The Nature of Things

The Satanic Verses , Salman Rushdie's notorious 1988 book that garnered him a fatwa from the ayatollahs, has been on my to-be-read list all these years since, but somehow I just never got around to it. Until now. Maybe it's just as well. Perhaps I wouldn't have had the patience for this complicated tale earlier. It is a difficult but ultimately rewarding read.  The book is so famous as to almost not require a description, but it is full of magical realism and of allusions to Islamic texts, not only the Qur'an, of which I have a woeful ignorance. I'm sure that my ignorance led me to a lack of understanding of some of Rushdie's points and yet I felt that his overall theme regarding human, and especially family, relationships was universal and fully accessible to me.  He begins his story with a hijacked airliner that is blown up over the English Channel by the terrorists who hijacked it. We meet Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha as they are tumbling toward the e...

Paul Ryan has been the darling of the Beltway pundits for years now. Dazzled by his flashing blue eyes and chiseled physique, they simply melt into little puddles when he looks their way and they never bother to vet what he's saying to see whether it is actually true. To them, he is a Very Serious Person, an honest fella who is just trying to find long-term solutions to financial problems which he and his party say are about to swamp the country. Nobody ever checks to see whether his numbers actually add up, and nobody bothers to ask  why, if he's so concerned about the deficit, so many of his votes in Congress over the years, particularly during the Bush years, have been votes for programs that added to the nation's deficit; e.g., two "unfunded" wars that were kept "off the books," a drug program for Medicare recipients that mainly benefited the drug companies and also was not paid for, disastrous tax cuts that provided the most benefits to the wealthi...

The best song lyric ever written? Maybe. Certainly among the most evocative. Music by Hoagy Carmichael Lyrics by Mitchell Parish Sung by Nat King Cole Images from space by the Hubble Telescope

With a tip of the hat to Carole of Carole's Chatter ... Now, admit it - you've been there, too!

We're going into the Labor Day weekend after a week of hot air filled with blatant lies swirling around Tampa. Hurricane Isaac may have done a lot of damage in Mississippi and Louisiana, but Hurricane Romney/Ryan has certainly done more damage to our body politic. Not to mention the truth. Oh, well, let's forget all of that for the moment. We need something to make us smile. And here it is. If this doesn't make your edges of your lips twitch upward, there's probably no hope for you. Happy Labor Day weekend! Be safe.

I haven't watched or listened to any of the Republican (Tea Party) National Convention this week. Frankly, you couldn't pay me to - it would just be too painful. But I have followed the convention, faithfully reading the reports in the news outlets that I follow daily and listening to summaries on The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. My overall impression of the event is that I cannot remember any convention in my lifetime or any presidential campaign in my lifetime that has been so clearly and profoundly built on lies. The candidates themselves seem unable to open their mouths without uttering bald-faced lies. As for the speakers at the convention, they have been, to put it as kindly as I can, a bit irony-challenged. *~*~*~* Let's consider Ann Romney, for example. She spoke on "Women's Night," which is a totally ironic concept in itself for this anti-woman party. Her challenge was to make her listeners love Mitt Romney and to convince women that the Republ...