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Category Archives: Book Reviews

60th Anniversary of The Rolling Stones

The year is 2012 and it’s the 60th anniversary of a long lived rock group called The Rolling Stones.  They played in Hamburg, Germany back in the 1960s, as did The Beatles and dozens of other musicians and wannabes.

Review: “Ticket to Ride” by Graham Sclater; Hamburg Beat Central In the 1960s Reeperbahn District.

Did you know that the music business was dangerous in Hamburg and its Beat Central? Music producer Graham Sclater was one of the young British musicians there in the sixties after the Beatles toured. He has given us a story of a young band like his and others who lived through the Reeperbahn experience of the St. Pauli District. Some did not make it, but their stories are riveting.

Love Him Or Hate Him, John Cusack Is Edgar Allan Poe – The Raven 2012

Love Him Or Hate Him, John Cusack Is Edgar Allan Poe on Film

The Raven (2012)

John Cusack portrays Edgar Allan Poe in a way we don’t usually imagine  the tormented poet.  This is all despite hearing all our lives that that Poe was an alcoholic, erratic, and even expelled from West Point. He was talented, but tortured.

In The Raven (2012), we witness Cusack’s Poe up close and with belief.

He craves alcohol, screams at people in bars and gets tossed out. He shouts at his newspaper editor and bellows about a hack critic’s work used in place of his own – the hack later gets himself sliced up.

Poe is not appreciated in his own lifetime as he might have been. In fact, his innovative style may have earned him a rating of “crackpot.” However, viewing the film one might say, “No wonder he drinks.”

See the film as soon as possible.

Love Him Or Hate Him, John Cusack Is Edgar Allan Poe on Film

Eating Off a Human Body

Nyotaimori Body Sushi, Human Rights and Women’s Status

Increasingly, we are hearing about licking body shots of alcoholic beverages from someone’s bare body. Drinking alcohol is high risk behavior, health-wise, but still not exciting enough, so extreme drinking games and nudity have been added. Further, we are seeing such antics on the big screen – and the really big screen, IMAX – in more and more movies. For instance, Project X.

Project X is nothing like SpaceX, LunarX or the XPrize. It’s about under-aged house party drinking egged on by the older college crowd until 4 square blocks of an upscale neighborhood are demolished and then burned to the ground. It’s fiction based on a true event. But the bad part is that the teenager that was sucked into doing this was complimented on it by his dad in the film. We’ll see more and more of these kinds of films. We’ll see more of the behavior in the future, since parents took their elementary school kids to see this R-rater and they all laughed together. These families should not be surprised to see naked folks in their homes unexpectedly and their kids licking liquor from their bodies.

People eat dinner from nude people-tables, too. The practice did not catch on in the USA in 2003 and was abandoned. In 2007, it became acceptable. Nude sushi restaurants began to open around the nation with completely nude women and men lying on tables and partially covered with sushi, which was more expensive now, because it had a naked woman (or man) under it. In 2012, the practice is more widespread, but the “tables” wear skimpy clothing now.

What’s next for the human body?

In other countries, women are forced to become sushi serving tables in a form of human trafficking –

Nyotaimori Body Sushi, Human Rights and Women’s Status

Hunger Games Today’s Youth Dangers

A lot of people don’t “get” The Hunger Games books and movie.

 

They don’t “get” that we are all Katniss in today’s society, running from murderers.

 

We are all hunted every day  – by competition, bullying, threats of downsizing and early retirement, con artists, the IRS, child sex trafficking, discrimination; verbal, physical, and psychological abuse…The Hunger Games have just added all these dangers to a game show that exploits preteens and teenagers. Do you remember what some of it feels like?

And who’s watching this reality show? The rich class in the Capital city of the North American Continent, sponsors – parents!

How is this any different from the stage mother that pushes her unwilling daughter into pageants at age 4 and screams when the girl does not win? Little girls dressing like Madonna and Beyonce and Gaga and wearing high heels and lipstick to school in first grade.  The boys have their own horror stories.

A girl I know had to take the SAT and Pre-SAT practice tests every year beginning at age 12. Her dad would not let her rest until it was a perfect score.

Six 6th graders at a Christian school committed suicide because their dads yelled about them getting “B” grade despite “all the money” they were paying to the school.

Bullying, Internet threats…getting beat up because you’re a good student. Do you remember?

The Hunger Games is for adults so we can teach the kids how to survive. See here:

Life-Or-Death Problems of Youth In the Hunger Games – Bread and Circuses

Beyond St. Patrick’s Day – How the Irish Saved Civilization

How the Irish Saved Civilization:

The Untold Story of Ireland’s Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europ e- By Thomas Cahill, 1995

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Researcher Thomas Cahill uses his education and experiences in the Church and the Classics as he shows that the Irish were critical in preserving Western Civilization in the Classics at a time in which the Huns and Germanics – Visigoths, Franks, Angles, Saxons, Ostrogothsm, and others – wanted to destroy it.

Irish monks preserved of Roman and Greek texts during the fall of the Roman Empire. it was the Irish that carefully copied the texts by hand in illuminated manuscript, a lengthy and worthy process, and added annotations in the margins. Each monk added what he knew from his own education, whether it referenced languages, history, customs, traditions, or whatever else he could add for the edification of new readers. Read more about this and see some illustrations at the link above.

Moon Ceremonies for December and January

A Cold Moon Christmas and Midwinter Celebration: Iroquois and Kwakiutl

We often wonder how migration of human groups could occur across the world and across North America. Then we find some of the same traditions both in the Pacific Northwest and in the Northeastern United States. While the Iroquois of the United States and Canada have shared large portions of their culture and histories with us, those of the Pacific Northwest are still rather mysterious and very interesting.

Out of the Silence – A Journey Through Pacific Northwest Villages

Just after World War II, an artist traveled through the Pacific Northwest and Southern Alaska, painting pictures of villagers and village life among the Indigenous Peoples. During the turbulent 1960s, a team returned to these sites for a camera tour. Both journeys are fortunately maintained as among the fine arts in Canadian museums, waiting for visitors.

The Iroquoian In the Diaspora – Oldest Representative Democracy In the World

Did you know that the Cherokee are related to the Iroquois? Read all about this native Confederacy and where they are now.

Christmas Fun – Deliciously Different

A lot of these recipes can be prepared for an ocean of special occasions and they sparkle up any holiday season with something fresh and different. You can be sure that every 10 years, homemaking magazines come up with only slightly different versions of the same recipes of the past decade, hoping to attract new cooks. However, the rest of us get tired of “same same same.” You will not get tired of these dishes!

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Did you know that Christmas was once illegal in both the UK and the Thirteen Colonies? — The Irish and others used a code to celebrate anyway and we use it today.

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Have you lost loved ones close to Christmas, making it a sad time of year? You can turn all that arond with some moving tributes to help you remember them:

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Do you like Christmas Films? These are not the ones you’ve seen already 100 times, but they are funny, poignant, and memorable.

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How about Christmas Travel? -

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Mark Twain Exposed False Flags

Many conspiracy theories surround nearly every war the USA has entered since the American Civil War.  Since the Spanish American War in the late 1800, these theories may, in fact, be correct and have been taken up by other authors.  

Mark Twain once wrote:

“Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self- deception.”

Some thinkers feel that Twain’s words have been buried and hidden from the American public in order to pull credence away from the Anti-Imperialism movement and a string of false flag attacks (inside jobs) used as excuses to wage war.

Fortunately, Twain’s materials are not hidden, but are accessible through postsecondary schools and an autobiography, the first volume of which appeared in 2010. He asked that 100 years pass before publishing and his wishes were granted. Two more volumes await publication. In the meantime, we have his essays and historians’ interpretations of them, at:

Mark Twain: Anti-Imperialism Against False Flag Ventures

and a discussion question among readers at:

Lilian Jackson Braun (1913 – 2011)

A dear woman that wrote for 80 of her almost 98-year lifespan delighted many people with her sports poems (spoems), ad copy, Good Living columns in the Detroit Free Press and the hunorous antics of Koko and Yum Yum cats as they were cared for by Jim Mackintosh Qwilleran - who wrote the Qwill Pen column in Moose County, 400 miles north of everywhere.    

Lilian Jackson Braun never tried out a typewriter, computer, SmartPhone or iPad, despite living into the 21st Century. She wrote everything with a pencil on legal pads - for 80 years! She began with her sports poems in high school and had the first one published when she was just 17.  Her short stories, news columns, and novels are now a permanent part of the American scene.

Lilian was told not to try to write for a newspaper, because hate mail came in for everybody and for a woman – tons of it! She did it anyway – for years –  hate mail be damed.

She despised gratuitous violence, profanity, and sex in novels and on-screen and simply would not stoop to using it as filler material - as so many authors do today. Lilian would have none of it and simply stopped writing novels for 18 years – and I’m glad she resumed in the mid-1980s.  

My writing contest Round Up of nominees this week is dedicated to the author Lilian Jackson Braun:

Nuggets for Elephants 

Pacific Northwest Legends

Book Review: The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed

Few people hear about the settling of the Pacific Northwest by Indigenous Peoples, followed by Europeans that included even Spain in the short term.  Author John Valiant writes about aspects of history that most people have not heard and he does so in The Golden Spruce.

Valiant is a completely thorough researcher that has dug out all of his information from written and oral histories, as well as from interviews. I doubt that he has left anything untouched in his work involving Haida Gwaii and a centuries-old magic tree killed without cause, except to a madman. The only thing he could add to the story is to have found the refugee cutter in some lair in the mountains or compound ala Bin Laden. Valiant is that thorough in his engaging work.

Someone out in the wilds of North America, a madman may still be hiding, but now everyone knows about him and will be on the lookout. 

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