Lightning’s Book Reviews: Don’t Know Much About History

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Don't Know Much About History book cover
Lightning Epps

Hi everybody! It’s me, Lightning!

My owner’s son has this book for his AP U.S. History class. You should read it! The title — Don’t Know Much About History — makes you think of the famous song by Sam Cooke, so right away you want to know more about it!

History is fascinating! For example, did you know that the Duke and Duchess of Windsor had ELEVEN pugs?! The Duke used to be the King of England but he had to “adbdicate” (that means quit) so he’d have enough time to walk all of his dogs.

I hope that fact is in the book!

Duke and Duchess of Windsor with pugs

— Lightning paw

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Thomas Jefferson on Edward M. Kennedy, 1932-2009

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Thomas Jefferson

I’ve never understood what was so great about this guy. He was immature, a drunk and a womanizer. In 1979, he couldn’t answer a softball question about why he wanted to be president and didn’t even make it out of the primaries.

The best thing I can say about him is that he got things done. He had an undeniably impressive track record of passing legislation — most of it disastrous, of course — but he did get it passed.

And he killed that poor girl, Mary Jo Kopechne. Don’t forget that. Put her in a lake, then went back to his hotel room and fell asleep. Never even reported it. Far from ending his political career though, the whole Chappaquidick “incident” was written off as just Ted being Ted.

As a deceased person myself, I know that death is like following a light into the next world. If you’re lucky, that light won’t be the moon shining through the window of a submerged Olds 88 . . .

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Appeasement

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There’s a point at which realism shades over into weakness . . . It’s hard to avoid the sense that Mr. Obama has wasted months trying to appease people who can’t be appeased, and who take every concession as a sign that he can be rolled.

— Paul Krugman
 

As we all know, you can’t appease terrorists. Oh wait, sorry–appeasing terrorists is worth a try. It’s Republicans you can’t appease.

— Best of the Web Today

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Personal Space

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The guy at the Green Burrito drive-thru leans all the way out the window and almost into my car to ask, in an Eastern European accent, “Can I get you any taco sauce or something?”

Uh, no thanks, Miroslav. I know different cultures have different ideas about personal space but here in America we like you to stay inside the window and just talk to us from there . . .

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Dwight Howard’s Reality

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[Dwight] Howard has also expressed the desire to have his own reality show.

Here’s a suggestion: The show should focus on Howard’s learning how to make savvy passes when he’s doubled, how to shoot a short-range jumper and how to make free throws.

That’s the kind of reality that the young man should be interested in.

— Charley Rosen

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The Moreno Valley: Junkyard of OC Dreams

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The Moreno Valley is now the poster child for American housing gone wrong, and the New York Times weighed in with one of their stock magisterial pieces, the kinds that read purty but don’t say jack shit about reality. The Orange County connection is that two of the homeowners profiled in the piece moved to the MV because they couldn’t afford apartments in OC, which should clue the rest of the nation into how stupid they were to buy into Moreno Valley. Reporter Jennifer Steinhauer doesn’t note that even people in Colton ridicule Moreno Valley residents for living there. It’s not an area “filled with people priced out of Los Angeles and Orange Counties, or looking to escape louder, less-safe cities,” as the Times notes; it’s a place for fools who weren’t smart enough to buy a house in Calimesa. Shit, even Beaumont is better than Moreno Valley, and Beamount is sketchy.

— Gustavo Arellano, OC Weekly

[The New York Times piece is here.]

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The Death of Ivan Ilych

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Leo Tolstoy

It occurred to him that what had seemed perfectly impossible before, namely that he had not spent his life as he should have done, might after all be true. It occurred to him that his scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was considered good by the most highly placed people, those scarcely noticeable impulses which he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing, and all the rest false. And his professional duties and the whole arrangement of his life and of his family, and all his social and official interests, might all have been false. He tried to defend all those things to himself and suddenly felt the weakness of what he was defending. There was nothing to defend.

“But if that is so,” he said to himself, “and I am leaving this life with the consciousness that I have lost all that was given me and it is impossible to rectify it — what then?”

— Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych

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White House Adds $2 Trillion to Deficit Forecasts

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The nation would be forced to borrow more than $9 trillion over the next decade under President Obama’s policies, the White House acknowledged late Friday, bringing their long-term budget forecast in line with independent estimates.

The new projections add approximately $2 trillion to budget deficits through 2019. Earlier this year, the administration had predicted that Obama’s policies would require the government to spend $7.108 trillion more than it collects in tax revenue over the next decade.

An administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the report will not be formally released until Tuesday, said the change is due primarily to updated projections of economic growth that are far less rosy than data used when the White House released its first long-term budget outlook in February.

— washingtonpost.com

I think I’d be way more upset about this if the numbers weren’t beyond human comprehension . . .

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HW ‘s Presentation Tips: Get to the Fucking Point

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Here’s a simple presentation tip that would help a lot of people: Get to the fucking point.

At a meeting this morning, the company sick time policy was explained to 100 people over the course of 30 minutes time via two PowerPoint presentations by two different people.

I’ll summarize it here:

If you’re well enough to work, you should come to work. If not, stay home. BUT — if you stay home too much, it may negatively affect your annual performance review.

That’s the policy. Let’s open it up for questions.

Don’t take 15 minutes to say something you can say in 15 seconds. Don’t feel like you have to include a historical introduction to the topic, charts, graphs, trends, industry comparisons.

Other people are not in love with the sound of your voice the way you are . . .

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Twitter: 2009-08-21

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  • Want to buy a customized Michael Vick Eagles jersey for your dog? http://tinyurl.com/la3o36 #
  • Obama: "We are God's partners in matters of life and death." Good mission statement for the death panels! #
  • RT @diablocody: Obsolete memory: pushing card catalog drawers in and out at the library. Also, the tangy smell of the old cards. #

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We Apologize to Jackasses for the Unintended Insult

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TV listings: The Prime-Time TV grid in Thursday’s Calendar section mistakenly listed MTV’s “Jackass” show on the MSNBC cable schedule at 7 and 10 p.m. where instead MSNBC’s “Countdown With Keith Olbermann” should have been listed.

— latimes.com

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