Steven M. Moore's Blog, page 157
January 28, 2015
Off-Beat Recipes #1…
[Note: I come up with these occasionally. Just thought I’d share. Maybe recipes for the Super Bowl? Or, something to eat when trapped inside by a blizzard? I take no responsibility for medical fallout. You are what you eat…and drink….]
Baloney Quesadillas. Ingredients: Flatbread, cheese and baloney slices, and salsa. Layer slices of baloney and American cheese onto half a flatbread (ham and brie can be used by sophisticates). Spoon on salsa liberally. Fold the flat bread over and heat in the o...
January 27, 2015
Irish Stew #36…
[Note: I apologize for the length of this post. No single item merited a full post, though, and there were many items in the news I wanted to comment on. Bear with me….]
Item: Future gridlock? Mr. Obama, in his State of the Union address, threw down the gauntlet. Some pundits are asking: why propose all these initiatives to help the middle class when he knows they’ll never get past the GOP Congress? These pundits have answered their own question, at least in part. The President knows they won’...
January 22, 2015
Are you ready for multimedia ebooks?
[Note to readers: this is my second post on the ebook revolution. In the first, I spoke to the advantages of ebooks over pbooks, but I didn’t mention the one potential advantage considered here. Enjoy!]
I’ve been an avid reader all my life, but I sense that there are fewer of us with each passing decade. That’s a unisex statement. When most people are just struggling to make ends meet, sometimes with more than one job, raise their children, and stay healthy, time for any entertainment can beco...
January 21, 2015
Movie Reviews #10…
Selma. I suppose it would be politically correct to join many reviewers, including WABC’s Sandy Keenan, and call this the “movie of the year,” but I don’t have to be politically correct in these posts. Having lived through these events (the film focuses on those leading up to the Votings Right Act of 1965) and previous ones leading up to integration (they’re more important, but not covered in the film), I will still acclaim that this is a pretty damn good documentary (that justifies the lack...
January 20, 2015
Poverty in America…
I often kid that I’m unlucky—I’ve never won much of anything, even the lottery of indie publishing, which I play in a lot. But that’s just mouthing off because I’m terribly lucky. I was born into a poor albeit not destitute middle class family where my parents struggled mightily to give their two sons a better chance in life. They had escaped the Depression in the Midwest, moved to California, and subsequently suffered through the rationing of WWII. We all worked our butts off and, with treme...
January 16, 2015
News and Notices from the Writing Trenches #79…
Item: Who’s N. Scott Momaday? Some of my readers might have noted his quote running across the top of this website and wondered. More energetic ones might have googled him to find that he’s of Kiowa descent (my understanding: they roamed in the same general geographic area as the Lakota, or Sioux) and the winner of the 1969 Pulitzer of House Made of Dawn. Very observant ones who also receive the Smithsonian magazine will remember him as the author of the article “The Year that the Stars Fell”...
January 15, 2015
Oldies but goodies?
Hillary, Jeb, and Mitt. Old duffers in the Senate and House. Most of the SC judges. Naughty or nice, they’re old. But are they effective? Do they have enough stamina to continue a political life? And, most importantly, why aren’t younger people stepping forward? Even Barbara Bush wondered about that, specifically why someone else besides the Clintons and Bushes couldn’t run for president. My ponderings are more general: is politics so tainted that people can’t even imagine running for office?...
January 14, 2015
Review of Carolyn J. Rose’s The Devil’s Tombstone…
(Carolyn J. Rose, The Devil’s Tombstone, Amazon Digital, 2014, B00RC4X0XQ)
This mystery novel makes the series set in the Catskills around Hemlock Lake a trilogy. 75% is excellent mystery and suspense, but not as tightly focused as #2 (Through a Yellow Wood) or as fresh as #1 (Hemlock Lake). It is another narrative jewel, though. I love the setting and characters and Ms. Rose’s probing of good, evil, and all the gray area in between. She does this as well as or better than, say, David Baldacci...
January 13, 2015
The French problem is our problem…
France has declared war on jihadist extremists. The rest of Europe is at war with them too. And we are at war with these radicals. Indeed, the modern world should be at war with them. There’s nothing “modern” about this fanatical thinking, this barbaric insult to true Islam and false ideology. It’s old thinking, a fanatical vision of how much better it would be to return to the simpler days of the early Middle Ages, of Ayatollahs and warrior chieftans, feudal lords and lowly serfs, a social s...
January 8, 2015
The ebook revolution: changing times…
The ebook is changing how, what, and when people read. The “how” is clear: many people are finding that carrying around and reading a book with an ereading device is better than lugging around a huge pbook. Consider William Manchester Paul Reid’s The Last Lion, a biography about Winston Churchill. (Yes, I read books like that too.) This pbook (the version I’m reading isn’t even hardbound) weighs more than the bust of Beethoven sitting on my upright piano (I use fake books, the staple of piano...
