The Fearless Blogger

Happy Thanksgiving!

This year marks a first for the Fearless Blogger – preparing Thanksgiving dinner!

Since I can’t work my tofurky magic sitting here blogging, I’m relying on my muppet friends to host my online holiday celebration.

Can’t Make Pumpkin Pie Without Pumpkins!

How Not to Roast a Turkey

Thanksgiving is About Family – The Swedish Chef & His Uncle

A Turkey that Likes Thanksgiving?

Ode to Joy

Sarah extolls the virtues of running (from runnersworld.com)

Here’s the deal: I want to share this video with you, but it’s late and I’m tired.

Frankly, I don’t know if I’ll be able to stay awake long enough to provide some example to substantiate this post’s title.

I know, I know – people can’t just go around making bold assertions – blanket generalizations – without providing evidence to back them up. It’s just not done! No one’s going to buy into empty cliches.

No amount of winks and catch-phrases can distract people from the absence of verifiable facts.

I get it – generic and vague isn’t good enough. People need specifics. I’ll try to find you some and I’ll bring them to you.

In the meantime, check out this video of Sarah Palin fans sharing the reasons they support her.

What’s that?

Without a single example to support my accusation, do I actually expect people to take this post seriously?

You betcha.

On November 20, 2009, at a Borders bookstore in Columbus, Ohio, Sarah Palin held a book signing event in support of “Going Rogue”. Palin’s supporters wanted her to run for the presidency, but they weren’t exactly sure what she’d do as president. Short on specifics, most of them were uncertain what her policy positions are. They just felt that they liked her. She’s “real”. And that the solution to all of our country’s problems—health care, energy, the deficit, unemployment, and the economy—was to cut taxes and lower spending, and Palin, they said, would solve them by doing just that.

This NEW LEFT MEDIA film was produced and edited by Chase Whiteside (interviews) and Erick Stoll (camera).

"Truly wonderful, the mind of a child is." - Yoda

I was trying to think of a blog post topic that would give me a good excuse to share this photo of little Jazz (my nephew).

It occurred to me that whenever I find something that puts a smile on my face, I like to include it here, so I can share the smile with you.

Well, looking at this picture, I can’t help but smile ear-to-ear. I hope it puts a grin on your face too!

(I think that’s as good enough of an excuse for a blog post as any – don’t you?)

Happy belated Halloween!  May the force be with you!!

image credit: Magh

Since I’m Jewish, curious, and a procrastinator I had no choice but to follow the link included in this tweet (Confession: I’m checking Twitter and now blogging instead of cleaning my kitchen.)

In his essay on protecting the printed word, The Electronic Book Burning, Alan Kaufman compares the current shift towards electronic media (and the resulting impact on small bookstores) to a Nazi pogram (and the resulting murders of  99 Jews, imprisonment in concentration camps of 25,000-30,000 Jews and the destruction of 267 synogogues [source]):

the awful scene [that] is reoccuring everywhere: venerable, much beloved bookstores closing and that portion of the populace who cherish books—an ever-shrinking minority—left baffled and bereft; a silent corporate Krystallnacht decimating the world of literacy.

And I thought I’m dramatic!!

Granted, I’ve never written, much less published, a book, so it’s perfectly reasonable that I don’t share such strong views on the value of the medium over the content.

That said, although understanding Kaufman’s background helps add a bit of context to the essay’s metaphor, somewhere in between the comparison of the destiny of inanimate objects to human beings and the correlating comparison of market-trend and consumer-driven business decisions to the calculating, hate-filled “Master Plan” of the Nazi’s, his message gets a bit lost.

image credit: Patrick Correia

Before you think I may be over-reacting, I’ll share some additional passages from the essay:

Like any product, the book must run harder and faster in the marketplace or else fall and die. And the books are falling. Only the fittest now survive. While mid-list authors drop in the snow, blockbuster thrillers and middlebrow memoirs and diet books huff their way forward. Soon, though, they too will drop. The idea is for no one to be left standing. All physical books must go up the chimney stack. Such was the methodology of the SS who forced their prisoners to run naked races round and round the barracks yard in the Polish winter, a race that no one was meant to win.

The book is fast becoming the despised Jew of our culture. Der Jude is now Der Book. Hi-tech propogandists tell us that the book is a tree-murdering, space-devouring, inferior form of technology; that society would simply be better-off altogether if we euthanized it even as we begin to carry around, like good little Aryans, whole libraries in our pockets, downloaded on the Uber-Kindle.

Rather than add my commentary as to whether I agree if books are “despised” or with the author’s view of proponents of electronic media as “hi-tech propagandists”, I’ll share a bit more from the essay:

Not since the advent of Christianity has the world witnessed so sweeping a change in the very fabric of human existence. Behind the hi-tech revolution is an idea of Progress that in many regards resembles the premises of Christianity itself. The superseding of the new way over the old, of the New Testament over the Old Testament, the discrediting of the traditional as inferior or even evil, a sense of powerful excitement about the revolutionary, and of course, most importantly, the promise of heavenly immortality over the temporal limitations of the wasting physical body—the accursed haptic book versus the blessed Holy Ghostly Internet—all these earmark the hi-tech pogrom against the book.

Hmmn.  Let’s continue, shall we?

Heinrich Heine, the early 19th century German Jewish poet, wrote: “”Where they burn books, they will ultimately also burn people.”

OK. Well, the above quote from the  closing paragraph actually resonates with me.

And then it is quickly overshadowed by one last final metaphor:

The advent of electronic media to first position in the modern chain of Being—a place once occupied by God—and later, after the Enlightenment, by humans—is no mere 9/11 upon our cultural assumptions. It is a catastrophe of holocaustal proportions. And its endgame is the disappearance of not just books but of all things human.

Just a thought here.  As a general practice – regardless of the comparison one is attempting to illustrate – the adjective “mere” is not probably not an appropriate adjective to be paired with “9/11″.  The expression “too soon” comes to mind (among other expressions, I won’t get into!).

I appreciate the value of the printed book as an art form and small bookstores as a culture.

All the same, I think the comparison is a stretch.  And frankly a bit offensive  - insensitive at the very least.

That’s just me though.
What do you think?

Read it here:
THE ELECTRONIC BOOK BURNING by Alan Kaufman (Evergreen Review No. 120, October 2009).

image credit: Sharyn Morrow

Glenn Beck may easily be the world’s biggest douche bag.*

There. I said it.

I’m no saint, but I try my best to practice “if you have nothing nice to say, say nothing at all”.  I also try to make a conscious effort not to fill this blog with angry rants or negativity.

But today, the gloves are coming off.

Although his actions leave a bitter taste in my mouth (a taste remarkably vinegar in nature), I’d like to just consider Glenn Beck a sorry idiot – to find compassion in my heart for the struggle life must be for such a delusional moron (I’m not one to make light of the mentally ill).

Thing is, Glenn Beck is more than a moronic douche bag.  He’s a dangerous moronic douche bag. Because unbelievably – sadly (and unbelievably sadly) – our country is filled with people who are so mentally lazy and emotionally stunted that they eagerly swallow every inane morsel he dishes out – and then regurgitate it as “fact”.

If Fox News considers what they offer to be “factual news” and not political perspectives, then I can comfortably assert that it is a fact that Glenn Beck is indeed the World’s Biggest Douche Bag (“WBDB”).

The WBDB‘s attempt to politicize Yom Kippur as an opportunity for “Fast and Prayer for the Republic” (video above) is hard to top, but this latest tidbit from the Huffington Post achieves at least a close second read more