Bravo, Ben!

Watch the trailer for Ben Stein's up-coming movie "Expelled!" Watch the entire thing; it's worth it.



You can learn more here.

Keeping Up

Lot's going on, not much time to blog.

Saw I am Legend last night with my son and middle daughter. Really well done. This wasn't a kid sci-fi movie. You know, like Independence Day. The row of jr. high kids in the front of the theater were restless the entire movie. Highly recommended.

I need to update my "What I am Reading or Listening to" box on the right side of my blog. I finished Gene Wolfe's new novel Pirate Freedom. Everything Wolfe writes is worth reading. This one wasn't as dense as many others, but it was quite satisfying nonetheless. The moment I finished I began to read it again. That's the mark of a good book.

Sledge's With the Old Breed ought to be read by every post-WWII American man. It's a marine grunt's battlefield account of the battles of Peleliu and Okinawa. There's nothing like it. I can't believe I hadn't read it until now.

Currently, I'm listening to Steve Martin read his own Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life. I enjoy Steve Martin's book. The Pleasure of My Company was a gem. I'm also listening to Dean Koontz's latest novel, The Darkest Evening of the Year. So far, so good.

John C. Wright is Right

About the preachy atheism of Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. The first book was promising, but it went down hill, actually to hell after that. The diabolical trajectory was clear in the first book The Golden Compass but embedded in a somewhat interesting story line. After that it just became a very bad story.

Nothing I have ever read, not by Heinlein and not by Ayn Rand has been more blatant in dropping the story-telling, and devoting its pages to preaching a message. The writer was drunk on sermonizing. If this plotline was a motorist, it would have been arrested for driving while intoxicated, if it had not perished in the horrible drunk accident where it went headlong over the cliff of the author's preachy message, tumbled down the rocky hillside, crashed, and burned.

Books & Movies

A few days ago I began to read, actually listen to Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild, the story of Chistopher McCandless's two-year "walk about" that ended in his death in 1992. I started it because a friend recommended it. I had no idea that they were making it into a movie. Last night as we were driving back from Taco Bell I saw the title on one of the local movie theater's placard.

I don't know. Nosing around the movie's web site makes me suspicious. It looks like they've taken some liberties with the story. And Sean Penn wrote the screenplay and directed the movie. Aach.

Interestingly, just after I finished The Kite Runner a few weeks ago I saw that it too was about to be released as a movie. I'm not sure I connected with The Kite Runner. It required me to suspend disbelief at too many key junctures. After a while, I just finished it because I don't like to start a book and then set it aside unless it's really bad. The Kite Runner is not really bad. It's not really even bad. Just not my kind of novel. I haven't looked, but I suspect it was one of Oprah's picks. It's that kind of book. Maybe the movie will be better.