October 19, 2020 at 1:06 pm (Dearest Mum, Family, fpj-photo-challenge, Links, postaday, Recommended)
Tags: elections, memories, Mondays, news, politics
The Lens Artists Challenge this year comes from Horse Addict. She tells a lovely story about a horse, you can read all about it here.
Voting is a form of communication. As of this morning, 3.5 million Californians, a record, have already cast their ballots, according to KPIX5 News.
A smile is a form of communication.
Siblings have a special form of communication.
Stay safe, dear blog readers. Stay safe.
October 13, 2020 at 3:58 am (Holidays, Links, postaday)
Tags: Halloween, Mondays
You are invited to share your photo walk, whether park, beach or street. As always, we are looking forward to seeing your creative responses. — The World Is a Book
Self’s walk: just down the block.
Self knows, this is not much of a walk. And she wishes she could have taken more pictures. But even taking these three were hard. At one house, she heard a kid say, “Mommy, why is that woman taking pictures of our house?” She skedaddled!
This neighborhood is BIG on Halloween decorations, self will try taking pictures of the more elaborately decorated houses tomorrow.
October 13, 2020 at 12:44 am (Books, Explorers, Personal Bookshelf, Recommended, television, Women Writers)
Tags: adaptations, COVID Reading, favorites, James Holden, Mondays, mysteries, science fiction, The Expanse, thrillers
Self is still reading Heaven, My Home (which is FAN-TAS-TIC), but as she’s a fan of The Expanse, and they just released the trailer for Season 5 (which drops on Dec. 16 — self can hardly wait), she’s also started reading Book # 5 of the series, Nemesis Games.
She read the first four books early in the pandemic — big, big thanks to James S. A. Corey for helping her power through those first mind-numbing weeks.
MILD SPOILER
Each book starts with a pulse-pounding prologue, and Nemesis Games is no exception. Here’s a description of an attack on the Martian shipyards at Callisto, an attack carried out by a fifteen-year-old. More than anything, self loves the realism of the action scenes:
Chapter One is “a year after the Callisto attacks … ” Holden is overseeing repairs on the Rocinante. YAAAAS! Self has missed Holden, this most unusual of heroes, a space slacker who nevertheless lavishes attention on his ship and his crew. Three years have elapsed since the last book: Is Holden in his late 30s now? From here on out, they’ll have to start aging up Steven Strait, the actor who plays him in the series. He started doing Holden when he was 28.
She’ll try not to share so much of Nemesis Games. Next posts will be all Heaven, My Home.
Stay tuned.
September 22, 2020 at 5:33 am (Books, Recommended)
Tags: biographies, COVID Reading, Mondays, politics, reading lists, US history
Replace McCarthy’s name below with Trump, replace ‘the Red Menace’ with Chy-nuh and you have McCarthy 2.0. History repeats itself.
After a bruising battle in the Senate, Joe McCarthy’s primary Democratic opponent, Millard Tydings, was left “exhausted and deflated.” Instead of “muzzling McCarthy, the Tydings Committee had given him a wider stage and a louder bullhorn to name his names.” Somehow, McCarthy “made himself look more like the aggrieved than the aggressor. His murky cause had become an article of canon for Senate Republicans. His audience never was fellow senators, or even the reporters in the gallery, but … chicken farmers and grocers … Ask God-fearing people anywhere who their white knight was in the crusade against the Red Menace and there were no longer ifs and buts, it was the battle-ready Leatherneck, Jousting Joe McCarthy.” (Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy, p. 187)
p. 188: “Joe couldn’t forget a slight … Joe was the one framing the narrative.”
September 21, 2020 at 8:23 pm (anthologies, Artists and Writers, Calls, Conversations, Links, Writing)
Tags: causes, Literary Magazines, Mondays, websites
Anomaly is an international journal of literature and the arts that provides a platform for works of art that challenge conventions of form and format, of voice and genre.
Deadline for the special issue on Citizenship and Its Discontents:
30 September 2020
Guest Editor: Grace Loh Prasad
Email: citizenshipfolio@gmail.com
Twitter: @GraceLP
August 31, 2020 at 9:54 pm (Books, Recommended)
Tags: COVID Reading, historical novel, irony, Mondays, novel, reading lists, Stendhal, summer
Sometimes her eager imagination concealed things from her, but she never entertained those deliberate illusions produced by cowardice.
— Chapter Six, The Charterhouse of Parma
August 18, 2020 at 4:23 pm (Books)
Tags: COVID Reading, Mondays, novellas, reading lists, summer, war novel
Honoré de Balzac’s swift, short, and brutal novelette.
August 18, 2020 at 2:51 pm (Surprises, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: biographies, causes, complaints, COVID Reading, Mondays, reading lists, summer, US history
NOTE: WordPress switched self over to the New Block Editing, which she hates. She can’t find a thing. Can you imagine WordPress PAID PEOPLE to study how to make self slower and more inefficient? Where, for instance, are categories and tags? Now self has to hunt for them. Thanks a lot, WordPress! It’s like those apps that keep downloading on her Android, preventing her from making a call (You have to wait for the app to finish downloading; there’s a download a day).
If you press the button for paragraph, you get a menu that has ten items for paragraph. AAAARGH. Who has the time. Can’t a paragraph just BE a paragraph, does self have to pick and choose one out of ten options for paragraphs?
In the 1990s, and especially after the Rwandan massacre, the American Bar Association (ABA) “recruited an astonishing five thousand American lawyers to go abroad and spend months of their time working pro bono publico, free for the common good, drafting laws and training judges. (“Lawers are bored. We were dying to go,” said one of them, Mary Noel Pepys, a land use lawyer from Kansas who went to Bulgaria and slept in her coat in the winter)”
“At a reception in Sofia in 1994, an older gentleman, a professor at the university, walked up to Sandra Day O’Connor “and pulled out a badly frayed copy of the U.S. Constitution and said he had been reading it for 40 years. O’Connor, who always carried a copy of the Constitution in her pocketbook, choked up. ‘It will serve you well,’ she told the man, ‘and guide you as it has us.’ “
— First: Sandra Day O’Connor, pp. 288-289
Can you imagine ANYONE in Trump’s White House pushing such a program. Now, everything is ME ME ME, how much can I get, how much can I get away with. Even Melania can’t summon up any energy to start something as simple as a Sister City Relationship with her hometown (Unless she’s really trying not to call attention to how she left it!)
She had plenty of time to start some kind of humanitarian thing with Eastern Europe, who knows? But no. She just didn’t care. Too busy re-negotiating her pre-nup to Dear Donald? (Does my pre-nup say I need to hold his hand in public? Then no, I do not need to hold his hand)
Self thinks the public’s perception of the law profession has forever been marred by association with Trump, the seediest President in American history. Think of the Trump lawsuits to block: a) revealing his taxes; b) suing to stop books like his niece’s from being published; or c) suing Democratic officials to make them look bad, such as the suit Gov. Brian Kemp brought against Atlanta Mayor Kesha Lance Bottoms to stop her from implementing her order to make wearing a mask mandatory in Atlanta.
Self is glad she’s reading a book about idealistic lawyers, for a change.
Stay safe, dear blog readers. Stay safe.
August 18, 2020 at 12:14 am (Books)
Tags: causes, COVID Reading, history, Mondays, politics, reading lists, women's rights
First: Sandra Day O’Connor, p. 261
August 17, 2020 at 6:28 pm (Books, Recommended)
Tags: biographies, COVID Reading, law, Mondays, politics, reading lists, SCOTUS, summer, US history
— Evan Thomas, First: Sandra Day O’Connor, p. 223
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