Books You Should Be Reading Number 42 Of A Bunch

Apathy Jack writes:

Sleeping Arrangements by Laura Shaine Cunningham

There is much precedent in the family for pretending that the dead have not died but are living in other cities. Practicing a form of emotional etiquette, it is considered good form to spare elderly relatives sad news. Whenever we attend family reunions, the uncles give me a quick refresher course in who’s officially dead and who’s not. It would be helpful to maintain a cross-index, because some elderly aunts know while others don’t know. Great-aunt Becky believes she has a nephew in Alaska, while her sister, Berta, knows that nephew died of heart failure three years ago. Entire sections of the family (the Kroll branch) have expired, but their surviving sister, my grandmother, has been told the whole group “moved to California.” (When a cousin actually did move to California, no one believed it – the other cousins all believed this was a euphemism for the much-longer journey.)

Books You Should Be Reading Number 41 Of A Bunch

Apathy Jack writes:

The Straw Men by Michael Marshall

Every now and then you’ll see a tattered piece of 1950s signage, something exuberant that harks back to flash bulbs and frozen glamour. Most have been torn down now, replaced by brutal information boards stamped out in Helvetica, the official typeface of purgatory. Helvetica isn’t designed to make you feel anything good, to promise adventure or gladden the heart. Helvetica is for telling you that profits are down, that the photocopier needs servicing and by the way, you’ve been fired.

...

This book was recommended to me by an old student, and I liked it enough that I’ve immediately started on the sequel, which contains the following piece of wisdom:

Forests in the day are friendly places. They remind you of Sunday walks, swooshing leaves, holding a parent’s big, warm hand, or providing that hand yourself. At night the woods take the gloves off and remind you why you’re nervous in the dark. Night forests say “Go find a cave, monkey-boy, this place is not for you.”

The Day Today - 8th February 2008

Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling writes:

We return to conspiracies. I posted a review of Richard "Face on Mars" Hoagland on January 17th, here's another debunking of his theories. What I found stunning was the following quote.

This isn’t just some remote corner of an intellectual ghetto on the Internet—the book came within one tick mark of making it onto the New York Times bestsellers list for paperback non-fiction (it reached #21 nationwide).

Let alone that it is classed as "non-fiction", there were only twenty non-fiction books ahead of it! Over to the professionals with the extraordinarily fascinating Matthew Dentith being interviewed on Bfm. the young lady was taken with our Matthew, she tries to wind up the interview put can't stop asking questions.

It's BBQ season - my count for this week alone shall be three by this evening - and you can't have a BBQ without a pool. On Waitangi Day, Josh had a BBQ, and a pool, for our enjoyment. Onw of the day's running gags was "What Would Anne Coulter Do?" - after Ben's shirt, and in relation to the pool I told the following story to Ewen from a book review in the Economist.

The book starts with a poignant story from 1951 of a victorious children's baseball team that wanted to celebrate by swimming at a municipal pool in Youngstown, Ohio. But one team member, Al Bright, was black. Initially the pool attendants denied him admittance. After many protests, the supervisor relented. The “negro” was allowed to enter the pool so long as all other swimmers left the water, and he sat on a rubber raft. As his teammates looked on, a life-guard pushed him once round the pool, reminding him, “whatever you do, don't touch the water.”

A look at the fundamentalist / evangelical intellectual tradition in America.

Something for those who watched the documentary on nuclear power on Sunday night. James Lovelock is for it as well.

"I can envisage somewhere about 2050, when the greenhouse really begins to bite, when people will start looking back and saying: whose fault was all this? And they will settle on the Greens and say: 'if those damn people hadn't stopped us building nuclear power stations we wouldn't be in this mess'. And I think it is true. The real dangers to humanity and the ecosystems of the earth from nuclear power are almost negligible. You get things like Chernobyl but what happens? Thirty-odd brave firemen died who needn't have died but its general effect on the world population is almost negligible.

"What has it done to wild life? All around Chernobyl, where people are not allowed to go because the ground is too radioactive, well, the wildlife doesn't care about radiation. It has come flooding in. It is one of the richest ecosystems in the region. And then they say: what shall we do with nuclear waste?" Lovelock has an answer for that, too. Stick it in some precious wilderness, he says. If you wanted to preserve the biodiversity of rainforest, drop pockets of nuclear waste into it to keep the developers out. The lifespans of the wild things might be shortened a bit, but the animals wouldn't know, or care. Natural selection would take care of the mutations. Life would go on.

Apathy Jack writes:

Further to the book I was talking about yesterday: I am a card-carrying communist in all areas except that of crime and punishment. My attitude towards crime is pretty much summed up in the following excerpt from Wasting Police Time (which is, I admit, an attack on “liberals” – of which I pretty much am one – so substitute the word ‘liberals’ with ‘people who disagree with Jack, so are Wrong’...)

...

Jail is totally misunderstood by liberals. ‘Look at the reoffending rate,’ they say.
Yes, criminals reoffend (though they reoffend more after community sentences than prison). They reoffend because they are criminals. They are greedy and lazy people who enjoy breaking the law.
If someone is thrown in jail and they don’t reoffend when they come back out, great.
If they do reoffend, put them in jail again – only, this time, for longer.
Honest people go out day after day and earn a pittance without breaking the law. Why don’t liberals try to ‘understand’ this behaviour?

Books You Should Be Reading Number 40 Of A Bunch

Apathy Jack writes:

Wasting Police Time by PC David Copperfield

The most predictable thing about being involved in violent incidents is that they are completely unpredictable.
If I respond to a report of thirty youths fighting in the street with baseball bats, I can be fairly certain that on my arrival they will have dispersed and that a subsequent area search will prove negative.
On the other hand, if the local library assistant rings up to report a problem customer returning a book late, you just know that you’re going to end up rolling around on the floor somewhere between Late Medieval History and Local Walks.

...

This book is an edited and tidied up version of coppersblog (see above link), which is just what it sounds like. The pseudonymous David Copperfield is a bit older than me, but out-curmudgeons me and makes it look easy: he is an old fashioned conservative, who believes the main problem with the justice system is that the prisons insist on releasing people after set lengths of time, instead of throwing away the key and letting them rot. Of course, given that my one major swing to the right is on the issue of crime, I pretty much agree with him. (That having been said; he does suffer from that particular myopia common to the middle classes of a certain age, of seeing crime committed by the young and/or poor as more serious than, you know, “small” crime; for example, he thinks that drunk and disorderly behaviour - more often than not committed by young morons - should be punished not with community service or periodic detention, rather with a jail sentence of no less than a year, but he also thinks that the punishment for drunk driving – essentially demerit points – is overly harsh on people who need their cars to go to work or to ferry their kids around...)

Wasting Police Time has a bunch of opinions I don’t agree with (cocooning those few that I do), but is a funny read, and does highlight many problems with policing in England – in fact, after the first edition of the book was released, questions were raised in Parliament by Opposition MPs who mentioned the book by name. And if nothing else, it possesses the following piece of wisdom:
Drugs are fun and they make you feel good, and that’s the extent of it. They do not ‘cause’ crime, though, any more than the existence of DVD players causes burglary, or the existence of short, ginger children causes bullying.

Books You Should Be Reading Number 39 Of A Bunch

Apathy Jack writes:

Truth And Consequences by Keith Olbermann

In four simple words last Friday, the president brought into sharp focus what has been only vaguely clear these past five and a half years, the way terrain at night is perceptible only during an angry flash of lightning, and then, a second later, all again is dark.
“It’s unacceptable to think,” he said.
It is never unacceptable to think.
And when a president says thinking is unacceptable, even on one topic, even in the heat of the moment, even in the turning of a phrase extracted from its context, he takes us toward a new and fearful path – one heretofore the realm of science fiction authors and apocalyptic visionaries.
That flash of lightning freezes at the distant horizon, and we can just make out a world in which authority can actually suggest it has become unacceptable to think.

...

This is a collection of the ‘Special Comments’ given by Keith Olbermann on his show Countdown. The show is stream-able here, and I cannot recommend highly enough that you watch it.

Also, here is his most recent special comment, from last week, about the Bush administration’s policy on warrant-less wire-tapping:

Books You Should Be Reading Number 38 Of A Bunch

Apathy Jack writes:

I Am America (And So Can You!) by Stephen Colbert

Childrearing is arguably the most important of my core values. I believe in it, I practice it, and I ceaselessly promote it to my friends and followers. That said, generally speaking, I’m against children.

What’s the matter? Did I shake you up?

See, I’m not against the conception of children; like I said, they’re the only permissible reason for intercourse. And I’m not against pregnancy – in fact, if you ask me, there’s nothing more beautiful than a third-trimester mother-to-be in full maternity regalia. Maybe it’s the elastic, I don’t know. But the effect is stunning.

No, my problem is the children themselves. They may be cute, but they are here to replace us. Need proof? Ever catch one walking around in your shoes? That’s a chilling moment, like finding an empty body snatcher pod in the basement.

“But children are out future!” Yes, but does that not also mean that we are their past? I don’t understand why we’re helping them. You don’t see union factory workers throwing a benefit for robots.

...

Colbert is, of course, host of The Colbert Report, which airs after the Daily Show in the ‘States. Fortunately, they stream a bunch of it here. If you’re not watching it regularly, you should be.

Apathy Jack writes:

Hanging out with Goths as I do, there’s a trend that comes and goes sporadically (or, more accurately, that I notice on and off – I don’t presume it stops when I cease to pay attention): People whose dogs have run away and whose girlfriends have dumped them and whose grandmothers have died, declare “I am suffering from Clinical Depression™” and get themselves a prescription of whatever’s popular at the local druggist that day.

(Actually, last time this phenomenon swept the city’s goth clubs – well, club – well, basement – it wasn’t the goths themselves who were mainly falling prey, rather the Goth Moths; weirdoes who hang out at goth events in an attempt to score some Spookybooty™ - in short: people like me. But I got me some Spookybooty, so am unrepentant.)

Taking brain-altering drugs because one’s brain is wired wrong is sensible – it’s no different from splinting a broken leg or suturing torn skin. Taking brain-altering drugs because you’re sad and too lazy to process your issues, too spineless to confront your demons, or too cheap to buy a helmet - that’s just annoying.

But anyway, others have said this better than me, including Elizabeth Wurtzel in Prozac Nation which I just finished reading, so instead of me bleating on at you about it, here she is:

...

As Prozac becomes viewed as a silly drug for crybabies, an instrument of what Dr. Kramer calls “cosmetic pharmacology”, the people whom it might really help – the ones who need it – will start to think that Prozac won’t help them. In the rape-crisis debate that currently rages, many feminists argue that too loose a definition of rape results in not taking “real” rape seriously, while others claim that anyone who feels violated was violated – and what tends to get lost in all the screaming and yelling is that there are all these real people who are raped and are in terrible pain. It seems entirely possible to me now, given the tone of so many of the articles about Prozac, that people will forget how severe, crippling, and awful depression really is.

Apathy Jack writes:

Today, Enemy, by Sevendust. This is just great. A music video that is a pretty direct retelling of the graphic novel Romp, which is about... actually, you should probably just watch the video – it would take too long to explain.

Books You Should Be Reading Number 37 Of A Bunch

Apathy Jack writes:

What I Do: More True Tales Of Everyday Craziness, by Jon Ronson

Monday night. People keep telling me that everybody in North Pole loves Christmas. But I’ve found someone who doesn’t. In fact she hates Christmas. Her name is Jessie Desmond. I found her via Myspace.
‘Christmas is a super big deal around here,’ she emailed me before I set off for Alaska, ‘but for me it is a general hate. Please don’t go off me about that.’
We meet in a non-Christmassy bar of her choice on the edge of town. She’s in her early twenties. She was educated at the middle school, and is now trying to make her way as a comic book artist. She has a Batman logo tattooed on her hand.
‘Christmas really grates on me, all the time, in the back of my head,’ she tells me. ‘Christmas, Christmas, Christmas. It drives me nuts.’
‘But there must be something you do like about North Pole,’ I say.
Jessie thinks about this. ‘Well, if you get into an accident or something, everyone’s willing to help you,’ she eventually shrugs.
I decide it’s safe to ask Jessie – being anti-Christmas – about the mass-murder plot.
‘Do you know the boys?’ I ask her.
She shakes her head.
‘Apparently they drew up a list,’ I say.
‘Well I have a hate list on my wall too,’ Jessie replies.
‘Yes,’ I say, ‘but I’m sure you don’t have access to weapons.’
‘I have a revolver in my bedroom,’ Jessie says.
‘Do you stand in front of the mirror with it and shout “Freeze!” and imagine what it’s like to kill your enemies?’ I ask.
There’s a silence.
‘I might,’ says Jessie, finally.

...

This is the second collection of Ronson’s Guardian columns, and is, to my mind, better than the first

Oh, and just in case anyone wants to get into my head, then they just need to read the first half of this book, because that is, in essence, me. I didn’t know whether to laugh, cry, or punch someone in the back of the head when Ronson details his rage at an admitted mostly imagined slight from several years earlier, that has him so riled that he is ranting about it to a stranger he meets in a bar, who asks him:
‘How can you find room in your life to harbour such anger against this person?’
I looked at her, perplexed, and replied, ‘I can find the time. Don’t worry.’



(For those keeping count, I decided to punch someone in the back of the head.)