Your Feminist Prayer of the Day

Nicked from here, a new blog I bookmarked. This Wonder Woman reminds me of Lynda Carter--strong, muscled, not too thin. You do not screw with this Diana.

Hail, Diana, Full of strength
Our Justice League is with thee.
Blessed art thou among Amazonians,
and blessed is thy punch to the gut of evildoers,
They cry, Jesus!
Wonder Woman, Wielder of the Lasso of Truth,
pray for us mere mortals,
now and at the hour of invisible jet.
A-mazing Wo-man.

Wanker of the Day

From here:

At Wednesday’s meeting for ExxonMobil shareholders in Dallas, CEO Rex Tillerson told those assembled that an economy that runs on oil is here to stay, and cutting carbon emissions would do no good.

He asked, “What good is it to save the planet if humanity suffers?”

Oh, I don't know. I suppose the people affected by Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy thought that was just a walk in the park. We'll put up with stuff like that, don't you know, as long as our precious oil-based economy keeps rolling along, and we can rebuild in the same places where those pesky EF-5 tornadoes keep coming through.

Now that I think about it, that last sentence must have been misquoted. Surely it reads like this:

"What good is it to save the planet if humanity suffers if our profits suffer?" 

Bernie Sanders, God bless him, talks about breaking up the big banks. This is a laudable goal, but it's not the most important.

Right now, the biggest threat to humanity, and to Earth itself, is the oil companies.

"Restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men"

The obvious is that which is never seen until someone expresses it simply.   ~Khalil Gibran

This should be posted in every police department in the country.

And please don't feed me that shit about "women taking precautions." We need to work towards a world where women don't have to take precautions, and rapists are prosecuted.

This should be everyone's goal.

"Who was that masked man?"

There's been a lot of outrage, and deservedly so, about Representative Louie Gohmert telling a woman who had a medically necessary late-term abortion she should have given birth anyway. But nothing I've read has addressed this little snippet of his comment. (Maybe I look for these things because I read a lot of science fiction dystopias.)

Ms. Zink, having my great sympathy and empathy both. I still come back wondering, shouldn’t we wait… and see if the child can survive before we decide to rip him apart? So, these are ethical issues, they’re moral issues, they’re difficult issues, and the parents should certainly be consulted. But it just seems like, it’s a more educated decision if the child is in front of you to make those decisions.

The parents should certainly be consulted?

This lends a very creepy undertone to the whole thing. If the parents are not making the decision, then who the hell is? Who is this 'we' you speak of, kemosabe?

That's a rhetorical question, of course. Obviously, in Mr. Gohmert's mind, the omniscent, all-knowing State is the only entity capable of making such decisions, and we should bow to its godlike wisdom.

A party of small, limited government, my ass.

Review: False Memory

False Memory by Dan Krokos

My rating: 1 of 5 stars



I want to start by saying that I read this book right after the excellent The Prey (see here), and pretty much any book would suffer by comparison. Having said that, this book is just meh.

It isn't just the cliched teenage-amnesiac story. It isn't the overly convoluted, twisty plot I could hardly follow, and the fact you know straight up that most of the things the protagonist is telling you aren't true (because the book's title is--wait for it--False Memory). It isn't the heavy-duty ethics lapses, such as one major character, Rhys, murdering the clones of the four protagonists and nobody thinking twice about it.

The book's most fatal flaw is the four main characters are deader than doornails.

No, they're not literally dead, not zombies or vampires, although that might spice things up a bit. They're simply unremarkable. They have no defining characteristics, no memorable voices, no life. One of them, Olive, dies in a throwaway death scene and the narrator hardly blinks. I felt like I needed a scorecard to tell them apart, because they completely lacked the little quirks and tics of real, fully developed characters. Then I realized I didn't care enough about them to demand a scorecard.

I don't know who edited this book, but there's some major fail here. This is one of those books where you say, "Hell, I can do better than that. I've already done better than that."



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"Men argue. Nature acts."

The images coming out of Moore, Oklahoma are just incredible.

51 people dead (as of this writing). A mile-wide swath of destruction. At least an EF-4 in strength, perhaps an EF-5. 200+ mph winds.

And even after this, there will still be assholes who deny the reality of climate change.

Review: The Prey

The Prey by Andrew Fukuda

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



This book is a sequel to The Hunt, which I read a few months ago. The Prey definitely improved on its predecessor; in fact, it is one of the best books I have read so far this year.

The previous book introduced a dark, bloody, dystopian world, where humans are seemingly all but extinct, subsumed by a new breed: a superstrong, superfast cannibalistic "people" who will literally tear you limb from limb, eating your flesh and drinking your blood. The hero, Gene, survives by the use of a brazenly clever "Purloined Human" (or "Heper," what humans are called in this book) technique: he hides in the midst of the monsters, pretending to be one of them (helped along by excessive showering, use of deodorant, and razors, to hide the body hair the monsters apparently do not grow). He has thought like one of them, as a matter of survival, for so long that it is very hard for him to remember that he is, in fact, human, which was one of the first book's major plot points.

This book ups the stakes exponentially, and answers a great many questions. The "duskers," as we learn they are called, are actually genetically engineered supersoldiers gone wrong. They were bred to fight humanity's wars centuries ago and ended up turning on their creations. There is supposedly a cure for this called the "Origin," which the group from the first book spends a great deal of time searching for (and finds in the Very. Last. Sentence. of this book--seriously, I've never seen cliffhangers like Andrew Fukuda writes). Gene and his pals, still being pursued by the duskers, stumble upon a hidden city of humans that is not quite right, to say the least. Either they're watching the desert city where the duskers, still five million strong, are confined, or they're humanity's last stand, products of a devil's bargain with the duskers. That point is not resolved; I trust it will be addressed in the last book of the trilogy.

The hallmarks of the first book remain: the almost unbearable tension and the gripping action scenes that all but explode off the page. If this story ever makes it to the movie screen, it would take a trilogy of films, a la The Hunger Games, to do it justice.



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