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In which I badmouth one of the most beloved TV shows in history

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I got into a discussion in comments on the Threedonia blog today. Their open thread featured a picture of the Andy Griffith Show cast.

I expressed my personal dislike for the show, based on my (wholly insecurity-based) allergy to all those 1960s shows set in rural or small town settings. I found them condescending in the extreme, and resented them (the rest of my family, for the record, liked the shows just fine).

Later I discussed the pilot for the show, which I remember clearly, as I saw it on its first broadcast. It was actually an episode of The Danny Thomas Show. Continue reading In which I badmouth one of the most beloved TV shows in history →

Fiction, Reviews

Expecting Someone Taller and Who’s Afraid of Beowulf? by Tom Holt

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A friend lent me his copies of Expecting Someone Taller and Who’s Afraid of Beowulf? I’m glad he did. I enjoyed reading them very much.

English writer Tom Holt has mastered (perhaps invented; I’m not sure) a form of contemporary, humorous fantasy in which mythical or historical characters mix with the modern world (kind of like some of my works, or Neil Gaiman’s, but funny). A critical blurb on the cover of EST says the book “recalls Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and Twain’s Connecticut Yankee….” I’d say the writing is more reminiscent of Wodehouse’s, at least some of the time (which is high praise indeed).

Take this passage from EST:

[Alberich] was a businessman, and businessmen have to travel on aircraft. Since there seemed to be no prospect of progress in his quest for the Ring, he had thought it would be as well if he went back to Germany for a week to see what sort of a mess his partners were making of his mining consultancy. He had no interest in the work itself, but it provided his bread and butter; if it did not exactly keep the wolf from the door, it had enabled him to have a wolf-flap fitted so that the beast could come in and out without disturbing people.

Continue reading Expecting Someone Taller and Who’s Afraid of Beowulf? by Tom Holt →

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John Brown, Abolitionist and Terrorist?

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John Brown at Harper's Ferry

Yesterday, 150 years ago, John Brown was hanged. He took justice in his own hands and killed several people during the 1850s in an attempt to end slavery in America. Obit magazine has a report. “Even though devotees flocked for decades to his grave as if it were the shrine of a saint,” St. John Barned-Smith writes, “the dispassionate massacre of people is the work of a bloodthirsty gangster, not a noble redeemer.”

Authors, Bookselling

Poe’s First Book Could Draw Huge Bid at Auction

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Edgar Allan Poe’s first book, Tamerlane and Other Poems, didn’t impress folks at the time, but it’s a rare find at auctions today for antique book buyers. Christie’s is selling a beat-up copy of the book which it says could sell for half a million or more, a record for American literature. Twenty years ago, another copy of the same book sold for $250,000, which is the current record price for this kind of thing.

Uncategorized

More Climatological Humor

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Tom Naughton goes to a doctor who trained with climate researchers on how to conduct medicine. “Man-made body enlarging. . . . If this keeps up, you’ll weigh 650 pounds by the year 2030. It’s a looming disaster.”

Goofing

Settling accounts

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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

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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 →

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Climate Change as Religion

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“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

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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

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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.

Book Reviews, Creative Culture