Rogue Lawyer
by John Grisham
Remember the movie The Lincoln Lawyer based upon the book of the same name by author Michael Connelly? Well author John Grisham certainly does. Grisham's novel Rogue Lawyer uses the same premise and seemingly even the same hero-a well, roguish, attorney who operates out of his vehicle, practices situational ethics, stays one step ahead of upset clients and angry law enforcement operatives, and has a black Man Friday of exceptional loyalty and impressive physical stature. Grisham doesn't try to hide the Connelly influence. In some respects I guess you could call it more of a tribute or deliberate tip of the hat as the title character, Sebastian Rudd, likes to read Connelly novels in his down time.
As mentioned Sebastian is the defense attorney of last resort for people who have run out of places to look for help. Some of the people Sebastian represents include victims of police brutality, mobsters on death row, and mentally challenged teens wrongly accused of horrible crimes. It doesn't matter to Sebastian (professionally speaking) if a sanctimonious ambitious politician was caught in bed with a dead woman AND a live boy. Sebastian is still going to fight to make the state prove its case. Sebastian insists on trying to force the state to obey the law down to the last little detail. If need be Sebastian will cheat in court or stretch the law to its breaking point, especially when he knows the state's representatives are also lying. This makes Sebastian less than popular with prosecutors, judges, and cops. Sebastian's courtroom adversaries have tried to make his professional life hell, get him disbarred or get him found in contempt of court. But cops often take Rudd's opposition more personally. They have tried to kill Rudd or his buddy Partner on at least three separate occasions. But as Rudd says they're still standing...or still ducking. Not all of Rudd's clients are innocent. Many of them aren't. Grisham uses this novel to articulate all the reasons why it's important to constrain the power of the state to put people in prison or deny them of life. So that portion of the novel was intriguing. It wasn't didactic.
Because sometimes you feel like a nut. And sometimes you don't. We talked before of how some people in other cultures consume insects. Although in this culture that practice is not widespread some people would like to endorse it and spread it. There are plenty of things that people consume in this culture, however which I find just as outrageous as eating insects. And of course not too far from me people are actually having a festival to celebrate the eating of cattle testicles and other delicacies.
DEERFIELD, MI - Members of American Legion Post 392 will host their 16th annual Testicle Festival on Saturday, March 18, offering savory options to patrons, such as cattle testicles and chicken gizzards.
The event, which will run from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m., typically draws a good crowd, according to Legion member Al Rau. Rau said the Legion will start serving dinner around noon "until they run out of nuts." Beer and mixed drinks are $2 a pop and there is no cover charge. "You get baked beans, coleslaw and a roll with dinner, plus the nuts and the gizzards," Rau said. "They taste like chicken."
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Yummy! Nuts and gizzards! Even if I still ate meat there would still be some foods which I wouldn't eat for any amount of money. This is not a question of rationality. It is purely about an ick and/or taboo factor. I'm not eating sheep stomachs. I'm not eating hog intestines. And I damn sure won't be eating bull balls. I just have no desire to ingest bovine genetic material. But everyone gets to do their own thing for their diet.
Are there foods you won't eat under any circumstances?
Quarry's Vote
by Max Allan Collins
With the Quarry series you pretty much know what you're going to get. This installment was no exception. Quarry is a ruthless Vietnam War veteran hit man with, if not quite a heart of gold, then at least a healthy respect for doing things the right way. Generally speaking if you're not on the list then you are as safe as a new born babe around Quarry. He's not the type to lose his temper and run around murdering people because someone insulted him or dented his fender. Live and let live is Quarry's motto, well at least it is when he's not removing someone from the planet for pay. Quarry lives by a code you see. As this book, a reprint from the late eighties opens, Quarry is living the dream life. After some unpleasantness from earlier stories, Quarry is retired from the murder-for hire game. He has fallen in love with a much younger woman, Linda and somewhat impulsively married her. Linda is good looking, busty, sweet, young and naive, which is just what Quarry likes. Linda doesn't know anything about Quarry's past. She doesn't understand Quarry's infrequent cold moods or know about the numerous guns, cash and fake id's that Quarry has stashed around their home and elsewhere. All she understands is that Quarry is a quiet man who loves her. And Quarry does love her, to the extent that someone considered the deadliest killer in the continental United States can love someone. By Quarry's own admission he's head over heels in love with Linda. He has learned things about himself that he didn't know. By his standards he's gotten soft and fat. He and Linda operate a Midwestern hotel, diner and gas station.
The money's not great but Quarry isn't hurting for money. Quarry has found peace. In fact Linda has just informed him that he's going to be a father. Well you know that bad men like Quarry can never truly find peace. One day when Linda is away a man whom Quarry has never seen before stops by Quarry's house.
And then suddenly, nothing happened.
I find Rachel Maddow's voice to be about as engaging as a dentist's drill so I didn't watch her MSNBC show last night which she breathlessly and shamelessly hyped as having the low down scoop on Trump's tax returns. So this morning when I awoke, I wondered if I had missed anything of import. No. No I didn't. Maddow didn't have Trump's current tax returns. She didn't have any evidence of nefarious tax evasion by Trump or investigation of Trump by the IRS or other ominous government agencies with a reputation for not playing around. She didn't have evidence of secret ties to Russian oligarchs or Trump owned dachas on the Black Sea. No, what Ms. Maddow had was two pages from Trump's 2005 federal income tax return that showed that Trump paid $38 million in taxes on an income of about $150 million. Please try to hide your shock. This juice wasn't worth the squeeze. Ultimately, the reporting that Ms. Maddow eventually aired on Tuesday night’s show — two pages from a single, decade-old federal tax return — was less groundbreaking than the mere fact that a portion of the president’s records had surfaced at all. The journalist who obtained the records, David Cay Johnston, a former tax reporter for The New York Times, said that the documents arrived “over the transom” in his mailbox. Mr. Johnston even speculated on-air that Mr. Trump had sent the documents himself.
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If you don't like rap music or more precisely certain types of rap music does that mean that you don't like Black people. Well it might. But as a pure question of logic of course disliking rap music doesn't mean you are a racist. One of the things that is funny about modern life is how thoroughly and completely many people came to associate rap music as the sole music which young black people were permitted to enjoy while still being "authentically" black. The flip side of this expectation is of course how fiercely some black people defend any attack on any type of rap music as being a a racist attack on all black people. Well maybe. Maybe not. I was moved to write about this because of a relatively recent incident in Houston, Texas in which the white female owner of a famed local club declined to book two rap acts because she found their lyrics offensive from both a gender and racial perspective. She also went on to make a few uncharitable comments about the type of people who came out to enjoy such music. She said that she would continue to book other types of rap music but of course by then the cat was out of the bag. Some comedians and musicians said that they would boycott the club because they felt unwelcome or that the owner was racist.
Black Book
directed by Paul Verhoeven
There are a number of thoughts which I had after re-watching this 2006 Dutch drama film set in the waning days of World War 2. The first is that the lead actress Carice Van Houten, just like her character Melisandre in HBO's Game of Thrones seemingly hasn't aged at all. Maybe it's just good genes and clean living. She wasn't wearing a ruby necklace in this film. Actually often she wasn't wearing anything in this film. The second thought is that if real life were a story, after the unpleasant experience of being invaded, defeated, occupied and subjugated you would think that the Western European democracies would have realized that violence, racism and colonialism were wrong. But real life is not a story. Freed from Nazi threat or rule, the post war European democracies almost immediately all fought vicious, bloody and ultimately pointless wars attempting to maintain white control over non-white nations in Africa and Asia. Some of the very same people depicted here leading the Dutch underground against the Germans wound up in Indonesia doing the same thing or worse to Indonesians that the Germans did to the Dutch. Life is strange. Everyone's a hypocrite. And the last major issue which crossed my mind after viewing this film is that both loneliness and love make for some very strange bedfellows sometimes. Even the worst of us usually still need human contact.
Today we have people opposed to the current U.S. President who style themselves the Resistance. Their opposition primarily consists of snarky tweets, strongly worded opinion pieces, hats shaped like female genitalia, sucker punching Trump voters and an occasional march or two. What would the Resistance look like once people start getting shot? Death has a tendency to reveal just who is real and just who is faking the funk by calling themselves the Resistance. There's no shame in recognizing that in facing real oppression, most people will go along to get along. Most of us would prefer not to be shot.
I Am Providence
by Nick Mamatas
The title of this book will be instantly familiar to any Lovecraft fan. It's what is engraved upon Lovecraft's tombstone. It's also an atypically boastful quote from the writer. So you might expect that this is a book about H.P. Lovecraft. Well it is and it isn't. If you are the type of person who avoids horror or sci-fi stories then don't worry because despite the seeming subject matter this is not at all a horror or sci-fi story-with perhaps just one or two minor exceptions. However we earn our daily bread there are millions of other people who do so in the same fashion. And from time to time people in the same line of work will have reason to come together for conferences, dinners and social gatherings. The conversations at such meetings may well be incomprehensible to people outside of that particular circle of experts. There are discussions about the finer points of the law or physics theories about dark matter which would not only bore me to tears but which I do not have the training or experience to follow. Someone who works on a farm may have a deep understanding of bovine diseases and be excited to compare notes with like minded people dealing with the same issues. A person who writes or acts for a living will probably be excited to rub shoulders with other artists who do the same thing and discuss challenges which less artistically inclined people simply can't understand. Cops get together to discuss the latest tactics in crowd control, legal requirements and forced entry. Accountants get excited over new payroll software. Guitarists may spend days arguing over amp circuity and music theory. And so on. Everyone has some area of knowledge which intrigues them and in which they may well be expert. This book asks the reader to imagine that the experts in question are not accountants or lawyers or physicists but instead H.P. Lovecraft fans, writers, would be writers and even a few groupies.
The Lovecraft experts, many of whom fit the stereotype of nerds blissfully unencumbered by traditional notions of hygiene, politesse or body hair removal, have come together in Providence, Rhode Island for the Summer Tentacular, an annual Lovecraft convention. Just because they all get together doesn't mean they like each other. A lot of the attendees are just there for the food and feuds.
