when the status quo frustrates.

Female friendships: A literary perspective

Saturday, August 9th, 2008

The main character-to-character relationship development in so many books (and movies) is between a man and a woman; the second-most common is between a man and a man–a relationship between two women as the central focus, especially two unrelated women, is definitely the rarest of the three. (Reminds me of the Bechdel test.) This thought came to me the other day when I was rereading a favorite old “comfort book”–it’s a book I first read decades ago as a young teen–I believe it originally belonged to my grandmother. I really love this book for two reasons: one, it’s rich in historical detail about the untamed West of the American 1840s, especially the California Trail, and the other because of the really wonderful portrait of a deep female friendship it paints.

This got me thinking even more–how many other books have I read that I really loved for that second reason? I realized that a few of my books are treasured because of just that. So I thought I’d throw a few of them out there, and see if anybody else out there has either read ‘em or knows of any other books that are beautifully written with a female friendship as a central theme that they’d like to recommend.

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09.08.2008 Books 10 Comments

Book Review: Guantanamo’s Child

Thursday, May 22nd, 2008

Guantanamo's child

I admit to being slightly obsessed with Omar Khadr’s story. Many of us here in Soviet Canuckistan, the one major U.S. ally unwilling to say a peep about America’s human rights violations in Guantanamo Bay, are slightly obsessed with Omar Khadr’s story. I’m not sure if the Khadr family—”Canada’s First Family of Terrorism”—gets as much press down south as they do here, but it was fascinating to watch public opinion change its tune in recent months as first, a military judge threw out the war crimes charges against him last June, and then in February, the not-at-all-surprising revelation that while he had been present at the firefight that killed a U.S. soldier, there was no actual evidence that he threw the grenade. Neither Canadians nor our government have been particularly sympathetic towards the Khadrs, even though Omar was only 15 when the Americans shot and captured him, even though we tend to wring our hands a fair bit over the plight of child soldiers (when they’re attacking someone else, that is). But Michelle Sheppard, the author of Guantanamo’s Child: The Untold Story of Omar Khadr, is one of the good ones as far as the mainstream media is concerned. Her clear-headed, honest reporting on the case for the Toronto Star has been a breath of fresh air, so of course I was thrilled when her book came out.

It did not disappoint. Sheppard has a keen eye for detail, and she manages to track every key moment in the Khadr’s lives. She paints a vivid detail of the years leading up to the firefight in Afghanistan, as Omar is dragged by his parents between Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Canada, indoctrinated into his father’s ideology even as he clings to the trappings of a Western childhood. The descriptions of Guantanamo, of course, are horrific, confirming much of what we already know goes on within those walls:

One evening in March 2003, Omar was taken from his cell and in no mood to co-operate. The guards left him in the interrogation booth for hours, short-shackled with his ankles and wrists bound together and secured to a bolt on the floor. Unable to move, he eventually urinated and was left in a pool of urine on the floor.

When the MPs returned and found the soiled teenager, Omar’s lawyers later said, the guards poured pine oil cleaner on his chest and the floor. Keeping him short-shackled, the guards used Omar as a human mop to clean up the mess. Omar was returned to his cell and for two days the guards refused to give him fresh clothes.

(If you have the stomach to read it, Rolling Stone has more here.)

Beyond telling a gripping, heartbreaking story, Sheppard is also courageous in tackling the motivations of terrorism. By tracing the Khadr family history and Ahmed Said Khadr’s path from being a secular Muslim primarily interested in charity work to the guy that Osama bin Laden kept snubbing at al-Qaeda get-togethers, she of course brings up the West’s involvement in the rise of Islamic extremism and questions what exactly it is that we’re doing in Afghanistan in the first place.

Omar, now 21, has spent a fifth of his life in America’s off-shore gulag. He is the only Western citizen remaining there. Slightly more moral countries have demanded the extradition or repatriation of their citizens, but despite the urging of Amnesty International, UNICEF, and the Canadian Bar Association, Canada has not. Our government has, in fact, acted in a rather callous manner to one of its own citizens. After Omar’s arrest:

Foreign Affairs media director Lillian Thomsen, on instructions from Colleen Swords, now head of the intelligence division, wrote in an email a new press message must “claw back on the fact that he is a minor.”

(The spin hasn’t worked, by the way. A poll last year revealed that slightly more than half of Canadians believe the government should ask for Omar’s repatriation. It’s somewhat of a relief to know that Canadians have more empathy than our minority government.)

Guantanamo’s Child is a brutal read (and for me, all the more depressing since I’ve started working with kids around Omar’s age), but one I hope will be ultimately worthwhile. Sheppard does a phenomenal job of laying out the argument that Omar is a child soldier in need of rehabilitation, not imprisonment and torture, as well as the ethical and legal case against Guantanamo Bay.

Highly recommended.

22.05.2008 Books, Military bullshit, Torture, War 10 Comments

Nature writer reaches new audiences with “Hot-loving polecats do[ing] it in prairie dog holes.”

Tuesday, January 15th, 2008

Plagiarism is wrong; especially plagiarism this bad:

On page 195, after several false starts to stoke the furnaces of readers, Bramlett and Shadow Bear finally get down to business. They have sex in his teepee on some animal pelts. Hungrily, their sinuous bodies rock and quake until both explode in rapturous pleasure. When the teepee flaps are rocking, don’t come a-knocking.

Bramlett hears something rustling in the bushes and recoils in fear. Could it be the evil Jack Thunder Horse, come to steal the map that reveals the secret location of the gold discovered by her late father?

No!

It’s just a family of ferrets….

“They are so named because of their dark legs,” Shadow Bear says, to which Shiona responds: “They are so small, surely weighing only about two pounds and measuring two feet from tip to tail.”

Shiona then tells Shadow Bear how she once read about ferrets in a book she took from the study of her father. “I discovered they are related to minks and otters. It is said their closest relations are European ferrets and Siberian polecats,” she says. “Researchers theorize that polecats crossed the land bridge that once linked Siberia and Alaska, to establish the New World population.”

The nature writer whose purely not-prurient article on the endangered black-footed ferret (Note from Author: Since I have your attention, please be aware of the plight of the black-footed ferret) became pillow talk for the “shirtless, dark-haired hunk in a loin cloth” Shadow Bear and “pioneer hottie, Shiona Bramlett” isn’t terribly upset, but Cassie Edwards’ readers are. As well they should be – Christ on a crutch, Cassie, you were paid for that crap. The least you could do was change enough of Tolme’s words to make that conversation less like it was being held by a couple of horny androids.

15.01.2008 Punkass!, Books 1 Comment

Why do conservatives hate penguins?

Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007

tango
Nefarious agents of the homosexual agenda.

I post about penguins probably more often than I should, but they’re terribly cute, and for whatever reason, they seem to get used as political footballs far more often than the poor things deserve.

Well, it’s happening again. The most challenged book of 2006, according to the Chicago-based American Library Association, was And Tango Makes Three. I haven’t read it, but it sounds cute: A zookeeper gives two penguins a fertilized egg, it hatches, and they raise the little penguin chick as their own. Aww. Penguins.

I bet you can guess why conservatives don’t like this book.

“The huge majority of parents would avoid this book if they knew it was brainwashing their children to support and experiment with homosexual behavior,” said Randy Thomasson, president of the California-based Campaign for Children and Families.

That argument might be more convincing were it not for the documented existence of gay penguins. Better keep those kids away from zoos as well.

You know, I always wonder about people who go on book-banning campaigns. With all the good causes out there, why expend that sort of energy to make yourself into the kind of laughing stock that tries to get a picture book about penguins pulled from libraries?

02.10.2007 Books, Family, Teh Gay 5 Comments

Link round-up

Friday, August 10th, 2007

I’m off as of Monday on vacation (I’ll be back the following week with, I hope, fascinating tales of Homeland Security and the SPP protests). In the meantime, here’s some reading material:

Baghdad without water.

You know the whole “you broke it, you bought it” Iraq war theory that’s popular amongst Sensible LiberalsTM? The invasion might have been a really bad idea after all, but troops can’t withdraw because then it’ll all get worse?

Well. 6 million people in Baghdad are without water. So yes, it can get worse, obviously. But it is so utterly, unbelievably bad that we here in the empire can simply not comprehend how bad it is.

According to Article 55 of Geneva Conventions (1949) to which the U.S. government is a signatory: “To the fullest extent of the means available to it the Occupying Power has the duty of ensuring the food and medical supplies of the population; it should, in particular, bring in the necessary foodstuffs, medical stores and other articles if the resources of the occupied territory are inadequate.”

Article 59 states: “If the whole or part of the population of an occupied territory is inadequately supplied, the Occupying Power shall agree to relief schemes on behalf of the said population, and shall facilitate them by all the means at its disposal.”

Never mind impeachment. Get the Bush Administration to the Hague. Now.

Hooyah!

I am dying to read Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, but in the meantime, the London Review of Books has a good review of it.

A man who hires a squad of elite lawyers to fight to protect his company from liability for anyone’s death, foreign or American, anywhere overseas, despite at least one incident of Blackwater mercenaries in Iraq shooting dead an innocent man; despite the death in Fallujah of four Blackwater mercenaries to whom the company hadn’t given proper armoured vehicles, manpower, weapons, training, instructions or maps; despite the death of three US servicemen in Afghanistan at the hands of a reckless Blackwater aircrew, who also died: well, casual observers might think this would render Erik Prince a villain. Yet it would make him a villain only in some liberal, humanistic, ethical sense. In the eyes of American law, Prince has done nothing villainous; on the contrary, he is a patriot and a Christian, which is to say, a good man.

Even the libertarians, who want to privatize the air you breathe, get understandably squicked at the idea of privatizing armies. And yet, this is exactly what’s happening, from Iraq to New Orleans. And this particular band of mercenaries is run by a crazed religious nutcase. Scared yet?

Speaking of religious fanatics…

PZ Myers has another fun post about Scott Adams and his religious wankery.

Maybe I’m God. If you don’t worship me and tithe to me, I’ll send you to PZ’s Hell when you die. You should worry, because every torment in my Hell is a million times worse than the torments in the Christian Hell — every magma smoothie is a thousand degrees hotter than theirs, to every poke with a pitchfork we add an anal reaming with a hook-suckered tentacle, every hill up which you must push boulders is 15° steeper, every lake of vomit contains twice as many chunks. Obviously, the potential problem is much greater in my Hell than your pedestrian Christian Hell, therefore you should believe in Me. Donate now, or suffer.

The problem with Pascal’s Wager is that even if you understand it properly, which Adams arguably does not, it’s an incredibly easy one to refute. It doesn’t take into account the existence of multiple competing faiths (even if you take the wager and worship the Christian God, you might still end up in Hades for failure to properly worship Zeus). And, of course, there’s that other wager—if you devote your life to a faith you don’t really believe in, just to be spared in the event that there really is a literal hell, you have likely spent your earthly existence in torment for absolutely no reason whatsoever.

Prisoners’ Justice Day

Finally, here in Canada, it’s Prisoners’ Justice Day. I’ll be heading out shortly to a vigil at Toronto’s Don Jail.

Have a great week!

10.08.2007 Books, Godbaggery, Human Rights, Politics, War 1 Comment

Because I can’t wait five damn days for the Pandagon comment thread, and I’m not joining some Yahoo discussion group

Monday, July 23rd, 2007

For those who’ve finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Thoughts appear at random.
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23.07.2007 Books 158 Comments

Peter F. Hamilton is a fucking asshole bastard

Thursday, July 27th, 2006

I’m just about finishing off Reality Dysfunction (on page 700 or so), any other Sci-Fi nerds who have already walked this dark path before me want to tear into it first before I really let rip on this piece of mary sue ridden evil-done with an eye towards the sexism and misognyny that permeates the whole thing?

For instance, will it be worth buying the next two books just to sate my curiosity about what happens, or does Joshua not die a horrible death at the end of the first book? (I could almost stand the satanist cliche, and the hyperactive case of Girlfriend In A Fridge syndrome but oh gawd, Joshua! Arrgh!)

Thoughts? Suggestions of how to dispose of the book after reading it?

27.07.2006 Books 1 Comment

Ladies! I got y’all a present! The other team’s playbook!

Monday, June 12th, 2006

I was over at my local Planned Parenthood today, getting my 90 day supply of magic happy pills, and I decided to take my $4 in change over to the used bookstore to see what was available. I’ve been looking for a copy of Andrew Neiderman’s “Sister, sister” for about 10 years now. “The Need” would be cool, too, but Neiderman must sell like six books per run because they are impossible to find. Didn’t find it, of course, but I managed to get a slightly less battered copy of Pride and Prejudice. No, that’s not your present.

I found your present in the 50-cent book sale shelf outside the store. “How to Succeed With Women” by Ron Louis and David Copeland. Ron authored a book called Sexpectations, and David leads seminars. They know everything there is to know about getting women, so after we read it together, we’ll know more about men, and more about ourselves. Do you see what we have here? Complete and total understanding of both sexes for a quarter a gender! You can’t get 12 ounces of soda for that price.

They have been mentioned in or have written about dating in Playboy, Maxim, Men’s Fitness, Men’s Health, Gallery, GQ Active, The London Times, Swank, Maxim UK, Cosmopolitan, YM, Playgirl, Mademoiselle, Bitch, Single Times, AVN, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, and many others. They and their book were mentioned in John Katz’s novel, Geeks.

Mentioned in OR written for, eh? Sounds promising. Anyway, the book is billed as a “serious, no-holds-barred answer to The Rules gives single and divorced men a step-by-step guide for romantic success. Covers everything from how to meet women to making romance happen.”

So, I’m thinking about waiting until I can get a copy of The Rules from the library, so that we may compare the Rules to the “11 foolproof icebreakers for any situation” and the “8 great ‘babe baits’ that bring women to you.” Call me suspicious, but I bet they don’t say the same thing at all.

12.06.2006 Punkass!, Books, For the ladies 2 Comments

Tyler Durden! Tyler Durden! Tyler Durden! Ok, Neil Strauss.

Tuesday, June 6th, 2006

In which your blogger gives a long and rambling review of Neil Strauss’ The Game, and compares it to Fight Club, in the hopes of getting mad hits when the movie comes out. There are spoilers, but not nearly 500 pages worth of them. You could read this whole thing and still be suprised by the book.

So recently there were some interesting discussions (and some unhelpful mockery) going around about fight clubs, boys clubs and the whole got-your-back concept of brotherhood in general.

All that talk about Fight Club reminded me about guys I know or know about who want to be Tyler Durden. You know the type: somewhat cool but hiding massive insecurity behind a tough-guy brag sheild. I graduated with a guy who fit the mold perfectly; mostly harmless, a little unstable, and full of unsubstantiated stories of asses kicked and authority figures humiliated, women fucked and scars earned-most of which are obviously exaggerated. We all liked him just fine for who he was, but still the bragging never stopped. It only become hilarious after he got engaged to a girl who had the girls version of the same issues and decided to brag to us how quickly she could make him come (Her: “I can get him off in ONE MINUTE!” Him: “*choke sputter* Uh, usually closer to forty-five!” Ahhh, priceless. Hold on a sec while I relive that….OK)
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06.06.2006 Punkass!, Books, Entertainment 12 Comments

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