Category Archives: books

Even Trolling Should Have Its Limits

books, cyberbullying, entertainment, internet, rhetoric Leave a comment

‘Twilight’ Stars Rally Around Fans After Death At Comic-Con (mtv.com) I haven’t read any of the Twilight books or seen any of the movies, and I don’t have any plans to. My tastes don’t tend to go towards young adult literature to start with — I only read Harry Potter this past spring — and I’ve never been much for vampire stories (except for Poppy Z. Brite’s early work). However, I’ve been directed to several entries on Reasoning With Vampires since its launch, and from the passages…

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The Death of Reaganomics’ Biggest Lie

books, politics, rhetoric Leave a comment

Although I never cared for Rush Limbaugh’s politics, in the early 1990s I couldn’t deny having an appreciation for his bluster.  (I was also a fan of Morton Downey Jr.’s back in the day for the same reason.  I can only say I was young and stupid back then.)  When Limbaugh went on his short-lived television show the day Kurt Cobain’s dead body was discovered and called him a “worthless piece of human garbage” and got cheers from his audience, that pretty much turned me…

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Whither Publishing Goest

books, shopping, writing Leave a comment

Calling Off Auction, Borders to Liquidate (New York Times) When Borders came to Toledo a few years ago I kind of made a point of not going there.  Their arrival caused Toledo’s largest and best independent bookstore, Thackeray’s Books, a favourite haunt of my family’s, to close up shop.  It didn’t help that Borders moved into Franklin Park Mall (I refuse to call it by its new name), which rapidly went downhill this past decade, gathering all sorts of undesirable characters.  When Southwyck Mall closed…

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So Long Ago

books, family, Uncategorized Leave a comment

One of the stories I’ve been reading recently is set at a dinner party. It’s not exactly Mrs. Dalloway, but it is good, and I can relate to it better because it’s set in America, albeit 1950s America. There is something about the 1950 American dinner party that seems so remote to me; at first when I was reading the story, it was hard for me to identify with the kind of upper-class people being depicted in the story, the whole idea of “summering” away…

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Everything in its proper place

books, dvds, personal, toledo, Uncategorized, videogames Leave a comment

This past weekend I picked up a CD/DVD rack from Best Buy. Mind you, I haven’t exactly been buying that many CDs or DVDs (or even video games) lately, but I have bought so many books that I needed to repurpose one of my DVD towers for books. I put the storage rack together over the weekend, and it was a huge hassle because the directions weren’t all that clear; I had to put several of the supports on three different times before I got…

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