“Bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will, to be rightful, must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal laws must protect, and to violate would be oppression.” –Thomas Jefferson: 1st Inaugural, 1801. ME 3:318
Bil asked the question: how many of Time’s list of 100 Best Novels have you read?
41 of them. Most of them in high school or college English classes. When I read the list I was disappointed at what was missing and some of the crap they included. These people can’t tell me they actually read Infinite Jest. I don’t believe it. And what the hell is “Are you there God, It’s me Margaret” doing on this list? If they needed to pick a teen novel, there are 30 better than that. I also wonder why they picked the year 1923 as the starting point. What’s significant about that year?
When I was in second grade, the following story was in my school reader, (which I’ve since discovered was called “Believe and Make-Believe (Sheldon Basic Reading Series)“) and I remember sitting with my mom at home listening to her read it out loud before bedtime. It was one of my favorite stories, and I was happy to stumble across it again out there on the internets. The credit I found was to “Caroline Feller Bauer” but I’ve since discovered (see comments below) that it was written by Betty Van Witsen.
There was once a little boy who ate cheese, peas and chocolate pudding. Every day he ate the same thing: cheese, peas and chocolate pudding.
For breakfast, he would have some cheese, any kind: cream cheese, American cheese, Swiss cheese, Dutch cheese, Italian cheese, cottage cheese, bleu cheese, green cheese, yellow cheese, even leiderkrantz. Just cheese for breakfast.
For lunch, he ate peas: green or yellow peas, frozen peas, canned peas, dried peas, split peas, black-eyed peas. No potatoes, though; just peas for lunch.
And for supper he would have cheese and peas and chocolate pudding for dessert. Cheese, peas and chocolate pudding. Cheese, peas and chocolate pudding. Every day, the same old thing: cheese, peas and chocolate pudding.
Once, his mother bought him a lamb chop. She cooked it in a little frying pan on the stove, and she put some salt on it and gave it to him on a little blue dish. The little boy looked at it. He smelled it (it smelled delicious!). He even touched it. but — “Is this cheese?” he asked. “It’s a lamb chop darling,” said his mother. The boy shook his head. “Cheese,” he said. So his mother ate the lamb chop herself, and the boy had some cottage cheese.
One day, his big brother was chewing on a raw carrot. It sounded so good and crunchy, the little boy reached his hand out for a bite. “Sure!” his brother said, “Here!” He almost put the carrot into his mouth, but at the last minute he remembered and asked, “Is this peas?” “No, it’s a carrot,” said his brother, “Peas”, the little boy said firmly, handing the carrot back.
Once his daddy was eating a big dish of raspberry pudding, It looked so shiny red and cool, the little boy came over and held his mouth open. “Want a taste?” asked his daddy. The little boy looked and looked at the raspberry pudding. He almost looked it right off the dish. “But, is it chocolate pudding?” he asked. “No, it’s raspberry pudding,” said his daddy. So the little boy frowned and backed away. “Chocolate pudding!” he said.
His grandma bought him an ice cream cone. The little boy shook his head. His aunt and uncle invited him for a fried chicken dinner. Everybody ate fried chicken and fried chicken and fried chicken, except the little boy. And you know what he ate. Cheese, peas and chocolate pudding. Cheese, peas and chocolate pudding. Every day the same old thing: cheese, peas and chocolate pudding.
But one day — ah, one day a very funny thing happened. The little boy was pretending to be a puppy. He lay on the floor and growled and barked and rolled over. He crept to the table where his big brother was having lunch. “Arf, arf!” he barked. “Good Doggie!” said his brother, patting his head. The little boy lay down on his back and barked again. But at that moment, his big brother dropped a piece of something right into the little boy’s mouth. The little boy sat up in surprise because something was on his tongue. And that something was warm and juicy and delicious!
And it didn’t taste like cheese. And it didn’t taste like peas. And it didn’t taste a bit like chocolate pudding. The little boy chewed slowly. Each chew tasted better. He swallowed the something.
“That’s not cheese,” he said. “No, it’s not,” said his brother. “And it’s not peas,” he said. “No, not peas,” said his brother. “It couldn’t be chocolate pudding.” “No, it’s certainly not chocolate pudding,” said his brother, smiling, “It’s hamburger.”
So the little boy thought very hard. “I like hamburger!” he said.
So ever after that, the little boy ate cheese, peas, chocolate pudding and hamburger.
Until he was your age, of course. Then he ate everything!
Reading a BBC News story on Phillip Pullman’s (author of the His Dark Materials series) critique of the coming C. S. Lewis movie and the subject matter of the books in general. I loved the Narnia series as a kid, but they don’t hold up entirely from a discerning adult point of view, for exactly the reasons Pullman notes; they are misogynist, and somewhat racist, and pretty damn low on the Christian virtue meter.
Further into the article, though, people begin commenting on Pullman’s critique, and there are quite a few boneheaded remarks from adults who clearly aren’t as discerning as I am, including this one:
“The day Philip Pullman writes a classic as compelling as The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe then he can criticise.” — Mark Jobson, Edinburgh
DUDE. You know not what you are saying, dude. Seriously. Pullman’s books can beat the crap out of Narnia, go back to bed, get up an hour later, and do it again. I love Narnia, and all, and I was thrilled when I heard they were making a movie, but I’m still realistic. I wish I knew the guy’s address; I’d send him copies.
Years and years ago, (1998) I was sitting around reading my copy of Benet’s Readers Encyclopedia, which is a somewhat obscure reference book. I came across a passage about “commonplace books” which described them as a type of journal from the 1800s where people would collect scraps of poetry, ideas and their own writing along a common theme. It differed from a diary in that it wasn’t a collection of personal recollections, but was more like an artist’s notebook. They were kept most often by authors who used them as the genesis for novels, but famous commonplace books were also kept by Thomas Jefferson and other politicos.
I was struck at that time by the similarity to what I was doing on the web. My site had been around for several years by that time; I had started with a few pages in 1994 on someone else’s site, and moved to my own area on a local service provider in 1996. I was essentially “blogging” regularly and had been since 1996, although blogger software was still a few years away and I was coding my “blog” by hand.
It was just about the time that it because possible for individuals to purchase domain names of their own, and my site, which was located at http://members.iquest.net/~batgirl/ at the time, was looking more and more professional, although it still had the tell-tale “personal” URL. So I took the plunge and paid for my own domain name, purchasing “commonplacebook.com.”
At the time, I had to explain the concept of a commonplace book to everyone and their mom and their dog every time I gave out my URL to people, or sent an e-mail, and for years I had the definition from Benets on the homepage of my site so people would stop e-mailing me about it.
A while back, I entered a google term of “commonplace book” into both google alerts and technorati so I could get an alert every time someone mentioned my site on their site.
Over the past six months or so, fourteen or fifteen different people have started calling their “blog” a “commonplace book” and they show up every day in my google and technorati pings.
Apparently, seven years after I started doing it, “commonplace book” has become the hot new thing to call your site to set it apart from the crowd.
Late bitches. Suffer; I’ve got the URL.
This week is Banned Books Week.
Go check out a challenged or banned book from your local library and celebrate freedom from censorship. Also be sure to stand up against book banning.
The American Library Association has a list of other great things you can do this week.
Some good news: Dumbledore is not dead, according to this site. Read their analysis of the clues hidden in the books to find out why they believe this.
It’s been my belief all along, mainly because of Fawkes, the Phoenix, but I didn’t reason it out the way these guys did. Their explanations make a lot of sense.
[Navigated to by way of Steven Johnson’s Blog. Johnson is the author of Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter which I read recently.]
Quoting from Wikipedia:
The phrase The Long Tail, as a proper noun, was first coined by Chris Anderson. Beginning in a series of speeches in early 2004 and culminating with the publication of a Wired Magazine article in October 2004, Anderson described the effects of the long tail on current and future business models. Anderson observed that products that are in low demand or have low sales volume can collectively make up a market share that rivals or exceeds the relatively few current bestsellers and blockbusters, if the store or distribution channel is large enough. Examples of such mega-stores include Amazon.com, Netflix and even Wikipedia.
Meaning that if you’re into some obscure punk band that no one but you and two people in Idaho have heard of, some businesses with large distribution channels can provide them to you, and their business on small demand items can exceed business for large demand items. Which explains who so many obscure movies are now being released on DVD, where there’s now a market for them via Internet companies that don’t need to provide a physical store to house them.
I’m started cataloging my library using Booxter software, by Deep Prose. Since 1997, I’ve kept lists of all the books I’ve read, but I’ve never been good at keeping track of the books I actually own and haven’t yet read, or books that I want to purchase. And for insurance reasons, I should have an accurate record of what I own. I’ve needed to get my library organized for a long time and it’s such a huge task that I’ve put it off forever.
But I’ve been needing to go through all my books lately to weed some out and put them in my upcoming yard sale (Saturday, August 27th, more details to follow).
This past week I started using the public library’s request and hold capabilities, and realized that I can request a book on the internet and have it sent to my nearest library to pick it up, rather than buying it full price. Duh, I know. I realize that Stephanie, Lori, Joel, Jen, Rachel, and Beth have all pointed the wisdom of obtaining books this way at one time or another. I don’t know why I never listened to them. I think that once I started being able to afford to buy books instead of checking them out (before the library had such robust online features) I went that route because I love books so much I wanted to be surrounded by them.
And Stephanie and I went to the library book sale yesterday and I successfully found several books that I had on my wishlist for a long time. If I had been better organized about what I own and what’s on my wishlist, I might have found them earlier, and I might have obtained lots of books cheaper instead of paying full price for them.
So far, into the Booxter cataloging software, I have entered 125 titles, which includes all of the books I had sitting around on tables in the living room, plus three shelves from my book case in the living room. There are 39 more shelves in the living room, plus two small bookcases upstairs and a shelf of books at work to add.
The software goes out and grabs data from numerous sources, including all the bibliographic data and the cover image of the book, and I can enter data as well, such as when and where I purchased the book and for how much, if I’ve read it and when, etc.
For the 125 books, the tally is 41,760 pages, $2,546.68 for the full price to replace the books, and $1,286.42 that I personally have spent on books. Those last two numbers scare me.
2019 Update: I never managed to get much more than this entered. I ended up switching library software, too, to Delicious Library – it had a barcode scanning tool. Cool idea, but it was a really buggy piece of software. I need to go back and try this again sometime, because scanning software is much better now.
Found in middle of Salon Magazine’s article “Verily, I sell unto you” — on the new trend of Christian business owners advertising their faith as a part of their business.
I knew there was a great reason not to go to Amway meetings.