Books: Supreme Courtship

Supreme Courtship by Christopher Buckley

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
Supreme Courtship is about a President who, fed up with the Powerful Senate Judiciary Committee rejecting his Supreme Court nominees, decides to get back at them by nominating Pepper Cartwright, a popular TV judge, a choice that will surely trouble the Senate. Of course, there is an election underway with a President who doesn't really want to be re-elected but runs for spite, in the face of an amendment to limit Presidents to only one term--an amendment that was developed because of him. It will be up to the High Court and its newest judge to resolve this Constitutional Crisis.

I think Buckley is superior at what he does. Christopher Buckley is always an entertaining read. His latest, Supreme Courtship, is just one more in which he just makes political comedy look easy. It's not quite up there with Thank You For Smoking, but for my money (or in this case, my library card) give me any one of his books for the plane ride, bus ride, or jury duty, and let everyone wonder what the hell I am laughing at.




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The most useless “feel good” regulation of the year.

I put my feelings about the Maryland Vehicle Emissions Inspection Program (or VEIP) in a blog post awhile back, based on my own, unique situation with my 1992 Honda Civic. (for those who don’t feel like reviewing the post: It doesn’t pass the VEIP test, therefore I have to go back every month and pay 14 dollars every time just to keep it on the road, which, as it happens, costs less than it would take for me to fix the car.) Now that Barack Obama is President, there are environmentalists who want him to help them adopt stricter emissions standards that surpass the federal standards.

From yesterday’s Examiner:

“Obama called on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to re-examine a Bush administration policy that denied California and other states the ability to set their own emissions standards.”

Environmentalists are thrilled.

“It gives leadership states like Maryland the assurance they will be able to meet their own goals to protect the citizens.”--Derek Walker, director of the California Climate Initiative for the Environmental defense Fund, and former head of the Maryland Democratic Party.

(again--I think cleaning up the environment is important, but my experience with the VEIP is that it just doesn’t work--I outlined this thoroughly in an earlier post)


Go ahead! Raise the emissions standards! My car will still keep coming back and failing the test because the law is still toothless and weak, but hey--it’s no skin off my nose.

Dave “The Polluter” G.

I laid out index cards of all the scenes in my new book...

...what the hell was I thinking?

Books: I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone

I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone by Stephanie Kuehnert

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
Very readable and entertaining book. The story is about a young girl whose mother left her at four months old to follow the music of the punk scene. The girl starts her own band, in an effort to bring her mother home. In many ways, the simplicity of this story is appealing. But a few parts of the story lost me, and I will freely admit this has to do with a few of my own personal biases: my dislike of certain cultural institutions like MTV and Rolling Stone Magazine. I loved the part about how the band starts, with all of the natural conflicts and issues that are always there when creative types get together. I was less interested when the band gets unnaturally big, as it seemed…maybe a little unbelievable (but then again, that’s just my own bias.) I was kind of hanging on through the whole “mother left to follow the music” thing, because at my ripe old age it seemed like a dumb reason for a mother to leave. (I think I might not have been the right audience for this book.) But once her real reason for leaving is revealed, it was good to see that it was something much more complicated than that. Throughout the book, the author uses a liberal amount of adverbs which for me was a little distracting, making me very aware that someone is telling a story, preventing me from getting lost in it. I feel like this story is really good and could have benefited from a few less words here and there.

Overall, I respect what the author has done. The story is layered and interesting, with good characters--I like the first person narrative of the daughter-- and all in all it was almost like a history lesson of the punk movement as seen through the eyes of the characters. And the author’s background in “bad poetry” and “DIY feminist ‘zines” are pursuits close to my heart, which is the main reason why I examined this book a little more closely than some others.




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