Letters to the Editor
shannonr
Published Letters: 257 Editor's Choice: 80
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Bill said what?!
[Read the article: Bill O'Reilly has a very tiny ... blacklist]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"These pin-heads running around going, 'Get out of Iraq now' don't know what they're talking about," he said. "These are the same people before Hitler invaded in WWII that were saying, 'He's not such a bad guy.'"
You're right as usual, Bill. I've often talked with my friends about all those damn 80-year old traitors running around the place.
O'Reilly stopped making sense (if he ever did) years ago.
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Lewis himself on the order of the books:
[Read the article: "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"Chronological order" describes the series beginning with "Magician's Nephew", contrasting with "published order" which begins with "Lion, Witch..".
In a letter written in 1957 to an American boy named Laurence, Lewis wrote the following:
'I think I agree with your order {i.e. chronological} for reading the books more than with your mother's. The series was not planned beforehand as she thinks. When I wrote The Lion I did not know I was going to write any more. Then I wrote P. Caspian as a sequel and still didn't think there would be any more, and when I had done The Voyage I felt quite sure it would be the last. But I found I was wrong. So perhaps it does not matter very much in which order anyone read them. I'm not even sure that all the others were written in the same order in which they were published.'
Quoted in "Letters to Children"
There is an excellent discussion of the "two orders" on this page: http://www.aslan.demon.co.uk/narnia.htm
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The more things change...
[Read the article: A million bogus fabrications]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Surely we're well past the point, as a reading public, where the words "a memoir" or indeed "based on a true story" indicate anything but a slight frisson of "extra believability juice" added to the entirely fictional mix inside the covers of a novel.
Here's a hint: factual books provide footnotes listing articles, papers, other books. Factual books exist in a very specific and carefully guarded world of review and peer criticism. Factual books, with rare exceptions, don't read like novelised movie scripts and become bestsellers.
James Frey, like all those before him to fall foul of the idiotic "but you said it was true!!!" brigade wrote a NOVEL. Novels are fiction.
The fact that the author claims to have "lived the story" described on the pages of any novel is simply another marketing twist, as any intelligent person who as ever seen Frey live (or even just on Oprah) would immediately guess with no further evidence.
Frey is a novelist. Novelists make things up. I can't help wondering if not a small portion of the shame the gullible will now try to heap upon Frey is simply ire at being fooled by such transparent fiction.
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Got anything besides comments on the guy's looks!?
[Read the article: The man behind Abercrombie & Fitch]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Sounding exactly like the supposedly bitchy "in-crowd" that Jeffries markets so successfully to, the personal attacks comprising 100% of the posts so far, and much of the article, would be amusing if they weren't so darn sad.
It's just marketing, people. It's not remotely scary. It doesn't have any chance of messing up anyone's life. And, in the case of the 'controversial' t-shirts, it's utterly hilarious that anyone at all would find that sort of intentionally faux-gasp sophomoric stuff offensive.
With really offensive things in the world, like tax cuts for the rich, and a murderous resource war perpetrated by the richest country in the world, you people have some "I'm terribly offended" juice left over for A&F!? Give me a break.
So the "in" crowd need their little uniforms to cover up the gaping emptiness inside. So Jeffries is getting rich selling crap to the colourless -- ain't that the American dream?
What is it about A&F and Mike Jeffries that really bothers you? Their "you must conform to rebel" clothes? His white teeth? Or is there a deeper unease that you're trying to cover up here? Something about runaway consumerism and a never-really-left-high-school desperation to be part of a tribe -- any tribe? Grow up, already!
"Uncool" people bitching about A&F is what drives their marketing, a point that the article's author (almost) got. It allows them to maintain their "the cool get it, everyone else doesn't" pose. So, by all means, get on board!
Or, if you've really got the cahones, take a long, hard look at what you're really catting on about.
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Coulter is a plant
[Read the article: Right-wing party animals]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It's been obvious to me for some time that Coulter is playing too one-dimensional a game to actually be a "conservative".
I mean, she drives away some members of her own party who are even fractionally left of "full right", but that's not her mission. Her mission is clearly to ensure that the "Reagan Democrats" never, ever, come back to the Republican Party.
Although I am impressed technically with the ploy of sending a pretend foaming, rabid attack dog over to the other side to drive the non-rabid back to your own team, and I think Coulter certainly does this, I can't help at be dismayed at her other effect: planting hideously offensive slogans in the mouths of the mouth-breathing element on the right. Kill them, convert their children to Christianity sort of stuff.
So unless she's already gone "off the reservation" -- in which case the rabid dog analogy needs to come to its analogical conclusion -- could Coulter's Democrat handlers please broadcast the "deactivate" code? Your experiement worked. Setting up Coulter as a sort of Republican Howard Campbell Jr. was fun, and you pulled it off, but please read the rest of Vonnegut's "Mother Night". You are what you pretend to be.