I just completed the unabridged audio edition of The Season of Lillian Dawes by Katherine Mosby, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. The language used in the novel is really over the top sophisticated, but since it’s written in the voice of a young privileged American man, the language fits him and his world perfectly.
I also realized that this novel shares many themes with another book I read and enjoyed recently: The Absence of Nectar. Both books have a main character who has obscured his or her identity and history, and both books are a kind of coming-of-age story, though the details differ radically between the two books.

In response to an astute observation by Fred Clark, I’ve created a new bumper sticker on CafeShops/CafePress:

It’s for sale to the public (at no markup).

I heard on the local news this morning that Texas is running a pilot program to identify sex offenders with the “highest level of deviant arousal.” The offender is connected to a bunch of physiological monitors, including one on the shaft of the penis, and his arousal level is measured as he is shown different types of images that might be sexually arousing.
The purpose:

The state says these new tests will help them weed out the low-risk sex offenders, like the 19-year-old who has sex with his 16-year-old girlfriend, from the pedophile who seeks sexual pleasure from children on the playground.
“The folks that show the highest level of deviant arousal are the ones we need to pay the most attention to and contribute the most resources to,” said Siegel.

I’m already uncomfortable with the whole idea that sex offenders cannot be rehabilitated or that they cannot control their actions.
This test, should it be adopted, raises further questions. What about ‘false positives’: men who are incorrectly identified as being aroused by ‘deviant’ images? And to me, it seems there’s a big difference between arousal and acting on that arousal.
We’re letting these people back into society but we’re trying to tell the public that they’re likely to continue their violent behavior. I’m certainly not a fan of locking someone up and throwing away the key, but isn’t one reason for incarceration to remove dangerous people from the general population? If we are so sure they’re so dangerous, why are we letting them out of prison in the first place?

Gelf Magazine has a regular feature where they pair up reviewers’ quotes used in media advertising with the full reviews from which they were taken. Not surprisingly, the entire review is often not as flattering as the short quote used.
For instance, advertising for the HBO movie The Girl in the Cafe uses this quote from The Oregonian:

An endearing romantic comedy!

But here’s the paragraph from which that quote was pulled:

This new offering from HBO Films is at its heart a bit of political propaganda wrapped into an endearing romantic comedy that starts losing its laughs when it gets to Reykjavik and decides its teachable moment has arrived.

This is awesome!

I ran across this quote by St. Augustine this morning:

Further, all men are to be loved equally. But since you cannot do good to all, you are to pay special regard to those who, by the accidents of time, or place, or circumstance, are brought into closer connection with you.

Katie and I have recently been given the challenge of puting St. Augustine’s advice into practice. You see, a friend of ours is now serving the first of a seven-year sentence in federal prison. He is not a close friend: I would characterize him as having a close connection to us through an accident of time, place and circumstance.

Despite my disappointment with the first installment of Guns, Germs and Steel, I went ahead and watched the second installment this week. Same impression.
I’ve concluded that I’m just not anywhere near the target audience for this show. The target audience must be people who’ve never really been introduced to the idea of history as interpretation and who, therefore, have never really questioned the more conventional presentations of history.
At the conclusion of the second installment, Professor Diamond states:

I came to Spain to answer a question – why did Pizarro and his men conquer the Incas instead of the other way around? There’s a whole mythology that that conquest and the European expansion in general resulted from Europeans themselves being especially brave or bold or inventive or smart, but the answers turn out to have nothing to do with any personal qualities of Europeans. Yeah, Pizarro and his men were brave, but there were plenty of brave Incas. Instead, Europeans were accidental conquerors. By virtue of their geographic location and history, they were the first people to acquire guns, germs and steel.

My response to that statement is ‘No duh!’ but the producers of this show must believe that this is a revelation to their target audience. I guess I shouldn’t be so hard on the show and understand that it was just not made for me.

I just ran across this great quote by Eleanor Roosevelt:

I once had a rose named after me and I was very flattered. But I was not pleased to read the description in the catalogue: no good in a bed, but fine up against a wall.

I just finished the unabridged audio edition of Skinwalkers by Tony Hillerman. It was a good mystery, but I didn’t enjoy it as much as The Dark Wind.

I’ve come across the name Jared Diamond a few times in the last year or two, and he sounds intriguing, but I hadn’t gotten around to reading any of his books. So, I was excited to hear that a three-part PBS documentary based on his book Guns, Germs and Steel would be broadcast starting this week.
So, I watched (most of) the first part this week, and the show disappointed me in several ways. First off, as noted elsewhere, it was slow (which is the primary reason I didn’t quite make it through the entire broadcast). But mostly, I found the presentation of the ideas insulting. The first episode explains how the availability of different resources (plants and animals to domesticate) led to different levels of cultural change in different parts of the planet in early human history. Good thesis, but it’s presented in two insulting ways: 1.) as if it is some revolutionary theory, and more importantly, 2.) as if Jared Diamond devised this theory all on his own. In fact, this is a long-established, uncontroversial academic theory, and Jared did not discover it; he is merely the popularizer.

If you like to shop at warehouse ‘club’ stores, and have a CostCo in your area, I urge you to support them over Sam’s Club because CostCo is a forward-looking corporation that views better pay for its employees as an important part of its corporate strategy.