Well, it’s that time of year again– The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at UCLA. I wrote about this last year, for those of you that care. This year’s edition is this weekend: today and tomorrow. I’ll be heading over there tomorrow afternoon, when it’s not as gloomy as today. (For the record, I still haven’t gotten around to reading Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. *blush*)

In honor of a great weekend (and anticipated overdose!) of books, I’m posting yet another book meme. This one is slightly different from the one I did last month, but it’s revealing in its own way too. Thanks to Verde for finding this.

Book Meme!
1. Copy & paste.
2. Bold the ones you’ve read.
3. Add four recent reads to the end.
4. Tag!

I won’t tag anyone, but you’re welcome to use this on your own blog, provided of course that you link back here. *grin* I’ll put those that I’ve read in bold, and leave those that I haven’t read, should read, will never read in normal text.

The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy - Douglas Adams
The Great Gatsby - F.Scott Fitzgerald
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Harry Potter 6) - J.K. Rowling
Life of Pi - Yann Martel
Animal Farm: A Fairy Story - George Orwell
Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
1984 - George Orwell
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Book 3) - J.K. Rowling
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Book 4) - J.K. Rowling
The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Harry Potter 5) - J.K. Rowling
Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut
Angels and Demons - Dan Brown
Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Book 1) - J.K. Rowling
Neuromancer - William Gibson
Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson
The Secret History - Donna Tartt
A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Book 2) - J.K. Rowling
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
American Gods - Neil Gaiman
Ender’s Game (The Ender Saga) - Orson Scott Card
Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson
A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis
Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides
Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
Good Omens - Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman
Atonement - Ian McEwan
The Shadow Of The Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway
The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
Dune - Frank Herbert
The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera
Hey Nostradamus! - Douglas Coupland
The Nature of Blood - Caryl Phillips
Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules -Ed. David Sedaris
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky
Notes From the Underground - Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Idiot - Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoevsky
Fathers and Sons - Leo Tolstoy
We -Yevgeny Zamyatin
Chromosome 6 - Robin Cook
Ceremony - Leslie M. Silko
No Man Is an Island- Thomas Merton
One Day In the Life of Ivan Denisovich - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
S. - Slavenka Drakulic
The Earth Shook, The Sky Burned- William Bronson
Don’t Know Much About Mythology- Kenneth C. Davis
Fables: Homelands- Bill Willingham
Hawaii- James Michener

As you can see, Russian Lit isn’t my thing. Oh, well. Happy Reading!

There’s been quite a number of scandals in D.C. and the country in general these days. From Enron to Katrina to Plame to Iraq– sometimes it’s hard to keep up. Don’t you just long for the days when a good ol’ fashioned sex scandal dominated the news 24/7? After all, titillating news about Oval Office blowjobs is SO much better than hearing about manipulation of energy for capital gain, mismanagement and neglect during a natural disaster, revealing the name of a covert intelligence agent, or lying the country into war, don’t you think?

Well, the good news percolating over the web today indicates that if the story has enough legs to carry through the weekend, we may just be due for a good ol’ D.C. sex scandal. As Georgia10 over at DailyKos relates, it seems that the lobbyist involved in the Randy “Duke” Cunningham scandal invited quite a few others to “pay to play” with gifts of cash, favors, and, um, “hospitality suites.” This wonderful euphemism indicates our Congressmen have spent their free time in D.C. frolicking with “ladies of the night.” The DailyKos article links to an earlier story in the San Diego Union-Tribune, and a piece posted yesterday in the Wall Street Journal. It’s not only the WSJ that’s picked up the story; apparently MSNBC is sniffing around as well. So this story potentially has legs– it’s not just the blogosphere, it’s the Corporate Media that’s perking up its ears, and whispering: sex scandal!

This one looks so far to be a Republican sex scandal, and depending on how it plays out, could really wound them this fall during election season. It depends on how soon some of the key players start to sing, and how fast investigations (if any) move. Still, if I was involved, I’d be scared: it’s one thing to obfuscate the public in somewhat complex unethical situations, but messing around with prostitutes is something anyone that isn’t living under a rock can understand.

Quite a few Republicans have had their share of hypocritical family values lately; here’s a list of some of them. To be fair, sexual misconduct is a bipartisan affair (*snicker*); Wilbur Mills, Wayne Hays, Gary Hart, and Mel Reynolds are examples of some of the Democratic members across the aisle who have gotten caught with their pants down, or their hands where they don’t belong.

No matter how this current scandal du jour plays out, I’m willing to bet it won’t have the cachet of exposés of years past. From naughty tales of cigars and boat cruises to frolicking in the Tidal Basin, simply boinking in a hotel room doesn’t carry the same heft of illicit romance. Still, power and misconduct is an old story on Capitol Hill. Someplace, somewhere, the ghost of Wilbur Mills is smiling.

One of the great cultural bastions in American society is the belief that with hard work and a bit of luck, one can pull themselves up by their own bootstraps and become “somebody.” This cherished axiom has wended itself through American history, from the early days of the Puritans to the supposedly self-reliant American West, whose fiercely independent farmers discreetly tuck away the gummint subsidy in the bank while loudly proclaiming the virtues of self-sufficiency as a truly American way of life.

This lovely myth has been exploded in a recent study published the other day. Yep, despite the uplifting tales of lowly immigrants and orphan boys rising from the gutters of the urban slums to the halls of the wealthy, the chance that someone starting out at the bottom and reaching the creme de la creme of American society is just one percent. Yep, 1%. On the other hand, you have a one-in-five chance of joining the moneyed classes if you already began life with a silver spoon in your mouth. George W. Bush may have gone to San Jacinto Junior High, sure, but Daddy went to Andover, so Junior went to Andover as well. The average kid at San Jacinto certainly didn’t wind up in prep school, but then again, the average kid didn’t come from a family with a fortune founded in the China opium trade a couple generations earlier.

The same is true for tons of other trust-fund kids all over America. The sad truth is that close to 99% of us are never going to be rich; we’re gonna live and die poor, working class, or middle class, at best. For every example you can come up with of someone like Andrew Carnegie, there’s a million more that never reach that zenith. Remember that the next time you feel like giving Bush and Congress a pass when they mention tax cuts for the rich.

I’m by no means recovered, so I’ll keep this fairly short.

Seems like things are spiraling out of control, and despite the rumors and rhetoric, it looks like we’re already in Iran. This is a very depressing thought, I’ll tell you that…

The only bright spot is that Smirk’s administration now has exactly 1000 days left (1000 days too long, but it’s still a countdown…) — hopefully the measures wending through the Illinois and now the California legislature (thank god I live in a state with halfway sensible pols!), thanks to Assemblyman Paul Koretz (*my* representative! *grin*), will push the issue of impeachment front and center, where it belongs, and short-circuit this disastrous administration.

Speaking of 1000 days, here’s a good editorial piece from Arthur Schlesinger, one of the elders in my former profession. I hope there’s an increased groundswell against any further action in Iran (some rather prominent scientists already have gotten the ball rolling– thanks to Surdus for drawing my attention to this letter!). Any aggressiveness or military action will be disastrous for the world, and will cast the U.S. as a pariah. You think gas prices over $3 is a pain in the ass? Wait til Smirk decides “nukuler” weapons is a great option to act on, and see the price of oil skyrocket. You know, the only two nations boasting that a pre-emptive nuclear strike is A-OK are North Korea and the U.S.

Wanna re-define that Axis of Evil again, Smirk?