(Part 2) Top products from r/entertainment

>Don't you often celebrate your love for people who have a little good and a lot of bad in them?

Well, no, not really. If they have only a little good but a lot of bad then there's not much to celebrate. I hate to risk Godwinating myself, but they say even Hitler loved dogs and children. The question is how much good and how much bad has the US caused, and at what scales? That is probably not possible to reasonably measure now. Maybe 100 years from now, if any of the transhumans remember what the US was, then we can take a dispassionate look at the historical situation and see how it all worked out.

>it's possible to love it for the good while still hating the bad

Fair enough, but there is no mention in the song of the bad, only the good. I need to have God Bless the USA coming in one ear, and People of the Sun or something coming in the other. :-D

As far as my ambivalent feelings go, that's just the way I feel. I've traveled a fair amount in Europe as well as the US, and it is always a relief to get home. But on the other hand even when I lived in New Jersey, it was never "home" to me, even though it was in America. And I felt a lot more alienated when I was in the deep south than when I was in Germany, say.

A lot of my ambivalence stems from reading books like The Politics of Heroin and A People's History of the United States, and general background reading I've done on stuff like the firebombing of Tokyo and the Banana Wars, etc. Ah I said I wasn't going to go tit-for-tat here, sorry, I'll leave it at that. Anyway, loving America in a realistic way seems to me like what it must be like to have a close family member who beat you as a child or something (maybe not quite that extreme, but you get the picture). It's a complicated kind of love, with a lot of caveats, and to express only the love and not expressing the other part makes me feel a little weird.

Thanks for sticking around and having a civil conversation about this though, it's an interesting subject to talk about.

Meh, it's been a SERIOUSLY long time since I kept up with her, but she went all "yay Jesus" for a while there and stopped writing vampire/witch stuff for a long time. Then Stan Rice died, Katrina happened, and she was suddenly like "yeah, back to vampires; Christians are hypocrites."

I think she only denounced her stuff because she found Jesus for a little while.

I have the profound pleasure to live in the same town and come in contact with Nikki Giovanni. In one of her earlier works, Gemini, she talks at length about bringing down the white establishment and not replacing it with black people, because then she'd just be in the same establishment. She wanted to bring it all down and start all over. She wrote this in the early 70s. As I gave her a copy to sign in 2008, I wanted to ask her how she felt about this now, particularly since she has a very well paying job and teaches primarily white kids. "Nikki, I'd like to ask you about Gemini," I said. She began to laugh and said, "oh, I haven't read that in so long... All I can tell you is that you always change. Every day, you change. When you don't change, you're dead."

So... I think a lot of authors denounce their earlier work, but not because they don't agree, but because they change.

She wrote a book. I recommend it. She was also an addict for a long period time of time, and got clean when she left Scott shortly after their kids were born.

I dont think she is making this about her, I think she is trying to show that an addict doesnt just mess up his life - he messes up the lives of everyone around him. And its not healthy to look up to these people as heroes or role models, when they are fighting such battles with their addictions. Just my two cents.

These quotes from the article really show what she is trying to say:

>The outpouring of condolences and prayers offered to our children, Noah and Lucy, has been overwhelming, appreciated and even comforting. But the truth is, like so many other kids, they lost their father years ago. What they truly lost on December 3rd was hope.

>"That mess was our father. We loved him, but a deep-rooted mix of love and disappointment made up the majority of our relationship with him."

>This is the final step in our long goodbye to Scott. Even though I felt we had no other choice, maybe we never should have let him go. Or maybe these last few years of separation were his parting gift to us – the only way he could think to soften what he knew would one day crush us deep into our souls.

Skip the shite article and read the great book about them: Whores.

You'll see why it went to shit: Heroin, then crack for Perry. Great performers and musicians, but wow, what a trainwreck. The book is built all from interview quotes from each of them during all these periods and after, so they tell the story instead of the authors voice.

"Take a fantastic leap of the imagination and explore the world through three parallel universes - Alphaverse (what our world could end up being), Betaverse (our world today), and Gammaverse (what our world could have been)"

This premise sounds strikingly similar to Kim Stanley Robinson's Three Californias trilogy.

Start with the oldest reviews, before the disclosure:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Cuckoos-Calling-Robert-Galbraith/product-reviews/0316206849/ref=cm_cr_pr_btm_link_18?ie=UTF8&pageNumber=18&showViewpoints=0&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending

5 stars, 3, 4, 4, 5, 5, 5, 5, 5, 3, 5. Those are good reviews.

Thanks for posting, but this is the actual source. The article you linked was quoting the book.

Read this book, HBO is making a documentary of it. IMO people can believe whatever they want, but this organization is run by thugs :

http://www.amazon.com/Going-Clear-Scientology-Hollywood-Prison/dp/0307745309

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dance-Dragons-Book-Song-Fire/dp/0002247399/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&qid=1292353217&sr=8-7

You can preorder the book and change all that.

I highly reccomend Cesar Milan's book: http://www.amazon.com/Cesars-Way-Everyday-Understanding-Correcting/dp/0307337332

Already a book. and a webcomic

http://amzn.com/0140051813

Some things I've gotten from Paperbackswap in recent months:

• A History of Mathematics
  
• Love All the People by Bill Hicks
  
• The Cassini Division by Ken MacLeod
  
• The Guns of August and The March of Folly (in hardcover) by Barbara Tuchman
  
• A large stack of Discworld paperbacks
  
  ...and a hell of a lot of other things. Many of these are things that had been on my wish list, so I got first crack at them when someone listed them. The service is useful beyond what's available at a given moment.
  

I would suggest you read up on Cobra II.

If you don't want frozen grapes, they have these reuseable ice cubes.

https://www.amazon.com/Exclusive-Whiskey-Stones-Gift-Set/dp/B0716JZ71Y

Don’t forget the cookbook

I agree with you, 100%. Well, I've only read up to Vol. 7 of the books, so maybe the General is a character I haven't read of yet, but I assumed you meant the Governor, so 100% might still be the correct description.

Oh, and if you haven't already, you should pre-order The Walking Dead: Rise of the Governor while you can still get the hardcover for paperback prices.