War & Peace

At some point last year, wanting to make better use of the time on my hands, I decided to combat my literary ignorance by reading some of the high-profile novels that I missed through my hitherto sparse literary education. Logically, I searched the numerous lists of highly rated books and tried to find titles or authors that I had at least heard of to start with. War and Peace made the top of most lists, so it is there that I started. Since odds are that most of my blog readers will not find the time to read such an intensive tome, I wanted to essentially review the book and try to explain why this book is so highly regarded. Also, this review is spoiler-free, so if this sort of thing seems up your alley, feel free to pick-up a copy and discover it’s intricacies for yourself.

Christmas Music in October! [gasp]

I am well known for listening to Christmas music as soon as is publicly acceptable each year. I love reminiscing about winters past, family gatherings, all that jazz. But, like most people, I find that 2 months is about all I can take of nearly nonstop Christmas music before I get jaded. All the same, if holiday music shows up sporadically on my Pandora station in October or February, I'm fine with it.

But I am very aware that other people have strong opinions about when it is and is not acceptable to begin playing holiday tunes in a public setting. I had one gentleman approach me when I worked at the movie theatre absolutely livid that there was Christmas music playing on October 29th, which is way before the universal Christmas music ok-day of Halloween...

The trouble was that the CD targeted for November 1st had arrived early and we were contractually obliged to play the most recent MovieTunes as soon as it arrived. I explained this and he was still upset. He demanded to file a complaint with whoever made the music selections. I explained that it was a separate company and that frankly (fyi: never, ever be frank with customers, no good will come of it), I doubt any good will come of it, since it is only a two day difference from the acceptable day, which is when they had intended to start playing this music anyways. At this point the gentleman starts cursing, demands to speak to the manager, who is not in, and then leaves the building with steam streaking out his ears and profanity streaming out his mouth.

Anyways, today I was in the local Borders and a subtle but discernible saxophone rendition of Silent Night was playing over the speakers. Now again, I love Christmas music and would not object to easing into the holiday season a few weeks early. But in this busy bookstore I realized that I was annoyed. This warranted some introspection. I discovered that I was not annoyed by the music itself, which was actually quite pleasant, but that I was annoyed that I needed to appear annoyed to fit in with the crowd around me. And that's just dumb. Spent the remainder of my stay in the store tapping my foot and humming through a smile.

China and the Democratic-Communism Conundrum

So the big news of the day is that the Nobel Committee awarded the prestigious Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo, a Chinese scholar who is currently serving an 11 year prison term for his pro-democracy and human-rights advocacy. This came just a few days after a likely counter-productive statement to the Nobel committee from the Chinese government warning that giving the award to Liu would have a negative impact on Chinese-Norwegian relations.


This got me to thinking about the nature of communistic governments and why China's government is so belligerent towards its dissidents. The combination of watching too much Star Trek and having a great world history teacher have always led me to believe that communism would work great if humans weren't involved, or at least the current human nature was radically altered. The problem is, of course, that humans are selfish and often materialistic creatures.