Banned Book Week

So we're halfway through Banned Book Week and I haven't even mentioned it once.  Hmmm, I must be slacking on my game (a lot) lately. 

As an avid reader, this is a subject that's close to my heart.  I remember being appalled the first time I learned that people in towns across America still actually held book burnings.  I couldn't believe that people still felt the need to burn a book.  But evidently they do and so, an idea was born.  Since that time I have periodically (no pun intended) tried to add to the collection of books in my personal library at least a few books that have banned.  They don't need to be current books, in fact most of the books I have acquired have been what I would consider classic.  Think Dickens, Twain, Caldwell or Steinbeck.  At one time I started a list but it got so big that I kind of gave up on it (for now.)

The thing I figured out is that most books that have been banned aren't "bad" books, they are simply books that make some people uncomfortable.  The problem is that just because someone is made uncomfortable by something, it doesn't mean that the something is the problem.  So, I will continue to peruse the list of banned books in search of new reading material.  Or in search of old reading material that I just don't have on my shelf. 

I've put the list of 2011's ten most challenged titles below...two things should be noted: 

1.)  Brave New World should be required reading for every citizen of the US today and
2.)  Within the last six months, my child has read #3 (the trilogy) and #10.  I'm probably a bad mother, but I'm okay with that.

1. ttyl; ttfn; l8r, g8r (series), by Lauren Myracle
   Reasons: offensive language; religious viewpoint; sexually explicit; unsuited to age group
2. The Color of Earth (series), by Kim Dong Hwa
   Reasons: nudity; sex education; sexually explicit; unsuited to age group
3. The Hunger Games trilogy, by Suzanne Collins
   Reasons: anti-ethnic; anti-family; insensitivity; offensive language; occult/satanic; violence
4. My Mom's Having A Baby! A Kid's Month-by-Month Guide to Pregnancy, by Dori Hillestad Butler
   Reasons: nudity; sex education; sexually explicit; unsuited to age group
5. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie
   Reasons: offensive language; racism; religious viewpoint; sexually explicit; unsuited to age group
6. Alice (series), by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
   Reasons: nudity; offensive language; religious viewpoint
7. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
   Reasons: insensitivity; nudity; racism; religious viewpoint; sexually explicit
8. What My Mother Doesn't Know, by Sonya Sones
   Reasons: nudity; offensive language; sexually explicit
9. Gossip Girl (series), by Cecily Von Ziegesar
   Reasons: drugs; offensive language; sexually explicit
10. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
    Reasons: offensive language; racism

Olympics 2012

I am sadly unappreciative of the Olympics lately.  Not the athletes, they are awesome.  Not the venue, London did itself proud with that one.  No, what I am so disappointed in is the coverage.  Specifically the time delayed, Americanized media coverage.

So the first thing is obviously the time delay issue.  I fricken HATE the time delay.  Why?  Because it means that I can't watch the news, read a newspaper, look at the computer or talk with anyone without fear of hearing the results of some event that I haven't yet watched.  So recognizing that time moves on and technology improves, there was something to be said for only being able to watch the events as they happen.  As far as I'm concerned, it showed your dedication to a specific sport.  Like the discus throw but they're competing at 3:00 am your time?  Suck it up and take at nap earlier in the day so you don't miss anything. 

The second issue also relates to the time delay...let's call it half arsed coverage.  If it's live, you get the whole shebang.  From the worst competitor to the best, you got to watch all of it.  How cool would it have been to be just as surprised as the rest of the world to be watching the women's gymnastics at the 1972 Munich Olympics and watch Olga Korbut do her famous back flip off the high bar?  I'll wait while you google that little gem...done yet?  How cool was that?  Anyway, there was none of this bs of only seeing the top three or four competitors.  I want to see all the dives of all the divers of all the countries.  Don't just show me China and their scarily perfect dives.  I want to see the guy that looks like a drunken kangaroo going off the board as well.  Because how can I judge how fantastic the winner is if I can't see who all of their competition is?

Which leads us to all the competition...why are there so many damned sports in the Olympics these days?  Is badminton even a sport?  How about handball?  Really?  And don't get me started on the heated ping pong competition.  But seriously, the absolute worst has to be the slalom canoeing.  What the hell is wrong with you people?  And as a side note, it only makes it worse when you find out that the badminton teams are deliberately trying to lose in the preliminaries so they can get matched with an inferior team for the finals.  Here's a hint: there's not that much glory in winning gold in badminton in the first place, don't make it worse by cheating.  I know, it's devastating to hear that, but it's the truth and someone had to tell you. 

And finally, how about those life stories?  Can we wring anymore emotive dances out of these broadcasters?  Sob stories, tragic lives leading down the path to Olympic glory, poor kids making good.  Don't get me wrong, I think each of these athletes has greatness in them, proven by the fact they are at the Olympics in the first place.  But I don't need to know every detail of their lives.  I don't want to hear five minutes of what they've overcome to watch them swim a two minute race.  Seriously, I don't care, I just want to see them compete.  And over-sharing mom of fantastic swimmer?  Please, stop.  Just stop. 

The Garden of Impending Doom

We have several gardens that we put together last fall and planted this spring.  Prior to our vacation in July, the gardens were producing beautifully on a daily basis.  At least as far as the cherry tomatoes go.  Those things were crazy prolific.  I'm talking three or four dozen tomatoes every day.  And they were awesome.  I don't know about you but I've never thought store bought tomatoes were all that great.  They're okay, but they're fairly nondescript.  But these things were downright spicy (comparatively speaking).  Long story short, Mister C was thrilled with his daily allotment of cherry tomatoes and I was eating them every time I walked through the kitchen (which is apparently a lot since my weight loss is at a standstill, but that's another story.) 

Anyway, other than the cherry tomatoes, the only other pre-vacation producers were the cantaloupe and watermelon plants and there were just a few of those.  The strawberries had been fairly choked out by the cantaloupe vines from hell by this point.  The red and green pepper plants were about three feet tall and had several small peppers on each plant.  The day before we left on vacation I had decided to pick the sole cucumber even thought I didn't think it was quite ripe.  My assumption being that since we were going to be gone for nine days it would go to waste if I didn't pick it.  It was actually pretty good, although fairly small.

Upon returning from vacation, the first thing I did was head to the garden to see what remained.  I gleaned several dozen cherry tomatoes, two cantaloupe and several watermelons.  The peppers weren't doing well at all, most of the fruit had rotted on the plant.  There were also several cucumbers.  Or at least what were supposed to be cucumbers. 

Instead of the cucumbers being a nice, dark green and of reasonable size, they were huge, yellow, slug-like things.  I'm not even kidding, I was looking at those things trying to figure out where their eyes were.  They were downright horrifying.  So I pulled them off the vine and brought them into the house for an autopsy. 

I've been watching a lot of "Dr. G, Medical Examiner" on the Discovery channel and I'm pretty sure I know what I'm doing here.  So I take my alien cucumber and I make the classic Y incision in it's...chest...in anticipation of figuring out what went wrong with the little bastard.  Instead of nice, firm, cucumber flesh, I have mushville (it's a word.)  An "off" scent came rolling off the deceased (I can only assume the cucumber was using some sort of illegal fertilizer) almost knocking me off my feet.  And then my beautiful Y incision kind of collapsed on itself due to the mush factor.  I'll be honest, I didn't see a need to continue the autopsy at this point since the end result was that this particular vegetable was uneatable (and that actually is a word.)  So, into the compost it went.

We've now been home for just over three weeks.  I've pulled a few more cantaloupes and watermelons off the vines and they've been awesome.  Nothing else seems to be producing right now (no berries, no grapes.)  The cantaloupe plants current have a half dozen more melons getting ripe which is great, although their vines have gotten much more aggressive.  Several of the vines are aiming for the air conditioner (it has been consistently over 100 degrees lately) and one pioneering vine has made it's way over to steal nutrients from my orange tree.  But that's not all...

This morning I went out to see if anything was available and after picking another dozen cherry tomatoes, I thought I would check to see if any new cucumbers have shown up.  They have...

Thank goodness we have them caged!

Stupid Time Waster That Made Me Smile

So this is apparently a "thing" to do on at least one site out there.  Here's the rules:

1.)  Go to Wikipedia and chose "Random Article".  Whatever comes up is your new band's name.

2.)  Go to Wikiquotes and chose "Random Article".  Pick a quote from the article and use the last 5-8 words as the title to your new album.

3.)  Go to flickr and go to the "Last 7 Days Interesting".  The fifth picture is your album cover art.

Here's the results for my new (imaginary) band, Laigin, and our groundbreaking album "Method of the Nuclear Bombardment". 

Kind of makes you want to bang your head, huh?  In a good way of course.

Soylent Green is...

Just watched this film again for the first time in twenty years or so. When Mister C told me he was planning to watch it I told him to go ahead without me because I'd already seen it and thought it was pretty bad. But after thinking about it for about thirty seconds I thought maybe I should watch it again, just to refresh my memory.

I can't say I liked this movie at all the first time I saw it. I thought it was completely and ridiculously stupid and the poor acting pretty well grated on my nerves. This time, I'm pretty sure the acting was just as poor but the premise of this film was a whole lot more interesting to me. Just twenty short years ago this movie was so far out as to be crazily unbelievable. Now, with what's happening in this country today, it's a little less so. It's still a seventies science fiction film with lots of poorly executed fight scenes and completely unrealistic "blood" from those fights. The film still feels erratic and disjointed to me, but maybe that's how it was meant to feel.

But mostly, the feeling I ended up with was not dis-similar to when how I felt after reading Huxley's "Brave New World" again recently. Kind of like "Holy crap, it's like they could see the future!" Like I said, an interesting film. Probably won't need to watch it again for another twenty years or so though.