why dave bergman is neat

What American Accent Do You Have?

2007-01-24T16:35:00.000-05:00

This quiz must be pretty accurate, or else my own particular results are just a very accurate fluke. And by the way, we do speak standard English straight out of the dictionary.

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Inland North You may think you speak "Standard English straight out of the dictionary" but when you step away from the Great Lakes you get asked annoying questions like "Are you from Wisconsin?" or "Are you from Chicago?" Chances are you call carbonated drinks "pop."
The Midland
The Northeast
Philadelphia
The South
The West
Boston
North Central
What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

New Tom Waits

2006-11-06T12:13:00.000-05:00

Emusic.com has some advance tracks available from Tom Waits' forthcoming album Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards, most of them free. Some parts of 'Road to Peace' are vapid and trite, but the rest of the songs are pretty good (it seems to me that it's difficult to sing well about contemporary geopolitics [cf. the Rolling Stones' recent 'Sweet Neo Con']--it's not that it can't be done, but rather that it's usually not done well); 'You Can Never Hold Back Spring' and 'Long Way Home' are especially beautiful.

YES!!! Evened Up at One to One.

2006-10-23T00:35:00.000-04:00

And this, currently on the front page of the Free Press website, is a great picture of Rogers.

Nine Tonight

2006-10-21T10:48:00.000-04:00

Ok, not really--more like eight or so tonight. The wiffle told me before she left for class today that the Seeg was scheduled to sing before Game 1 tonight, and was kind enough to leave the article up on the computer for me to verify...and it's true! It's true! So tune into the game a little early tonight for some sweet Seger action.

On Beer

2006-10-18T01:11:00.000-04:00

A short bit from powells.com on Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer by Maureen Ogle:

A Pitcher Is Worth a Thousand Words
A Review by Doug Brown

There is a myth among us beer snobs about the history of beer in America. It goes something like this: everyone used to drink full-bodied beers up until prohibition. After prohibition, the big brewers took over the industry, flooding the market with weak beer made more from rice than barley, because rice is cheaper. They aggressively drove everyone else out of business, and so now Americans drink this limpid swill because they don't have a choice. It makes a great story, particularly for fans of hearty ales and microbrews. The only problem is, as Ogle lays out in this fascinating history, the myth is almost completely untrue.

The first brewers in America were German, and made German style-lagers that were indeed much heartier than today's big brews (think Paulaner Salvator). However, these brewers had two troubles selling their beer. One was consistency; it was hard to make the same beer with the same flavor batch after batch. The other was that nobody other than German immigrants liked this style of beer; it was heavy, calorie rich, and not particularly refreshing on a hot day. For cities with large German populations, like Chicago and New York, this was fine. For everyone else, a new type of beer was needed.

The answer was found in Bohemia (today's Czech Republic), in the town of Plzn (also known as Pils). Folks here made a light lager, perfect after a hard day's work. This style was brought back to America, and named pilsener after its town of origin. Except there was a problem. You can't make pilsener with American six-row barley, because it's too protein rich. You end up with unprecipitated blobs of protein, sort of like drinking a lava lamp. Brewers toiled away and found a solution: mix the barley with adjuncts like white corn and rice. Here's where part of the myth dies -- rice is more expensive than barley. Yes, the big brewers use rice not to save money, but because it makes better beer. This new American style of pilsener was immensely popular, and the thick German-style lagers all but vanished (we're still back in the mid-late 1800s, by the way).

Then a friend of brewer Adolphus Busch asked for a special beer to supplement his wine dealership. The friend, Carl Conrad, had learned of a beer made in Budweis, a town in Bohemia. The Budweis-style beer that Busch crafted for his friend used Saaz hops from Germany and rice as an adjunct. It was more expensive to make than most other American beers. It was lighter in color, and subtler in flavor. The two named it after the town of origin: Budweiser. And the rest, as they say, is history. The new brew was a huge hit with American palates. Imitators sprang up, and soon most of the successful breweries were making a Budweis-style pilsener.

Breweries in large cities had all the business they needed within a couple miles of the brewery, so had little need to expand. Brewers in smaller cities like Milwaukee and St. Louis had to transport their beer elsewhere to expand their markets. As they shipped to more and more distant cities, their capacities grew. Thus, the fact that these cities didn't have large local markets ironically became the reason most of the major brewers were located there (similarly true later on for Coors). Big brewers also introduced assembly line automation decades before Henry Ford supposedly invented the concept.

In the late 1800s a temperance movement started gaining momentum. Interestingly, lager was previously not considered alcoholic, as it only had a 3.2 percent alcohol content. By the end of World War I, the movement was powerful enough to push through a constitutional amendment, and prohibition was born. Only the brewers with deep enough pockets were able to survive, though some eked along by brewing soft drinks or selling yeast. When prohibition was repealed over ten years later, the number of players in the field had been considerably reduced.

The next thirty or forty years were times of further consolidation. As more brewers fell on hard times due to decreased alcohol consumption by Americans, the larger brewers bought up the smaller ones -- or the smaller ones just went under. By the 1960s, there were few breweries left. Then the big breweries turned to marketing in a way they never had, tying in beer with sports, using clever mascots (remember the Hamm's bear, from "The land of sky blue waters"?), and doing everything else to get Americans drinking beer again. It worked for a while, but soon a subset of the fickle American palate wanted something other than Budweiser.

Enter a guy named Fritz Maytag, who in 1965 bought a defunct brewery in San Francisco called Anchor. After trying to sell the same kind of beer Anchor had been making, Maytag found out why the brewery had gone under. Once again, a new kind of beer was needed. He turned to ale, and made a brew called Anchor Steam. Restaurateurs loved it. The microbrew boom was born.

Today drinkers have a wider variety of beers to choose from than ever. The big breweries still dominate the business with their pilseners, but not because people don't have a choice. The majority of American beer drinkers really do like the light flavor. Go figure. The big breweries got big by caring about consistency, and using more expensive ingredients than the cheap malts and hops used by failed brewers. In short, they survived for all the of the same reasons people like craft beer today. I won't be switching from Deschutes to Bud anytime soon, but Ogle has diminished my dislike of the big brewers – no small task, that. Whatever type of beer you prefer, Ambitious Brew makes for good reading while quaffing your favorite. Along with Ken Wells's entertaining romp Travels with Barley, this is highly recommended for any beer fans on your gift list (including yourself).

(LvALDaily.)

Bless You, Boys!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

2006-10-15T00:54:00.000-04:00

WE'RE GOIN' TO THE WORLD SERIES, BABY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

AND WITH A BOTTOM-OF-THE-NINTH TWO-OUT WALK-OFF HOME RUN TO BOOT!!!!!!!!!!!

This Is an Amazing Story of Self-Sacrifice

2006-10-14T11:59:00.000-04:00

SEAL falls on grenade to save comrades By THOMAS WATKINS, Associated Press Writer
Fri Oct 13, 3:02 PM ET

CORONADO, Calif. - A Navy SEAL sacrificed his life to save his comrades by throwing himself on top of a grenade Iraqi insurgents tossed into their sniper hideout, fellow members of the elite force said.

Petty Officer 2nd Class Michael A. Monsoor had been near the only door to the rooftop structure Sept. 29 when the grenade hit him in the chest and bounced to the floor, said four SEALs who spoke to The Associated Press this week on condition of anonymity because their work requires their identities to remain secret.

"He never took his eye off the grenade, his only movement was down toward it," said a 28-year-old lieutenant who sustained shrapnel wounds to both legs that day. "He undoubtedly saved mine and the other SEALs' lives, and we owe him."

This puts flesh on words like 'courage' and 'love' (cf. John 15:13, 'Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends').

Read the rest
here.

(LvMemeorandum.)

The Moon Will Send You Back

2006-10-11T01:18:00.000-04:00

Just got back from seeing Richard Buckner a little bit ago, accompanied by Doug Gillard from Guided By Voices. It was good. He played a lot of stuff off of Meadow, which pumped up the volume at times despite there being only two axe-slingers. I have to admit, the performance seemed a little perfunctory, but his voice was beautiful as usual. It was also marred somewhat by a few groups of people who thought it would be a good idea to talk loudly while he was playing. Why anyone would pay $13 to chat it up and not listen is beyond me. Perhaps that contributed to the aforementioned perfunctoriness and decibel-level.

In the end, however, these are mere quibbles. The music was good, and I don't think that there were more than 70 people there. When I've seen him in Ann Arbor, the crowd has been signficantly larger. Don't know why.

Oh, and by the way: Go Tigers!

Bless You Boys Redux!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

2006-10-08T00:39:00.000-04:00

Oh, how sweet. I was 8 years old the last time I got to enjoy any Motown motion in the postseason.

Did anyone SEE the Gambler's performance last night? And Bonderman--well, you saw how good HE was today.

Yes.

Bless You Boys!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

2006-10-08T00:38:00.000-04:00

Turns out you can't buy success after all.

Punks.

Network

2006-10-01T23:42:00.000-04:00

The wiffe and I just finished watching Network, a brilliant anti-television jeremiad. Tell you what: 1976 must have been a great year for movies. Not only did the greatest sports movie of all time, Rocky (though I'd be willing to hear a case for Hoosiers and the original Bad News Bears), win Best Picture; Network won Best Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Supporting Actress. Not that the Oscars can always be the best guide, but I think those folks did a pretty good job here.

Photo Phun

2006-09-23T10:43:00.000-04:00

This picture would be a lot better if he were holding a John Grisham novel.

First Review of Meadow

2006-09-23T01:51:00.001-04:00

No longer are Buckner's albums music to read Erskine Caldwell to.

But there still pretty lights-out good.

For another take from someone who's basked in the Buck for a while, see here.

Oh, I Almost Forgot

2006-09-23T01:51:00.000-04:00

I also saw Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Prices.

It was pretty bad.

I Watched Crash Tonight

2006-09-23T01:49:00.000-04:00

It's a karma piece.

The Music of the Midwest

2006-09-19T23:55:00.000-04:00

And speaking of 'independent' rock 'n roll (though all rock 'n roll is fundamentally dependent), the best example you can find in my opinion is Chamberlain's 1998 album The Moon My Saddle on Doghouse Records. I am rocking out to it right now. Musically and instrumentally it is solid, lyrically it is several rungs above most of what passes for songwriting on the pop music ladder, and the overall feel of the album is wonderful. 11 songs of joy and yearning.

Review

2006-09-19T01:14:00.000-04:00

The Rock Show was pretty good. Shearwater was decent, and their opening and closing numbers packed a noteworthy punch. The stuff in the middle was ok.

The second band was called Bottomless Pit. 'Nuff said.

Magnolia Electric Co. played a set of solid rock 'n roll. That's what I went to hear, and they delivered. Nothing fancy, nothing hip, nothing cutting-edge. Straightforward and foot-tap-inducing rockness. Sometimes not being cutting-edge is the best way to be cutting-edge. They did an especially killer rendition of 'Riding with a Ghost'.

In other news, the wiffle and I watched Pickup on South Street tonight. Fantastic.

Ok, Now.

2006-09-17T18:28:00.000-04:00

Off in a few minutes to see Shearwater and Magnolia Electric Co., aka Songs:Ohia, aka whatever else they're called.

On This Day in Literary History

2006-09-14T13:48:00.000-04:00

1964 : Steinbeck wins the Medal of Freedom

On this day, writer John Steinbeck was presented the U.S. Medal of Freedom. Steinbeck had already received numerous other honors and awards for his writing, including the 1962 Nobel Prize and a 1939 Pulitzer Prize for Grapes of Wrath.

Steinbeck, a native Californian, studied writing intermittently at Stanford between 1920 and 1925 but never graduated. He moved to New York and worked as a manual laborer and journalist while writing his first two novels, which were not successful. He married in 1930 and moved back to California with his wife. His father, a government official in Salinas County, gave the couple a house to live in while Steinbeck continued writing.

His first novel, Tortilla Flat, about the comic antics of several rootless drifters who share a house in California, was published in 1935. The novel became a financial success.

Steinbeck's next works, In Dubious Battle and Of Mice and Men, were both successful, and in 1938 his masterpiece The Grapes of Wrath was published. The novel, about the struggles of an Oklahoma family who lose their farm and become fruit pickers in California, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1939.

After World War II, Steinbeck's work became more sentimental in such novels as Cannery Row and The Pearl. He also wrote several successful films, including Forgotten Village (1941) and Viva Zapata (1952). He became interested in marine biology and published a nonfiction book, The Sea of Cortez, in 1941. His travel memoir, Travels with Charlie, describes his trek across the United States in a camper. Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize in 1962 and died in New York in 1968.

Five Years Later

2006-09-11T11:39:00.000-04:00

R.I.P.

I'm Eager for Seger!!!

2006-09-11T00:35:00.000-04:00

In stores the 12th of September, Face the Promise, is Seger's first new album in 11 years.

On This Day in Literary History

2006-09-07T12:25:00.000-04:00

1911: Guillaume Apollinaire is arrested for stealing the Mona Lisa

On this day, French poet Guillaume Apollinaire is arrested and jailed on suspicion of stealing Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa from the Louvre museum in Paris.

The 31-year-old poet was known for his radical views and support for extreme avant-garde art movements, but his origins were shrouded in mystery. Today, it is believed he was born in Rome and raised in Italy. He appeared in Paris at age 20 and quickly mixed into the city's bohemian set. His first volume of poetry, The Rotting Magician, appeared in 1909, followed by a story collection in 1910. A supporter of Cubism, he published a book about the subject, Cubist Painters, in 1913. The same year, he published his most esteemed work, Alcools, where he used a variety of poetic forms and traditions to capture everyday street speech. In 1917, his experimental play The Breasts of Tiresias was produced, for which he coined the term "surrealist."

Apollinaire's mysterious background and radical views led authorities to view him as a dangerous foreigner and prime suspect in the Mona Lisa heist, which took place August 22. No evidence surfaced, and Apollinaire was released after five days. Two years later, a former employee of the Louvre, Vincenzo Perggia, was arrested while trying to sell the famous painting to an art dealer.

New Buckner Twangness

2006-09-07T10:48:00.000-04:00

I just found out this morning that Richard Buckner has a new album, Meadow, slated to be released on September 12.

Dig.

On This Day in Literary History

2006-09-06T17:03:00.000-04:00

1847: Henry David Thoreau leaves Walden and moves in with the Emersons

On this day in 1847, writer Henry David Thoreau moves in with Ralph Waldo Emerson and his family in Concord, Massachusetts, after living for two years in a shack he built himself on Walden Pond.

Thoreau graduated from Harvard and started a school with his brother. But in 1839, he decided while on a canoe trip that he wasn't cut out for teaching. Instead, he decided to devote himself to nature and poetry. Deeply influenced by his friend Emerson's poetry and essays, Thoreau started a journal and began publishing essays in the Transcendentalist journal The Dial. At age 25, Thoreau left Concord for New York, but detested city life and returned after a year. Two years later, at age 27, he decided to live by Transcendentalist principles, spending time alone with nature and supporting himself with his own work. He built his home and lived off his garden for two years while reading and writing. In 1854, his collection of essays, Walden, or Life in the Woods, was published.

During his time at Walden, Thoreau spent a brief time in jail for refusing to pay taxes to support the war with Mexico. He later wrote Civil Disobedience, one of his most famous essays, based on the experience. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi would later be inspired by his writings. After Thoreau's time at Walden, he wrote magazine articles and became an avid abolitionist, working to smuggle escaped slaves to freedom through the Underground Railroad. He died in 1862.

On This Day in Literary History

2006-09-05T14:08:00.000-04:00

1957: On the Road is published

One of the first novels of the Beat movement of the 1950s, On the Road, by Jack Kerouac, is published on this day in 1957. The novel chronicles the cross-country wanderings of a Kerouac-like hero, Sal Paradise, and his pal Dean Moriarty, and their free-ranging encounters with drugs, free love, and the budding counterculture. The book, which Kerouac wrote in just three weeks, became an instant classic.

Although a credo of the Beat-inspired Hippie movement of the 1960s was "Never trust anyone over 30," Kerouac was 35 when the book came out. He had long been associated with the Beat movement when On the Road came out, and the novel is filled with characters based on Beat figures like Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs.

Kerouac was born in March 1922 in Lowell, Massachusetts. The son of French-Canadian parents, he learned English as a second language. In high school, Kerouac was a football star and won a scholarship to Columbia University. In World War II, he served in the Navy but was expelled for severe personality problems. He became a merchant seaman. In the late 1940s, he wandered the United States and Mexico and wrote his first novel, The Town and the City. His later novels included The Dharma Bums (1958), The Subterraneans (1958), and Lonesome Traveler (1960). Kerouac was a heavy drinker when he died in Florida from an internal hemorrhage, at the age of 47, on October 21, 1969.

On This Day in Literary History

2006-09-04T16:47:00.000-04:00

1905: Historical novelist Mary Renault is born

On this day, Mary Renault, critically acclaimed author of historical novels about ancient civilizations, is born.

Born Mary Challans (Renault was a pen name), she was the daughter of a London physician. At age 8, she decided to be a writer. At Oxford, she studied medieval history and used her knowledge of the era as background for her first novel, which she destroyed after many rejections.

Renault worked as a nurse during World War I and continued to write in her off-duty hours. In 1939, her novel Promise of Love, based on her nursing experiences, was published in the United States. In 1946, her novel Return to Night won the $150,000 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Prize. Although the book became her first U.S. bestseller, it was never made into a movie.

After World War II, Renault turned her attention to historical fiction. Fascinated by ancient Greece, she traveled widely in the area and became a self-taught expert on the region's history. Her 1958 novel, The King Must Die, and its sequel, The Bull from the Sea (1962), retold the Greek myth of Theseus from an historically accurate point of view. All her historical novels, including The Alexander Trilogy (1984), about Alexander the Great, were widely praised both for their rich, accurate detail and lively storytelling. Renault settled in South Africa, where she lived until her death in 1983.

On This Day in Literary History

2006-09-02T10:38:00.000-04:00

1946: The Iceman Cometh, by Eugene O'Neill, opens on Broadway

Hailed by many critics as Eugene O'Neill's finest work, The Iceman Cometh opens at the Martin Beck Theater on this day in 1956. The play, about desperate tavern bums clinging to illusion as a remedy for despair, was the last O'Neill play to be produced on Broadway before the author's death in 1953.

Like many of his other works, the play drew on O'Neill's firsthand experiences with all-night dive bars and desperate characters. Although his actor father sent him to top prep schools and to Princeton, O'Neill dropped out of college after a year. He went to sea, searched for gold in South America, haunted the waterfront bars in Buenos Aires, Liverpool, and New York, and married briefly. He drank heavily. In 1912, when O'Neill was nearly 30, he came down with tuberculosis and was sent to a sanitarium in Connecticut. While recovering, he wrote his first play and decided to devote himself to drama. He began churning out gritty, realistic plays about lives on the margins of society. He wrote nine plays from 1913 to 1914, six from 1916 to 1917, and four in 1918. In 1917, a Greenwich Village theater group, the Provincetown Players, performed his one-act play Thirst. The group became closely associated with O'Neill's future work. In 1920, his first full-length play, Beyond the Horizon, was produced on Broadway.

Between 1920 and 1943, O'Neill wrote 20 long plays and several short ones. His work was groundbreaking in its use of slangy, everyday dialogue, its dingy, run-down settings, and his experimental use of light, sound, and casting to set an emotional tone.

O'Neill's family life had been very unhappy. His father became rich playing just one theater role, the Count of Monte Cristo, for many years and never succeeded in becoming a more serious actor. His mother used morphine, and his beloved older brother became an alcoholic. All three died between 1920 and 1923. O'Neill wrote several autobiographical plays about his family after they died, including A Moon for the Misbegotten (produced in 1957) and Long Day's Journey Into Night (produced in 1956). Other major works include The Hairy Ape (1923) and Mourning Becomes Electra (1931). Although O'Neill was an outgoing host with an active social life during his second marriage, he became reclusive during his third. In the 1940s, he developed a degenerative nervous disease, and he died in Boston in 1953. Many critics call O'Neill America's first major playwright.

It's worth pointing out that this is an important day in other areas of history, too. Today was VJ day in 1945, and on this day in 1969 Ho Chi Minh died.

On This Day in Literary History

2006-08-31T11:18:00.000-04:00

1908: William Saroyan is born

William Saroyan, the son of an Armenian immigrant, is born in Fresno on this day in 1908.

Saroyan's father died when the boy was only three, and he was raised in an orphanage. His mother later reunited the family. To earn extra money for the family, Saroyan started selling newspapers on the streets of Fresno, California, at age eight. Although he left school at 15, he became an avid reader and haunted the public libraries.

Saroyan published his first collection of stories, The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze, in 1934, followed by Inhale and Exhale in 1936. His first play, My Heart's in the Highlands, was produced in 1939. His play The Time of Your Life, about a group of lonely drifters in a San Francisco bar, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1940. Saroyan rejected the award, saying the play was no better than anything else he had written.

In his novels, Saroyan portrayed a fundamental goodness in all of his characters. His work was frequently based on his own childhood, and boys are often his main characters. The central figure in the stories of My Name Is Aram is a young Armenian-American boy, and his 1943 novel, The Human Comedy, featured a 14-year-old boy whose older brother has left to fight in World War II. Saroyan also wrote several memoirs in the 1960s and 1970s. Saroyan married Carol Marcus, and the couple had two children, a son and a daughter. The couple divorced, remarried, then divorced again. Saroyan fell into deep debt in the 1960s and was plagued by tax problems. He wrote as much as possible to regain his financial footing, and much of his later work received mixed reviews. He died in Fresno in 1981.

On This Day in Literary History

2006-08-30T10:15:00.000-04:00

1904: Henry James returns to the U.S.

Henry James returns to the U.S. for a visit after living abroad for two decades.

James was born to a wealthy and eccentric philosopher father in 1843 in New York, N.Y. His older brother, William, became the country's first distinguished psychologist as well as a well-known philosopher. The brothers and their younger siblings were taken abroad by their parents for four years to study European culture during their teens. The family roamed England, Switzerland, and France, visiting galleries, museums, theaters, and libraries.

A back injury exempted James from serving in the Civil War, and he briefly attended Harvard Law School. He began writing fiction in his teens, and his first story was published when he was 21. He soon became a regular contributor of essays, reviews, and stories to Atlantic Monthly and other important periodicals. In 1873, James moved to England and continued publishing reviews while writing many more novels, including The American (1877) and the popular Daisy Miller (1878). In 1881, he published his masterpiece The Portrait of a Lady. Like many of his other works, it deals with naÝve, young Americans moving in sophisticated European circles. He wrote nonfiction as well as fiction, and the prefaces to new editions of his novels were collected in The Art of the Novel (1834).

First Review of Modern Times

2006-08-29T14:20:00.000-04:00

Music to read Walker Percy to.

Fingers Tingling

2006-08-29T11:08:00.000-04:00

Just picked up Modern Times.

Can't wait.

Notes on Notes

2006-08-28T18:01:00.000-04:00

The best radio station in the Philadelphia area, 88.5 WXPN, has been transmitting a delightful amount of Emmylou Harris tunes to our car stereo the last couple of days. First, yesterday the wiffle and I caught a chunk of a live Emmylou performance (with [I think] Buddy Miller accompanying her) on the 'Mountain Stage' program, and then today on the 'World Cafe Live' program they had Emmylou and Mark Knopfler in studio to interview and play some songs from their lately-released album of duets. They sounded really good. It's especially nice to hear those two play together because it is my opinion that Knopfler has one of the best guitar sounds and styles around and Emmylou has one of the best voices around. Of the songs I've heard from their new album All the Roadrunning, 'This Is Us', 'Beachcombing', and the title track stand out in my mind.

Also, tomorrow...new Dylan album! Nice.

Notes on Movies

2006-08-27T23:49:00.000-04:00

The wiffle and I saw Invincible tonight. It was great. I don't care what any reviewers say. Yes, I know it stars Mark Wahlberg. Yes, I know it also stars Greg Kinnear. Yes, I know the plot is predictable and sentimental; but that's ok, because the genre of the movie calls for predictability and sentimentality. It obeys its generic constraints, and it does it well. It's supposed to pump you up and make you feel good. Also, it's got some sweet mid-70s rock, including 'Stranglehold' by Ted Nugent. And, finally, I like the little play on words between the title (Invincible) and the main character, Vince (i.e. 'the victor', 'the conqueror) Papale. One recurring motif in the movie's storyline is the accusation that Vince is a failure and always will be. But by the end, Vince lives up to his name and becomes 'invincible'.

On This Day in Literary History

2006-08-25T10:11:00.000-04:00

August 25

1949 Novelist Martin Amis is born

Martin Amis, son of novelist Kingsley Amis, is born in Oxford on this day in 1949. Amis' father is a prominent novelist whose 1954 book, Lucky Jim, an academic satire, brought him international fame.

Martin Amis was the middle of three siblings. He attended 14 schools during the 1950s and 1960s as his father lectured at numerous universities in England and around the U.S. His parents divorced when he was 12, and Amis spent his teenage years hanging out in bars with the mod and hippie crowds. He went to Oxford, where he excelled. When he graduated, he became a journalist working for London's elite literary publications. He started writing fiction in his early 20s, and his first novel, The Rachel Papers, was published in 1973. His novels, including Money (1984), London Fields (1989), and The Information, all use innovative plot structure and energetic wordplay to explore, and often to satirize, grotesque and lurid topics. His 1991 book, Time's Arrow, shows the life of a former Nazi doctor in reverse, as if the doctor were living time backward. Amis married in 1984, has two sons, and is an avid pinball and snooker player.

Huh.

2006-08-24T11:31:00.000-04:00

Well, Pluto is no longer a planet. Poor guy.

2006-08-12T22:54:00.000-04:00

My uncle, Kim Bailey, died this morning. May he rest in peace. If you think of it, please lift up his wife, Linda, in prayer.

Death be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not so,
For, those, whom thou think'st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee, 5
Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow,
And soonest our best men with thee doe goe,
Rest of their bones, and soules deliverie.
Thou art slave to Fate, Chance, kings, and desperate men,
And dost with poyson, warre, and sicknesse dwell, 10
And poppie, or charmes can make us sleepe as well,
And better then thy stroake; why swell'st thou then;
One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.

John Donne

The Nerd Quiz

2006-08-04T12:59:00.000-04:00

Today I learned that I am not a nerd, but that I am also definitely not hip.

(LvTheTwoStroke.)

Epiphany Fellowship

2006-08-04T12:08:00.000-04:00

Cool new church project in North Philadelphia. Something definitely to keep in your prayers.

(LvMark Driscoll.)

No Posts

2006-07-12T16:18:00.000-04:00

No posts from me for the next bit of time in these here parts. Devastating, I know. But then I'll try to get back on top of it and respond to any comments. Take care!

On This Day in Literary History...

2006-07-04T08:20:00.000-04:00

July 4

1855 First edition of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass is published

On this day, Walt Whitman's first edition of the self-published Leaves of Grass is printed, containing a dozen poems.

Whitman was born in West Hills, Long Island, and raised in Brooklyn. He left school at the age of 14 to become a journeyman printer and later worked as a teacher, journalist, editor, and carpenter to support his writing. In 1855, he self-published Leaves of Grass, which carried his picture but not his name. He revised the book many times, constantly adding and rewriting poems. The second edition, in 1856, included his "Sundown Poem," later called "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," one of his most beloved pieces. Whitman sometimes took long ferry and coach rides as an excuse to talk with people, and was also fond of long walks and cultural events in Manhattan.

In 1862, Whitman's brother was wounded at the Battle of Fredericksburg, and Whitman went to care for him. He spent the rest of the war comforting both Union and Confederate soldiers. After the war, Whitman worked for several government departments until 1873, when he suffered a stroke. He spent the rest of his life in Camden, New Jersey, and continued to issue revised editions of Leaves of Grass until shortly before his death in 1892.

4th of July

2006-07-03T14:51:00.000-04:00

In honor of the 4th of July tomorrow, I'm going to give a hearty shoutout to John Witherspoon's sermon The Dominion of Providence over the Passions of Men, preached in 1776 (Princeton, NJ). It's long, but well worth reading. Witherspoon was the only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence and is also a forefather of Reese Witherspoon. So at least read it if you liked Walk the Line. For more on Witherspoon, see Roger Kimball's article in The New Criterion (registration required).

Since It's World Cup Time

2006-06-30T05:51:00.000-04:00

Man pulls TV from house fire to watch soccer Thu Jun 29, 7:31 AM ET

BEIJING (Reuters) - A Beijing soccer fan refused to let the small matter of his house burning down disturb his enjoyment of Tuesday's World Cup match between France and Spain.

A fire broke out in a hutong in the center of the Chinese capital at 3am local time Wednesday -- kickoff time in Hanover -- and gutted the traditional courtyard dwelling, the Beijing Daily Messenger reported.

"When the neighbors shouted 'fire!', I took my little baby and ran out in my nightclothes," the man's wife told the paper.

"My husband paid no attention to the danger, just grabbed the television and put it under his arm.

"After getting out of the house, he then set about finding an electric socket to plug in and continue watching his game."

The anti-social timing of the matches broadcast from Germany, which is six hours behind China, has forced some Chinese fans to go to great lengths to follow the action.

One man quit his job in Beijing to return to his hometown Chongqing so he could watch the whole tournament uninterrupted.

State news agency Xinhua reported that the 23-year-old's boss at the IT company had offered him a pay rise, but he turned it down flat, saying the World Cup was more important than his job.

The Guangzhou Daily reported that local police were forced to release a thief arrested for stealing a mobile phone when the victim refused to press charges because he did not want to miss the start of a match.

Although there are also many female World Cup fans in China, one man in the southeastern city had to sign a contract with his wife agreeing to do all the housework during the month of the finals so he could watch the matches at night.

Another from Putian, Fujian province, took a less diplomatic approach, Xinhua reported.

When his cheers during the Argentina-Ivory Coast match woke his wife and she switched off the television, he locked her in their bedroom and settled back down to watch the game ignoring her loud protests.

Notes on Humo(u)r

2006-06-29T09:22:00.000-04:00

It's good to laugh at yourself sometimes. Actually, it's good to laugh at yourself a lot. Humility and all that. And this video made me, as an evangelical Christian, laugh myself almost onto the floor: 'Baby Got Book', a parody of Sir Mix-a-Lot's 'Baby Got Back'. You know what the song was about before; well, now it's about the Bible.

Notes on Notes

2006-06-29T07:32:00.000-04:00

In spite of her having collaborated with Bright Eyes, I still respect Emmylou Harris and recently came across another duet of hers that I quite enjoy--it's called 'This is Us', with Mark Knopfler, off the All the Roadrunning album. Knopfler is becoming one of my favorite guitar players. His style is so subtle, and I don't know how he gets that great electric tone, but it is killer. Emmylou's voice is, as usual, stunningly beautiful. We can add this to the following list:

'If I Needed You', with Townes Van Zandt
'Oh My Sweet Carolina', with Ryan Adams
'Gulf Coast Highway', with Willie Nelson
The Neil Young collaborations on her album Wrecking Ball
Her contributions to Bob Dylan's album Desire
A live performance where I heard her sing 'One More Cup of Coffee' with Buddy Miller (remember that, Mark?)

By the way, I finally saw Walk the Line last night. It was pretty good.

On This Day in Literary History...

2006-06-29T07:30:00.000-04:00

June 29

1613 The Globe Theater burns down

The Globe Theater, where most of Shakespeare's plays debuted, burned down on this day in 1613.

The Globe was built by Shakespeare's acting company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, in 1599 from the timbers of London's very first permanent theater, Burbage's Theater, built in 1576. Before James Burbage built his theater, plays and dramatic performances were ad hoc affairs, performed on street corners and in the yards of inns. However, the Common Council of London, in 1574, started licensing theatrical pieces performed in inn yards within the city limits. To escape the restriction, actor James Burbage built his own theater on land he leased outside the city limits. When Burbage's lease ran out, the Lord Chamberlain's men moved the timbers to a new location and created the Globe. Like other theaters of its time, the Globe was a round wooden structure with a stage at one end, and covered balconies for the gentry. The galleries could seat about 1,000 people, with room for another 2,000 "groundlings," who could stand on the ground around the stage.

The Lord Chamberlain's men built Blackfriars theater in 1608, a smaller theater that seated about 700 people, to use in winter when the open-air Globe wasn't practical.

Soccer and Nihilism

2006-06-28T08:29:00.000-04:00

I've actually been enjoying watching the World Cup, but I thought that this article was mildly entertaining, in which the authors, in addition to citing the game as the perfect postmodern sport (a game about nothing in which nothing happens), claim that it is the most unhuman game for human beings to play, since it forces homo sapiens to batter a ball around with unprotected head and denies to homo habilis the right to use the hands--i.e. it flies in the face of two things (big brains and opposable thumbs) that, in the authors' view, make us distinctively human. Here's a little taste:

In truth, soccer could be played without using a ball at all, and few would notice the difference. The game consists of 22 men running up and down a grassy field for 90 minutes with little happening as fans scream wildly. When the ball actually approaches one of the goals, the fans reach fever pitch and the cheering becomes a deafening roar.

Of course, these infrequent occurrences in which the soccer ball approaches the end zone--where goaltenders wile away their time perusing magazines, trimming their fingernails or inspecting blades of grass--rarely result in a shot on goal. Most often the ball ends up high over the goal, missing everything by 20 or 30 feet. These "near misses" typically send the fans into paroxysms; TV announcers scream themselves hoarse. Then the players mill about the field for another 20 or 30 minutes or so and the goaltenders return to their musings before the ball returns, like Halley's comet in its far-flung orbit, for another pass in the general vicinity of the goal.

(LvRef21.)

Notes on Notes

2006-06-27T06:42:00.000-04:00

A friend send me a compilation of 'Weird Al' Yankovic's songs about food a couple of months ago. It is called, appropriately, 'The Food Album'. I haven't listened to Weird Al in a long time, but let me tell you something: it is still hilarious. The album includes such classics as 'Eat It', 'My Bologna', 'The Rye or the Kaiser, and 'Lasagna'. I still laugh out loud at some of the stuff.

Two on Literature

2006-06-22T04:31:00.001-04:00

Any readers interested in art, faith, life, and the intersection of the three might want to check out a recent Weekly Standard review (well, I guess they call it a ‘preview’) of Arthur Kirsch’s book Auden and Christianity by Wilfred M. McClay, professor of humanities and history at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga. Auden moved from left-wing sympathies back to Anglicanism, though in influences (two of the most important being Reinhold Niebuhr and Soren Kierkegaard) and many sympathies he seems to have been a modernist liberal Protestant (by the way, I don’t claim expertise on Auden’s theological pedigree; these are just some off-hand remarks and a summary of some parts of the article), and he held many unorthodox views. Of course, however, he was most influential as a poet and critic, not as a theologian, and that is probably the way he would’ve wanted it (though Kirsch also notes that he would have wished to be remembered ‘as a man who sought to live a Christian life’). Still, the book seems to contain an interesting analysis of this part of his life. As a teaser, here are the first two paragraphs of the (p)review:

IT'S A SAFE BET THAT W.H. AUDEN would have been suspicious of the idea behind this book. True, he was forthcoming about his attraction to the Christian faith, an attraction that remained strong even during his years of professed atheism, and became explicit after his formal return to the church in 1940. He was equally forthcoming in lamenting what he called the "prudery" of "cultured people" who treat religious belief as the last remaining shameful thing, and find theological terms "far more shocking than any of the four-letter words." Furthermore, there can be no doubt that Auden was, and deserves to be known as, a Christian writer, rather than a writer who merely happened to be Christian. Many of his most distinguished works of poetry and criticism, especially in his American years, are not only indebted to, but positively enveloped in, the riches of Christian narrative, language, imagery, allusion, and moral insight.

The notion that religious faith and serious thought are mutually exclusive categories always struck Auden as risible and unintelligible. But he would have bristled at an effort to separate out his religious beliefs and restate them as systematic propositions, or examine them independently or thematically, rather than see them as players in his rich and various inner symbolic drama. Such an undertaking would probably have struck him as unspeakably vulgar and, moreover, an invasion of his privacy, putting his devotional life on display and forcing him unwillingly to be judged by the public standard of a "religious" man, a role for which he felt singularly ill-equipped.

Auden was primarily a poet. Let’s move on now to someone who was primarily a critic: F.R. Leavis. The Weekly Standard also has a review of F.R. Leavis: Essays and Documents, edited by Ian MacKillop and Richard Storer. The (p)review is by Brooke Storer. Leavis was a great contributor to the professionalization of the study of English literature, a polarizing figure who was ‘not only dogmatic but belligerent and paranoid’. He wished to educate his students in how to study and analyze literature; on a less sympathetic reading, he wished rather to indoctrinate them:

Leavis's effect on educational standards was so pervasive that his inimical colleague, the literary historian E.M.W. Tillyard, complained that his students were trained rather than educated; they came up to Cambridge, he said, already armed with "a repertory of labels and phrases to be attached, by cunning, to the proper exhibits," and fully informed as to "the proper authors to admire or despise." Patrick Harrison, a former student of Leavis's, has spoken not only of "OK texts" for Leavis's students to read and approve, but "OK words"--"poise," "immediacy," "sharply realized"--for them to bandy about in examination papers.

Toward the end of the (p)review, we read the following:

To reexamine Leavis's career is to return to the question he thought he had definitively answered: that is, whether it is really desirable to "professionalize" literary criticism at all. Perhaps Leavis's Victorian and neo-Victorian predecessors (George Saintsbury, Arthur Quiller-Couch, Lord David Cecil) had it right, and the study of literature must remain the province of the erudite amateur. Literature simply cannot be judged or examined by scientific standards; if it could, it would not be literature at all but science or philosophy.

I admit that one would be hard-pressed to successfully apply scientific standards to literature. I’m still, however, the follow-up to that leaves me a bit unsettled: ‘...if it could, it would not be literature at all but science or philosophy.’ Are boundaries between types of writing really this hard and fast? If they are, then what do we do with, say, the ancient Greeks, who wrote science as literature, philosophy as literature (and, of course, literature as philosophy)?

Anyway, the book sounds like a good read, even including class-notes taken by his students. If you’re interested in literary criticism and its history, it might be worth perusing.

(Links via ALDaily.)

Uganda police ban playing pool in the daytime

2006-06-21T12:45:00.000-04:00

Wed Jun 21, 8:23 AM ET

KAMPALA (Reuters) - Ugandan police have banned people from playing pool during the daytime because it encourages crime, local media said Wednesday.

The game is very popular in the east African nation, where pool tables sit under canopies outside thousands of small bars.

But Kampala police chief Grace Turyagumanawe said youths often played while drinking illegal spirits and smoking drugs.

"They also use this as a meeting place to make plans of robbing people of their property at night," he told the Daily Monitor newspaper. "We are not banning the sport, but we are stopping people from playing it during the day."

Bar owners like pool tables because they earn income but use no electricity. Uganda has suffered power cuts for months.

On This Day in Literary History...

2006-06-21T10:15:00.000-04:00

June 21

1956 Arthur Miller refuses to name communists

Playwright Arthur Miller defies the House Committee on Un-American Activities and refuses to name suspected communists.

Miller's defiance of McCarthyism won him a conviction for contempt of court, which was later reversed by the Supreme Court. His passport had already been denied when he tried to go to Brussels to attend the premiere of his play The Crucible, about the Salem witch trials.

Miller was born in 1915 to a well-off German-Jewish family with a prosperous clothing store. However, the store went bankrupt after the stock market crash in 1929, and the family moved to Brooklyn. Miller finished high school at 16 and decided to become a writer after reading Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov.

Miller worked for two years in an automobile-parts warehouse before he attended the University of Michigan, where he studied journalism and playwriting. His student plays, largely studies of Jewish families, won awards. His first literary success was a novel called Focus (1945), about anti-Semitism. His first hit Broadway play, All My Sons, was produced in 1947. In 1949, Death of a Salesman was produced and won a Pulitzer Prize.

In 1956, Miller divorced his first wife and married glamorous movie star Marilyn Monroe. The couple remained married until 1961, the same year she starred in the movie he wrote for her, The Misfits. In 1962, he married his third wife, photographer Ingeborg Morath, and continued to write hit plays.

Miller died on February 10, 2005 at age 89 of congestive heart failure.

A Couple of Interesting Articles

2006-06-20T06:33:00.000-04:00

(Via Arts&Letters Daily.)

The first is by Roger Scruton on Francis Fukuyama and the 'end of history'. The article is too brief for Scruton to develop his ideas at any length, but I heard him talk about a similar thesis at Villanova sometime last year. Here are the three concluding paragraphs:

Fukuyama is wrong to believe that Hegel was the first historicist philosopher. He was preceded by Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406) and Giambattista Vico (1668-1744). Ibn Khaldun made the useful point that historical processes are not governed by culture and knowledge only, but also by the will to reproduce. This will, he believed, dwindles as people become habituated to luxury, and dynasties therefore rise and fall according to a quasi-biological logic.

That, clearly, is far too simple an hypothesis. But it adds something that is missing from most historicist theses, and especially from those German theories that appeal to Kojève and Fukuyama, namely the permanent legacy of human biology. Much that we attribute to history we ought rather to attribute to biology – including aggression, territorial expansion and maybe even scapegoating, racism and the all-pervading emotion that Nietzsche called ressentiment.

Christ taught us to overcome those things, and paid the price for doing so. Maybe it is the long-term effect of his sacrifice that so much of European history looks like a process of steady emancipation from the grim realities of species life. But that only tends to confirm the thesis that Fukuyama attributes to Huntington: that the march of history towards liberal democracy is a local achievement of Christian culture.

Second is a scathing review by Peter Beaumont of Noam Chomksy's Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy. While claiming that Chomsky does land some 'crunching punches', Beaumont's major beef is that the book is long on rhetoric, short on ideas, and irresponsible with information. As a bonus, you can find out by reading the article that Beaumont believes in recoverable authorial intent. One claim that was confusing to me: Beaumont claims that under the Bush administrations 'American officials' have been responsible for 'kidnapping' while 'storm[ing] their way around the globe'. Is that true? I haven't heard or read anything about official American kidnappings.

On This Day in Literary History...

2006-06-19T06:46:00.000-04:00

Today's nugget is about Nathanael West and the publication of A Cool Million. I haven't read that one, but I have read The Day of the Locust, which I remember being very good. One thing I'd forgotten about it, though, was that it had a character named Homer Simpson.

June 19

1934 Nathanael West's A Cool Million is published

On this day, Nathanael West's novel A Cool Million, a satire of rags-to-riches morality tales, is published.

West, the son of Jewish immigrants, was born in New York in 1903. He attended Brown University, then went to Paris to write for about a year and a half, during which time he wrote his first novel, The Dream Life of Balso Snell, about disgruntled characters inside the Trojan Horse. Only 500 copies of the book were printed when it was published in 1931.

West returned to New York, where he took a job managing a hotel. He frequently gave free or cheap rooms to struggling fellow writers, including Dashiell Hammet and Erskine Caldwell. In 1933, he published his novella, Miss Lonelyhearts, about a male reporter who becomes increasingly troubled by the pitiful letters he answers in his advice column.

In the 1930s, West moved to Hollywood to write screenplays, and in 1939 he published The Day of the Locust, considered one of the best novels written about early Hollywood. West and his wife, Eileen McKenney, were killed in an automobile accident in California in 1940. Although West was not widely read during his lifetime, his popularity grew after World War II and after the publication of The Complete Works of Nathanael West in 1957.

For trivia buffs, it's interesting to note that West died on the same weekend as F. Scott Fitzgerald:

By a bizarre coincidence, Fitzgerald and West died on the same weekend in December 1940. West was killed in an automobile accident on December 22, near El Centro, California, with his wife Eileen McKenney. He was recently married, with better-paid script work coming in, and returning from a trip to Mexico. Distraught over hearing of his friend's Fitzgerald's death, he crashed his car after ignoring a stop sign. Eileen McKenney become the subject of a book, My Sister Eileen (1938), written by Ruth McKenney, her sister.

And since The Day of the Locust is about Hollywood, today's tidbit about entertainment history is relevant as well:

June 19

1905 First nickelodeon opens

On this day in 1905, Pittsburgh showman Harry Davis opens the world's first nickelodeon, showing a silent film called The Great Train Robbery. The storefront theater boasted 96 seats and charged only 5 cents. Nickelodeons soon spread across the country, typically featuring live vaudeville acts as well as short films. By 1907, some two million Americans had visited a nickelodeon, and the storefront theaters remained the main outlet for films until they were replaced around 1910 by large modern theaters.

Inventors in Europe and the United States, including Thomas Edison, had been developing movie cameras since the late 1880s. Early films could only be viewed as peep shows, but by the late 1890s movies could be projected on a screen. Audiences were beginning to attend public demonstrations, and several movie "factories" (as the earliest production studios were called) were formed. In 1896, the Edison Company inaugurated the era of commercial movies, showing a collection of moving images as a minor act in a vaudeville show that also included live performers, among whom were a Russian clown, an "eccentric dancer," and a "gymnastic comedian." The film, shown at Koster and Bial's Music Hall in New York City, featured images of dancers, ocean waves, and gondolas.

Short films, usually less than a minute long, became a regular part of vaudeville shows at the turn of the century as "chasers" to clear out the audience after a show. A vaudeville performers' strike in 1901, however, left theaters scrambling for acts, and movies became the main event. In the earliest years, vaudeville theater owners had to purchase films from factories via mail order, rather than renting them, which made it expensive to change shows frequently. Starting in 1902, Henry Miles of San Francisco began renting films to theaters, forming the basis of today's distribution system. The first theater devoted solely to films, "The Electric Theater" in Los Angeles, opened in 1902. Housed in a tent, the theater's first screening included a short called "New York in a Blizzard." Admission cost about 10 cents for a one-hour show. Nickelodeons developed soon after, offering both movies and live acts.

Weird

2006-06-15T07:40:00.000-04:00

So a live rodent has been discovered that was thought to have been extinct for 11 million years--'a docile, squirrel-sized animal with dark dense fur and a long tail but not as bushy as a squirrel's' that 'waddles like a duck with its hind feet splayed out at an angle — ideal for climbing rocks'.

But apparently this wasn't the first specimen of the rodent that has been discovered; it was just thought to be a new species:

'The long-whiskered rodent was branded as a new species last year when biologists first examined dead specimens they found being sold at meat markets.

I'm not sure, but I'm guessing it's not something you're going to find on special at Kroger or Superfresh.

Notes On Notes

2006-06-15T06:03:00.000-04:00

The best albums of 2006 so far.*

*N.B., these are the best albums that I've heard so far in 2006 (released at any time before, well, now), not what I think are the best albums released in 2006.

1. Explosions in the Sky, The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place. You might recognize some of the songs of this Midland, TX, outfit from the movie Friday Night Lights. The album, entirely instrumental, is breathtakingly beautiful, and I don't say that hastily or with typical indie-rock hyperbole. Evocative.

2. The Weakerthans, Reconstruction Site. This is by far the most intelligent pop album I've heard in a long time. Of course, as I was writing this, I realized I don't actually have the whole thing at the moment. To be remedied soon.

3. Songs: Ohia, The Magnolia Electric Co. Good midwestern rock/twang type stuff.

4. Richard Buckner, Richard Buckner. Do I really need to give an explanation?

5. Neutral Milk Hotel, In the Aeroplane, Over the Sea. All I can say is I don't know why I didn't pick this up sooner after Beauchamp's recommendation about 6 or 7 years ago.

And Matthew Might Enjoy This One

2006-06-15T06:01:00.000-04:00

I'll just post the lead paragraph and let his fingers do the walking.

June 15

1846 Francis Parkman arrives at Fort Laramie

Francis Parkman, one of the first serious historians to study the American West, arrives at Fort Laramie and prepares for a summer of research with the Sioux.

This Is Also Worth Nothing for Our History Buffs

2006-06-15T05:59:00.000-04:00

MAGNA CARTA SEALED:
June 15, 1215

Following a revolt by the English nobility against his rule, King John puts his royal seal on the Magna Carta, or "Great Charter." The document, essentially a peace treaty between John and his barons, guaranteed that the king would respect feudal rights and privileges, uphold the freedom of the church, and maintain the nation's laws. Although more a reactionary than a progressive document in its day, the Magna Carta was seen as a cornerstone in the development of democratic England by later generations.

John was enthroned as king of England following the death of his brother, King Richard the Lion-Hearted, in 1199. King John's reign was characterized by failure. He lost the duchy of Normandy to the French king and taxed the English nobility heavily to pay for his foreign misadventures. He quarreled with Pope Innocent III and sold church offices to build up the depleted royal coffers. Following the defeat of a campaign to regain Normandy in 1214, Stephen Langton, the archbishop of Canterbury, called on the disgruntled barons to demand a charter of liberties from the king.

In 1215, the barons rose up in rebellion against the king's abuse of feudal law and custom. John, faced with a superior force, had no choice but to give in to their demands. Earlier kings of England had granted concessions to their feudal barons, but these charters were vaguely worded and issued voluntarily. The document drawn up for John in June 1215, however, forced the king to make specific guarantees of the rights and privileges of his barons and the freedom of the church. On June 15, 1215, John met the barons at Runnymede on the Thames and set his seal to the Articles of the Barons, which after minor revision was formally issued as the Magna Carta.

The charter consisted of a preamble and 63 clauses and dealt mainly with feudal concerns that had little impact outside 13th century England. However, the document was remarkable in that it implied there were laws the king was bound to observe, thus precluding any future claim to absolutism by the English monarch. Of greatest interest to later generations was clause 39, which stated that "no free man shall be arrested or imprisoned or disseised [dispossessed] or outlawed or exiled or in any way victimised...except by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land." This clause has been celebrated as an early guarantee of trial by jury and of habeas corpus and inspired England's Petition of Right (1628) and the Habeas Corpus Act (1679).

In immediate terms, the Magna Carta was a failure--civil war broke out the same year, and John ignored his obligations under the charter. Upon his death in 1216, however, the Magna Carta was reissued with some changes by his son, King Henry III, and then reissued again in 1217. That year, the rebellious barons were defeated by the king's forces. In 1225, Henry III voluntarily reissued the Magna Carta a third time, and it formally entered English statute law.

The Magna Carta has been subject to a great deal of historical exaggeration; it did not establish Parliament, as some have claimed, nor more than vaguely allude to the liberal democratic ideals of later centuries. However, as a symbol of the sovereignty of the rule of law, it was of fundamental importance to the constitutional development of England. Four original copies of the Magna Carta of 1215 exist today: one in Lincoln Cathedral, one in Salisbury Cathedral, and two in the British Museum.

On This Day in Literary History...

2006-06-15T05:57:00.000-04:00

June 15

1300 Dante is named prior of Florence

On this day, poet Dante Alighieri becomes one of six priors of Florence, active in governing the city. Dante's political activities, which include the banishment of several rivals, lead to his own exile from Florence, his native city, after 1302. He will write his great work, The Divine Comedy, as a virtual wanderer, seeking protection for his family in town after town.

Dante was born to a family with noble ancestry whose fortunes had fallen. His father was a moneylender. Dante began writing poetry in his teens and received encouragement from established poets, to whom he sent sonnets as a young man.

At age nine, Dante first caught a glimpse of Beatrice Portinari, also nine, who would symbolize for him perfect female beauty and spiritual goodness in the coming decades. Despite his fervent devotion to Portinari, who did not seem to return his feelings, Dante became engaged to Gemma Donati in 1277, but the two did not marry until eight years later. The couple had six sons and a daughter.

About 1293, Dante published a book of prose and poetry called The New Life, followed a few years later by another collection, The Banquet. It wasn't until his banishment that he began work on his Divine Comedy. In the poem's first book, Dante takes a tour through Hell with the poet Virgil as his guide. Virgil also guides the poet through Purgatory in the second book. The poet's guide in Paradise, however, is named Beatrice. The work was written and published in sections between 1308 and 1321. Although Dante called the work simply Comedy, the work became enormously popular, and a deluxe version published in 1555 in Venice bore the title The Divine Comedy. Dante died of malaria in Ravenna in 1321.

On This Day in Literary History...

2006-06-14T05:32:00.000-04:00

June 14

1811 Harriet Beecher Stowe is born

Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, is born on this day in Litchfield, Connecticut, the seventh child of Congregationalist minister Lyman Beecher.

Stowe studied at private schools in Connecticut and worked as a teacher in Hartford for five years until her father moved to Cincinnati in 1832. She accompanied him and continued to teach while writing stories and essays. In 1836, she married Calvin Ellis Stowe, with whom she had seven children. She published her first book, Mayflower, in 1843.

While living in Cincinnati, Stowe encountered fugitive slaves and the Underground Railroad. Later, she wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin in reaction to recently tightened fugitive laws. The book sold some 300,000 copies and did much to galvanize public opinion in the North against slavery. Stowe traveled to England in 1853, where she was welcomed as a literary hero. Along with Ralph Waldo Emerson, she became one of the original contributors to The Atlantic, which launched in November 1857. In 1863, when Lincoln announced the end of slavery, she danced in the streets. Stowe continued to write throughout her life and died in 1896.

On This Day in Literary History...

2006-06-13T07:43:00.000-04:00

This is a good one, given my recent rediscovery of the joy of detective novels.

June 13

1893 Dorothy Sayers is born

Mystery writer Dorothy Sayers, creator of detective Lord Peter Wimsey, is born on this day in Oxford, England.

Sayers, whose father was an Oxford teacher and minister, became one of the first women to receive a degree from Oxford. Although the family moved to the country when Sayers was four, she received an excellent education in Latin, French, history, and mathematics from her father and won a scholarship to Oxford. She received highest honors on her final exams in 1915. Although women at the time were not granted degrees, the rules changed retroactively in 1920.

After Oxford, Sayers worked as a poetry editor in Oxford and a teacher in France. She returned to London to work as a freelance editor and an advertising copywriter for England's largest ad agency. She later turned her experiences at the agency into comic fodder in Murder Must Advertise (1933).

She began writing detective fiction in the early 1920s, and her first novel, Whose Body?, was published in 1923. It introduced the world to the educated and fanciful Lord Peter Wimsey, who over the course of some dozen novels and many short stories emerged as a complex, intriguing character, comic and lighthearted at times, but plagued with nightmares and nervous disorders from his service in World War I.

In Strong Poison (1930), Wimsey solves a mysterious poisoning and wins freedom for the wrongly accused mystery novelist Harriet Vane, with whom he falls in love and pursues through several books. In Gaudy Night (1935), set at an Oxford reunion, Vane finally accepts Wimsey. The two, plus Wimsey's butler Bunter, depart on a comical honeymoon, plagued by dead bodies, in Busman's Honeymoon (1937).

Sayers herself had an unhappy romance in the early 1920s and had a child in 1924. Two years later, she married Scottish journalist Oswald Atherton Fleming, who became an invalid not long afterward. She spent much of the next 25 years caring for him, until his death in 1950.

With G.K. Chesteron, Sayers founded the Detection Club, a group of mystery writers. She edited an important anthology called Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horrors from 1928 to 1934. After the late 1930s, she grew tired of detective fiction, and having won enough financial independence to write what she liked, she returned to her academic roots and wrote scholarly treatises on aesthetics and theology, as well as translations of Dante and others. She died in 1957.

Notes on Sports

2006-06-12T06:31:00.000-04:00

I'd just like to congratulate the Detroit Tigers for being the first team in baseball to 40 wins this season. Now, before anyone gets too excited, let's remember what's been happening this year to Detroit sports teams with the best regular season records (see early playoff exits of Red Wings and Pistons). Still, it's nice to enjoy a first-place standing this far into the season given that they haven't been having a year like this since my age was in single digits. Looks like bringing Leyland in was a great move.

Also, the World Cup is apparently going on right now. If I followed soccer, that would probably seem really sweet to me. But at least there are millions of Germans who think it's really sweet.

On This Day in Literary History...

2006-06-12T06:29:00.000-04:00

June 12

1942 Anne Frank receives a diary

On this day, Anne Frank, a young Jewish girl living in Amsterdam, receives a diary for her 13th birthday. A month later, she and her family went into hiding from the Nazis in rooms behind her father's office. For two years, the Franks and four other families hid, fed and cared for by Gentile friends. The families were discovered by the Gestapo, which had been tipped off, in 1944. The Franks were taken to Auschwitz, where Anne's mother died. Friends in Amsterdam searched the rooms and found Anne's diary hidden away.

Anne and her sister were transferred to another camp, Bergen-Belsen, where Anne died of typhus a month before the war ended.

Anne's father survived Auschwitz and published Anne's diary in 1947 as The Diary of a Young Girl. The book has been translated into some 30 languages.

On This Day in Literary History...

2006-06-10T08:33:00.000-04:00

June 10

1881 Tolstoy disguises himself as a peasant and leaves on a pilgrimage

On this day in 1881, Count Leo Tolstoy sets off on a pilgrimage to a monastery disguised as a peasant.

Tolstoy had already produced his two greatest masterpieces War and Peace (1865-1869) and Anna Karenina (1875-1877). The Russian nobleman was engaged in a spiritual struggle and felt torn between his responsibility as a wealthy landlord to improve the lot of the people, and his desire to give up his property and wander the land as an ascetic. He had started giving away his possessions and declared that the public owned his works, but his wife, Sofya, worried about the financial stability of the couple's 13 children, gained control of the copyrights for all his work published before 1880.

Tolstoy was born in 1828. His parents died when he was a child, and he was raised by relatives. He went to Kazan University at age 16 but was disappointed in the quality of education there and returned to his estate in 1847 without a degree. He lived a wild and dissolute life in Moscow and St. Petersburg until 1851, when he joined the army. He fought in the Crimean war, and his experiences in the defense of Sevastopol became a successful literary memoir, Sevastopol Sketches, in 1855. While in the army, he wrote several other autobiographical works.

In 1857, Tolstoy visited Europe and became interested in education. He started a school for peasant children on his estate and studied progressive educational techniques. In 1862, he married, and the following year he published a successful novel, The Cossacks.

Later in his life, Tolstoy embraced Christian anarchism and was excommunicated from the Russian Orthodox Church. In 1910, he fled his home secretly with his youngest daughter but caught pneumonia and died at a remote railway station a few day s later.

On This Day in Literary History...

2006-06-08T10:50:00.000-04:00

June 8

1999 Hannibal by Thomas Harris hits bookstores

Some 1.3 million copies of Hannibal, the final book in the Hannibal Lecter series by Thomas Harris, arrive at bookstores around the country. Hannibal quickly tops the bestseller charts, despite-or perhaps because of--an intensely gruesome plot.

Hannibal Lecter, the brilliant psychiatrist/serial killer with a taste for human flesh, first appeared in Harris' 1981 book, Red Dragon, as a minor character. He played a larger role in The Silence of the Lambs (1988), which sold some 10 million copies and was made into an Academy Award-winning movie in 1991, starring Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster. Hannibal was made into a film starring Hopkins and Julianne Moore in 2001.

Harris was born in 1940 in Richmond, Mississippi, the son of a biology teacher and an electrical engineer. In 1968, he took a job in New York with the Associated Press. While working for the news agency, Harris and two friends had an idea for a novel about hijackers seizing the Goodyear blimp during the Super Bowl. Harris turned the idea into the bestselling Black Sunday (1975). He has turned out bestsellers ever since. Like his antihero Hannibal Lecter, Harris is a gourmet chef with a taste for fine wines. He divides his time between Sag Harbor, Miami, and Paris.

On This Day, Etc.

2006-06-07T07:59:00.000-04:00

Give some recent discussions about Midwestern literature, today's 'This Day in History' in the 'Literary' category is especially pertinent:

June 7

1954 Louise Erdrich is born

Award-winning novelist Louise Erdrich is born this day in Little Falls, Minnesota.

Erdrich's Native American heritage became a dominant theme in her novels, which explored the lives of American Indian families. Her grandfather was tribal chairman for the Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota, and Erdrich was raised in the nearby town of Wahpeton, where her parents taught at a boarding school for Native American children run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Erdrich took a B.A. at Dartmouth College, where she met her future husband, Michael Dorris, who was also part Native American, descended from Modoc Indians from Kentucky. She earned her master's degree at Johns Hopkins. At various times, she worked as a field hand, a highway construction worker, a waitress, a lifeguard, and the editor of a paper for Native Americans in Boston. She and Dorris married and adopted three children. They later had three of their own as well, and struggled to support their growing family until Erdrich won the prestigious Nelson Algren fiction prize in 1982, with an award of $5,000. The award-winning story grew into her first novel, Love Medicine (1984), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Erdrich's subsequent books, including The Beet Queen (1986), Tracks (1988), The Bingo Palace (1994), and Tales of Burning Love (1996), were critical and popular successes. Meanwhile, Dorris' writing was also winning awards and gaining recognition.

The pair, who dedicated all their books to each other, seemed the perfect literary couple until Dorris committed suicide in 1997. Dorris was about to be indicted for sexually and physically abusing their children. Erdrich had secretly been separated from Dorris for more than a year at the time of his death.

Her 1998 novel, The Antelope Wife, features a deteriorating marriage and a husband who slides into drunkenness and self-pity before shooting himself. In the book's dedication, she was careful to make it clear that the subject matter was not based on Dorris' life. It read, "This book was written before the death of my husband."

Besides Modern-Day Deviltry, This Is Also a Big Day in the History of 20th Century Literature

2006-06-06T06:48:00.000-04:00

June 6

1949 George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four is published

On this day, George Orwell's novel of a dystopian future, Nineteen Eighty-four, is published. The novel's all-seeing leader, known as "Big Brother," becomes a universal symbol for intrusive government and oppressive bureaucracy.

George Orwell was the nom de plume of Eric Blair, who was born in India. The son of a British civil servant, Orwell attended school in London and won a scholarship to the elite prep school Eton, where most students came from wealthy upper-class backgrounds, unlike Orwell. Rather than going to college like most of his classmates, Orwell joined the Indian Imperial Police and went to work in Burma in 1922. During his five years there, he developed a severe sense of class guilt; finally in 1927, he chose not to return to Burma while on holiday in England.

Orwell, choosing to immerse himself in the experiences of the urban poor, went to Paris, where he worked menial jobs, and later spent time in England as a tramp. He wrote Down and Out in Paris and London in 1933, based on his observation of the poorer classes, and in 1937 his Road to Wigan Pier documented the life of the unemployed in northern England. Meanwhile, he had published his first novel, Burmese Days, in 1934.

Orwell became increasingly left wing in his views, although he never committed himself to any specific political party. He went to Spain during the Spanish Civil War to fight with the Republicans, but later fled as communism gained an upper hand in the struggle on the left. His barnyard fable, Animal Farm (1945), shows how the noble ideals of egalitarian economies can easily be distorted. The book brought him his first taste of critical and financial success. Orwell's last novel, Nineteen Eighty-four, brought him lasting fame with its grim vision of a future where all citizens are watched constantly and language is twisted to aid in oppression. Orwell died of tuberculosis in 1950.

This Party Seems Perverse to Me

2006-06-06T06:40:00.000-04:00

They used to have races during the hottest part of the summer that my brother ran in when he was in high school (participants were given a t-shirt that said 'I ran through hell'). The race was just a race with a shirt that capitalized on the town's weird name, but this goes a little bit beyond that and seems to be--well, playing with fire.

Hell, Mich., heats up for 6-6-6 party Sun Jun 4, 7:04 AM ET

HELL, Mich. - They're planning a hot time in Hell on Tuesday. The day bears the date of 6-6-06, or abbreviated as 666 — a number that carries hellish significance. And there's not a snowball's chance in Hell that the day will go unnoticed in the unincorporated hamlet 60 miles west of Detroit.

Nobody is more fired up than John Colone, the town's self-styled mayor and owner of a souvenir shop.

"I've got `666' T-shirts and mugs. I'm only ordering 666 (of the items) so once they're gone, that's it," said Colone, also known as Odum Plenty. "Everyone who comes will get a letter of authenticity saying you've celebrated June 6, 2006, in Hell."

Most of Colone's wares will sell for $6.66, including deeds to one square inch of Hell.

Live entertainment and a costume contest are planned. The Gates of Hell should be installed at a children's play area in time for the festivities.

"They're 8 feet tall and 5 foot wide and each gate looks like flames, and when they're closed, it's a devil's head," Colone told The Detroit News for a Saturday story.

Mike "Smitty" Hickey, owner of the Dam Site Inn, wasn't sure what kind of clientele would show up Tuesday.

"We're all about having fun here. I don't think we're going to get the cult crowd, the devil worshippers or anything like that," said Hickey, whose bar's signature concoction is the Bloody Devil, a variant of the Bloody Mary.

Colone, meanwhile, has been in touch with radio stations as far away as San Diego and Seattle that are raffling off trips to Hell in honor of 6-6-6.

The 666 revelry is just the latest chapter in the town's storied history of publicity stunts, said Jason LeTeff, one of its 72 year-round residents — or, as the mayor calls them, Hellions or Hell-billies. But LeTeff wasn't particularly enthused.

"Now, here I am living in Hell, taking my kids to church and trying to teach them the right things and the town where we live is having a 6-6-6 party," he said.

According to the town's semiofficial Web site, there are two leading theories about how Hell got its name.

The first holds that a pair of German travelers stepped out of a stagecoach one sunny afternoon in the 1830s, and one said to the other, "So schoene hell" — roughly translated as, "So bright and beautiful." Their comments were overheard by some locals and the name stuck.

The second holds that George Reeves was asked after Michigan gained statehood what he thought the town he helped settle should be called, and reportedly replied, "I don't care, you can name it Hell if you want to." The name became official on Oct. 13, 1841.

A couple funny pictures of town signs can be seen here.

And, on a Darker Note...

2006-06-05T06:06:00.000-04:00

...this is also the anniversary of the assassination of Bobby Kennedy.

June 5

1968 Bobby Kennedy is assassinated

Senator Robert Kennedy is shot at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles after winning the California presidential primary. Immediately after he announced to his cheering supporters that the country was ready to end its fractious divisions, Kennedy was shot several times by the 22-year-old Palestinian Sirhan Sirhan. He died a day later.

The summer of 1968 was a tempestuous time in American history. Both the Vietnam War and the anti-war movement were peaking. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated in the spring, igniting riots across the country. In the face of this unrest, President Lyndon B. Johnson decided not to seek a second term in the upcoming presidential election. Robert Kennedy, John's younger brother and former U.S. Attorney General, stepped into this breach and experienced a groundswell of support.

Kennedy was perceived by many to be the only person in American politics capable of uniting the people. He was beloved by the minority community for his integrity and devotion to the civil rights cause. After winning California's primary, Kennedy was in the position to receive the Democratic nomination and face off against Richard Nixon in the general election.

As star athletes Rafer Johnson and Roosevelt Grier accompanied Kennedy out a rear exit of the Ambassador Hotel, Sirhan Sirhan stepped forward with a rolled up campaign poster, hiding his .22 revolver. He was only a foot away when he fired several shots at Kennedy. Grier and Johnson wrestled Sirhan to the ground, but not before five bystanders were wounded. Grier was distraught afterward and blamed himself for allowing Kennedy to be shot.

Sirhan confessed to the crime at his trial and received a death sentence on April 24, 1969. However, since the Supreme Court invalidated all death penalty sentences in 1972, Sirhan has spent the rest of his life in prison. He has never provided a clear explanation for why he targeted Bobby Kennedy.

Hubert Humphrey ended up running for the Democrats in 1968, but lost by a small margin to Nixon.

And on This Day in Literary History...

2006-06-05T06:03:00.000-04:00

June 5

1949 Ken Follett is born

Bestselling thriller writer Ken Follett is born on this day in Wales to a devout Christian family that does not allow young Ken to watch TV, see movies, or listen to the radio.

As a result of his strict media diet during childhood, Follett became a voracious reader. After college, he became a reporter for the newspaper in Cardiff, Wales, his hometown, and later reported for a paper in London. Deciding he wasn't a very good reporter, he tried his hand at novels after a friend received a 200-pound advance (less than $400) for a thriller. Coincidentally, Follett needed about 200 pounds to fix his broken car, so he wrote a thriller, which was picked up by Everest Publishers.

Although his advance was large enough to fix his car, the book flopped, and Follett went to work for Everest. He wrote 10 novels during the next four years, finally breaking through with The Eye of the Needle. He wrote many more bestselling spy thrillers, then branched out with historical fiction such as Pillars of the Earth, about cathedral builders in medieval Europe, and On Wings of Eagles, a nonfiction account of Ross Perot's mission to rescue employees trapped in Iran.

On the Weird Name of Brad and Angelina's Kid, Etc.

2006-06-05T06:01:00.000-04:00

Just plain Bill is banned in Hollywood name game
By Arthur Spiegelman
Fri Jun 2, 10:11 AM ET

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - If you have ever wondered what's in a name, consider: Brooklyn, Moxie Crimefighter, Bluebell Madonna, Suri, Phinneaus, Apple and, debuting just last week, Shiloh.

All these are names that celebrities have bestowed upon their newborns in their quest for the unusual, outlandish or off-the-wall. Consider plain Bill boring and banned.

The experts say it is only a matter of time before the latest trendy new names spread to the general public. For example, ordinary people in the Bronx could start naming their children Brooklyn -- a name British soccer star David Beckham and his ex-Spice Girl wife Victoria chose for their son.

Although some name experts think the public might embrace Brooklyn as a first name, they might not jump at the name another former Spice Girl, Geri Halliwell, gave her daughter -- Bluebell Madonna.

Shortly before the birth, Halliwell told a British magazine she saw bluebells everywhere and took that as a sign. As for the name Madonna, she explained it this way: "No one else has the name except the Virgin and the singer, who I adore."

It might take a few years to see if the name Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt gave their new daughter -- Shiloh -- when she was born Saturday catches on with the general public.

A GIRL CALLED MESSIAH

Paul JJ Payack, the head of Global Language Monitor, which monitors word and name usage, says Shiloh is unusual in several ways: it is the site of one of the bloodiest battles in the Civil War, a male name and means Messiah.

"This is, indeed, a very unusual trend, where the baby's name is seen as just another Hollywood adornment," Payack said.

"Having children has become a fad, and as will any fad emanating from Hollywood, self-augmentation, adornment and going to the extreme are going to be present," he said.

Pam Satran, co-author of the bestselling baby naming book "Beyond Jason & Jennifer," says that for years bland names were the order of the day, but not any more. In fact, the next edition of her book will be titled, "Beyond Jason & Jennifer, Madison & Montana" to recognize the first name revolution.

"Twenty years ago celebrity baby names were pretty simple. It was Kate, Kate, Max, Max. Now celebrities are trying to outdo celebrities," she said.

In the 1950s, if a celebrity had an unusual name he or she would change it something simple and socially acceptable like Ken or Debbie.

As the decades passed, new fads included using boys' names for girls, like Drew, Cameron and Stockard. Then came the place names: Madison, Brooklyn, Paris and now, Shiloh.

"These days if you have an ordinary name in Hollywood you change it to a weird one. The more distinctive your name is the better. There's a whole issue of image and branding out there," Satran said.

She added, "Celebrities are very much aware of the power of their image."

And with that in mind, here are some example of what celebrities have recently called their children: Julia Roberts, Hazel and Phinneaus; Gwyneth Paltrow, Moses and Apple; Jason Lee, Pilot Inspektor; Joely Fisher, True Harlow; and Nicolas Cage: Kal-el.

According to the Social Security Administration the 10 most popular male names of the 2000s so far are Jacob, Michael, Joshua, Matthew, Andrew, Christopher, Joseph, Daniel, Nicholas and Ethan.

For girls they are Emily, Madison, Hannah, Emma, Ashley, Abigail, Alexis, Olivia, Samantha and Sarah.

Or to sum up in a single word: BORING.

A T.S. Eliot Reference in Mitch Albom's Article about Detroit's Horrid Game 6 Loss to Miami

2006-06-03T14:15:00.000-04:00

'And finally, before the 11 o'clock news, with Dwyane Wade battling the flu and barely a factor, with a kid called White Chocolate outplaying all of them, with not a bang but a whimper -- and barely a whimper at that -- the Pistons lost their last game of the season.'

The State Quiz!

2006-06-02T08:50:00.000-04:00

Well, I don't think this is accurate in any way, shape, or form, but I'll post my results as a shout-out to Mark.

You're Nevada!

People are constantly mispronouncing your name, and this has provided you
with a lot of frustration over the years. You prefer silver to gold, sagebrush to trees,
and cards to sporting events. There is almost nothing you aren't willing to lay down a
wager on, and others seek you out for advice on their own wagers. You don't take marriage
terribly seriously, though you are one of its biggest proponents. Far too often these
days, others are mistaking you for an industrial-strength garbage bag.

Take the State Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

Notes on Sports

2006-05-25T04:17:00.000-04:00

Odd as it may seem, the most surprising thing in the sports world to me right now is not the struggles the Pistons are having in the playoffs. It is the fact that the Tigers have the best record in Major League Baseball. Granted, they've only played two games so far against teams in the AL East (home of the Yankees and Red Sox, among others), but they're playing equally well at home and on the road (7 losses each), and to be where they are 46 games into the season is almost shocking. It's almost like '84 again! As my grandpa says, they have essentially the same team as last year--but the new manager seems to be whipping them into shape. You go, Jim Leyland! And go, Tigers! Or, as they used to say in the old days, 'Bless you boys!'

Notes on Notes

2006-05-24T06:18:00.000-04:00

1. I've recently started downloading some stuff by Songs: Ohia. I'm especially digging the first two tracks off the the 2003 album 'The Magnolia Electric Co'. I also dig the fact that the main dude is from the same town as my maternal gradmother (Lorain, OH).

2. John Fahey has put together an interesting album of early American music. It's called 'American Primitive, vol. 1--Raw Pre-War Gospel 1926-36' and is on the Revenant Records label. I only have three songs from it at the moment: 'I'll Be Rested (When the Roll is Called)', by Blind Roosevelt Graves and Brother (this song is fantastic); 'Oh Death', by Charlie Patton and Bertha Lee; and 'Holy Mountain', by Elder Otis Jones. In this last one, the music stops for a piece mid-song as the elder preaches it from Isaiah. Then the music kicks back in again with energy and verve.

Did I just say 'verve'?

Blech.

2006-05-24T06:09:00.000-04:00

Well, the Pistons beat themselves again last night. I don't want to hear a word about Wade, Shaq, blah, blah, blah. The simple fact of the matter is that the Pistons can't put any points on the board right now. The problem is one of offense, and this was true even in a game in which the Pistons had only 6 turnovers and outplayed Miami on the offensive glass. Yes, they allowed too many points (and easy ones) to secondary players on the Heat, but with a (much) more solid offensive performance, they could still take games such as that. Look at it this way: in any of their last 8 games, by scoring 92 points or more, they win them all--every single one, including all three losses to Cleveland and last night's loss to Miami. They've managed to win 4 games out of those eight, 2 on nights when they've put up points in the mid-90s and up, and 2 without doing it. They're holding teams to fairly low scoring (in spite of Miami's ridiculously high field-goal percentage--75% in the first quarter?!?), but aren't doing much scoring themselves. They haven't, I don't think, broken 86 points since Game 2 of the Cleveland series--and this from a team that averaged somewhere around 97 points per game during the regular season. Come on, boys--it's time to keep up defensive pressure and click that offense into high gear.

Notes on Notes

2006-05-07T15:06:00.000-04:00

Some stuff that's been rocking my proverbial face:

1. 'Roll on John': Bob Dylan, from the Smithsonian Folkways Various Artists album There Is No Eye: Music for Photographs.

2. Summer in Abaddon: Pinback. I've been kind of out of the loop, so I didn't realize Pinback had come out with a new album a couple years ago. I'm not sure what the significance of the album title is for the album or the band, but 'summer in hell' certainly does not sound pleasant, with its 'hotter than hot' connotations, etc. The first track reminds me of their last album, and the rest strikes me as a little different.

3. 'Sinner's Prayer': BB Kind and Ray Charles, from the Genius Loves Company album.

4. 'If I Needed You': Townes Van Zandt and Emmylou Harris, from Texas Rain. I really dig Townes Van Zandt, and Emmylou's voice is about enough to break your heart. Other great Emmylou duets with dudes: 'Gulf Coast Highway' with Willie Nelson; 'Oh My Sweet Carolina' with Ryan Adams.

5. Anything by Matt Pond PA. Seriously. Anything. Especially The Nature of Maps.

6. Lucinda Williams' version of 'Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor', from the Ramblin' album.

What Neil Diamond Song Are You?

2006-05-07T14:58:00.000-04:00

Apparently, I'm 'Coming to America'.

By the way, the HTML won't work right for this. Sorry.

What Neil Diamond Song Are You?

Coming To America

Click Here to Take This Quiz
Brought to you by YouThink.com quizzes and personality tests.

Computer Question

2006-05-04T16:33:00.000-04:00

Hey everybody--I just saw on nba.com/video that you can download NBA playoff games for cheap from Google, but when I try clicking on it, Google tells me it's not available in my location. Does anyone know anything about this? Is it always impossible to download their stuff then not in the U.S.? Is there a legal way to do it through a proxy or anything?

Kobe Bryant Vocabulary Quiz Game

2006-05-03T06:10:00.000-04:00

From an article on Yahoo! Sports:

Bryant was tossed by referee Leon Wood after complaining that a hard foul against Brown should have been called flagrant.

"He didn't like my toneage, if that's a word." Bryant said. "He's the decider. Is that a word, decider?"

A Day Late...

2006-04-17T09:06:00.000-04:00

HAPPY EASTER!

Good Friday

2006-04-14T05:49:00.000-04:00

Isaiah 53

1 Who has believed our message
and to whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed?

2 He grew up before him like a tender shoot,
and like a root out of dry ground.
He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,
nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.

3 He was despised and rejected by men,
a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering.
Like one from whom men hide their faces
he was despised, and we esteemed him not.

4 Surely he took up our infirmities
and carried our sorrows,
yet we considered him stricken by God,
smitten by him, and afflicted.

5 But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was upon him,
and by his wounds we are healed.

6 We all, like sheep, have gone astray,
each of us has turned to his own way;
and the LORD has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.

7 He was oppressed and afflicted,
yet he did not open his mouth;
he was led like a lamb to the slaughter,
and as a sheep before her shearers is silent,
so he did not open his mouth.

8 By oppression and judgment he was taken away.
And who can speak of his descendants?
For he was cut off from the land of the living;
for the transgression of my people he was stricken.

9 He was assigned a grave with the wicked,
and with the rich in his death,
though he had done no violence,
nor was any deceit in his mouth.

10 Yet it was the LORD's will to crush him and cause him to suffer,
and though the LORD makes his life a guilt offering,
he will see his offspring and prolong his days,
and the will of the LORD will prosper in his hand.

11 After the suffering of his soul,
he will see the light of life and be satisfied;
by his knowledge my righteous servant will justify many,
and he will bear their iniquities.

12 Therefore I will give him a portion among the great,
and he will divide the spoils with the strong,
because he poured out his life unto death,
and was numbered with the transgressors.
For he bore the sin of many,
and made intercession for the transgressors.

Man of Sorrows
Philip P. Bliss

Man of Sorrows! what a name
For the Son of God, Who came
Ruined sinners to reclaim.
Hallelujah! What a Savior!

Bearing shame and scoffing rude,
In my place condemned He stood;
Sealed my pardon with His blood.
Hallelujah! What a Savior!

Guilty, vile, and helpless we;
Spotless Lamb of God was He;
“Full atonement!” can it be?
Hallelujah! What a Savior!

Lifted up was He to die;
“It is finished!” was His cry;
Now in Heav’n exalted high.
Hallelujah! What a Savior!

When He comes, our glorious King,
All His ransomed home to bring,
Then anew His song we’ll sing:
Hallelujah! What a Savior!

A Hymn Text for Maundy Thursday

2006-04-13T09:53:00.000-04:00

"'Twas on That Dark, That Doleful Night"
by Isaac Watts, 1674-1748

1. 'Twas on that dark, that doleful night
When powers of earth and hell arose
Against the Son of God's delight
And friends betrayed Him to His foes.

2. Before the mournful scene began,
He took the bread and blessed and brake.
What love through all His actions ran!
What wondrous words of grace He spake!

3. "This Is My body, broke for sin;
Receive and eat the living food";
Then took the cup and blessed the wine:
"'Tis the new covenant in My blood."

4. "Do this," He said, "till time shall end,
In memory of your dying Friend.
Meet at My table and record
The love of your departed Lord."

5. Jesus, Thy feast we celebrate;
We show Thy death, we sing Thy name,
Till Thou return and we shall eat
The marriage supper of the Lamb.

Maundy Thursday

2006-04-13T09:40:00.000-04:00

From Wikipedia:

In the Christian calendar, Maundy Thursday, also known as Holy Thursday, is the Thursday before Easter, the day on which the Last Supper is said to have occurred.

The Middle English word Maundy, used only in this context, derives from Old French mandé from Latin mandatum novum do vobis, "a new commandment I give unto you, love one another as I have loved you" (John xiii:34), words spoken by Jesus to the Apostles after washing their feet in preparation for The Last Supper. Foot washing is increasingly popular as a part of Maundy Thursday liturgies in many churches. Washing of the Feet has been a traditional component of the Armenian Orthodox Church.

The day has also been known as Sheer Thursday, due to the idea that it is the day of cleaning (schere) and because the churches themselves would switch liturgical colors from the dark tones of Lent. This name is a cognate to the word still used throughout Scandinavia, such as Swedish "Skärtorsdag", Danish "Skærtorsdag" and Norwegian "Skjærtorsdag".

In the Roman Catholic Church, it is generally referred to as Holy Thursday.

In the United Kingdom, the monarch traditionally distributes Maundy money.

In Germany, the day is referred to as "Gründonnerstag," a word built of two roots, "grün" ("green") and "Donnerstag" ("Thursday"). However, the word "grün" probably does not mean "green" in this case. While its etymology is somewhat unclear, many trace it back to "grinan" ("to wail") in Old High German, a word connected with the English "groan".

In the Philippines, a popular Maundy Thursday tradition is the Visita Iglesia (Church Visit), which involves visiting several Churches at which the faithful commemorate the vigil that the Apostles kept while Jesus prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane. The last Mass before Easter is also celebrated on Maundy Thursday, usually including a reenactment of the Washing of the Feet of the Apostles; this Mass is followed by the procession of the Blessed Sacrament before it is taken to the Altar of Repose.

And This is Gross

2006-04-13T06:20:00.000-04:00

Here come the rat-tailed maggot? Wed Apr 12, 9:47 AM ET

CAPE TOWN (Reuters) - Rat-tailed maggots, every bit as ugly as they sound, have been popping out of basins, toilets and taps across Cape Town, sparking a citywide panic that health officials tried Wednesday to calm.

Ivan Toms, director of health for the South African tourist mecca, said the risk the water supply was infested was slim.

"The water is chlorinated and filtered and comes from dams in the mountains where it is extremely unlikely that this maggot would be found," he said in a statement.

The body of the aquatic brownish larva can grow up to 2.5 cm (an inch) long, with a rat-like tail that can be twice that length and in fact serves as a breathing tube.

It later metamorphosises into the brightly colored drone fly, which looks like a honey bee and feeds on pollen.

The maggots are usually found in stagnant water and the drone fly -- possibly on the increase in the city -- may have laid its eggs inside hand-basin pipes, Toms said.

If swallowed, the cylindrical, crush-resistant grub-like body was unlikely to cause major health problems, he said.

"Since the rat tailed maggot is quite large and clearly visible to the naked eye, it is highly unlikely that it would be ingested in the first place," he added.

Well, That's Nice. (Not) Lovin' It.

2006-04-13T06:16:00.000-04:00

Fast-Food Fries, Chicken Fattier in U.S. By LINDA A. JOHNSON, Associated Press Writer
Wed Apr 12, 11:10 PM ET

Order french fries or hot wings at a McDonald's or a KFC in the United States and you're more likely to get a super-sized helping of artery-clogging trans fats than you would be at their restaurants in some other countries.

A study of the fast-food chains' products around the world found remarkably wide variations in trans fat content from country to country, from city to city within the same nation, and from restaurant to restaurant in the same city.

Praise for the Fountain Opened

2006-04-11T10:48:00.000-04:00

William Cowper is one of my favorite English poets. I thought this would be a good one to share during Easter week.

XV. PRAISE FOR THE FOUNTAIN OPENED.—Zechariah xiii.1.

There is a fountain fill’d with blood

Drawn from Emmanuel’s veins;

And sinners, plunged beneath that flood,

Lose all their guilty stains.

The dying thief rejoiced to see

That fountain in his day;

And there have I, as vile as he,

Wash’d all my sins away.

Dear dying Lamb, thy precious blood

Shall never lose its power,

Till all the ransom’d church of God

Be saved to sin no more.

E’er since, by faith, I saw the stream

Thy flowing wounds supply,

Redeeming love has been my theme,

And shall be till I die.

Then in a nobler, sweeter song,

I’ll sing thy power to save;

When this poor lisping stammering tongue

Lies silent in the grave.

Lord, I believe thou hast prepared

(Unworthy though I be)

For me a blood-bought free reward,

A golden harp for me!

‘Tis strung, and tuned, for endless years,

And form’d by power divine,

To sound in God the Father’s ears

No other name but thine.

Quotation for the Day

2006-03-23T15:03:00.000-05:00

"I think conservatives should study the ideas and arguments that prevail on the left. There is always something to learn from these arguments, if only which way the wind of resentment is now blowing. And lifting your eyes from this joyless stuff, you will thank God that you are a conservative."

- Roger Scruton

Pope to Visit UK?

2006-03-21T11:14:00.000-05:00

The Roman Catholic church in England and Wales sought to play down reports last night that Pope Benedict XVI was planning to visit Britain next year. It would be only the second time that a pope has come to the UK since Henry VIII broke with Rome to set up the Church of England in 1534.

A week ago the Catholic church released a statement announcing that it had formally invited the 78-year-old German pontiff to visit. "It is too soon to say either in what that visit might consist, or whether it would be feasible, given the Pope's commitments and the many invitations he has already received from across the world," it said.

"But the president of the Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, is keen that the Pope be aware of how delighted the British people would be should he feel able to accept.

"It is very unlikely that any papal visit would coincide with the 25th anniversary of Pope John Paul II's visit in May 1982."

Farmer feeds family friend's corpse to pigs

2006-03-08T06:20:00.000-05:00

So says Yahoo. Strange. Here's the lead to the article:

BERLIN (Reuters) - A German farmer confessed to feeding the corpse of an elderly family friend to his pigs and then stealing from his bank account, police said Monday.

Police ruled out murder and the 29-year-old farmer has been charged with improper burial and fraud.

The elderly friend died in the farmer's yard in February 2005 and the farmer, through his mother, had power-of-attorney giving him access to the dead man's bank account and pension.

The farmer initially put the corpse in a deep freezer, police in the German town of Frizlar-Haddamar said, and told curious locals the old man was in a nursing home.

In other news, coffee may lead to heart problems for slow-metabolizers:

Among slow-metabolizers, those who drank two or more cups of coffee daily were at least 36 percent more likely to have a nonfatal heart attack than those who drank little or no coffee. Even higher risks were found for younger slow metabolizers — those under 50. They were up to four times more likely to have a heart attack than slow metabolizers in their age group who drank little or no coffee.

Well, at least the heart attacks are nonfatal. Also, if anyone wants to look at the article and tell me why that guy in the picture is 'sipping' his coffee in such an odd manner, I'd appreciate it.

In other news, the song 'History of Lovers' by Iron and Wine/Calexico is sweet.

Quotation for the Day

2006-03-07T16:04:00.000-05:00

"Don't be so gloomy. After all it's not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock..."

(from G. Greene's "The Third Man")

cinematic buffs might recognize the image as a still from the 1949 movie of the same name, starring Orson Welles.

Kirby Puckett

2006-03-07T06:24:00.000-05:00

I always enjoyed watching him play.

R.I.P.

Live at the Acropolis

2006-03-07T06:22:00.000-05:00

Say it ain't so, Yanni!

Question

2006-03-05T11:41:00.000-05:00

Does anyone know how I can convert digital pictures of the pages of a book into PDFs?

Like a Two-stroke

2006-03-05T11:39:00.000-05:00

Mark has a new blog on which you can see, among other things, photographs of his wounded left buttock. Check it out.

Notes on Notes

2006-02-17T11:28:00.000-05:00

1. emusic.com is pretty sweet.

2. Aesop Rock is the best rapper I have ever heard.

3. One of the most popular personal tracks of the last few weeks is the Small Brown Bike/Casket Lottery cover from a few years back of 'Under Pressure' of Bowie/Queen fame. I think I prefer it to the original.

4. Ray Charles has possibly the coolest voice I've ever heard, with the possible exception of Stevie Wonder.

5. Big Bill Broonzy's version of 'John Henry' is wicked sweet.

6. I have two songs from the Iron&Wine/Calexico split ('He Lays in the Reins' and 'Prison on Route 41'), and both are great.

7. 'If Ye Love Me', composed by Thomas Tallis, is one of the most beatiful pieces of choral music--or, for that matter, of music in general--I've ever heard.

There. I think that is enough of the superlative for today.

The Best Thing I've Read on the Cartoons So Far

2006-02-09T10:50:00.000-05:00

LvReformation21.

Monks and Dylan

2006-02-07T09:48:00.000-05:00

Peter Leithart reproduces the following interesting anecdote:

Joseph Frank closes his review of two recent books on Maritain and early 20th century Catholicism with this charming scene: "Maritain returned for a last visit to the United States in 1966 to say farewell to old friends and to visit the grave of his sister-in-law Vera buried in Princeton. At the same time he went to see others, one of whom was the poet and monk Thomas Merton. The latter regaled him with recordings of Bob Dylan, 'whom he [Merton] considers a great poet, a modern Villon. What a strange scene it is,' writes the friend accompanying Maritain, 'listing in the monstery of Gethsemani to the hard and expressive voice of a young rebel poet.'"

The 313

2006-02-05T16:34:00.000-05:00

Seger and Kid Rock....

2006-02-05T16:32:00.000-05:00

they played "Rock n' Roll Never Forgets"
Nice!

Dave Bergman is neat

2006-01-31T10:29:00.000-05:00

Dave Bergman at "A Detroit Salute" last night.

On Literary Pleasure

2006-01-25T09:44:00.000-05:00

'Learning tends to be, in various ways and for various reasons, pleasurable, and for many of us learning from poems (or novels or movies or pop songs) tends to be doubly pleasurable, to flesh and spirit equally, to mind and heart simultaneously--that harmony, that interdependence of our faculties seems to me of the essence for this enjoyment, for these literary pleasures. But as [Roland] Barthes insists and Aristotle, were he not something of a prude, would agree, without the sensual urge for the satisfaction of the senses, the mind's and the spirit's pleasures, unsummoned by the sensual imagination, would not exist. Delighted cognition would no more exist than would the pleasure of solace or diversion, and so it is the carnal pleasure in reading poems aloud, the heard voice's evoking images and sounds and meanings, that I emphasize. And this pleasure has much less to do with that cunning honey smeared on the rim of the medicinal cup (but what child was ever twice fooled by that ruse?) than it does with the slow and imperceptible nurture that Valery assures us we forget that we ingest, so intent we are on sucking the sweetness from the orange.'

W.R. Johnson, 'The Death of Pleasure: Literary Critics in Technological Societies' (from The Interpretation of Roman Poetry: Empiricism or Hermeneutics?, Karl Galinksy, ed., p.202)