For those who’ve been wondering where the heck my domain went, sorry about that.

The domain’s registar (not my current web hosting provider, with whom I am very happy — and to whom I will be transferring registration tomorrow) decided that it wasn’t necessary to alert me before the domain expired.

The current registrar was my former web hosting provider. I guess this was their form of payback for leaving them. As mad as I am at them, I’m not even gonna name them and give them any traffic or publicity.

UPDATE:  I thought GraceNet was good.  Boy, was I wrong.  Upcoming post explaining why.  I’ll link it here when it’s written.  Right now I have to go clean up their mess.

But if you’re looking for a good web hosting provider, check out The GraceNet. They’re not the cheapest, but they won’t be closing tomorrow either (like a lot of cheap fly-by-nighters). Tech support is great. And (if they’re still doing this — and I think they are), once you lock onto a plan, your price won’t change — ever.

It’s a Christian-run business, but these aren’t folks who slap an ichthus on their yellow-pages ad willy-nilly. These guys are the real deal. I generally give my business to the best, not just the fish people. The GraceNet happens to encompass both, IMHO.

The Eyre Affair
Jasper Fforde
(book 1 of the Thursday Next series)

In this book, Jasper Fforde creates an alternative world that is often more believable (or at least, more enjoyable) than our reality. In Fforde’s creation, the dodo has been brought back to life (and is fast becoming a common pet), time travel is tricky but quite natural, and literature is paramount. The importance of literature can be summed up by several instances, only a few of which I list here:

• Children trading bubble-gum cards of authors, not athletes
• Will-Speak vending machines which quote a bit of Shakespeare for a small price
• A performance of Richard III enacted weekly entirely by attendees
• Discussions, arguments, and downright religious fervor over several issues of literature, perhaps none so strident as those surrounding the true authorship of Shakespeare’s plays

Perhaps the most revealing point of the importance of literature, though, is given by the occupation of the heroine, Thursday Next. She works for Special Operations in England, specifically SpecOps 27, the Literary Detective Division. As part of her duties early on, she assists in the investigation of the theft of a first-edition Charles Dickens book.

The thief becomes evident quickly — Archeron Hades — Thursday’s former college professor, and an almost comically evil bad guy (he does bad things for the sheer joy of them — any monetary advantages are merely ancillary). But the motive is not known at first. As it turns out, one of Hades’ henchmen enters the book, pulls a minor character out of the book, and kills him. As he did this to a first edition, all copies of the book are thereafter irrevocably changed to the omission of that character.

Hades then threatens to start stealing other first editions and killing off major characters, thereby stripping the world of much of its great literature. Much of the remainder of the plot involves Hades’ entrance into Jane Eyre and Next’s attempts to foil his schemes and (hopefully) capture him.

In addition to having to chase down Hades, Thursday also has to deal with the Goliath Corporation, which claims to be a benevolent weapons contractor, but in reality, has a financial strangehold on England. Whether they’re just a pain in the neck or truly one of the bad guys remains to be seen as the book unfolds.

As you can probably tell, it’s hard to classify The Eyre Affair. It blends so many genres — literature, mystery, detective, science fiction, fantasy, and humor. Some of the references and humor are fairly Anglo-centric — I only “got” them after some online investigations — but don’t diminish the story that much for the non-UK reader. Often this is seen in characters’ names — apparently Fforde delights in puns — such as Thursday’s uncle Mycroft (named after Sherlock Holmes’ brother) or her boss, Braxton Hicks (named after the contractions that occur during pregnancy). Other non-name references come to mind, but they border on spoilers, so I won’t go into detail. Suffice it to say that the more well-informed you are, the more you’ll probably enjoy this book. I’d count myself as “not very”, but I still enjoyed The Eyre Affair immensely.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Now for the parental guidance and/or offense section of the review: There’s a handful of bad language peppered throughout the book. In addition, a primary character has the bad fortune to have a last name that is a homonym of the s-word. The f-bomb gets dropped a few times, but (if I recall correctly) it occurs within one 3-page span, and is actually somewhat in context.

The only other thing that bugged me was multiple references to a war that England had been in for over 100 years, and more specifically the opposition to the war that Thursday and most other veterans have to it. Although I don’t think that Fforde was trying to draw a parallel to the US presence in Iraq, and the MSM’s incessant implications that the President is the only person in the world that thinks the US should be there, some of the statements and attitudes were too familiar. However, as the book unfolded, I saw that this issue was not even just character-development for the heroine, but a bona fide part of the story, so it grew less and less irksome.

Another story of bad translation. (All names changed to protect the innocent)

Jack and Carol Webber are friends of my parents and missionaries. They have largely ministered on US military bases, both in the states and abroad. During one of their stints in Germany, they were renting the middle floor of a house. The top floor was occupied by their landlords, the Schmidts, a nice elderly couple. The bottom floor was occupied by the Schmidts’ grandson, who was about 20 years old.

Carol doesn’t speak much German, and Mrs. Schmidt didn’t speak any English, but they became friendly anyway, and Mrs. Schmidt invited Carol up to her place for coffee one day. While Carol was there, the grandson came up to visit. Mrs. Schmidt said, “Dieses ist mein Enkel.”

Carol knew enough German to know that “dieses ist mein” meant “this is my”, but didn’t know the translation of “Enkel”. She assumed that Mrs. Schmidt was simply saying the equivalent of “This is my Johnny”, and so thereafter, Carol called him “Enkel”. As he didn’t speak any English either, he just smiled every time she did so.

A few weeks later, Carol looked at the mailslots for the house. They said “Herr and Frau Schmidt”, “Herr and Frau Webber” and “Werner Schmidt” — no mention of “Enkel”. She asked Jack about this and he laughed and explained to the 45-year-old Carol that she had been calling the 20-year-old boy, “grandson”.

There was a story the other day of an American soccer fan who was in Hanover, Germany, for the World Cup. He forgot the name of his hotel, its location, everything — and burned 6 hours and police help trying to find it again.

This reminded me of a story that a colleague told me once. He and another co-worker went to Berlin on business for several weeks. One Friday night, they went bar-hopping. They decided to park near the first bar, then walk to the others, then back to their car at the end of the night.

Parking the car, they looked at a street sign and made a mental note that they were on “Einweg Strasse”. Knowing that “strasse” means “road” or “street”, they figured that they just had to remember “Einweg” as the location of their car.

Four bars and six hours later, they decided to return to the car. But they couldn’t find where they had parked. They walked to an intersection to get their bearings. Looking at the street signs, they found that they were at the corner of “Einweg Strasse” and “Einweg Strasse”.

“Einweg Strasse” means “one-way street”. So all they knew was that they were parked on a one-way street somewhere in Berlin. They hailed a cab, rode back to the hotel, and went out the next day to find the car.

The church (which I didn’t attend) that ran the school (that I did attend in elementary school) was pastored by a man whose last name was Jordan. Most of the congregation put him on a higher pedastal than most Roman Catholics put the pope, but in actuality, he was just laughably despotic.

(Yeah, I know that those two words don’t really go together. But it’s one of those “if you don’t laugh, you’ll commit suicide” kind of things.)

In high school (having moved to another state and school), my mother and I were both in the church choir. And we both knew not to look at my father in the congregation when singing the last verse of He Leadeth Me, because he’d always get a goofy grin on his face as we all sang, “As God through Jordan leadeth me.”

This story was actually brought to memory by this post, citing a bunch of mis-heard lyrics in hymns and other Christian songs.? It’s pretty funny.?

For those less in the know, Jay Mariotti is a sports writer for the Chicago Sun-Times. He is sometimes very critical of Chicago White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen. And to some extent, I guess that Mariotti’s job.

Recently, Guillen went off on rookie pitcher Sean Tracey for disobeying him and not hitting Texas Ranger Hank Blalock with a pitch after Texas pitcher Vicente Padilla had hit Chicago’s A.J. Pierzynski twice. As anyone who’s followed MLB for more than 5 minutes knows, this is fairly standard. (And, no, I’m not here to discuss the merits — or lack thereof — of the retaliatory pitch.) Tracey was soon after sent back to AAA (for obvious reasons — though for inexplicable reasons, the club white-washed the act of Tracey defying his manager and cited other reasons for Tracey’s demotion).

This was too much for Mariotti (who apparently falls on the “lack thereof” side of the argument) and he lit into Guillen — in print — asking (among other things) if Guillen had lost his mind and if Guillen’s “headline-grabbing incidents” were burning out everyone on his team. (For those of you who like links, my apologies. I’d link you to Mariotti’s article, but I can’t find it. However, you can’t swing a virtual dead cat on the web without hitting a self-righteous diatribe discussing Guillen’s response to Mariotti, which follows.)

In response to this and previous criticisms, Guillen said about Mariotti:

What a piece of [expletive] he is, [expletive] fag.

That quote is just how it appears anywhere and everywhere that I have seen it, and that — in and of itself — is quite telling. No one got their shorts in a wad over the two expletives. Guillen could’ve gone off on a Lasorda-like tirade and nobody would have blinked. Yet, those expletives are the words that are censored when the quote is disseminated. But, oh the uproar over Guillen’s use of the word “fag”.

Funny, I thought the whole point of self-censorship was to remove the offensive words, yet given the reaction to that last word, it’s clear that the media are more offended by it than s*** and the f-bomb. (So, as an aside, is the message here that the media censored what it did, but did not censor “fag”, for the benefit of the great unwashed, while they realize what is truly offensive, because they are so much smarter than we are?)

This is actually rather helpful, as it clears up which issue (in the media’s eyes) is more or less important than another issue. For those of you keeping score at home, here is the beginning of a list, with the worse problem listed first:

1. homophobia
2. profanity

(Please know that I don’t think this is an issue of “homophobia” — one of the most misused and over-used words in the English language. Just hanging a tag on it from the media’s perspective. Similarly, as I add to this list below, most of the terms will not be my belief, but more tags.)

No outcry over Mariotti’s questioning of whether Guillen had lost his mind. So revising the list:

1. homophobia
2. mental health slurs
3. profanity

Guillen later went on to explain that in his country (Venezuela), “fag” doesn’t refer to sexual orientation so much as courage, and that what he was saying was that Mariotti wasn’t man enough to confront him face-to-face regarding the many issues of which he has been critical of Guillen.

Now whether this is true or not is of very little consequence. Because the same people who are wringing their hands over Guillen’s use of one 3-letter word, are the ones who keep telling us that Americans need to be more sensitive and accepting of other cultures, and that the baggage that people from other countries bring into America simply has to be ignored embraced, apparently because we’re all so stupid here. But Guillen’s origins are totally ignored here, so it’s clear that it’s time to update the list:

1. homophobia
2. xenophobia
3. mental health slurs
4. profanity

(With #2 running far behind #1 in its offensiveness.)

Interestingly, in 2003, Chicago Cubs manager Dusty Baker, in defense of the many (hot) day games at Wrigley Field, said:

Personally, I like to play in the heat. Most Latin people and minority people do. You don’t find too many brothers from New Hampshire or Maine, right? We were brought over here because we could work in the heat. Isn’t that history? Your skin color is more conducive to heat than it is to the lighter-skinned people.

Baker was villified for his “racist” remarks and compared to Jimmy “the Greek” Snyder for citing unfortunate history. But he wasn’t ordered to sensitivity classes as Guillen has been. So updating the list again:

1. homophobia
2. racism
3. xenophobia
4. mental health slurs
5. profanity

(Again, with #2 running far behind #1 in its offensiveness.)

On the sports TV show Around the Horn, to which Mariotti contributes, he stated:

Personally, it doesn’t bother me.

Yet a couple days later, he wrote:

[The other Chicago sports teams] run professional shops, and when a player, manager or coach has an issue, things are handled with a certain dignity.

In Ozzie’s world, you are called a “fag”.

So one more update to the list:

1. homophobia
2. racism
3. xenophobia
4. mental health slurs
5. profanity
6. self-serving hypocrisy

It’s hard to keep up with what the left feels is important, so feel free to keep this list with you as an aid. No charge.

The end is near.

It used to be that the squeaky wheels in the corporate world would threaten “escalation” (contacting your manager, and then going as far up the managerial chain as necessary) to get their way, right away.

At least in those days, there was a threat of the squeaky wheel actually getting off his glutes and doing something. No more. Now you can just cite “executive focus”. As in, “You need to do this right away, because it has executive focus.”

Those two words are wielded like some talisman that’s supposed to strike fear in my heart and make me jump, saying “how high?” only after I’m on my way up. Ignoring the fact that probably only 10% of the people who say those magic words are within 6 degrees of separation from an executive, I’m sorry, but I just don’t buy the implication that I can blow off my day-to-day customers, and the executives won’t get upset.

Chad Paronto and Mike Remlinger are making me miss Dan Kolb.