Do you make web sites?

Posted by Cyn | Filed under Geekery

Read more | Comments off | July 31st, 2008

Review: New Moon by Stephanie Meyer

Posted by Cyn | Filed under Book Reviews, Reading

I fin­ished read­ing New Moon, which was much, much more dra­matic (emo­tion­ally) than Twi­light. As in, Bella goes into a zom­bie state for months, and the book just has blank pages with the names of each month as place hold­ers – Octo­ber, Novem­ber, Decem­ber, Jan­u­ary, etc. I (and most every­one I know) have han­dled divorce bet­ter than this kid han­dles a teenage breakup! And her par­ents never put her in ther­apy why? (I think she should have been in-​​patient, myself.)

I couldn’t let go enough to read this book from the intended audience’s per­spec­tive. I kept think­ing that there’s no way I’d let a child of mine get involved with any­one so clingy. She wants to be with a guy 24/​7, and no, I am not exag­ger­at­ing at all. These books are a case study of depen­dent per­son­al­ity dis­or­der. The fact that they are so incred­i­bly pop­u­lar is wor­ri­some to me.

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Read more | Comments (6) | July 30th, 2008

The Girl Is Back!

Posted by Cyn | Filed under Family

It was only a few days, but I missed her. She had fun, saw both sets of grand­par­ents and var­i­ous other kin, got fig pre­serves made just for her, went shop­ping, and other stuff I can’t recall at the moment. I expect that she’ll be catch­ing up on sleep for the rest of the week.

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Read more | Comments (3) | July 29th, 2008

Another Homegrown Terrorist, This Time in Tennessee

Posted by Cyn | Filed under News

Police: Man Shot Church­go­ers Over Lib­eral Views

Knoxville, Ten­nessee — An unem­ployed man accused of open­ing fire with a shot­gun and killing two peo­ple at a Uni­tar­ian church appar­ently tar­geted the con­gre­ga­tion out of hatred for its sup­port of lib­eral social poli­cies, police said Monday.

That makes a lot of sense. This whack­job is unhappy because he lost his job, gets a let­ter say­ing he’s los­ing his food stamps too, and instead of blam­ing the Repub­li­cans who have been in charge of the coun­try for the past eight years, he trots off to the near­est UUA con­gre­ga­tion and opens fire dur­ing a children’s performance.

Two peo­ple are dead, one because he gave his life in an attempt to save oth­ers. Five more are injured – no chil­dren, at least.

What did those peo­ple do to upset the home­grown terrorist?

The Unitarian-​​Universalist church pro­motes pro­gres­sive social work, includ­ing advo­cacy of women and gay rights. The Knoxville con­gre­ga­tion also has pro­vided sanc­tu­ary for polit­i­cal refugees, fed the home­less and founded a chap­ter of the Amer­i­can Civil Lib­er­ties Union, accord­ing to its Web site.

Good­ness. How upset­ting. Obvi­ously, they caused him to lose his truck­ing job. Yep. Makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it?

Sam Har­ris’ views on reli­gion make more sense every day.

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Read more | Comments (5) | July 28th, 2008

Sunday Night

Posted by Cyn | Filed under Critters, Family, Reading

Yes, I’m bor­ing. I hate try­ing to think of titles for posts.

The girl is off vis­it­ing, hav­ing left yes­ter­day after­noon. Her cat is fran­tic. He is very much attached to HER, not US. So when­ever she leaves the house, he goes nuts, gets ter­ri­bly anx­ious, and is cer­tain that she’ll never, ever come back. He spends most of his time sit­ting in the front win­dows or sniff­ing under the front door, try­ing to detect her return.

Shel­ley never freaked like that, but then Katie vis­ited Atlanta once a week pretty much every week from the time she was a few weeks old ’til they moved here with me. She knew the girl would always come back. And Shel­ley was with me for a year before Katie was born, and attached to both of us. Kioshi is just a one-​​person cat. I should make that a one-​​girl cat, as he isn’t big on males at all.

I read the first of Laura Anne Gilman’s Retriever nov­els, Stay­ing Dead. Fun stuff, and I think many of you would enjoy it. Then I went on to Twi­light by Stephanie Meyer. Katie was so excited about it that I had to see what the big deal was. She fin­ished that huge sucker in a day or so. I took a lit­tle longer, but then I wasn’t the one check­ing the library’s hold queue sev­eral times a day.

I can see why the series is such a huge hit with some teenage girls, but I don’t think it will carry nearly as much pop­u­lar­ity with any other age group or males, period. There’s too much “oh, I’m bad for you” angst­ing from the vam­pire (male roman­tic lead). Seri­ously – he beats David Boreanz’s Angel all to pieces on the brood­ing, and that takes some doing.

The main char­ac­ter, Bella, is annoy­ing to me because she’s pretty damned use­less. She hon­estly can’t be trusted to walk down a hall­way with no obsta­cles with­out hurt­ing her­self. She’s not cre­ative or par­tic­u­larly intel­li­gent, shows no par­tic­u­lar tal­ents of any sort – a beige per­son, in my mind. What’s there to like?

I took a break and read Curse The Dark (sec­ond of the Retriever series) before start­ing New Moon, but I did start it. And damn, it’s even more emo­tion­ally dramatic.

I’m not sure I’ll read the other two books when­ever we get hold of them (I’m not sure the fourth is even out yet). I know that Katie will, though. The series isn’t writ­ten badly, but I’m way out of the tar­get audience.

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Read more | Comments (1) | July 27th, 2008

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