James Lileks, he of the “Bleat” and the well-turned phrase, has a wife, and his wife has just lost her job. (As assistant attorney general of Michigan, for goodness sake.) We like James Lileks; we like his writing, and we want him to keep writing. He’s got a tip jar over on his site; as Iam Hamet said this morning, why not go put something in it?

Update: Minnesota, I meant Minnesota, I really do know the difference between Minnesota and Michigan. Sigh.

WARNING: Possible Spoilers Ahead! Proceed at your own risk.

OK, I stayed up until after midnight last night to finish this, and I
went away well-satisfied. It was great–the best Potter yet. Jane’s
reading it now, and it’s taking her far longer to get up than usual.
The kids are too young to care, and of course are completely oblivious to
the whole thing.

For once I have to disagree with Ian Hamet. In my review
of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, I said that I was
dissatisfied with the character development in book; in his comment on
that review, he said I’d probably be similarly dissatisfied with this one.
Not so! All of the major characters do a certain amount of growing, there
are many more minor characters, and we get a much better sense of them.
I was especially impressed with yinny Weasely and Neville Longbottom.
As Deb said, the kids are finally beginning to act like teenagers, as we
see with Harry and Cho Chang. But not only are the hormones raging, they
are also beginning to take responsibility–the establishment of
Dumbledore’s Army is a case in point, and a juicy one.

And then there’s Professor Umbridge–what a delightfully evil creation
she is. Not for her the deed grandiose; instead, she’s a master of
bureaucratic evil, of the death of a thousand cuts. Rowling understands
that evil can be most effective when it is small, stupid, and just plain
mean, especially when it is cloaked with righteousness and respectability.
I’m thinking of Professor Umbridge’s detention punishment: writing
sentences with a pen that painfully draws blood from the back of your
hand.

But Umbridge is not only arrogant, she’s also stupid. By alienating the
faculty as well as the student body she assures her downfall. And wasn’t
it delightful to watch Professor McGonagle give Peeves hints on the
proper way to unscrew a crystal chandelier from the ceiling?

Indeed, there were so many wonderful moments that I hesitate to list them all:
the organizational meeting for Dumbledore’s Army; the moment when
Dumbledore announces that he’s found a new Divination instructor; the way
the students and faculty of Hogwarts join forces against
Professor Umbridge; the battle at the Ministry of Magic; Malfoy’s final
comeuppance on the Hogwarts Express.

The one thing I disliked was the lack of any kind of redemption or
forgiveness for anybody. For example, Harry’s supposed to be
great-hearted; but he isn’t great-hearted enough to forgive Snape, even
after learning the root of Snape’s dislike. He’s unhappy at having his
image of his father darkened, but he has no sympathy for his father’s
victim. It’s likely that Snape would have rejected any advances of
friendship or reconciliation that Harry might have made…but I do think
Harry should have tried.

Richard Dawkins, the well-known scientist and apologist for the theory of evolution, has recently written an article entitled “The Future Looks Bright“, which I found via Craig Ceely’s blog. In it, he tries to raise our consciousness about atheism:

Paul Geisert and Mynga Futrell, of Sacramento, California, have set out to coin a new word, a new “gay”. Like gay, it should be a noun hijacked from an adjective, with its original meaning changed but not too much. Like gay, it should be catchy: a potentially prolific meme. Like gay, it should be positive, warm, cheerful, bright.

Bright? Yes, bright. Bright is the word, the new noun. I am a bright. You are a bright. She is a bright. We are the brights. Isn’t it about time you came out as a bright? Is he a bright? I can’t imagine falling for a woman who was not a bright.

A “bright” is someone who subscribes to “a world view that is free of supernaturalism and mysticism.” I’m writing about this, because it’s a word that shows signs of catching on here in the blogosphere. And because it’s a word that (quite unlike “gay”) was purposely chosen to be insulting to those who (like me) espouse some kind of religious faith.

Apparently, because I am a Christian and believe that Christ died on the cross that my sins might be forgiven, I am not a “bright”. In fact, I must therefore be “not so bright”. Or perhaps even “dim”.

Like gay, it should be positive, warm, cheerful, bright.

One might add “arrogant”. If “bright” didn’t have the prior connotation of “intelligent”, with the implication that non-brights are unintelligent, Dawkins and his ilk would never have chosen it. The word “gay” carries no such freight.

I’ll be very curious to see if Steven den Beste weighs in on this. Steven is an atheist, as he discussed recently in a series of posts; he’s also a gentleman.

In the meantime, for any of my readers who might self-identify themselves as “brights”, you might wish to consider whom you’re insulting by so doing. For most of you, it’s probably a larger group than you think.

Update: Rude, that’s the word I was looking for. Rude, ill-mannered, uncouth, discourteous, take your pick. Of course, if that’s how you want to be perceived….

This is the third and most recent in Farland’s Runelords series; there’s
has to be at least one more to finish the story. It follows directly
after Brotherhood of the Wolf, which ended on a really down
note, and mostly continues the bleak mood.

Not a lot happens that’s conclusive: King Gaborn and his crew
continue to harry the reaver army they defeated at the climax of the
previous novel; Averan, a young girl introduced in the previous book,
becomes the apprentice of Binnesman the Earth Warden, to no one’s
surprise; Gaborn sends agents to various other kingdoms; Raj Ahten
returns home to Indhopal, where he’s faced with a number of threats to
his rule, including a bigger, nastier reaver army; Binnesman’s “wylde”
continues to grow in power and intelligence; the Darkling Glory summoned
by Raj Ahten in that last book is (possibly) revealed as something much
nastier still; in the end, nothing at all is settled.

In short, Wizardborn carries the saga along adequately well (I
enjoyed reading it) but doesn’t have much of an ending and provides no
real sense of closure. It does, however, set a number of interesting
trains in motion; I’ll be curious to see them all collide in the next episode.

Lynn Sislo has just posted the third installment in her Beginner’s Guide to Classical Music. Good stuff!

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, by J.K. Rowling

As all the world knows, June 21st was Harry Potter day throughout the
English-speaking world. I’ve not yet managed to get a copy of the latest
tome, but in preparation I re-read
Harry Potter and Goblet of Fire, which I’d only read once
before, when it in turn was brand new.

I liked it better this time. I’m in a lazier mood, maybe, but recently
I’ve been tending to read books at their own pace, slowly, rather than
rushing through them as fast as I can. Read slowly, I found it more
entertaining, especially the scenes toward the end. It’s a good yarn.

The character development is a little lacking, except for the major
players. Harry spends a good bit of the book, we are told, fascinated by
Cho Chang, who plays on the Ravensclaw quidditch team. We aren’t told
much about why he finds Cho attractive, just that he does. (Of course,
looking back on my years as teenage boy, perhaps that’s realistic.)

Anyway, I’m looking forward to the next one…when I can find a copy.

I’ve got an extremely busy week just ahead, so posting might be sporadic. Or it might not; we’ll see. Everything should be back to normal by the end of the month.

I’ve just posted Chapters 10 and 11 of Through Darkest Zymurgia!

If you’ve come in late, it’s a ripping yarn of adventure, exploration, and potable beverages. Try it, you’ll like it!

I love James Lilek’s daily page, The Bleat; it makes me laugh out loud more often than anything else I see on the ‘net. It’s all because of passages like this one:

One of the how-to books my wife bought suggested a boombox in the maternity room, with quiet music that helped you “center.” Something with flutes or aeolian harps or zithers played with feather dusters. I brought some Beethoven. Bring that kid out to the strains of the fifth! I also brought some nebulous new-age stuff I’d purchased in the 80s. It all sounded like music suitable for glacier races. It wasn’t any help at all – it just trickled out from the speakers, like the faraway sighs of a lovely zeppelin slowly deflating. At sunset. Near a lake. With swans.

I picked up my daughter at the library after work tonight. She is
spending one day a week there during the summer months helping out
with shelving books, story hour and the young adult book group the
librarian is trying to garner interest in. I got chatting with the
librarian, a very nice woman with virtually no knowledge of the kids
market in books or even what young folks like to read. Of course,
being the type that will recommend books to anyone who even remotely
looks interested, I left her with a list of decent fiction that kids
ages 10-14 might enjoy reading. No more “MaryKate and Ashley go to
Hawaii” for this crowd!

One of the books I recommended is Fox’s “One-Eyed Cat.” It’s a
Newberry Honor book, one of the few lit awards that actually seems to
award good writing and not good publishing. The story is fairly
simple. A young boy has a father who’s a preacher and a mother crippled with
rheumatoid arthritis. His dashing Uncle comes to visit for his
birthday and brings him a hunting rifle which his father promptly
confiscates and banishes to the attic. Curiosity takes over and the
boy sneaks up to the attic at night, gets the gun and goes out to do a
little target practice. He’s startled by a noise, reacts and shoots
something. Later, he sees a cat with its eye shot out wandering the
neighborhood and realizes he was the one that shot it.

That is a very bald precis of the plot. The father is well portrayed
as a heartbroken man with a sick wife struggling to care for her and
his son. The mother is realistically depicted without being
melodramatic about her pain or illness. And the young boy finds a
friend in an old man down the road who takes in the cat and nurses it
back to health. When I read the back cover, I worried that here was
yet another anti-hunting novel along the lines of Bambi–something
not well thought of in my family of avid hunters–but really it
turns into more a tale of responsibility and consequences, guilt and
repentance than anything else. And it reads really well. Definitely a
must read for my daughter.