The best quote of the day comes from Dirty Harry over at Libertas, in a piece on a couple new films about Che Guevera: “I can’t imagine what it must be like to hold an ideology where Wal-Mart outrages me more than the slaughter of 600 people.”
Baskin-Robbins Tonight
Get a scoop of ice cream for 31 cents tonight at Baskin-Robbins in support of The National Fallen Firefighters Foundation.
May 1: I took the family to the East Brainerd Baskin-Robbins last night after church. It was packed. The 5-6 people behind the counter could not stop taking orders. I heard one of them say she had never seen it that busy.
Another Way to Cheat on Exams
Here’s a story you won’t see in your local paper. A committee from a school board in Ahmedabad, India, is looking into what appears to be a full-fledged scam for passing high school final exams. Indian students can request a writer or exam-taker, if they are injured or unable to write the answers for their own exam. Naturally, the writer is supposed to put down only the answers provided by the student who should be taking the exam in the first place, and I think the policy allows academically weak students to stand as writers for other student. Presumably, the writer would not be able to help the other student. But if, say, you bribe a strong student or someone with answers to write for your son, well, if he gets a better grade, why should anyone complain? I ask you. Does the Bible say anything about taking someone else’s test in an Indian high school? No, it doesn’t, so what’s to complain about?
Telling Stories Online
Honor’s Kingdom, by Owen Parry
Honor’s Kingdom opens in the summer of 1862 in a London morgue, where a diverse group including Charles Francis Adams (son of John Quincy Adams and ambassador to the Court of St. James), his son Henry, an English Foreign Office official, a London policeman and a surgeon are gathered, along with the hero and narrator of the book, Abel Jones. Jones is a native of Wales and a veteran of the East India Company’s wars, but he’s now a major in the U.S. army and a secret agent of the American government.
He and the Adamses are there because the deceased, a Rev. Campbell (whose body was discovered in a basket of live eels), was an American. He was also (though they’re not mentioning this) another secret agent, and he had been investigating rumors that some British ship builder is building a warship for the Confederacy, in spite of the official neutrality of the government.
Ambassador Adams assigns Major Jones to find out who killed Campbell, and what it was he’d learned that got him (and two previous agents) killed.
Jones, in his methodical way, sets about an investigation which takes him from the halls of Parliament and the finest homes of West End London to the most miserable, soul-grinding slums of the city. He meets the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone, as well as a colorful variety of thieves, pimps, con men, music hall entertainers and prostitutes. Eventually his investigation extends to Glasgow, which is (amazing to tell) an even more miserable place to be poor in than London. His life is threatened by (among others) footpads, East Indian assassins and a mysterious man in a red silk mask. He chances to encounter Anthony Trollope, James McNeil Whistler, Karl Marx and William Booth along the way.
It’s jolly fun—exciting, engaging and sometimes moving. Educational, too. Continue reading Honor’s Kingdom, by Owen Parry
Screenwriter Depicts Realistic J. Austen
The screenwriter for a new British TV drama called, “Miss Austen Regrets,” wants the show to depict a realistic woman as Jane Austen. “She was lively and ferocious. Some of the comments about her neighbors make your eyes water,” writer Gwyneth Hughes said.
“The vegetable is gorgeous!”
We married off the Older Niece down in Iowa this weekend, and it was one of the better weddings I’ve attended, I think. They chose to do the whole thing low-key, low pressure.
So I had to make my own pressure.
I left too late. I should have left at 7:30 a.m. at the latest on Saturday, but I thought that if I waited till 8:00 I could drop off the package I’d promised to mail to my new publisher at the Post Office, and still have plenty of time.
Unfortunately the Post Office doesn’t open till 9:00.
So I hit the road (taking care to go around the area where they’ve closed off Highway 35 south, at Highway 62, for repair). We had snow on the ground, and a nasty west wind was shooting across my bow. Continue reading “The vegetable is gorgeous!”
New Granta
Granta, the magazine of new writing, has done something new with its website, so take a look.
Do you subscribe to any literary journals? Which ones or which ones would you subscribe to if somehow that special something made you do it–whatever that is?
Christ Walks in Rwanda
Dr. Peter Holmes, co-author of Christ Walks Where Evil Reigned: Responding to the Rwandan Genocide, talks about the book’s subject.
Unlike most of the terrible slaughter in the Great Lakes regions of Central East Africa, the Rwandan genocide was between two vocational groups, people who spoke the same language and lived in the same village. The Tutsi were the herdsmen who owned the cattle, the Hutu the farmers who worked the land. Just like Cain and Abel. They developed a profoundly deep hatred and jealousy for each other that were fed by the colonial strategy of dividing the natives in order to use them to control one another.
10,000 people were slaughtered every day for 100 days. Around a half million women were infected by AIDS intentionally by men who had infected themselves for that purpose. Several hundred thousand children were maimed or left alive without parents.
One of the biggest tragedies of the Rwandan genocide was that the UN ignored it, as did the American and European governments. Much of the communication from the country was from the official government which was ruled by the Hutus who were leading the genocide.
[It] did not occur like an army sweeping through the country but was instead made up of neighbors who were Hutu or Hutu–sympathizers who were jealous of the person next to them because they had more cows, or more wealth. Jealousy, hate, and even a fear of over-population helped birth the explosive slaughter. Continue reading Christ Walks in Rwanda
When writers talk too much
For those of you waiting for word on my health, I got a report today. I do have an iron deficiency, for which I’ll have to take a supplement. And they’re going to schedule some charming tests in the near future to find out if I have an ulcer, or what.
Mark Steyn, in an article for MacLean’s, takes a filet knife to the “commissar” of the Canadian Human Rights commission (who is prosecuting him for hate speech), pointing out in wonderful style that she knows no more about history than she knows about liberty.
More on how not to write, below the fold: Continue reading When writers talk too much