can't walk to school without looking like drunk mime. I would try to time my commute based on this map, except I can't understand it ...
We've found a witch! May we burn her? Or, in this case, chop off her head with a machete ...
"I'm afraid. I'm afraid, Dave. Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I'm a...fraid."
Wow. 01.01.01. Welcome to the new millennium.
Now, I want a personal jet pack. I was promised a personal jet pack.
Heck, we already have Captain Kirk's communicator and robot dogs. So somebody had darn well better get me a jet pack and -- oh, yeah -- a treadmill leading to my flying car. And I wouldn't mind a time machine that looks like a phone booth or a guide to touring the galaxy on five Altarian dollars a day, either.
I saw this story (go ahead, click the link; in testimony to my HTML coding skills, it will open in a new window) a few weeks ago, and my first thought was "when will this happen in New York?" (Well, my second thought, actually: My first was something like: "Look at those wacky Germans!")
So I'm walking down the street yesterday and pass a bus stop shelter where one of these posters previously hung. The side of the shelter was smashed to bits, with fragments of glass sprayed across the pavement. The advertisement was, of course, gone.
There's another copy of the poster at a bus stop across from the J-School. I give it about a week.
"Welcome to the writer's life -- where the only way to survive is by writing, and writing well enough that people will pay you to write more. If you can do that, you have nothing to worry about. If you can't, there's always a future in sewer maintenance."
It would be cool if they actually called them proconsuls. This examination by the Washington Post of the real face of America around the globe is fascinating.
"Then doves start flying, they were as big as ducks ..."