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Chalker’s “Charon” may not be the greatest but don’t call it quits yet!

April 29, 2010

Of the four novels in The Four Lords of the Diamond series, I think that Charon: a Dragon at the Gate, simply falls on its face. I thought the same when I was sixteen reading the series for the first time. The first book, Lilith: A Snake in the Grass is cool because it sets [...]

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Organic, Inc.: Natural Foods and How They Grew by Samuel Fromartz

April 15, 2010

Organic, Inc. describes the rise of “organic” from a hippie health-food eccentricity to a mainstream American food industry over the past few decades. Fromartz, a business journalist, writes in a very accessible and enjoyable style, that keeps your interest even in the midst of somewhat dry and esoteric subjects like political wrangling between organic proponents [...]

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stagnation, exploitation and hope in Chalker’s Lords of the Diamond and Soul Rider novels

April 7, 2010

I’m still on my Jack Chalker kick. Just the other day, I finished re-reading The Four Lords of the Diamond series. I read it last when I was sixteen. It’s a pretty exciting tale of a super assassin sent to four separate, interrelated, penal colony worlds, the Warden Diamond, to unravel a secret plot of [...]

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R.I.P. Magic Chef; long live LG!

March 10, 2010

Our dish washer finally died. I saw it coming. Do they even make Magic Chef appliances any more?!? I think that ours was the original dishwasher from the time our building was constructed in 1978. So really a pretty good run but it had sure lost its magic long ago. There were always a bunch [...]

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sexual politics in Chalker’s Soul Rider series

February 25, 2010

I’ve finished Jack Chalker’s five volume “Soul Rider” series and since, I’ve been obsessing more and more about issues of sex, gender and sexuality raised by the work. So here we are on this amazing place called World. There are areas that are more or less like our planet where the “conventional” physical laws work: [...]

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ecstatic happiness on Chalker’s world of flux and anchor

February 4, 2010

“…some people take drugs to chemically induce a happiness they cannot otherwise achieve; others drink to excess for the same reason. Still others throw themselves into religious frenzies in a bout of self-intoxication. All are seeking happiness. But happiness, even Heaven, is the absence of further progress. When one is happy, one wants no more [...]

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When in doubt, have champagne: French Women for All Seasons by Mireille Guiliano

January 29, 2010

I just finished Mireille Guiliano’s French Women for All Seasons, the sequel to her bestselling French Women Don’t Get Fat. Like the first, this book is a guide to thinness and the good life. The name for this blog entry comes from one of her section headings on wine; and just like champagne, this work [...]

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surviving the Eighties on Jack Chalker’s Well World

January 7, 2010

Has anyone out there in the greater blog-i-verse ever heard of Jack Chalker? He saved my sanity in the 1980’s. I was a dorky, shy, hypersensitive high school kid then; confused about a lot of things: adulthood, sexuality, my relationship to the world beyond the cookie cutter NoVA suburb that I grew up in, you [...]

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New Moon for the blue moon

December 22, 2009

Yep. I loved the film. Hegui and I went the first night that New Moon opened at the huge Cineplex in the new downtown San Francisco shopping center. It was the 9:30PM show so was mostly teen girls, adult women, a sprinkling of uncomfortable boyfriends and some hip gay guys. We were with the last [...]

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Slow Food Nation: Why our food should be good, clean, and fair by Carlo Petrini

November 18, 2009

Well, I’ve finally been able to finish this challenging book. To be honest, I skimmed the last quarter of it. Slow Food Nation: Why Our Food Should Be Good, Clean, And Fair was a real struggle for me. Ostensibly the book is about exactly what the title says: the slow food movement and the philosophy [...]

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