Category Archives: Library

Educational television

Posted on February 20, 2009 | Comments Off on Educational television

Trek.JPG

Via Treppenwitz. More of these funnies here. Also this one.

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Posted in Blogosphere, Israel, Library, Scribbles, Space

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Dr. King’s wiretapper

Posted on February 20, 2009 | Comments Off on Dr. King’s wiretapper

Used to be (and probably still is) that any appearance at the LBJ Library by PBS poohbah Bill Moyers drew an SRO crowd. Mainly aging, LBJ liberals yearning for the Great Society. They apparently never knew this side of the old Baptist hypocrite:

"His part in Lyndon Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover’s bugging of Martin Luther King’s private life, the leaks to the press and diplomatic corps, the surveillance of civil rights groups at the 1964 Democratic Convention…"

That’s from CBS newsman Morley Safer’s memoir Flashbacks. Liberal fascists do make strange bedfellows. 

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Posted in Blogosphere, Library, Texana

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The dying newspaper

Posted on February 16, 2009 | Comments Off on The dying newspaper

Conservative bloggers like to believe the reason that so many American newspapers are for sale, and why Time and Newsweek can now be called the skinny weeklies, is because of their biased reporting. Well, maybe. But they’ve always been biased. Back in the 1960s-70s, they were biased to the right, instead of the left.

Insiders, of course, blame the loss of advertising to the Internet, especially the classifieds, the lifeblood of many fish wrappers. I give this excuse far more credence than the bias. But I also have come to think that it’s the basic irrelevance of the content.

Political correctness, like whacking some radio talker when he makes a racist remark, has become the business of the front page, and endless scolding. News, unless it’s politically neutral or has a politically-correct peg, is simply no longer news. Like the first Muslim-honor beheading in New York, which is excused and shuffled off to join what’s left of the truss ads. Can’t criticise Islam. T’ain’t PC. Trouble is, PC is boring as well as gutless. So why read those who peddle it? Why not hunt the Internet for the real news? Not to mention the classifieds?

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Posted in Library, Obituaries

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Chronicler of suburban adultry

Posted on February 11, 2009 | Comments Off on Chronicler of suburban adultry

Not to mention the urban variety. And divorce, of course. The Afterlife and Other Stories is a good read–since its pieces are of, not the dead and gone, but the aging and leaving. It’s the first read, in fact, I ever made of John Updike material. I must have read a score of reviews over the years but never actually read one of his novels or short stories. At the suggestion of an Israeli friend, I am now embarked on his novel The Centaur, which, so far, seems suitably weird. From the short stories I find I can agree with some of his reviewers that, if not wholly misogynistic, he certainly was wary of women. Which is understandable, I think.

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The sun is still quiet

Posted on February 7, 2009 | Comments Off on The sun is still quiet

So, according to Henrik Svensmark:

No sunspots = more clouds = lower temperatures.

The Central Texas winter, which began quite early last year, should be more or less over by March 1. Let’s just hope.

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Posted in Blogosphere, Library, Rancho Roly Poly, Science/Engineering, Space, Weather/Climate

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Octavia E. Butler

Posted on January 24, 2009 | Comments Off on Octavia E. Butler

This lady is one great writer and story teller. Such a pity she died so young. Nevertheless I am still happily plowing through her thirteen eleven twelve (confusing bibliography) published novels. I started here, and recently finished this post-apocalyptic one and this fantasy one.

Last night I finished her short story collection, Blood Child, and came away with five favorites out of nine there, including the title tale about species symbiosis and a sympathetic, loving tale of incest. Her deceptively simple prose is enticing, even when the stories are strange. Her genre is science fiction and fantasy, after all. More of the latter than the former, it seems, though that may just be where I am in the trek. Harrowing as some of her tales are, they usually end satisfactorily, even hopefully. Like classic science fiction often does. Give her a try, if you haven’t already. You won’t be sorry.

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Marooned in Realtime

Posted on January 15, 2009 | Comments Off on Marooned in Realtime

This novel by Vernor Vinge is one of the most imaginative I’ve read. It easily compares with the works of the old masters of scifi. Ostensibly a murder mystery, it’s also about the last two hundred or so human beings left on earth, thousands of years in the future–to the extent that they stay on earth when not "bobbling" forward through time. Their travels caused them to miss what they call the Great Extincton of humanity and they don’t know what caused it. Now they must figure out how to start over again, if only at a nineteenth century level. 

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Posted in Library

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