It must be NHPR week at the blog. NHPR reporter Brady Carlson won the previous trivia contest, and producer Tai Freligh was the first to correctly identify the author of this passage:
“That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.”
That was taken from the Virginia Declaration of Rights, precursor to the U.S. Bill of Rights, and of course written by George Mason. Mason was largely forgotten by American history because of his robust anti-federalism. But he’s finding his way back into our consciousness in the usual American way: through sports.
I’m pulling for Florida in the men’s Final Four, but it’s good to see that George Mason’s unexpected entry has raised the profile of its unjustly forgotten namesake.
Go Gators!
If you checked this week’s New York Times bestseller list, you might have noticed that two of the top three spots on the fiction list were held by New Hampshire writers. No. 3 was Dan Brown. No. 2, Jodi Picoult.
Picoult’s newest novel, The Tenth Circle, sounds great, and I’m really looking forward to picking it up. She’s written a dozen others, and she’s done what very few writers these days have been able to pull off: She’s pleased critics while hitting the top of the bestseller lists.
And she has the best hair in all of American letters.
She lives in Hanover with her antique-dealer husband Tim and their three kids, and you know she’s all right because she’s a committed devotee of Aimee Mann.
I caught up with her while she was out in California promoting The Tenth Circle, and she was kind enough to take the time to share her current reading list. It is:
Maybe a Miracle, By Brain Strause. “It reminded me a bit of my book Keeping Faith, which is why I picked it up. . . and I couldn’t have been happier that I did. With a pitch perfect male adolescent narrator, it was a terrific read about what we believe in, and why.
“I also recently read an advanced copy of Jacquelyn Mitchard’s Cage of Stars, which will hit bookstores this week. A tale of a Mormon girl whose life is shaped by a single act of violence in her family, it explores the fine line between justice and revenge.
“I am currently reading an advance reading copy of Carolyn Parkhurst’s new novel, Lost and Found — about 3/4 of the way through and really laughing my way through it. Carolyn’s taken the American fixation on reality TV and crafted a novel that follows several couples through a world-travel game show. . . and what they pick up both physically and emotionally along the way.
“Next up: Breaking Her Fall, by Stephen Goodwin. It’s a book that reminds me of my newest novel, The Tenth Circle, and how a father finds out that his daughter may not be the person he believed her to be.”
And there, fans, is Jodi Picoult’s reading list. I have to say, she’s got one great office perk: access to advance copies of all the latest novels.
So now you know what the No.2 best-selling novelist in America is reading. I think if I were Brian Strause or Carolyn Parkhurst, I’d be clipping this Book Corner for a dust jacket blurb.
By now you’ve probably heard about the alleged gang rape by members of the Duke lacrosse team. The 911 calls were released today, and all they reveal is that a woman reported that a white man yelled a racial slur at her and a friend while they were on the street or the sidewalk outside the house. She first says they were driving, then tells the dispatcher they were walking. She has the exact street address of the house, though the number is not visible from the street. (Of course, she’d have the address if she were a prostitute or stripper called to the house but didn’t want the dispatcher to know why she was there.) She never mentions any sort of assault. She says she wasn’t harmed “in any way.” Very peculiar.
UPDATE: More stories from The Herald-Sun, Durham’s local paper, and the local AP.
EMI has removed cigarettes from the hands of Ringo Starr, John Lennon and Paul McCartney for its reissue of the 1964 Capitol Albums Vol. 2. Ironically, George, the only one not smoking on the cover, is the one who died of lung cancer. Evidently they chopped off two of Ringo’s fingers when removing his cigarette. (That’s what you get when you outsource your graphics department to Albania.)
Clearly we are all doomed and it is only a matter of time before the ultimate irony occurs and the anti-smoking zealots have the cigarettes erased from the cover of Van Halen’s 1984.
But until that happens I say we take advantage of his revisionist impulse and shift the historical cleansing to something far more appalling: Sweaty men.
For the love of all that is good and decent in the world, someone please airbrush some shirts on these guys!
And these guys.
And this guy! (I think my parents actually had this album. Which may be why I’m terrified of men with flutes).
Clearly the record companies have not done enough to protect the American consumer from sweaty, shirtless men. We must demand action. And afterwards, we can move on to these lovely gems:
Can’t DC Comics sue this guy for copyright infringement?
Someone please save the sheep, quick.
I don’t know what to do with this one.
It’s Blueberry Man!
Saving the public from those visual horrors would be a good start. Once we get the censors to clean up those graphics nightmares, we can move on to The Rolling Stones, Bow Wow Wow, and the entire Scorpions catalog.
Some Penn student parrots all the conventional arguments, including the “too white” line, in arguing that New Hampshire doesn’t deserve the first Presidential primary. The funny thing is that the guy obviously thinks he’s got a brilliant, air-tight argument. As usual, the point not addressed is how candidates could possibly have any meaningful interaction with voters in the huge, nationwide primary he endorses.
It’s funny how New Hampshire just can’t win no matter what. On the one hand we’re too quaint and unrepresentative of America to be trusted with such an important early primary. On the other hand, the fact that New Hampshire voters almost always choose the same candidate the rest of the country choses (proving that New Hampshire voters are not quaint and out of the mainstream), means we are powerful beyond our size and cannot be trusted with such an important early primary.
If the winner of the primary never went on to win the nomination, they’d say we were hopelessly out of touch and couldn’t be trusted with such an important early primary.
The fact is, these detractors are concocting arguments to suit their preformed conclusion that rural white folks must have as much political power as possible ripped from their calloused, chapped hands. It’s plain, old-fashioned bigotry.
I’ve been looking at the wire photos from the protests in France, and man are those unemployed French young people fashionable. See here, here and here. Where do they get the money for all those trendy clothes?
And doesn’t the guy on the left in this pic look just like Jeff Gordon?
Congrats to NHPR reporter Brady Carlson, who was the first to correctly identify Toys in the Attic as the Aerosmith song R.E.M. covered in 1987’s Dead Letter Office, which is a great cd, by the way. You cannot call yourself an R.E.M. fan if you don’t know Wolves, Lower by heart.
Brady chose as his prize Swing Dance: Justice O’Connor and the Michigan Muddle, by Bob Zelnick, chairman of the Journalism Department at Boston University.
Now, on to the next question.
Who wrote these words:
“That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.”
Another NH restaurant owner admits that he supports a statewide smoking ban in bars and restaurants because he’s afraid that if he goes smoke-free himself he’ll lose business.
What is it with these restaurant owners?
The Senate Finance Committee hears testimony on the bill today. I have pretty good word from the Senate that the ban is expected to fail there by a comfortable margin.
So, Vin Sylvia, Shawn Macomber, Shawn’s lovely wife and I all went to see socialist songsmith Billy Bragg at the Somerville Theater last Thursday, where we were treated to Bragg’s rock and roll sermonizing. It was a very good show, despite the boring, hastily written tribute to anti-American, anti-Israeli protester Rachel Corrie.
If you don’t know Billy Bragg, I recommend checking him out. Billy Bragg was born on a soapbox, facing left. In one song he describes himself as having a “socialism of the heart.” But for me what makes him not just tolerable but compelling is the poetry and passion in his rants. I disagree with most of what he yells, but I just love to hear him do it. His protest songs are masterful both musically and lyrically, and his love songs are heart-wrenching. There’s an animal honesty in the guy’s passion and a genius in his rhetoric that is moving even if you have completely different ideas about the way the world does and should work.
Driving back from the show, which was (as always) a combination concert/ political speech, I thought of some of the complaints after James Taylor’s last Manchester show, which I didn’t see. Some were upset that JT gave some left-wing commentary during the performance. With Billy Bragg, you know you’re going to get preached to, and the preaching is so entertaining you’d be really disappointed if he didn’t do it. Taylor isn’t the protest singer Bragg is, so I can see how someone could wind up at a JT show without expecting some left-wing speechifying. Yet I wonder how many who complained about the JT concert would simply write off a performer, no matter how good, if they knew he was going to take some time to preach beliefs they didn’t share.
Seems to me a lot of people on both sides deprive themselves of so much in life because they erect little shelters to block out what they find disagreeable, or rather what they think they’ll find disagreeable. It’s self-imposed sensory deprivation. And all it does is keep them in the dark, where they remain happily ignorant of what they’re missing.
With Aerosmith’s tour, including the Manchester show, cancelled because of Steven Tyler’s surgery, how about a little Aerosmith trivia?
In 1987, R.E.M. released a cover of what Aerosmith song? OK, so it’s R.E.M. trivia. You’ll get over it.
First one in with the correct answer gets the book or cd (from the ones stacked here in my office) of his or her choice.
Here are a couple of stories about the late Estonian President Lennart Meri, whose funeral was Sunday. A Siberian exile, writer, official in the Soviet puppet government, and later President of independent Estonia, he led an amazing life.
The Economist
AP pre-funeral story
AP post-funeral story
Sen. John Sununu gets quoted in this Washington Post story on efforts to write new ethics laws on lobbying and campaign donations.
