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Bulletin Board
Blog Headlines of the Week
Interesting Reading in the Interweb Tubes
Bookish Linkage
Nonbookish Linkage
I made some studies, and reality is the leading cause of stress amongst those in touch with it.
Jane Wagner, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe
Again, no one should be surprised that “very intoxicated” appears in the next paragraph of this story: “A [Florida] man was arrested Friday after deputies said he called 911 multiple times to complain his mother took his beer away.”
Also in Florida, the family of a 13-year-old home-schooled girl has filed an age discrimination complaint against a college because it has a minimum age requirement of 15. (Overlawyered)
This could be called taking “fighting for your client” to an extreme.
A prison cell is not a home, at least for purposes of Iowa’s civil rights act.
Who knew that you could be suspended from school for wearing rosary beads? Evidently, they “are sometimes worn as gang symbols.”
A Massachusetts attorney was suspended for six months and one day for serving a summary judgment motion on opposing counsel of record. The problem? He knew that counsel of record had recently died.”
And, if you haven’t heard already, a woman is suing Google for bad directions. (Futurelawyer) (Lowering the Bar has more details.)
Neither law nor human nature is an exact science.
Harris’s Hints on Advocacy
Although religion seems to permeate life in America, it isn’t often someone tries to quantify how good or bad we may be. County Sin Rankings takes a somewhat waggish approach to doing so.
It relates seven factors to the seven deadly sins to come up with a score. Here’s the sins and correlative factor:
- Pride – High school dropout rate
- Greed – Income equality
- Envy – Unemployment rate
- Wrath – Violent crime rate (for some reason, no data was available or listed for South Dakota)
- Lust – Chlamydia rate
- Gluttony – Adult obesity
- Sloth – Poor or fair health
The rankings compare only counties within a state, not counties in different states. While it’s easy to debate specific correlations between the factors and the sins, it’s still kind of fun to see how some of our areas rate.
Minnehaha County comes off fairly well, falling on the “good” side of the scale in all but pride. With a one percent difference, Lincoln County slides into the “good” side of the scale in the pride category, making it good across the board. Hughes County‘s worst scores are for pride and gluttony, although even those are in the mid-range. I will leave it to the political experts to debate whether there is any significance to that. Pennington County, meanwhile, falls into the mid-range for pride and greed but is generally “good” otherwise. Lawrence County, our gambling mecca, scores worst in greed, although it still manages to stay in the mid-range.
The role economics plays in the calculation and how there isn’t necessarily a correlation between these factors and the sins is seen in some of the counties that don’t fare all that well. Buffalo, Shannon and Todd counties commonly are are at or near the the top of the list of the poorest counties in the country. (So is Ziebach but data is not available for it on the site.) None falls on the “good” side of the scale in any category.
Buffalo County rates “bad” greed, envy, gluttony and sloth. It’s best ranking is in lust, where it is about mid-range. Shannon County rates “bad” in lust and gluttony and comes near that ranking in sloth and envy. It’s best ranking is in greed, but even that is on the bad end of mid-range. Finally, Todd County is truly bad only in pride. It is mid-range in envy and lust, sliding toward bad in the other categories.
By sin and available data, here’s the “goodest” and “baddest” counties:
Pride
- Good: Dewey, Douglas, Hanson, McCook, Potter, Roberts
- Bad: Todd
Greed
- Good: Bon Homme, Custer
- Bad: Buffalo, Sanborn
Envy
- Good: Beadle, Brookings, Brown, Hughes, Jerauld, Lincoln
- Bad: Buffalo
Lust
- Good: Turner
- Bad: Shannon
Gluttony
- Good: Lawrence
- Bad: Shannon
Sloth
- Good: Brookings, Clay, Hamlin, Hanson
- Bad: Corson
“If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?” “No,” said the priest, “not if you did not know.” “Then why,” asked the Eskimo earnestly, “did you tell me?”
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Each war generates its own collection of memoirs, novels and histories. Often, the best come after the conclusion of the war, thanks to the perspective of time. With combat in Afghanistan continuing, we probably have yet to see that war’s canon. Among contemporary accounts, though, Sebastian Junger’s War certainly is laudable,
 As a correspondent for Vanity Fair, Junger took five trips to the Korengal Valley in eastern Afghanistan, where he embedded with a U.S. Army airborne unit. He spent most of this time with the most remote outposts, “the tip of the spear” of the U.S. military’s effort in the valley. He is equally adept at describing the chaos and terror of actual combat as well as the often stupefying boredom that occurs between firefights.
Although the book tends to focus a bit more on one or two soldiers and even then doesn’t really look at them and their experiences in great depth, the focus is on the soldiers, not policy or politics. That is what may elevate War above many other current works about combat in Afghanistan and Iraq. The soldiers themselves are not focused on a big picture or any grand strategy. Instead, they are concerned about the man next to them, a concern Junger uses to delve into the effects of combat on individuals and the role of war in human society.
At less than 300 pages, the book is too slim to fully explore the life of a combat soldier at a dangerous, remote outpost or thoroughly ruminate on the concept of its broad title. And recent events show how transitory military achievements — and hence their stories — can be. Just four weeks before Junger’s book was released, U.S. forces withdrew from the Korengal Valley.
Combat isn’t where you might die — though that does happen — it’s where you find out whether you get to keep on living.
Sebastian Junger, War
This month’s list is a little skewed. That’s because I came across most of the books in May but, as things worked out, they were on sale or available now from the library or publicity person. So I’ve already read a couple on them. That doesn’t negate the lust that existed though.
Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin, Hampton Sides — This is one of the books that alters the list a bit. I saw it at the local bookstore shortly after the first of the month and, as luck would have it, was able to get it from the library on a 14-day loan. Thus, a case of lust satiated.
The Imperfectionists, Tom Rachman — A glowing front page review in the NYT Book Review and the fact this debut novel is set in a newspaper newsroom led me to get on the list for this at the library. As with the prior entry, I got it relatively quickly and read it over the long weekend.
Kraken, China Miéville — Along with Charles Stross, Miéville may be my favorite of the younger writers in SF/fantasy. While Miéville is clearly in the fantasy camp, there was no doubt this was going on the list when it popped up on my radar. Good thing is it doesn’t come out until the end of the month so maybe I’ll have cleared away some other books from the TBR stacks by then.
War, Sebastian Junger — Nearly unanimous glowing reviews about Junger’s embedding with an Airborne unit in Afghanistan meant that when I saw it on sale in a bookstore on my recent trip it ended up coming home with me.
Wolf Among Wolves, Hans Fallada — Technically, this probably should have been on last month’s list as I knew it was coming out but forgot it had a late May street date. Either way, I’ve developed a sort of Hans Fallada addiction so couldn’t resist the opportunity to review this 1937 novel about life in Germany amidst economic havoc in 1923, translated into English for the first time in 70 years.
Report Card:
Year-to-date (January-May)
- Total Bibliolust books: 25
- Number read: 10 (40%)
- Started but did not finish: 3 (12%)
Cumulative (September 2008-May 2010)
- Total Bibliolust books: 111
- Number read: 68 (61%)
- Started but did not finish: 7 (6.3%)
…gunpowder destroys itself along with its victim, while a book can keep on exploding for centuries.
Christopher Morley, The Haunted Bookshop
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