Category Archives: Media

C.S. Lewis on His Dark Materials, Harry Potter, and The Da Vinci Code

Or whatever certain circles think is the controversial-book-we-need-to-protect-people-from du jour. There are earnest people who recommend realistic reading for everyone because, they say, it prepares us for real life, and who would, if they could, forbid fairy-tales for children and romances for adults because they ‘give a false picture of life’—in other words, deceive their […]

How I Rip and Encode MP3s on the Ubuntu Linux Command Line

I like to know how to use the command line for everything I can. Here are the tools and commands I use to make mp3s. First, I rip from the CDROM to a wav file. cdparanoia 1 prokofiev1.wav cdparanoia lets me specify the input device, but I don’t need to, since the default—/dev/cdrom—is what I […]

What Plato Might Have Said But Didn’t

Search Google for “Let me make the songs of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws,” and you’ll discover a number of people think Plato said such a thing. However, as Kevin Mungons pointed out, there’s no evidence he did. How do faux quotes like this get started? They seem to come […]

Visit to Maine

Today we took a day trip with my mother to Maine, mainly to see the house of author Sarah Orne Jewett, who was the subject of my mother’s masters thesis. Jewett had an odd fascination with her initials; she would carve them on random items, including the window pane of her room, which you can […]

Harry S Truman

A few weeks ago I finished David McCullough’s Pulitzer prize-winning biography. I started the book mainly because I enjoyed McCullough’s history of the Brooklyn Bridge, and when I find an author I like I try to read his other books. Even though I think some of Truman’s policies as President were misguided, and I despise […]

Christine Rosen’s Fundamentalist Education

After hearing an interesting NPR interview with Christine Rosen, author of My Fundamentalist Education: A Memoir of a Divine Girlhood, I thought her book would describe why she left “fundamentalism.” Other books do that: Leaving the Fold is a collection of testimonies of former “fundamentalists” who end up everywhere from milquetoast Christianity to bizarre spiritualistic […]