Weather summary 7:19 PM July 21
Before today we’d had about 4 inches of rain so far this year. As you can see, we’ve had 1.73 inches this evening. I’ve rarely ever seen it rain any harder.
Update 9:15 PM: About 2 inches total rainfall so far with light rain still falling. One-third of the whole year’s rain has fallen in the past five hours.
Michael Cooper, ex-husband of Elizabeth Gilbert — she of the gazillion-selling Eat, Pray, Love, about her post-divorce global journey — has sold his own book. Displaced will tell his side of the story, which, it turns out, is also global: …
Whatever happened to getting over a relationship by “searching for purpose” at the end of a bar with plenty of Otis Redding on the jukebox?
If I laugh out loud, I link. Very funny.
Thanks to Jill for the link. But Jill, my daughter, my second-born, I don’t want you thinking that the F-word is OK just because you see that adults use it.
My new BBF (Best Blog Forever) is The Second Pass. Among other things, they post excerpts from books. These two are pure poetic prose.
If you don’t know about Erin Andrews and what has happened, this will get you started.
On July 21, 1959, Judge Bryan ruled in favor of Grove Press and ordered the Post Office to lift all restrictions on sending copies of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” through the mail. This, in effect, marked the end of the Post Office’s authority — which, until then, it held absolutely — to declare a work of literature “obscene” or to impound copies of those works or prosecute their publishers. This wasn’t exactly the end of obscenity as a criminal category. Into the mid-1960s, Barney Rosset would wage battles in various state courts over William Burroughs’s “Naked Lunch” and Henry Miller’s “Tropic of Cancer,” other Grove novels now widely regarded as classics. But the “Chatterley” case established the principle that allowed free speech its total victory.
Excerpt from Fred Kaplan, “The Day Obscenity Became Art” – NYTimes.com.
A holiday not because of Lawrence’s book, but to celebrate the expansion of freedom this decision represented.
The Second Pass drops ten classics from your must read list.
If you’re looking for reading suggestions in bulk, you’re spoiled for choice. There are classics, like Clifton Fadiman’s Lifetime Reading Plan or Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon. And in recent years, a cottage industry has sprung up of books that recommend books — The Top Ten, Book Lust (and its follow-up, More Book Lust), The Modern Library, etc., etc.
Some of these efforts are quite good and owned by the authors of this feature — but a problem arises: Such guides are presumably meant to save readers time by pointing them in the right direction, but the guides themselves amount to several months or years of reading. The books they recommend add up to several lifetimes. What starts as an attempt to save hours ends as a commitment to more hours than you probably have.
That’s where we come in. Below is a list of ten books that will be pressed into your hands by ardent fans. Resist these people. Life may not be too short (I’m only in my mid-30s, and already pretty bored), but it’s not endless.
iTunes, I love you.
Current 20:
“Unlikely activities where I’ve hurt myself: sitting down at a desk, getting up from a desk, getting in a car, playing guitar, using a broom.”
“I wouldn’t want to work from home myself but I wish my coworkers did…”
From a RT by Nora of Linda Messing (lindamessing) on Twitter.
“If I had went to college, I would have went to Duke.”
Kobe Bryant telling ESPN about his mutual admiration society with Duke Coach Mike Krzyzewski (2004).
Click image for larger version
I saw this guy drive by twice when I was in Washington two years ago. I heard that he has a different car now.
It’s the birthday
… of Janet Reno, the first woman attorney general of the United States. She is 71.
… of actor Edward Herrmann. He is 66.
… of actor Wendell Burton, 62. Burton was Liza Minnelli’s boyfriend in The Sterile Cuckoo.
… of Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau. He’s 61.
… of Yusuf Islam, also 61. He was born Steven Demetre Georgiou. Much of his life he was known as Cat Stevens and he sold 60 million albums. Stevens wrote “The First Cut is the Deepest,” a hit for four artists, most recently Sheryl Crow. In 2006, he returned to music after nearly 30 years; his new stage name is Yusuf.
… of Mork. Robin Williams is 58. Williams has been nominated for the best actor Oscar three times without winning. He did win the best supporting actor Oscar for Good Will Hunting.
… of Jon Lovitz. He’s 52. Fresh!
… of Brandi Chastain. She’s 41.
… and of C.C. Sabathia, 29.
Ernest Hemingway was born on this date in 1899. He died a few weeks before his 62nd birthday in 1961. Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954 “for his mastery of the art of narrative, most recently demonstrated in The Old Man and the Sea, and for the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style.” The New York Times has an extraordinary wealth of reviews, articles, interviews and other material collected on Hemingway.
Marshall McLuhan was born on this date in 1911.
Jeff Sharlet, author of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, takes a look at the C Street House, “the secretive religious enclave on Capitol Hill thrust into the news by its links to three political sex scandals.”
An excerpt:
If sexual license was all the Family offered the C Street men, however, that would merely be seedy and self-serving. But Family men are more than hypocritical. They’re followers of a political religion that embraces elitism, disdains democracy, and pursues power for its members the better to “advance the Kingdom.” They say they’re working for Jesus, but their Christ is a power-hungry, inside-the-Beltway savior not many churchgoers would recognize. Sexual peccadilloes aside, the Family acts today like the most powerful lobby in America that isn’t registered as a lobby — and is thus immune from the scrutiny attending the other powerful organizations like Big Pharma and Big Insurance that exert pressure on public policy.
Money quote: “If you’re chosen, the normal rules don’t apply.”
Ars Technica reviews the updated Public Radio Player. They begin:
Public radio’s existing iPhone app was already cool—it allowed listeners to hear public radio stations from across the country on their phones, live. But the new version of the Public Radio Player, released this weekend, adds an incredible new set of features that provide a glimpse at the future of “radio.” Welcome to the on-demand, in-your-pocket future, today.
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