Every now and then a perfectly serviceable novelist writes something that makes you fear for his sanity. And every now and then, one of these clangers is published.
And you wind up with John D. MacDonald babbling about a nude yacht with an “all-girl crew”… and your flesh just crawls.
This book was one of JD’s Travis McGee series, solid, kind of offbeat, highly entertaining thrillers. Why he ever felt the need to write about a nude all-girl yacht crew is a poser for the ages. I mean, gee! Editors are supposed to protect you from making a fool of yourself! What was MacDonald’s editor thinking?
PS–Hats off to Lisa for correctly identifying the Travis McGee book in question.
How do you discuss anything with someone who insists that 2 and 2 make 5? How do you maneuver in a political worldview that states that all white persons are born evil?
You don’t. Forget striving for a meetings of the minds. Far Left Crazy must be defeated.
It’s getting crazier and crazier out there, and at some point it’s going to bring our whole civilization crashing down. You can only go so far, insisting that some fat guy in a wig and wearing a dress is a woman, before you’re no longer spouting poppycock on purpose but spouting it because you don’t know the difference between horse-schiff and reality anymore.
Patty decided to clean out our spam cache today. There were over a thousand items in it.
This included a staggering number of sexual enhancement ads. I will not quote them here. Insta-Hard. Rock-Hard. Secrets of Secret African Penis Cult. A more pathetic assemblage cannot be imagined.
I wonder what some archaeologist will think if, a couple thousand years from now, he discovers and reads our spam cache. “Were these people really that obsessed with the size of various body parts? No wonder their civilization collapsed.” I mean, what must we look like to a stranger, if the spam cache is the only thing he sees? What if that’s all that’s left of us? That, and assorted get-rich-quick schemes that wouldn’t fool a puppy.
Are there really that many people out there all lathered up to buy these products? Is the male half of our population really and truly that badly lost? (For some reason, or maybe no reason, they haven’t been sending us products pitched to females. Go figure.)
I pity our posterity. And I pray they’ll do better than we have so far.
They still think they can force this down our throats.
I received a comment yesterday that went straight into the trash bucket.
This person–I am assuming he really is a person–was there to defend Critical Race Theory. He defended it by saying a lot of things that included the phrase, “You white people.” ‘Cause we’re all alike, ya see–all born bad, according to Hypocritical Race Theory. (Y’know, I think I’ll call it that from now on.)
What if I went around saying “You black people”?
I don’t reply to such persons because I don’t trust myself not to lose my temper and say something which I’ll regret later. I have come to understand that Democrats and other Far Left villains want us to hate and fear each other according to race. They want us at each other’s throats. And I don’t want to give them what they want.
CRT is a war against America. The good news is that virtually everybody really hates it a lot. It may be the only thing that you can get most Americans to agree on.
So we should be able to win this war–if we have the stomach to fight it.
I don’t generally review books I’ve already reviewed. But I’ve just finished re-reading Curtain and it shocked me all over again.
This was a heckuva book to be writing while World War II was going on and German V-2 rockets were killing people on the streets of London. But that’s when Agatha Christie wrote it–the story of Hercule Poirot’s last case, written when she still had two more decades’ worth of Poirot mysteries to write–and then she locked it in a safe for 30 years.
In Curtain the world war is never mentioned. One senses that the action in the story could have taken place either just before the war or just after–although in terms of the Poirot timeline, that would be impossible. But that’s not why I’m writing this review.
Have you ever been involved in a group conversation in which one or two persons comes out with something totally outrageous, wicked, beyond the pale–and gets away with it? Worse–everybody else sort of tepidly, timorously agrees with it, even though you can tell by their body language that they don’t really agree and would just like this part of the evening to be over. So somebody drops a bomb–“I don’t care what they say, people who say they don’t believe in Climate Change ought to be jailed!”–and everybody else nods their heads, maybe mutters “Yeah, uh-huh,” and totally fails to call them out on it. Because, I guess, who wants to get into another one of those interminable arguments?
A lot of that goes on in Curtain. Characters natter on about useless lives, lives not worth living, people who are a burden to others, and how they all need to be humanely put out of the way, cull the crowd for the good of the species etc. And no one else ever says, “What are you, some kind of Nazi? You sound like Heinrich Himmler talkin’–if he were here, he’d fit right in!” I mean, we don’t even get an “Oh, come now!”
Now… why would Agatha Christie include such conversations in her novel unless she had heard them, probably pretty often, before World War II broke out? Heard them at dinner parties or casual get-togethers. Heard them from well-educated, highly thought-of people. After all, it was eugenics–which was Settled Science in the 1930s. You had to agree or you were anti-science.
Gee, I wonder why so many people in Britain became convinced that their ruling class wanted to sell them out to Hitler. Well, has our ruling class sold us out to China? Honk if you don’t think it looks that way.
This is a shocking book. Agatha Christie wrote it while her nation was fighting for its very life against an enemy that believed in eugenics and had no compunction at all about putting it into grim practice–an enemy with which her nation’s ruling class had much in common.
One wonders to what extent God had to intervene to keep Britain from entering into an alliance with Nazi Germany.
Way back when, I taught at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. It was an engineering college then. Its graduates were expected to be able to design and build things that wouldn’t fall apart.
Now RPI has an “ethnomusicologist”–do you know what that is? does it have anything to do with engineering?–who has organized a major academic conference [groans offstage] to “explore” pop stars like Taylor Swift… and especially in regard to “the whiteness of her fans.” Am I wrong, or are these people starting to sound like Captain Ahab? Obsessed with killing the White Whale.
Well sheee-it! boys ‘n’ girls–that bridge you designed and built just collapsed with 200 cars on it, but so what? You’re clued into the whiteness of Taylor Swift’s fans! Really, what more could anybody ask in an engineer?
Damn, everything’s racist! You just can’t have any fun anymore! Gotta ban everything.
This year’s Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue is the first to feature a fake woman on its cover–a man impersonating a woman, but they call it “transgender” and you’re supposed to “celebrate” it… or else.
I am not going to reproduce that cover. Here are three dinosaurs instead of three swimsuit models who actually all look like they’re the same person (only one of them’s a man who says he’s a woman).
SI brags that the three sex objects–oops, I mean “models”–on the cover “are all different!” No, they’re not. Yeesh. We were just writing about robots an hour or two ago, and here are three alleged humans who might as well be robots.
Yes, I hear you: “C’mon, Lee, don’t be a prude, show us the cover!” But in fact the cover’s no big deal: you’ve already seen its like a thousand times. The only thing different is that one of the “women” is a man (pray for his mother). They look like they came off an assembly line.
How great a weight of perverted idiocy can we pile on our civilization before we flatten it?
It’s just further evidence that suggests the whole world is going barking mad crazy, largely thanks to humanist experts, sages, counselors, prognosticators, “scientists,” “educators”–fercryinoutloud, why do they call them “educators” when all they do is make people stupid?
I don’t think God will let us go extinct–but He sure doesn’t have to keep this particular civilization around a minute longer than He pleases.
A story I reported last Friday has stuck with me and, I fear, convinced me that our whole civilization has gone haywire: to wit, the decision by Ontario “school officials” (euphemism for dunderheads) to teach 9th graders that 2+2 isn’t 4 (https://leeduigon.com/2021/07/16/when-22-aint-4/).
Look at the scenery, dude, and tell me this is not a horror movie. Men are women with penises. Woman are men with vaginas. Right answers to math problems are racist. We have to stop talking about “shark attacks” because it’ll hurt sharks’ feelings.
The question is, For how long can you run a civilization on pure babbling nonsense before it crashes and burns? Like, if the math is wrong, the bridge will fall down, the plane will crash, the medicine won’t make you better… etc., etc. And meanwhile they’re purposely and energetically teaching children to hate and fear each other based on race.
How much longer can this last?
He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh; the Lord shall have them in derision. Then shall He speak unto them in His wrath, and vex them in His sore displeasure… Psalm 2
We appeal to the Judge of all the earth to save us when this carnival of lunacy goes up in smoke.
Meanwhile–this is King Jesus’ royal estate you jerks are messing up, and King Jesus’ people whose minds you’re playing it. It’s not wise to provoke the King.
