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I've opened an account here now; hopefully I will post more here than I did on the old lj one. We'll see.
"What is our present condition? We have just carried an election on principles fairly stated to the people. Now we are told in advance, the government shall be broken up, unless we surrender to those we have beaten, before we take the offices. In this they are either attempting to play upon us, or they are in dead earnest. Either way, if we surrender, it is the end of us, and of the government. They will repeat the experiment upon us ad libitum. "
--Abraham Lincoln, January 11, 1861
"But you will not abide the election of a Republican president! In that supposed event, you say, you will destroy the Union; and then, you say, the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us! That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, 'Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!'"
--Abraham Lincoln.
James Monroe (2005) by Gary Hart.
This is a monograph in the series "The American Presidents." Hart's thesis is Monroe was the first 'national security' president; to this end he exalts the fifth president as much as possible - e.g., minimizing John Quincy Adams' contribution to the Monroe Doctrine.
Hart goes out of his way to criticize some of the ideas in another "American Presidents" volume; oddly, not ideas concerning Monroe, but rather dealing with his presidential predecessor as expressed in Garry Wills' James Madison. I'm sure this gratuitous attack has nothing to do with the fact Wills had some rather negative things to say about Hart in his Under God - describing Hart as "the first candidate of Adulterers' Lib," for example.
Leaving that bit of pettiness aside, I was not particularly impressed with this brief biography, but then I haven't gotten much out of any of the volumes of this series that I've read.
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Isaac Asimov's Treasury of Humor (1971) by Isaac Asimov.
I don't think I've done any bookblogging this year, so I thought I would ease back into it with this pretty slight item.
My late father taught Sunday School, and he used this as a resource for many of his opening jokes before he started on the lessons. I used it as bathroom reading, though I had read it before back in my early teens and remembered very little of it. Not surprising, since it's not very memorable; and not very funny, either, full of chestnuts that were stale at the time of publication forty years ago (and thus perfect for a Senior Men's Sunday School class). I only chuckled a couple of times, at best, and usually was left completely stone-faced. It's also very sexist, which Asimov's repeated assertions that he is a feminist don't do much to remedy.
A few points of interest among the general drabness:
- He misattributes "I wonder how one augur can pass another on the street without laughing" to Cato the Elder, when it was actually Cicero. And thus he misses getting to point out that Cicero was himself actually an augur. (IIRC, Cicero makes the infamous comment in a private letter when he was actually running for the office.)
- Asimov includes the 'teeth in Hell' joke ("In Hell there will be gnashing of teeth!" "But Reverend, what if the damned are toothless?" "In Hell teeth will be supplied!") IIRC - maybe I read it in Bart Ehrman somewhere - some twentieth-century theologian prankster made a pseudepigraph where that is a bit of dialogue between Jesus and his disciples. (Still not funny.)
- There's a joke about building a supercomputer, asking it if there's a God, and getting the response from the computer that, "There is now!" Asimov then mock-petulantly complains that it's a de facto rip-off of his story "The Last Question." He generously allows, though, that maybe the joke is older than his story. Well, yeah, since it's basically a paraphrase[1] of Fredric Brown's "Answer." That was published in 1954. Asimov's "The Last Question" came out in '56. Wow, at least the possibility of two plagiarism lawsuits there! I assume nothing ever happened on that front -- Brown died the year after this book was published, which may have something to do with it.
[1] The joke actually seems a bit longer than Brown's original short-short.
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Science fiction writers have accomplished so much. Where would we be without powdered-sugar doughnuts or Pringles potato chips?
According to an amazon.com consumer review, Iris Murdoch "one" a Booker Prize.
The morons march on . . .
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Should have started this at the start of February, but better late than never.
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From Dorothy Sayers' dedication to Nine Little Tailors (1934): "From time to time complaints are made about the ringing of church bells. It seems strange that a generation which tolerates the uproar of the internal combustion engine and the wailing of the jazz band should be so sensitive to the one loud noise that is made to the glory of God."
And in the movie Goldfinger (1964) James Bond says, "My dear girl, there are some things that just aren't done, such as drinking Dom Perignon '53 above the temperature of 38 degrees Fahrenheit. That's just as bad as listening to the Beatles without earmuffs!"
This is why I never say anything about rap.
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