I’m constantly tossing interesting websites into what I call my blogpile. Some of them find their way here in the form of regular posts, but more often than not they languish and get buried deeper in the pile. The end result is that I have to go back and do a bit of shoveling. Today’s item is The Boy Scouts Part 3.

1SG Troy Steward: The reason why I serve has changed several times over the 19+ years I have been in the Army. My career started long before I ever raised my hand for the first time. It probably started in 1969, on the day I was born at Ft. Bragg to a father who was a Green Beret, home on leave from one of his multiple tours in Vietnam for my birth. This was…

Poet Sherry Chandler has involved herself in a second blog and her second post at The Peace Tree on Chris Hedges’ War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning is riveting. I have tremendous respect for what Sherry writes and says. I have books stacked so I high I am at risk of being a comic obituary:

Writer dies trapped under fallen books, film at 11.

Yet, I’ve added Hedges’ book to the list and plan on picking it up later this morning.

Yesterday I mused about book lists and books important to me. And then last evening I heard a 1987 interview with one of my writing idols: Tom Wolfe. Before I knew what it meant to be a writer, I knew after reading The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and Hell’s Angels that I wanted to do what Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson did.

I’ve heard many versions of Wolfe’s discovery of New Journalism, but hearing him tell the story was magic for me.

You can hear his recounting at time mark 2:56, but I think this is one of Terry Gross’s best interviews so take the time to listen to the whole thing.

I could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. So for your morning blog chuckle I present: From My Dad.

Once upon a time, a young lad was born without a belly button; in its place was a golden screw. All the doctors told his mother that there was nothing they could do.

The moral of this story is: Don’t screw around with things you don’t understand – you could lose your ass.

How would you like to legally rake in more money than you can imagine and only be taxed at a 15-percent rate? Sound like a dream? It isn’t. Thanks to the largess of President George Bush and the Republican Congress we have a capital gains tax of 15-percent, the lowest in the history of the tax. But capital gains aren’t income you say?

Well they are if you’re a private-equity partner. Let Robert Reich explain:

What exactly do private-equity partners do? They use the investment money of pension funds and college endowments and wealthy investors to buy up publicly-held companies and turn them briefly into privately-held companies. Then they do what you might do when you want to resell your home – redecorate, refurbish, knock out some walls, apply fresh paint, sell the furniture.

When capital gains are taxed at less than half the tax rate the rich pay on their incomes, you can expect this sort of gamesmanship.

I’m not comfortable having issues of social justice being treated as games.

My name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. My electronic chapbook was born.

This is a passage I copied from Story: Substance, structure, style and the principles of screenwriting by Robert McKee.

If the value-charged condition of the character”s life stays unchanged from one end of a scene to the other, nothing meaningful happens. The scene has activity – talking about this or that – but nothing changes in value. It is a nonevent.

Part of being a good citizen of the blogosphere is visiting, reading and, most importantly, taking the time to leave a comment on other’s blogs. It’s all about the conversation. In the interest of setting an example I’ve decided to link to those blog posts that have compelled me to leave a comment.

1813 Eat Meat for Breakfast!
1207 Carole Cohen gets it

I’m constantly tossing interesting websites into what I call my blogpile. Some of them find their way here in the form of regular posts, but more often than not they languish and get buried deeper in the pile. The end result is that I have to go back and do a bit of shoveling. Today’s item is The Boy Scouts Part 2.

Eddie: Yesterday was one hell of a day. The day before, we’d headed out to pull overwatch over a crappy area. It was pretty uneventful, because my squad stayed back to guard the trucks while the dismounts set in. Not that I’m complaining, because overwatch usually involves a tall building and a lot of stairs, and with all the equipment, we’re each carrying 50-60 extra…

I’m not a well-read reader. While, I’ve read a lot of books, few of them would not appear on anyone’s top 100 list of World literature. But I am drawn to reading lists and occasionally I actually read one or two off of a list before I get spun off into another genre, another author. Yesterday I came across:

The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books. The list is intriguing for its brevity and breadth.

Brevity because it restricts each author’s list to no more than 10 works of fiction: novels, short-story collections, plays or poetry. That’s hard to do. I was once asked to compile such a list and I couldn’t cut it further than 18.

And breadth because it includes lists from no less than 125 working writers. There are many, many names on the list that I’ve never heard of, but who are, as indicated by their presence, writers of some note.

The 125 writers listed 554 books. At, as editor J. Pedar Zane notes, a book a week, that’s 11 1/2 years of reading.

So who’s on the the top top 10, those books that received the most votes?

1. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy.
2. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
3. War And Peace by Leo Tolstoy.
4. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov.
5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.
6. Hamlet by William Shakespeare.
7. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
8. In Search Of Lost Time by Marcel Proust.
9. The Stories of Anton Chekhov.

And, the only woman writer in the top top 10:

10. Middlemarch by George Elliot.

The Top Ten parses the list in any number of ways — top 10 of the 20th century, top 10 works of fantasy and science fiction and top 10 mysteries and thrillers, to list three.

And, of course, each writer’s personal list is included.

Here are three of the lists from writers I read and admire.

Sherman Alexie: Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, Howl by Allen Ginsberg, the poems of Emily Dickinson, The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko, She Had Some Horses by Joy Harjo, The Branch Will Not Break by James Wright, The Grapes Of Wrath by John Steinbeck and Beloved by Toni Morrison.

James Lee Burke: The Sound And The Fury by William Faulkner, Dubilners by James Joyce, For Whom The Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway, All The King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren, the stories of Flannery O’Connor, the stories of Andre Dubus, Mildred Pierce by James M. Cain, The Big Sky by A.B. Guthrie, Jr., The Moon And Sixpence by W. Somerset Maugham and The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Stephen King: The Golden Argosy edited by Van H. Cartmell and Charles Grayson, The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie, McTeague by Frank Norris, Lord Of The Flies by William Golding, Bleak House by Charles Dickens, 1984 by George Orwell, The Raj Quartet by Paul Scott, Light In August by William Faulkner and Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy.

Of the nearly 40 works here, I have read a grand total of one and a further handful I have either listened to on tape or gulp seen the movie.

I wonder what that says about me, my education and these kinds of lists? Would the individual lists be different if each author had been allowed to submit their selections anonymously? How different would the list be if the 125 authors had not been restricted to American and English writers?

Like all such lists, they are doomed from the beginning. It might have been possible to create such a list prior to World War I. But I think the explosion of publishing during the 20th century makes this an impossible task.

What do you think?

These things happen … the soul’s bliss
and suffering are bound together
like the grasses …

The last, sweet exhalations
of timothy and vetch
go out with the song of the bird;
the ravaged field
grows wet with dew.

From Twilight: After Haying by Jane Kenyon.

I could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. So for your morning blog chuckle I present: From My Dad.

God may have created man before woman, but there is always a rough draft before the masterpiece.

My name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. My electronic chapbook was born.

This is a passage I copied from Story: Substance, structure, style and the principles of screenwriting by Robert McKee.

A scene is an action through conflict in more or less continuous time and space that turns the value-charged condition of a character”s life on a t least one value with a degree of perceptible significance. Ideally, every scene is a story event.

I’m constantly tossing interesting websites into what I call my blogpile. Some of them find their way here in the form of regular posts, but more often than not they languish and get buried deeper in the pile. The end result is that I have to go back and do a bit of shoveling. Today’s item is The Boy Scouts Part 1.

Teflon Don: A Marine is working on a Police Training and Transition team. Two of his Iraqi Police trainees grab an insurgent, who calls out “By Hussein, let me go!” The IPs drop the insurgent, who runs away.The Marine, astonished, asks why they released the man, and the IPs explain: “He asked for mercy by Hussein, the son of the Prophet, and custom…

I so get this joke.

It’s been a busy week in Wally World: the Universe’s source of cheap plastic crap. On The Writing On The Wal — the blog USA Today says should be on its readers’ radar — Jonathan Rees, Robert Feinman, Peter Sayles and I continue our work dedicated to drawing back the curtain on the Bentonvile Behemoth’s corporate disinformation and other flackery.

THE ONLY BUM IN TOWN… Keep reading…

NEW YORK CITY PROTEST… 8 MAY… Keep reading…

THE FECKIN” T-SHIRTS ARE STILL THERE… Keep reading…

AT THE WALLY PLEX… There are sound stages on Hollywood”s back lots smaller than Bentonvile”s behemoths, so it”s no surprise that budding video talent has been sneaking cameras in at odd hours. And now for the midnight show at the Wally Plex featuring katiejobo. Keep reading…

WOULD SAM BE PROUD…? That”s the question that Forbes magazine asks in it”s profile of Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott this month. There”s nothing astonishing or even new in the profile, the litany of Wal-Mart events is familiar to any of our readers. Keep reading…

WALLOPING WAL-MART… I have long and repeatedly made the case that Wal-Mart is not a retail juggernaut. Smart business people with vision are quite capable to taking on the Bentonvile Behemoth and taking it down as the case of Publix illustrates. Keep reading…

RETAIL AND WHOLESALE IN INDIA… Not only will Wal-Mart compete with India”s traditional mom-and-pop retailers, it also intends to sell to these stores, becoming the major supplier for its own competitors. The strategy is Machiavellian in the extreme. Keep reading…

WAL-MART GOING BROWN…? In what could be a commercial version of the retail tear-down trend (buying a house for the property and demolishing the existing structure to build a new one) Wal-Mart is reportedly looking at the Gottschalks chain of 64 stores in California. Keep reading…

CAN THE STOCKS BE FAR BEHIND…? I thought that Wal-Mart wasn”t chasing down any shoplifters who stole merchandise worth less than $25. Well, Lisa King Fithian and an unnamed second shoplifter puts a lie to that rumor. She pleaded guilty to stealing a $7 item and was given a choice: Keep reading…

I could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. So for your morning blog chuckle I present: From My Dad.

The Silent Treatment

Men are not equipped for these kinds of contests.