I knew there was something familiar about those Potter books

[From Lee, via IM]

Life now has meaning

According to the rules laid out in Punk Rock Dad, my punk rock name is:

(Are you ready for this?)

(Are you sure?)

(Really?)

(Okay, you’ve been warned…)

Larry Leprosy.

Currently reading

  • Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban – J.K. Rowling (hardcover)
    Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’ve only read the first Potter book once before, way back when it was released. So now I’m going through the whole series. And does anyone actually buy the paperbacks of the Potter books? Have parents actually made their children wait a year after each novel is released so they can buy the paperback because they’re that…thrifty?
  • Blood Meridian – Cormac McCarthy
    Does this man ever use quotation marks to designate dialogue?
  • The Hunters – W.E.B. Griffin
    The third in the Presidential Agent series, following By Order of the President and The Hostage. The paperback won’t be out until December, so if you must read it now, nab the hardcover.
    Apparently I’m in a fiction mood at the moment, and a widely varying one at that. Fantasy, western, and modern thriller. Yes, I am a man with many sides…

Bad Luck and Trouble

Late last night, I learned that Lee Child’s next Jack Reacher novel by will be released on May 15th. Bad Luck and Trouble is the 11th novel featuring the former Military Police officer turned drifter. I’ve been reading the Reacher novels since the beginning, and I’m anxiously awaiting this latest from Child.

How much has actually changed

Mark Steyn, in the introduction to America Alone:

1970 doesn’t seem that long ago. If you’re in you fifties or sixties, as many of the chaps running the Western world are wont to be, your pants are narrower than they were back then and your hair’s less groovy, but the landscape of your life–the look of your house, the layout of your car, the shape of your kitchen appliances, the brand names of the stuff in the fridge–isn’t significantly different. And yet that world is utterly altered. Just to recap those bald statistics: in 1970, the developed nations had twice as big a share of the global population as the Muslim world: 30 percent to 15 percent. By 2000, they were at parity: each had about 20 percent.

And by 2020?

September 11, 2001, was not “the day everything changed,” but the day that revealed how much had already changed. On September 10, how many journalists had the Council on American-Islamic Relations or the Canadian Islamic Congress or the Muslim Council of Britian in their Rolodexes? If you’d said that whether something does or does not cause offense to Muslims would be the early twenty-first century’s principal political dynamic in Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and the United Kingdom, most folks would have thought you were crazy. Yet on that Tuesday morning the top of the iceberg bobbed up and toppled the Twin Towers.

This book is about the seven-eighths below the surface–the larger forces at play in the developed world that have left Europe too enfeebled to resist its remorseless transformation into Eurabia and that call into question the future of much of the rest of the world, including the United States, Canada, and beyond. The key factors are:

  1. Demographic decline
  2. The unsustainability of the advanced Western social-democratic state
  3. Civilizational exhaustion

Let’s start with demography, because everything does.
I’m already enthralled.

I love how Dewey thinks

Unshelved comic
If the comic is too small to read, click on it to go to the Unshelved page.

Recently added

New additions to my ever-increasing Amazon wish list:
+ The Immortal Game: A History of Chess, or How 32 Carved Pieces on a Board Illuminated Our Understanding of War, Art, Science and the Human Brain – David Shenk
+ Infidel – Ayaan Hirsi Ali
+ Evangelism for the Faint Hearted – Floyd Schneider
+ Drive – James Sallis
Just thought the readership might be interested in some of these titles for their own reading (and learning) pleasure. (And in the interest of full disclosure, all of the above links are through my Amazon affiliate ID.)

Happy Birthday, Brent!

Wishing a joyous and loving birthday for you, my friend. As I stated in my comment to your post, I shall celebrate with some Lost And Found and by starting This Beautiful Mess.
See you at lunch. 😀

OSC gets a dig in on Bill and Ballmer

From Orson Scott Card’s Empire:

“I’m not surprised,” said Cole. “What do you think it takes to build one of those? Two million? Six?”
“Real costs or Pentagon costs?” asked Reuben.
“Microsoft costs.”
“These are not a Microsoft product,” said Reuben.
“Developed in secret, though.”
“Yeah, but they don’t lock up.”

Israel Update

If you’d like a first-person account of the Hezbollah attacks on Israel, and the Israeli response, head over to David Dolan’s site and subscribe to his e-mail list.
David is a Christian pastor and author who has been resident in Israel for many years. Last year, David spoke at our church, and even for someone like me, who has followed the Mideast conflict, and the region’s history, for many years, it was eye-opening.