Conspirata opens like many crime thrillers. There is the discovery of a dead body.
But Conspirata (Simon & Schuster) is different than most crime thrillers, as the dead body in this novel is a slave who was murdered more than 2,000 years ago, and the person called to investigate is Marcus Tullius Cicero, the great Roman orator and statesman.
The good folks at the Illinois Humanities Council pass along this collection of the best author-vs-author insults in history. Below, I offer metacommentary.
1. Mark Twain on Jane Austen:
Every time I read ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.
Yet the words “every time” suggest otherwise. Just how often do you read this book you claim to despise, Mr. Clemens?
I’ve always thought my yearbook photo looked a little dorky, with the haircut and the glasses that were on the cutting edge of fashion back then, twenty-million-or-so-years ago. But then, along comes this post from aceonlineschools.com … and I get to thinking, “maybe my photo isn’t so bad, after all” … well … at least not as bad as SOME of what they’ve labeled “30 Awesomely Bad School Portraits.”
April 6, 2010
I dream I am about to leave on a road trip to shoot a television show with my brother. We are late. We rush to the bus station on our bikes and a young man is inspired to see us because he, too, is on his bike and he plans to make it to his location on time. He asks us if we feel positive. We say we feel pretty good, but we don’t know for sure if we will make it. The young man is disgusted because of our lack of certainty, and he lectures us because we don’t think positively.
You may have heard that Hugo Chavez, el Supremo of the People’s Republic of Venezuela, is now on Twitter. But as you might not be following him, I’ve decided to publish some of his recent tweets here:
just tortured dissident. no more speak out. no tongue.
finished building camp. germans send us ovens. real xperts.
like AZ law. try it here. instead immigrants arrest everyone.
pogrom in jewish community. much fun.
twitter good. must ban it.
According to nerdy Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson) a superhero is a “perfect combination of optimism and naiveté.” Of course, skill with lethal weapons and a fearless nature are also required. In Kick-Ass, however, the powerless become unlikely superheroes. The film is a parody of superhero movies, but I was still invested in the characters and story. And most of all, Kick-Ass is a hoot. [Read more →]
The marvelous Mr. Cohen has written a chilling piece here tonight, The end of privately held medicine.
In the piece, he tells the tale of a Senator’s quest to ban medicine in your home, for the purpose of, drum roll please… Saving the Children! The surprise is overwhelming!
But I’m not sure how up-to-date Mr. Cohen is on the technological front…
Democratic senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey is calling for the FDA to ban dissolvable tobacco products. These products, which include pellets, sticks, and strips, are marketed as an alternative to smoking.
And lung cancer. And certain death.
But Senator Lautenberg, that great defender of small children and furry animals (or is it furry children and small animals?), finds something nefarious about this. He argues that if young children were to see these concoctions as candy, and swallow a whole bottle of them, they could get sick.
However, when told that any pill or medication could be misconstrued as candy, the senator decided to take the ban to its logical conclusion, by calling for the end of all privately-owned medicine. [Read more →]
It’s rare for a television reality show to perfectly capture the American cultural zeitgeist, except on those all-too common occasions when it actually does, which is frequently. These shows hold a mirror to our own reality (“reality” shows), by reflecting back to us who we are, what we’re doing, what are our shared interests. American Idol is a perfect microcosm of our culture’s pursuit of musical success (a “recording contract”), on which so many of our young, I-want-it-now-mp3-downloading children place so much importance. Then there is Survivor, which glorifies the reveling in the cut-throat world of deserted island back-stabbing in the pursuit of filthy lucre (“dirty money”), in the form of a $1 million prize. This is the type of greed typified by the current Goldman Sachs situation; I’m not sure of the specifics on that, but I know that a greedy win-at-all-costs attitude was the motivating factor.
These days, we talk about Banned Book Week and we talk about censorship in school libraries, but in the 1500′s, they were serious about censorship. Get caught reading something on the Vatican’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum (List of Prohibited Books) and your prize was an appointment with the local Inquisitor. Based on the true story of Giordano Bruno – an Italian monk, excommunicated and on the run from the Inquisition – Heresy casts Bruno in the role of investigator, helping to solve a series of grisly murders while spying for Queen Elizabeth. [Read more →]
