When Hugo Chavez spoke to the United Nations on Wednesday, calling George W. Bush “the devil,” he help up a copy of MIT linguistics professor Noam Chomsky’s “Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance” and recommended it to the General Assembly and the American people.
“The people of the United States should read this… instead of watching Superman movies,” Chavez later told reporters. Chavez also said one of his great regrets was not meeting Chomsky before he died. Chomsky is alive and well at 77.
Chomsky’s book has since shot to the top of Amazon’s Bestsellers list from number 20,664.
Prompting the question, what other books does Hugo read?
Sneaky Uses for Everyday Things: How to Turn a Penny into a Radio, Make a Flood Alarm with an Aspirin, Change
by Cy Tymony
ISBN: 0740738593
NON-FICTION – A small guide to how to MacGyvver yourself out of situations using objects you may have with you. I checked the book out from the library, so no time to tinker around making anything. Some of the descriptions are pretty loosy-goosy, so you’d want to build some of these gadgets at home and see them working before you tried to build one in a tight spot. I get the impression that the author compiled the book from a gathered list of ideas, rather than building them all at home in his own basement.
A parent would probably have fun guiding their kids through some of these amateur science experiments to show kids how to build their own radio or make a working compass. But they might want to skip the chapter on how to make your own weapons. Leave that to the adults.
I’m guessing the target market for this book is “teenage boy.” Hmmm. Probably why I read it. There are follow-up books, too: “Sneakier Uses for Everyday Things: How to Turn a Calculator into a Metal Detector, Carry a Survival Kit in a Shoestring, Make a Gas Mask with a Balloon…”.
How Nancy Jackson Married Kate Wilson
and Other Tales of Rebellious Girls and Daring Young Women
by Mark Twain and John R. Cooley
Library Journal: “A dozen minor Twain pieces to show how Twain used some of his slight fictions to idealize his daughters Clara and Suzy Clemens as romantic, rebellious, and daring adolescents in the decades that glorified the sassy Gibson Girl. Twain probably considered his stories of transvestites, lesbian relationships, and sexual oddities almost scandalous, and he must have viewed “Little Bessie,” in which a child questions her mother about God, as dangerously blasphemous.”
A not terribly captivating book, in all, probably of more interest to Twain scholars than to women interested in tales of daring and rebellious women. The best story in it is Little Bessie about a girl who vigorously tears apart her mother’s Christian mythology — a story that wasn’t ever published, probably because it’s the most true thing Twain wrote.
Geography Club
by Brent Hartinger
Geography Club is a gay teen novel about 16-year-old Russel Middlebrook who comes out to himself befriends other gay teens at his high school, while battling bullying and homophobia from other classmates. It’s number 2 Book Sense’s list of favorite banned books. It’s been challenged at some school libraries due to homophobia, although it’s quite chaste in subject matter.
It was a quick and pleasant read and is a nice counterpoint to popular teen lesbian novels like Annie on My Mind. It’s nice that books like this exist nowadays. When I was a teenager, I was stuck with reading all the cross-dressing plays of Shakespeare, and checking out Collette novels.
New Yorker article on a gay couple who were ordered to stop kissing on an airplane:
Shortly after takeoff, Varnier nodded off, leaning his head on Tsikhiseli. A stewardess came over to their row. “The purser wants you to stop that,” she said.
“I opened my eyes and was, like, ‘Stop what?’ ” Varnier recalled the other day.
“The touching and the kissing,” the stewardess said, before walking away.
Tsikhiseli and Varnier were taken aback. “He would rest his head on my shoulder or the other way around. We’d kiss—not kiss kiss, just mwah,” Tsikhiseli recalled, making a smacking sound.
In the row behind them were Leisner and Jackson. “They were like two lovebirds,” said Leisner, who is a classical guitarist. Frobes-Cross, a Columbia grad student who was sitting across the aisle, had overheard the stewardess’s decree, too. “First thing I catch is ‘You have to stop touching each other,’ ” he said. “And I’m, like, Whoa, that’s really weird.”
After discussing the issue further with the crew, the pilot of the plane told them that they needed to shut up or he would divert the plane. The airline officials also refused to speak to the when the plane landed.
The airline tried to claim that the policy was in place for all couples, but when people called in later to ask, they admitted that straight couples are not prohibited from kissing each other on the plane.
I would so be in trouble for this, because Stephanie and I hold hands and kiss all the time.
And article I discovered via Shakespeare’s Sister:
Gay Stereotypes: Are They True?
Are Gays More Like Straight Men Than We Think?
By JOHN STOSSEL and GENA BINKLEY
Yes, John Stossel is writing about gay stereotypes. I don’t need to go on do I? ‘Cause — John Stossel?!
WTF?!
I’m going to stop here before I get too pissed off by the whole thing and end up having a stroke or something. Fucking Stossel.
I mentioned Indy Undercover on IndyScribe, but I’ve now read several of the posts, and want to comment here on it separately.
Indy Undercover a site about law enforcement issues in Indianapolis, purportedly written by an law enforcement officer. It’s getting lots of traffic and comments from other people who claim to be law enforcement officers in the city, and the tone of the site is hyper right-wing and very, very anti Democrat.
There are a couple of blog comments that reference this past year’s Human Rights Ordinance — specifically that officers felt the ordinance trumped their concerns about the consoliation of the IPD and the Sheriff’s Department. But the comments are virulently homophobic, which is really alarming. These are the people who are supposed to serve and protect us? Yikes, yikes, and double f*&king yikes.
UPDATE: After the 2006 November election, it was revealed that the Indy Undercover website was not run by anyone from the Indianapolis Police Department, but rather by Indianapolis radio personality Abdul Hakim-Shabazz.