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The Weblog at The View from the Core - Monday, May 23, 2005
   
   

I've Been Tagged. Or Memed. Or Something Like That.

Esquire has passed the baton to me, so to speak.

1. Total Number of Books I've Owned: I would guess circa 500-600. That's not counting books from my childhood, only a handful of which have survived.

2. Last Book I Bought: The Oxford Book of Regency Verse 1798-1837 (ed. H.S. Milford, 1928). I had been thinking about getting this book for a couple of years, and I finally found a near-perfect copy for a reasonable price, and I acquired it a week ago. This past weekend was beautiful here in the Mon Valley, and I took this book with me when I rode my bike a couple of times down to the municipal park on the river, a few blocks from home.

3. Last Book I Read: South Park Conservatives. The author, Brian C. Anderson, was kind enough to send me a copy a few weeks ago, and I finally finished it last Friday. A very fine read! I'll try to work up a review. (I even took notes while reading.)

4. Five Books That Mean a Lot to Me:

  1. The Red Hat, by Covelle Newcomb, a biography of Cardinal Newman that I read when I was a senior in high school. It made a very deep impression on me, and I must say it played a role in my joining the Catholic Church a few months after I graduated.
  2. Mere Christianity, by C.S. Lewis. It was the first systematic treatment of Christian theology and apologetics that I read, when I was in college. It was the first of what would eventually turn out to be an entire shelf full of Lewis books in my possession.
  3. The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien. I have read this book 15 times; it is a great work of mystical theology. (Lewis's Space Trilogy would be a similar runner-up.)
  4. The Poems of St. John of the Cross (third edition), tr. John Frederick Nims. It was given to me by my friend Fr. John J. Hugo, December 30, 1980; it sparked my deep and abiding love of poetry.
  5. The Norton Anthology of Poetry (revised edition, 1975). This was the first really good anthology of poetry I ever owned. A superb selection, with excellent notes and glosses. I found a lot of poets there that I have come to love. (Quiller-Couch's Oxford Book of English Verse [new edition, 1939] and his Oxford Book of Victorian Verse [1913] would be similar runners-up.)

5. Tag 5 people and have them do this on their blog. I will decline to do this, since I haven't been paying enough attention to know who has already been tagged.

P.S. Someguy is a little late to the game. :-)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Mon. 05/23/05 08:37:54 PM
Categorized as Blogosphere Stuff.


   
   

Readworthies IX

A handful of interesting, informative, and insightful articles.

News, editorials, columns, essays, et al.


Deep Blue Campuses by Daniel J. Flynn @ Leadership Institute (ht):

.... American campuses are very different from the nation that surrounds them. The differences are especially profound when it comes to politics. The United States is closely divided between the two major parties. No such division exists on any major college campus....


Newsweek is biased like the rest of the media elite by Dick Morris @ The Hill:

The Newsweek magazine story falsely reporting desecration of the Koran by American military interrogators in Guantanamo, Cuba, where terror suspects are being held, is the fourth major false report printed or aired by a highly respected arm of the Anglo-American journalistic establishment in the past year....
Each of those “mistakes” was biased in favor of the left and was committed in the haste of liberal journalists to get some ammunition to discredit Bush and the Iraq war. But when the same reporter who wrote the current story filed the first disclosure of the Monica Lewinsky affair with his editors at Newsweek, the magazine piously refused to run the story.
In fact, in all the years of the Clinton presidency, I cannot recall a single instance of a similarly inaccurate high-profile story attacking the Democratic president.....


History and Mystery: Why does the New York Times insist on calling jihadists "insurgents"? by Christopher Hitchens @ Slate (ht):

When the New York Times scratches its head, get ready for total baldness as you tear out your hair. A doozy classic led the "Week in Review" section on Sunday. Portentously headed "The Mystery of the Insurgency," the article rubbed its eyes at the sheer lunacy and sadism of the Iraqi car bombers and random murderers. At a time when new mass graves are being filled, and old ones are still being dug up, writer James Bennet practically pleaded with the authors of both to come up with an intelligible (or defensible?) reason for his paper to go on calling them "insurgents."
I don't think the New York Times ever referred to those who devastated its hometown's downtown as "insurgents." But it does employ this title every day for the gang headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. With pedantic exactitude, and unless anyone should miss the point, this man has named his organization "al-Qaida in Mesopotamia" and sought (and apparently received) Osama Bin Laden's permission for the franchise. Did al-Qaida show "interest in winning hearts and minds … in building international legitimacy … in articulating a governing program or even a unified ideology," or any of the other things plaintively mentioned as lacking by Mr. Bennet?...


Newsweek Dissembled, Muslims Dismembered! by Ann Coulter @ anncoulter.com (ht):

When ace reporter Michael Isikoff had the scoop of the decade, a thoroughly sourced story about the president of the United States having an affair with an intern and then pressuring her to lie about it under oath, Newsweek decided not to run the story. Matt Drudge scooped Newsweek, followed by The Washington Post.
When Isikoff had a detailed account of Kathleen Willey's nasty sexual encounter with the president in the Oval Office, backed up with eyewitness and documentary evidence, Newsweek decided not to run it. Again, Matt Drudge got the story.
When Isikoff was the first with detailed reporting on Paula Jones' accusations against a sitting president, Isikoff's then-employer The Washington Post — which owns Newsweek — decided not to run it. The American Spectator got the story, followed by the Los Angeles Times.
So apparently it's possible for Michael Isikoff to have a story that actually is true, but for his editors not to run it....


The Last Star Wars: Putting Revenge of the Sith and the prequels in perspective. by Jonathan V. Last @ The Weekly Standard (ht):

It is now safe to declare the Star Wars prequels a failure. Whatever their merits as films, the three panels of George Lucas's new triptych, The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, and The Revenge of the Sith have failed to add permanently to the Star Wars mythology. Try to name one character or image or line of dialogue from these prequels that will, 30 years from now, have the cultural resonance that Darth Vader, the Death Star, the Millennium Falcon, the Mos Eisley creature cantina, "Use the Force," or "Luke, I am your father" have today.
The only iconic figure to emerge from the prequels is Darth Maul, the horned, red-faced Sith who had barely any dialogue and was dead by the end of Phantom Menace. But at least we'll remember him. Next to Darth Maul, the image most likely to endure from the prequels is Jar-Jar Binks, who is regarded as a campy mistake, like the ewoks from Return of the Jedi. The rest of these three movies — some seven hours of story-telling — has turned out to be merely disposable cinematic product, like Tomb Raider or Planet of the Apes.
You can judge the size of the prequels' cultural footprint by studying the merchandising. For instance, when Cingular began hawking its Star Wars tie-ins recently, they used characters from the original Star Wars movies — Chewbacca, Vader, Storm Troopers — not characters from Revenge of the Sith. The Star Wars toy industry has likewise become a shell of its former self.... [spoilers follow]


Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Mon. 05/23/05 08:26:43 AM
Categorized as Readworthies.


   
   

"There's Lot More to Polls Than Just Numbers"

An occasional correspondent has an article in the Chicago Tribune, yesterday:

In early October 2004, Newsweek released a poll immediately after the first presidential debate, which showed a dramatic shift in public opinion in favor of John Kerry.
Did Kerry narrow the gap with his debate performance? Was he really the closer that many in the media had suggested he was? Newsweek was basing its headline "The Race is On" and accompanying story on a comparison between its two most recent polls. The problem, though, was that the polling data was inconsistent.
The October Newsweek poll sampled more Democrats than it did Republicans....
One could say that I give the media more credit than it deserves for its knowledge of polls, but a claim of ignorance is not a valid defense. One could make the argument that the media rely on their polling firms to conduct fair polls, and therefore do not feel compelled to delve into the background data.
But a lack of diligence is a cop-out and hypocritical because the media don't allow the same excuse for those they investigate.
Transparency is crucial if the media plan to market polls as truth.
To give credit to the pollsters, many are now releasing their data as links to companion articles on the Internet. It's a step forward.
However, none of the demographic breakdowns or shifts in these polls were mentioned in the news reports, and I suspect the reason for that is because the media never questioned the data to begin with.
As a result, the opportunity for honest debate was lost.

As a result, the opportunity for honest debate was lost? Gee. You don't suppose that was the whole purpose, do you, Faithful Reader?

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Mon. 05/23/05 08:03:02 AM
Categorized as Media.


   
   

"Exaltation"

Random Poetry List XL

O leaf upon the highest bough,
The poet of the woods art thou
   To whom alone 'tis given—
The farthest from thy place of birth—
To hold communion with the earth
   Nor lose the light of heaven.

O leaf upon the topmost height,
Amid thy heritage of light
   Unsheltered by a shade,
'Tis thine the loneliness to know
That leans for sympathy below
   Nor finds what it hath made.

John B. Tabb (American, 1845-1909)

Originally e-mailed on Tuesday, May 23, 2000 @ 8:41 PM.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Mon. 05/23/05 07:57:35 AM
Categorized as Literary & Random Poetry List.


   

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