Blogs, Socials, Reading

Disney to Refund “Baby Einstein” Buyers

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The buyers of “Baby Einstein” videos were told their children would get a leg up on brain development by watching the DVDs, but no one has seen the benefits yet. Disney is now offering a refund spanning the last five years. The American Academy of Pediatrics advises against allowing two year olds watch TV, and research has shown that reading with your child helps the child develop language skills quite a bit. Texting with your baby is even better!

Ok, I made the last part up. But I’m sure listening to Mozart in the drivethru at McDonald’s or while going to sleep builds the brain. I mean, if it worked for Mozart . . .

Also on that post from the School Library Journal is a link to a list of ten good kid-lit bloggers.

Religion

A beiger shade of pale

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Joe Carter at First Things passes on a story about the “average color” of the universe, according to astronomers. You’ll quickly note that it’s about the same shade as the walls of a doctor’s waiting room. The joke is that this must be “God’s favorite color.”

It reminds me of an old Reader’s Digest story about a pastor who shows friends around his new parsonage. “Why are all the walls beige?” one of them asks.

“Because that’s the only color a committee can agree on.”

Is beige God’s favorite color? I doubt it very much.

In the first place, how do we know this universe is the only one there is? Perhaps there’s a bouquet, a rainbow of universes, running the full spectrum from infrared to ultraviolet. Perhaps we live in one of the dull ones.

My experience with God is that He Himself is anything but dull, and he doesn’t make decisions by committee. Like Aslan, He’s not a tame Lion. He has a taste for extremes, and the average beige of our universe represents a mean between the extreme joys and the extreme horrors of existence.

I have to imagine that His favorite color (like mine) is red. Because when He looks on the red of His Son’s blood, He is pleased and forgives our sins.

Fiction, Reviews

Stuart M. Kaminsky: Toby Peters books: An appreciation

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Last night I noted, belatedly, the passing of author Stuart M. Kaminsky last month. Purely by happenstance, I was reading several of his Toby Peters mysteries at the time, and was already planning to post about them.

The hero of the series, Toby Peters, is a shabby, distinctly down-market private eye working in Los Angeles in the late ’30s and the ’40s. Despite the fact that he can’t afford any better office than a closet in a dentist’s office, lives in a seedy boarding house overseen by a batty landlady, drives a tiny old Crosley automobile, and can never find a clean shirt to wear, he continually takes cases involving prominent personalities, especially movie stars.

It has occurred to me that Kaminsky was having a joke on us, and that the real secret of Toby Peters is that he was delusional.

But when I look past that bit of spontaneous deconstruction, I find the Peters mysteries simply a lot of fun. Peters is no Philip Marlowe. Although he can handle himself in a fight (he used to box and his face shows it), he injured his back doing bodyguard work for Mickey Rooney a while ago, and has to sleep on a mattress on the floor. He doesn’t drink at all, and his favorite food is cold cereal. He has an ex-wife whom he loves, but she won’t go out with him because he’s immature. He has a brother who’s a cop, and who generally seems to hate him (he gave him his first broken nose), but who usually comes through for him in a pinch. When he needs help with his cases, he can sometimes hire an old cop or security guard, but most of the time he ends up enlisting his friends—Gunther, his next-door neighbor, who is a three-foot-tall Swiss translator, Sheldon, the fat and unhygienic dentist from whom he rents his office, and Jeremy, the retired wrestler and poet who owns the office building. The result often resembles a Keystone Kops chase more than the elegant “payoff” in a William Powell movie.

The books I’ve read in this spree were Down for the Count (concerning Joe Louis), Think Fast, Mr. Peters (concerning Peter Lorre, a splendid opportunity for some Sam Spade dialogue), Buried Caesars (Gen. Douglas MacArthur) and Tomorrow is Another Day (Clark Gable).

They were fast reads. They didn’t offend me (though there’s a little rough language and implied sex). They were often very funny, and always well-written.

Recommended.

Uncategorized

Outrage

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If anyone reading this has friends or family at Fort Hood, especially if any of them are among the dead or wounded, our prayers are with you.

I had not known until this afternoon that military personnel are forbidden to carry weapons on military bases.

This strikes me, an ignorant civilian, as not only idiotic but oxymoronic. They’re known as our “armed forces,” after all.

The last people who should be defenseless in this country ought to be soldiers, and the place least vulnerable to a shooting spree ought to be a military base.

Or so it appears to me.

Reading

Christian Authors Show, A Christmas Carol, and Kaminsky

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I did a webcast radio interview on Saturday, with an operation called The Author’s Show. (You go to this site and then click on The Christian Author’s Show on the tool bar.) Supposedly my segment has been posted now, and you should be able to select it from the menu. But I can’t make it work. Maybe you can. Maybe it’s just my computer.

Dr. Ted Baehr (with whom I apparently have some distant connection, through my publisher) loves the new animated A Christmas Carol, with Jim Carey. I guess I’ll have to see it. If I love it too, it’ll mean I’ll have four different versions to keep on DVD and watch each Christmas. I’m not sure I can carry (or Carey) all those Carols.



Noodling around the internet, I discovered the shocking news that Stuart M. Kaminsky died, just about a month ago. I’m bereaved.

Kaminsky was one of the best, inadequately appreciated, mystery writers in America. He won awards and all, but he never really broke out as I would have wished for him. Instead of writing creepy thrillers full of gore and psychopaths and cannibalism, he wrote old-fashioned whodunnits, frequently brightened by his wit and always lightened by his human compassion.

As it happens, I just found several of his Toby Peters mysteries at the bookstore, and am almost finished with them. I was planning to write an appreciation when I finished the last one—maybe tomorrow.

I haven’t made up my mind entirely whether I prefer his Toby Peters stories (Hollywood in the Thirties and Forties, with our shabby detective pulling a succession of big movie stars out of the soup) or his Lou Fonesca stories (about a sad sack Sarasota process server who mostly gets around on a bike). I’ve read one of his Inspector Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov novels, set in Soviet Moscow, but it struck me as kind of claustrophobic and depressing. His Abe Lieberman books were good, but not as good (in my opinion) as the Peters and Fonesca stories.

We’ve lost a true professional, and someone I suspect I would have liked if I’d met him. Rest in peace, Stuart M. Kaminsky.

Bookselling

Price Wars Don’t Work When Everyone Fights

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When Amazon, Target, and Walmart sell a book at well below wholesale price, they can’t be making money. So what are they doing? Attempting to hurt every other bookseller in every other city. James Surowiecki writes about the price war for The New Yorker.

The idea is to let your competitors know that you’re not eager to slash prices—but that, if a price war does start, you’ll fight to the bitter end. One way to establish that peace-preserving threat of mutual assured destruction is to commit yourself beforehand, which helps explain why so many retailers promise to match any competitor’s advertised price. Consumers view these guarantees as conducive to lower prices. But in fact offering a price-matching guarantee should make it less likely that competitors will slash prices, since they know that any cuts they make will immediately be matched. It’s the retail version of the doomsday machine.

(via ArtsJournal)

Bookselling

Not without honor in my own city

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Today provided another of those little rewards that make being an author almost worth the trouble. I spoke on the phone to a lady from Ingebretsen‘s Scandinavian store.

If, for some obscure reason, you don’t live in the Minneapolis area, you probably don’t know about Ingebretsen’s. It’s a community institution. It started (if I have the story right) as a neighborhood grocery on Lake Street, catering to Scandinavian immigrants, back in 1921. The neighborhood remains an immigrant center even today, except that the immigrants now tend to be Mexican and Sudanese. But through all the decades, Ingebretsen’s has remained on the old corner, faithful to the neighborhood, dispensing lutefisk, flatbread, goat cheese and herring to a small but grateful public.

Somewhere along the line they expanded to include a Scandinavian gift shop, and they’re the best and most successful brick-and-mortar enterprise of that sort in the metropolitan area. I make a pilgrimage every Christmas season, and it’s usually a long walk from wherever I can find a place to park. Before stepping inside to join the throng, I have to make a conscious effort to abandon all concept of personal space.

I wrote to Ingebretsen’s, along with a couple other midwest dealers in the same sort of line, after West Oversea came out. I enclosed copies of reviews and a free copy of the book. The lady at Ingebretsen’s told me she’d read the book and enjoyed it, and had added it to their winter catalog (which I knew about) and to their web site (which I didn’t).

Don’t mess with me. Among Minneapolis Norwegians, Danes, Swedes and Finns, I now have street cred.

Publishing, Reading

Kindle Under Fire from iPhone Apps

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eReader apps for the iPhone are surging in popularity, according to a marketing research firm. The firm suggests Amazon’s Kindle may become a remainder to Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch, which has 57,000,000 users.

Book Reviews, Creative Culture