I Wish They’d Stop Sanitizing History

Recently, I heard that a publisher is going to change the word “nigger” to “slave” in Huckleberry Finn, and my thought is that they missed the point.  Mark Twain was controversial, heck, he still is; the fact that he didn’t want his autobiography published until 100 years after his death speaks to that.  I think Twain had a better grasp of the controversy than the publishing house making the changes seems to think, and, by changing the words, the book will probably lose some of its impact.  If people are so offended by a word that they won’t read a book because of it, than maybe those people should think about that, and what it says about them.  (They also might not want to read the KJV of Deut. 23:2 for a different offensive word.)  Starting down this road of censorship seems like a bad idea to me.

Another thing I heard about on the news was that the House of Representative’s reading of the Constitution left out the ‘slaves being counted as 3/5′ passage.  It’s almost like they’re trying to rewrite history.  It makes me wonder what else they left out, and what they’ll try to leave out as they write new laws.  Beyond the fact that the people who wrote it were setting guidelines, I get the feeling that the people who pushed for the reading of it were mostly just trying to waste time.  And leaving parts out seems to point to a selective view of history.  Looking at how it was and how things have changed can be a valuable lesson.  Ignoring history doesn’t make it go away.

A Particular Order of Narnia

I would love to own The Chronicles of Narnia series, but I would want it to be numbered in the order that it was written as opposed to the that the new order that I keep seeing.  Yeah, I know, it’s supposed to be chronological, but maybe it was written in the order that it was written for a reason.  Anyway, I don’t know how hard it would be to find it in the original order, but that’s the way I would want it.

A Star Stone Book

I already have several Stasheff books, but I don’t have either of the Star Stone ones.  I’m pretty sure that I checked out and read the first one a long time ago, but I wouldn’t mind having it to read again.

World War Z

I recently finished World War Z by Max Brooks.  Or, perhaps I should say that I finally finished it; I’ve been reading it off and on for quite some time.  It’s a good book, but it sometimes freaked me out, too.  I would suggest that anybody with an active imagination to consider that before they pick up this book.  I found reading other books concurrently helped, but I don’t know if that would work for others.

The book is written as a series of interviews with survivors of a war against a zombie invasion.  The interviews work there way through the beginning of the infestation to the time after the war where things are starting to get back to normal.  Well, as normal as things can get when there’s still some zombies still around.

Ratio

Now this is a book I can get behind.  I heard about it on NPR.  I like the idea of having a list of ratios to know how to make basic recipes.  I think too many people worry about making a recipe ‘just right’, when it really not that important most of the time; especially when it comes to spices.  As long as the basic recipe is right, the rest of it’s just variants.  In fact, I had an idea for a cookbook somewhat similar to this, in a general sense.  It would have basic recipes and then a list of variants after each.  The point of my idea was to encourage people to not be afraid to change things in a recipe, and support the idea of trying new things.  I think this book probably does a better job of that than I could, so I’m glad it’s out there.  That being said, I won’t be dumping my cookbooks.  I like to flip through them to get ideas for recipes.

Towel Day

Don’t panic, and don’t forget you’re towel!  Today is Towel Day.  It commemorates Douglas Adams, the author of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy“.