Goofing

Settling accounts

6 Comments

MEMORANDUM

TO: The Universal Calendar Company

FROM: Lars Walker

RE: November

Having recently exhausted the November page in my 2009 calendar, I feel compelled to make you aware of my extreme disappointment with the quality of your product in recent years.

I make no comment on the art you selected to illustrate the month, although “Naked Maples in Dubuque” might be considered, by certain sensitive souls, a less than transcendent theme. I understand that you can only work with the material actually available.

I note that the November 2009 page contains the requisite number of days, i.e., thirty (30). This is technically up to code.

However, I can tell you, on the basis of a lifetime of experience with months, that your customers have not received full value for their temporal dollar. I am aware that months are packed by weight, not volume, and that a certain amount of settling may have occurred during transport. However, my memory is clear in the matter of the length of Novembers back in the 1950s when I was a boy, and I am convinced that this past November does not come close to meeting that standard. Clearly someone (I make no personal accusations) has been adulterating the product. Continue reading Settling accounts →

Fiction, Reviews

The Man-Kzin Wars X: The Wunder War, by Hal Colebatch

5 Comments

The fact that I haven’t read the previous books in this series (created by Larry Niven) probably disqualifies me from making intelligent comments on Man-Kzin Wars X: The Wunder War, but I picked it up because Hal Colebatch is an e-mail friend, and a wise and perceptive writer over at the American Spectator (also a lawyer and sometime government functionary in Australia).

Full disclosure: I did not get my copy for free as a reviewer. I sprung for it out of my own money.

The premise of the Man-Kzin Wars series, as I understand it, begins with the assumption that space-traveling cultures are generally peaceful cultures. Warfare is too much of a scientific and economic drain for warlike civilizations to get far in interstellar exploration and commerce.

However, there is an exception—the Kzin, a race of tiger-like (but larger and stronger) bipeds who sweep across the galaxy like Romans on the march, conquering and enslaving (often devouring) peaceful civilizations as they go. When they first approach a human colony, the paradisaical planet called Wunderland, it looks like more of the same. The humans there have put warfare so far behind them that the study of it is next to illegal, and curious scholars are at a loss to understand the functions of weapons, or what military ranks indicate. Continue reading The Man-Kzin Wars X: The Wunder War, by Hal Colebatch →

Uncategorized

Climate Change as Religion

3 Comments

“The environment should compete with religion as the only compelling, value-based narrative available to humanity,” claims a paper on the United Nations Environmental Program and its need to be at the center of political and economic decisions at the U.N. and around the world. Reported in a Fox News exclusive, the author of the paper, Mark Halle believes:

there are signs that the hugely ambitious role he and his fellow-thinkers sketched for UNEP as religion’s main competitor are “beginning to happen.” Halle pointed to UNEP’s espousal this year of a so-called Green Economy Initiative, a proposal to radically redesign the global economy and transfer trillions of dollars in investment to the world’s poorest developing countries, but one that is couched in terms of providing new green jobs, an end to old, unfair carbon-based energy subsidies, and greater global fairness and opportunity. Halle called the development “quite exciting.”

I’m sure the U.N. will do its best to keep all of that money out of corrupt hands in various African governments, just like they did with the Iraq Oil for Food program.

Fiction

Attention All Shoppers: Avoid the Dreadful Horror in Aisle 6

9 Comments

I hope your holiday shopping has not been as traumatic as this one recorded by Loren Eaton. And if it has, I hope the military or store owners picked up all of your bill–that’s the least they could do.

Bookselling, Reading

Best of the Year and More

2 Comments

Scott Lamb has started up conversation on the NY Times list of best book from 2009.

Also, in case you missed it, the winner of the Best of the National Book Award winners for fiction is The Complete Stories by Flannery O’Connor, as it should be.

Uncategorized

Eulogy on a turkey

2 Comments

It was a good Thanksgiving break. In spite of my fears, I got the house (adequately) cleaned, and the turkey (more than adequately) roasted by the time the family showed up. As always we were crowded but cheerful, and everybody seemed to have a good time.

We gathered on Saturday, and by Sunday the cold I’d been flirting with ravished me entire, and I spent the day in bed with it. And a book, which I’ll be reviewing shortly.

The interview with the Christian Authors Show, which I mentioned in an earlier posting, has finally appeared on their schedule. It will be the featured interview on Dec. 9 and 10, and selectable after that. (Unfortunately, I can’t link to the section I’m in. You have to select “The Christian Authors Show” from the menu.)

In case nobody’s mentioned it to you, Christmas is coming. West Oversea is the perfect gift for every person on your list! Even if they don’t read books, the guilt your gift will engender will be salutary for their characters. And it’s the one gift you know they won’t exchange—because we don’t do returns.

In fact, you should buy two copies for everybody. It will make Christmas truly magical.

For me and my publisher, anyway.

There’s an ordering link on the sidebar.

Non-fiction

Bold, the Young Viking Poets

4 Comments

Robert Ferguson, author of The Vikings: A History, claims “a mastery of poetry was a must for any young Viking who wanted to make a name for himself. . . . Young Icelandic warrior-poets (or ‘skalds,’ as they were known) such as Gunnlaug Snaketongue, Kormak Ogmundarson, and Hallfred the Troublesome Poet, were documenting the ecstasies and despairs of romantic love as early as the late 10th century, some 200 years before the medieval troubadours we typically credit as being the world’s first true Romantic poets.”

Authors, Non-fiction, Writing

Untrustworthy Memory in Print

1 Comment

Jonathan Yardley writes about some of the great memoirs of the past and the dredge we have clogging the half-priced bookshelves today. He says, “On the one hand, we want ‘authenticity and credibility’ in autobiographical writing; on the other, we want to be entertained, which can sometimes lead writers to exaggeration or invention. . . . [But] what the memoir boom has in fact given us is too many dull or forgettable memoirs, precious few of which have enriched our literature but most of which have simply encouraged the narcissism of their authors.”