Category: Culture

Culture in all its manifestations, high and low

Best Selling Album Ever

https://www.thewrap.com/the-eagles-greatest-hits-michael-jackson-thriller-record/

The best selling album is The Eagles’ “Greatest Hits 1971-1975. Thriller by Michael Jackson no longer has the title.

What is your number one Eagles’ tune?

Their Greatest Hits 1971-1975
Disc 1:
Take It Easy
Witchy Woman
Lyin’ Eyes
Already Gone
Desperado
One Of These Nights
Tequila Sunrise
Take It To The Limit
Peaceful Easy Feeling
The Best Of My Love
Eagles Greatest Hits Volume 2
Disc 2:
Hotel California
Heartache Tonight
Seven Bridges Road (Live Version)
Victim Of Love
The Sad Cafe
Life In The Fast Lane
I Can’t Tell You Why
New Kid In Town
The Long Run
After The Thrill Is Gone

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This Week’s Book Review – Monster Hunter Memoirs: Saints

I write a weekly book review for the Daily News of Galveston County. (It is not the biggest daily newspaper in Texas, but it is the oldest.) My review normally appears Wednesdays. When it appears, I post the review here on the following Sunday.

Book Review

‘Monster Hunter’ trilogy comes to entertaining conclusion

By MARK LARDAS

Aug 15, 2018

“Monster Hunter Memoirs: Saints,” by Larry Correia and John Ringo, Baen Books, 2018, 288 pages, $25

Fanfic gets written when a fan of a writer writes their own story in that author’s world. It is especially popular in fantasy and science fiction. What happens when an established science fiction author gets so enthusiastic they create fanfic?

“Monster Hunter Memoirs: Saints,” by Larry Correia and John Ringo happens.

Ringo, well-established when Correia’s first novel, “Monster Hunter International,” appeared liked the series so much he wrote three novels set in Correia’s urban fantasy universe. He showed the novels to Correia. The two decided they were worth publishing. They rewrote the books together to make the plots fit better into Correia’s canon. The result was the “Monster Hunter Memoirs” trilogy. “Saints” is the final book. It was preceded by “Grunge” and “Sinners.”

The story involves Monster Hunter International, but is set in the 1980s and 1990s with a monster hunter who died before the events of “Monster Hunter International.”

The central character, Chad Gardenier, is literally on mission from God. A Marine, in the Beirut barracks when a suicide bomber attacked it in 1983, Chad was given a choice in the anteroom to heaven: go to heaven or return to earth to save the world. Chad was a Marine. Of course he accepted the mission to save the world.

He hooked up with Monster Hunter International shortly after his medical discharge from the Marines. Stumbling into an outbreak of zombies, he killed a bunch, saved folks and got a job offer from MHI. By the start of “Saints,” Chad is an experienced monster hunter leading the team in New Orleans. New Orleans is filled with all sorts of nasty monsters needing killing. After all, it is a voodoo kind of place.

It turns out there is a reason New Orleans attracts such creatures buried way under the city; and it threatens to destroy the world. Chad Gardinier finally confronts the mission for which he has been sent.

“Monster Hunter Memoirs: Saints” ends up a fusion of Correia’s and Ringo’s writing styles, blending both their humor and their fascination with firearms. Fans of either writer will find this entertaining.

 Mark Lardas, an engineer, freelance writer, amateur historian, and model-maker, lives in League City. His website is marklardas.com.

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Enemy of the People 2018-08-16

Today we were treated to a burst of collusion by the lamestream media.   For the past week, the Boston Globe has been encouraging journalists to publish editorials today that would condemn President Trump for calling the “fake news media” the “enemy of the people.”   Somewhere around 350 editorials were published today in answer to the Boston Globe’s call.   There were also a handful of editorials that opined that this collective effort would surely backfire and only prove Trump’s allegation that the journalists are partisan Leftists and “the Opposition Party.”

So, Ratburghers, did you bother to read any of these editorials?

Did you see any new points that you had not already heard many times?

Did you see any really good examples of arguments against President Trump?   Any criticisms that seemed to be helpful or useful to the public discourse over the battles between Team Trump and mass media?

Have you heard any conversations triggered by this effort at a collective rebuke of President Trump?

My thinking is that this is a really small deal.   Nobody will be persuaded to think differently than they already did.

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Shameless Blog Self-promotion

Last month, Ray and I took a two-week cruise to Hawaii, round trip from San Francisco, with Hillsdale College.  Over at my personal blog, RushBabe49.com, I am documenting that trip with  pictures and commentary, in 1-2 day bites.  You are all invited to drop by and read my posts.  The latest describes our day in Lahaina, Maui (day 9 of the 15-day cruise).  Scroll down for earlier posts, starting with Day One when we left San Francisco.  Sea days were spent in lectures given by some people you are sure to be familiar with.  Each post starts with the image below.  Please visit and comment!

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Colorado v Christians

The process is the punishment.   Just a couple of weeks after the Supreme Court ended a six-year legal ordeal, the Human Rights Commission of the State of Colorado has started a new investigation of Jack Phillips the Christian Baker who owns the Masterpiece Cakeshop.

The complainant is a transgender person, who requested a birthday cake to celebrate “the 7th-year anniversary of my transition from male to female.”

Now this is harassment of a businessman for trying to exercise his traditionalist Christianity in his shop.   Even though the legal fees will be donated, this man has spent six years of time in a stressful series of hearings, interviews, interrogations, depositions, and other miscellaneous court proceedings, plus time spent with his own legal team.   He has been facing bankruptcy the entire time as the weight of the State of Colorado makes it difficult for him to tend to his family and his business.

When Leftists scoff that Christians are not under threat in America, Jack Phillips is exhibit A of the rebuttal.    He has just filed for a federal injunction against the Colorado Human Rights Commission.

“Colorado continues its practice of treating Phillips worse than other cake artists because it despises his religious beliefs and how he practices his faith,” the lawsuit claims.

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Buckley Presides | Abides

The whole conservative Stop edifice began crumbling, and morphed into Conservative, Inc. on the Lido deck, with Buckley’s passing.  Before that happened, and before Jonah became a crap-weasel, his own term BTW, I Christened a serious piece of yard art as Buckley.  He presides over my pond, and now he sports a parasol in the form of two Agapanthus (Lily of the Nile) blooms.  Showing his age, he also wears a bit of lichen on his pate.

At the bottom left of this picture is a Koi named Zion, after the locale of our honeymoon.  He has a one inch bulbous protruding tumor on his left rear quadrant, but he seems to not care about it one whit since it formed several years ago.  His personality includes a proclivity to eat voraciously and hyper-energetically, like a crazed shark.  The bubbles in the center of the picture are generated by an aerator that helps oxygenate the water during these hot days.  We’ve never seen the water lily leaves mound up above the water like this.  Happy warm days here in the Willamette Valley of Oregon: 94F at 3 this afternoon.

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Today’s Kipling – The King

Since we have recently been getting all misty about days past, I thought this poem appropriate. It is a reminder that nostalgia has always been a “thing.” What I find especially amusing is its last two verses. Today steam locomotives are the stuff of romance. When Kipling wrote this poem, boarding the 9:15 was about as exciting as boarding a jet from Houston to St. Louis.

The King

Rudyard Kipling

“Farewell, Romance!” the Cave-men said;
“With bone well carved He went away,
Flint arms the ignoble arrowhead,
And jasper tips the spear to-day.
Changed are the Gods of Hunt and Dance,
And He with these. Farewell, Romance!”

“Farewell, Romance!” the Lake-folk sighed;
“We lift the weight of flatling years;
The caverns of the mountain-side
Hold him who scorns our hutted piers.
Lost hills whereby we dare not dwell,
Guard ye his rest. Romance, farewell!”

“Farewell, Romance!” the Soldier spoke;
“By sleight of sword we may not win,
But scuffle ‘mid uncleanly smoke
Of arquebus and culverin.
Honour is lost, and none may tell
Who paid good blows. Romance, farewell!”

“Farewell, Romance!” the Traders cried;
“Our keels have lain with every sea;
The dull-returning wind and tide
Heave up the wharf where we would be;
The known and noted breezes swell
Our trudging sails. Romance, farewell!”

“Good-bye, Romance!” the Skipper said;
“He vanished with the coal we burn.
Our dial marks full-steam ahead,
Our speed is timed to half a turn.
Sure as the ferried barge we ply
‘Twixt port and port. Romance, good-bye!”

“Romance!” the season-tickets mourn,
“He never ran to catch His train,
But passed with coach and guard and horn —
And left the local — late again!”
Confound Romance!… And all unseen
Romance brought up the nine-fifteen.

His hand was on the lever laid,
His oil-can soothed the worrying cranks,
His whistle waked the snowbound grade,
His fog-horn cut the reeking Banks;
By dock and deep and mine and mill
The Boy-god reckless laboured still!

Robed, crowned and throned, He wove His spell,
Where heart-blood beat or hearth-smoke curled,
With unconsidered miracle,
Hedged in a backward-gazing world;
Then taught His chosen bard to say:
“Our King was with us — yesterday!”

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