Category Archives: Culture

Business is good in one mega-church pulpit

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osteen.jpgHouston has several of the nation’s largest churches and business is quite good in at least one of them:

The next book from megaselling pastor Joel OsteenóBecome a Better You: 7 Keys to Improving Your Lifeówill have a first printing of three million and a one-day laydown on October 15. . . . The Osteen first printing is believed to be the highest for a hardcover book in S&S history, said spokesperson Adam Rothberg.
Osteen made big news last year (“Osteen Heads to Free Press,” PW Daily, Mar. 15, 2006) when he jumped the Warner ship for Simon & Schuster for a deal worth some $13 million, according to informed sources, though S&S denied that figure. Osteen’s first book, Your Best Life Now, was published by Warner Faith (now Hachette’s FaithWords division) in 2004 and has sold more than four million copies to date, with a constant presence on the bestsellers lists.
S&S will publish Become a Better You simultaneously in Spanish-language and audio editions.

Kurt Vonnegut, R.I.P.

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Vonnegut.jpgNovelist Kurt Vonnegut, the author of fourteen novels including ìSlaughterhouse-Fiveî and ìCatís Cradle,î died last night in Manhattan at the age of 84 after suffering irreversible brain injuries as a result of a fall several weeks ago.
Vonnegut has always interested me, probably because he rented a house in Iowa City one summer back in the 1960’s next to my big family’s home on Brown Street while he was teaching at the University of Iowa’s heralded Writer’s Workshop. Vonnegut kept to himself mostly, although my brothers, friends and I would occasionally see him watching us play baseball and football in a big open field that adjoined the house he rented. This was around the time he was probably working on “Slaughterhouse Five” (my favorite), which may explain why my friends and I noticed one day a rather extensive array of empty liquor bottles teeming from the trash cans in the back yard of Vonnegut’s house. Chivas Regal was Vonnegut’s preferred brand at the time. May his restless and somewhat tormented soul rest in peace.

The very funny Mr. Gaffigan

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Jim_gaffigan.jpgMy college age children have introduced me to the comedy of Jim Gaffigan, who is the subject of this nice NY Times profile. In addition to being a very funny fellow who remains quite appreciative for his good fortune, Gaffigan is one of the most prominent of a refreshing new breed of comedians (Frank Caliendo is another) who eschew profanity in their routines:

[Gaffigan] also said he was gratified by his fansí repeated support for the decision he made about five years ago to quite literally clean up his act and purge it of the ìcussing,î as he calls it, that he found he was using as a crutch. (On the meet-and-greet-line in Charlotte, he tried to warn some unsuspecting audience members about to buy one of his older CDs that his language was coarser.)
ìThe topics Iím discussing ó thereís no reason to curse when youíre talking about escalators,î he said. ìAmong comedians, George Carlin, Richard Pryor and Lenny Bruce are, in a way, the martyrs who fought for us to have the right to curse. I feel like they also made it possible for us not to.î

Levinson and Balkin on the Dred Scott case

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dscott.jpgLongtime University of Texas Law Professor Sandy Levinson has teamed up with Jack Balkin of Balkinization fame to author a new SSRN paper, 13 Ways of Looking at Dred Scott. For a provocative abstract, check the following out:

Dred Scott v. Sanford is a classic case that is relevant to almost every important question of contemporary constitutional theory.
Dred Scott connected race to social status, to citizenship, and to being a part of the American people. One hundred fifty years later these connections still haunt us; and the twin questions of who is truly American and who American belongs to still roil our national debates.
Dred Scott is a case about threats to national security and whether the Constitution is a suicide pact. It concerns whether the Constitution follows the flag and whether constitutional rights obtain in federally held lands overseas. And it asks whether, as Chief Justice Taney famously said of blacks, there are indeed some people who have no rights we Americans are bound to respect.
Dred Scott remains the most salient example in debates over the legitimacy of substantive due process. It subverts our intuitions about the relative merits of originalism and living constitutionalism. It symbolizes the problem of constitutional evil and the question whether responsibility for great injustices lies in the Constitution itself or in the judges who apply it.
Finally, Dred Scott encapsulates the central problems of judicial review in a constitutional democracy. On the one hand, Dred Scott raises perennial questions about the judicial role in cases of profound moral and political disagreement, and about judicial responsibility for the backlash and political upheaval that may result from judicial review. On the other hand, the political context of the Dred Scott decision suggests that the Supreme Court rarely strays far from the wishes of the dominant national political coalition. It raises the unsettling possibility that, given larger social and political forces, what courts do in highly contested cases is far less important than we imagine.

Build it and they will come

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skywalk.jpgFormer Mercury, Gemini and Apollo Astronaut Buzz Aldrin is about ready to show us that there is something else to do to get away from the gaming tables while visiting Las Vegas:

On March 20, the second man on the Moon, Buzz Aldrin, will lead the first walk across Skywalk, the cantilevered glass semicircular walkway that juts out 70 feet over the Grand Canyon and 4,000 feet above the Colorado River in Arizona.
The walkway, which will open to the public on March 28, is made of two million pounds of glass and steel and cost more than $30 million to construct. It is the centerpiece of a development plan called Grand Canyon West. The group behind the project ó which will include a 6,000-square-foot visitors center, with a museum, a movie theater, a gift shop and several restaurants ó is the Hualapai Indian tribe, which also has a reservation on the million acres of land they own on the western rim of the canyon.

The website for the Skywalk is here. It’s about 120 miles from Las Vegas. A walk around the Skywalk will cost $25 plus the Grand Canyon West entrance fee.

Faces of the Subway

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subway%20pictures.jpg
Check out this Bill Sullivan photo series of people walking through three subway aisles. A reminder that simple ideas often result in compelling art.

But do they have WiFi?

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coffee_ov1_small.jpgIt was a tough day for yuppies yesterday as this Consumer Reports analysis concluded that good ol’ fashioned McDonald’s coffee was superior to Starbuck’s in taste testing. But both McDonald’s and Starbucks are going to have a hard time competing with the new coffee franchise described in this LA Times article:

On a quick break from his job as a trash hauler, Rob Chapman was in the mood for some coffee. So he pulled his truck into the Sweet Spot Cafe, a drive-through espresso stand on busy Aurora Avenue here in the Seattle suburbs.
“Do you want a Wet Dream or the Sexual Mix today, honey?” asked barista Edie Smith, dressed in a tight-fitting yellow blouse that did a less than fully effective job of covering her cleavage. She leaned down in the window, perhaps all the closer to hear his order. He chose the first option: a coffee with white chocolate, milk and caramel sauce.
It is possible, of course, that Chapman and the dozens of other drive-by customers at the parking lot stand one recent morning stopped by only for the coffee.
But, as Chapman dryly observed, “I do enjoy coming here more than Starbucks.”
In a way, it is perhaps stunning that it took so long for entrepreneurs here to figure out that coffee, the fabled Seattle obsession, mixes very well with sex, the fabled human obsession.
But apparently it does, to judge from the growing number of steamy espresso stands that have popped up around the region in the last year or so.
At the Sweet Spot here in Shoreline, the Natte Latte in Port Orchard and the Bikini Espresso in Renton, not to mention the multi-stand Cowgirls Espresso, the term “hot coffee” has clearly taken on a whole new meaning.

It’s safe to say that it’s only a matter of time before this type of coffee shop catches on in Houston.

So, where does Bob Dylan holiday?

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dylan_newport_2002.jpgThe same way that I would like to — he goes to his new vacation home in the Scottish Highlands to play golf:

Bob Dylan said in one of his songs that his heart was in the Highlands. Now he has proved the point by paying more than £2 million for a secluded Edwardian mansion with a view of the hills.
The notoriously reclusive American star and his brother David have bought Aultmore House in the foothills of the Cairngorms.
The house was built at the turn of the 20th century for the millionaire owner of a department store in Moscow and has been described as one of the finest homes in the Highlands. [. . .]
Dylan is a keen golfer and plays off a 17 handicap at Malibu Country Club in California. His new home is close to the more utilitarian Abernethy golf club, where a day ticket costs just £10, but membership is never a foregone conclusion.
Jack McCool, the treasurer, said: “Mr Dylan would have to apply in writing just like everyone else and be vetted by the committee.
“If there were no objections then he would be a member after paying the membership fee, which at present is £105.”

Golf at Malibu and the Highlands? Sweet.

“30 Rock” channels a sitcom classic

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30%20rock.jpgIt’s well known in my family that I haven’t watched a sitcom regularly on television for many years. But my son Cody and brother Mike recently recommended that I give the new NBC comedy sitcom “30 Rock” (8:30 p.m., CST, Thursday) a try, so I watched it over the past several weeks and found it to be quite clever and entertaining.
As this CNN.com article notes, the show is basically a 2007 version of the popular Mary Tyler Moore Show from 30 years ago, with former Saturday Night Live writer and performer Tina Fey playing the Mary Tyler Moore-type lead role and Alec Baldwin playing an absolutely hilarious combination of the Lou Grant/Ted Baxter character from the MTM show. Having seen Baldwin in several movies, I knew that he was a fine actor, but had no idea that he possessed the depth of comedic talent that he is exhibiting on this show. The scene of outtakes of Baldwin’s flubs (“product integortion?”) during the filming of a short corporate presentation — which can be viewed here toward the end of part two of episode 5 “Jack-Tor” — is already a cult classic. Check it out.

The sad story of Denice Denton

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Denice%20Denton.jpgDenice Denton grew up in the Houston area, went to MIT to study engineering, won a number of research awards and eventually signed on in 1987 as a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin, where she was the only female faculty member in the department of electrical and computer engineering at the time. She continued to excel at Wisconsin and by 1996, Denton was hired at the age of 37 as the first female engineering dean at a major US research university in the U.S. (the University of Washington’s College of Engineering).
Thus, it was not particularly surprising that Denton was named as chancellor at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2004, the youngest chancellor in the UC system. Less than two years later, an embattled Denton went on medical leave and checked herself into the Langley Porter Psychiatric Hospital at the University of California at San Francisco. On June 24, 2006, after checking out of the hospital, Denton committed suicide by leaping from a high-rise apartment building in San Francisco.
This Paul Fain/Arts & Letters Daily article covers the final few weeks of Denton’s life, and it’s fascinating look into the intersection of depression, political correctness, anti-political correctness, and the byzantine world of academic politics. Definitely not a life for the faint-hearted.