Book Author Sues Reviewer

I'm not sure whether this is what the newspaper business calls a man-bites-dog story. Such a tale (or tail) depends on someone doing something you just wouldn't expect. Of course, most book authors probably harbor desires to sue for a bad review - and that's on their good days. (Imagination on the bad days tends toward more graphic and inventive violence.) So I was a bit surprised to read this BoingBoing post about a blogger who saw the subject of a negative review head right to court. As the post quotes the blogger:

He claims to have a revolutionary idea for how evolution works, but his ideas have no connection to reality, and these lovely elaborate drawings he made look nothing at all like actual embryos. The bottom line is that I said his work was more about the evolution of balloon animals than biology.

Obviously this is proof positive that Darwin was nuts and that the fittest aren't necessarily the ones surviving.

Crimes and Non-Punishment

I heard a snippet of a speech George Bush gave about the Scooter (what an embarrassing nickname to cleave to) Libby sentence. The reason he gave for commuting the sentence was because the 30 month period was "too harsh." But is commutation an all or nothing process? Couldn't the president have cut it back to what he thought was not harsh, especially as I suspect the Libby defense fund will probably pay the $250,000 fine and that although he can't practice law (until Bush presumably pardons him on leaving office), he could certainly work as a lobbyist or in some other managerial position where the premium is on government connections? The process of redefining language that Orwell mentioned in 1984 is, and was even then, a daily practice. Blink and you can forget that someone is trying to hoodwink you.