Some Books I've Read Lately or am reading

The Complete Cartoons of the New Yorker.












John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights I just started this one. I am reading the chapter on John Brown as Calvinist.

The Best Game Ever: Giants vs. Colts, 1958, and the Birth of the Modern NFL Raymond Berry was an intense ball player.

Bitsy pookums

Calvin and Hobbes is the best comic ever. By a mile. No one else is even close.

Flannery O'Connor: Live

If you are a fan of Flannery O'Connor and her writing, as I am, the this is a real treat.

I'll let the Morning Oil blog explain it:


Here's something you won't hear every day. Flannery O'Connor, a year before her death at 39 from Lupus disease, gave a lecture at Notre Dame. It consisted of a short talk on some aspects of the grotesque in southern fiction (along with some insightful remarks on what it means to be a Catholic writer) and a reading of her short story A Good Man Is Hard To Find. I went looking for a recording of the talk, and found that the only place it was available was if you ordered a copy from ND's archives, which was way too expensive. After a bit of researching, I found an obscure internet radio station that had obtained a copy and had broadcasted it a while back. I streamed the radio episode from their website with Realplayer, recorded the lecture with an audio capture program, converted the .wav file to .wma (mp3 was too lossy) and uploaded it to the internet.


Anyway, for those of you interested, here's The Morning Oil exclusive of one of Catholicism's best writers ever reading her own work (you've got to love that accent).

Subdue it and have dominion ?

Here is a chilling sentence:

A network of lawyers and animal activists has orchestrated these changes, largely without opposition, in order to whittle down the legal distinctions between human beings and animals.

From an article in the New Yorker on Leona Helmsley and the practice of leaving millions to pets in wills.

Rod Dreher on NPR

I happened to catch an NPR program called Speaking of Faith while driving this weekend.

It was a conversation with conservative columnist Rod Dreher. The hour focused on the election and the religious right and how cultural and social conservatives fit into this election.

Worth a listen. Download the mp3 here.

One can only die as a Christian

Fr. Sophrony [Sakharov of Essex] says that it is impossible to live as a Christian; one can only die as a Christian, meaning that a person who looks after his own life, his own ease, cannot live the Christian life.

Thanks to Christopher Orr.

What is Terre Haute good for?

Apparently, predicting the outcome of the presidential election.

Also take a look at this map of the two states and eight counties that have voted for the winning presidential candidate from 1960 through 1996.

This is an awesome site ...

... for history and photography buffs.

And this is an awesome picture. Click it to see it at full size.

St. Louis, Missouri. May 1910. "Newsies. Johnston's Branch adjoining Saloon at 10th & Cass Street." Photograph by Lewis Wickes Hine.

It's all my wife's fault

My wife has infected our children with a debilitating disease called "cheering for the Chicago Cubs".

Needless to say, there has been much weeping and gnashing of teeth among my household now that the Cubs once again have cast themselves into the outer darkness.

My second eldest daughter calls this the saddest newspaper article she has read in a long time.