Blogs, Socials, The Press

“Better is One Day in Your Courts”

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Mike Adams over at Townhall.com (sorry for the pop-up rich environment) posts what seems to me a splendid piece today. It’s in the form of an address to his students at UNC-Wilmington, which he plans to give at the start of the school year. In it he throws down a gauntlet, declaring that he plans to violate the school’s speech code, and see how the administration defends the suppression of ideas in an academic setting.

By the time these three speakers are finished, at least one of you will have filed a formal complaint claiming I have created a “hostile environment.” You’ll be relying, of course, on one of our university’s illegal speech codes.

I will respond by doing something that may surprise you: I will use the same illegal speech code to claim that the speech in your complaint is hate speech, which creates a “hostile environment” for people of faith.

Bookselling

Book-ordering day, 2009, fall edition

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Today was one of the great, dreaded days of my year as a bookstore manager. I finally had in hand the book orders from all (and by all I mean most) of the instructors, for texts they want their students to have this fall. So I sat down at the phone and started placing orders, relying on my efficient and elegant Microsoft Xcel-based system.

And it went pretty well. I finished all the orders, I think (got to double-check tomorrow), except for the one publisher who put me in a call queue this morning until I gave up, and then put me in a call queue this afternoon when I tried again. I left my number on voice mail.

The most harrowing order is always Zondervan (last in sequence because it starts with “Z”). They have a fully automated ordering system which depends entirely on pressing the buttons on the phone dial. I ought to love it, as it involves no actual human interaction, but I think I fear numbers even more than I fear people.

It’s an odd phenomenon I’ve noticed in the last few years, that I never seem to experience particular satisfaction anymore when I finish a major task. Even when I complete a whole novel, I’m left with the feeling Flashman had at the end of Flashman at the Charge, when he’d finally made his way over the Khyber Pass to Peshawar, having fought, lied and skulked his way through fire, blizzard and carnage, to reach a British post at last, and all the official had to say to him was, “Very good. This is a customs post, among other things. Have you anything to declare?”

The reason for the dysphoria, of course, is that I don’t try enough new things.

Oh well. I can live without particular satisfaction.

Uncategorized

Because the Truth Doesn’t Cut It

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The Arctic sea will not be free of ice by 2030, as Greenpeace has said.

Big Hollywood writes: “Although [the retiring head of Greenpeace] admitted Greenpeace had released inaccurate but alarming information, Leipold defended the organization’s practice of ’emotionalizing issues’ in order to bring the public around to its way of thinking and alter public opinion.”

Speaking of emotionalizing issues, what comes to mind when you think of the year 2012? Your son will be out of college? The next presidential election? The end of the world? Maybe I’m stretching, but I won’t be surprised if someone behind this film is arguing that if the next presidential election goes the wrong way, we’re doomed.

Blogs, Socials

Award Nomination and Your Feedback

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Brandywine Books has been nominated for an award during Book Blogger Appreciation Week. Our category is “Best Spiritual/Inspirational or Religious Book Review Blog.”

The friendly people behind this award have asked us to give them for their consideration five posts which we believe put our best feet forward. What do you think we should recommend? Since it’s a book review category, I’d prefer book reviews or book-related posts, but Lars post on villains may be a good choice or perhaps his post on Klavan’s crime trilogy a while back. Maybe we should stick to the spiritual-inspirational-religious topics though.

Please let us know what you think, and thank you for nominating us for this award.

Fiction, Reviews

The Brass Verdict, by Michael Connelly

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The Brass Verdict is Michael Connelly’s second novel about his new character, lawyer Mickey Haller. I wasn’t too sure whether I liked Mickey much when I read the first one, The Lincoln Lawyer, but this book definitely warmed me to him.

Mickey Haller is a defense attorney. He’s just coming off a one-year hiatus when he gets the news that an old friend, another defense lawyer named Jerry Vincent, has been murdered, and has left his stable of clients to him. One of them is a “franchise case,” a big-paycheck, high-profile case involving Walter Elliott, a Hollywood movie mogul.

There are problems with defense lawyers as heroes of stories. We all know that in the real world they’re not Perry Mason. They defend the worst people in the world, and if they’re good they get very rich off it. What makes Mickey Haller sympathetic is that he feels that moral tension, on a deep level. It probably had a lot to do with the cocaine-and-alcohol habit that destroyed his marriage, alienated his daughter, and nearly cost him his life.

On moving into Jerry’s office, Mickey finds two policeman going through the case files—illegally. He kicks them out, but oddly finds himself drawn to one of them, who turns out to be Harry Bosch, the hero of the majority of Michael Connelly’s novels. This is an excellent strategy on the author’s part, and helped me settle into the story.

Harry asks questions—who had Jerry Vincent bribed? How was the FBI involved? Mickey doesn’t know the answers. Harry doesn’t believe him. But they will still be drawn together into the double mystery of Jerry’s murder and the Elliott trial, which turn out to be linked. And the killing isn’t over.

A good story by a master storyteller. Connelly did telegraph one surprise though, at least in my case. He generally keeps politics out of his books (for which I’m eternally grateful), but here he did mention one character’s conservative affiliations. I immediately thought, “I’ll bet this character turns out to be a villain.” And behold, it was so.

Maybe Connelly’s done the same thing with liberal characters in the past, but I never noticed it. (Then again, I probably wouldn’t.)

But storytellers, be warned—we know your poker tells.

Authors

Klavan on death panels

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Andrew Klavan has an opinion on whether “death panels” are a legitimate concern or not.

It begins to occur to you that this is how you are going to die: by the fiat of fatuous ideologues—that is to say, by the considered judgment of a government committee. They are going to snuff you out and never lose a minute’s sleep over it, because it’s only fair, after all.

The basic fallacy, it seems to me, is the assumption that “socialized” and “compassionate” are the same thing. This is where liberals are blinkered. They believe that their virtuous intentions (and in most cases they are extremely virtuous) will guarantee virtuous outcomes. “Don’t talk to me about real-world consequences! I’m talking about my feelings here!”

Thanks to Dave Lull and Loren Eaton, who both sent the link.

Coffee, Tea, Drinks

The Face of Taster’s Choice

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Do you remember the label on Taster’s Choice instant coffee? It’s of a man enjoying his cup of scoop-n-stir joe. Apparently, the man in that photo didn’t know his face made the cut back in the 1980s, because a few years ago someone said, “Dude, you look like that dude on that coffee stuff, you know?” And when he checked the jar, he saw for first time that his was the face of Taster’s Choice.

So he sued, and you’d think that the man whose face became an international logo would be owed a lot of money, unless he signed it away in the beginning. But no, the company just ran with the image without getting back to him, avoiding payment and violating their contract.

Now, the courts are asking whether the man still has the opportunity to sue, because it’s been awhile since all this happened.

Book Reviews, Creative Culture