Consolation Champs

Here’s a wonderful story. Terry Fallis is one of the founders of Thornley-Fallis Public Relations, one of the most social media-savvy PR firms around. Terry wrote and self-published a political satire last year called The Best Laid Plans. Not only did he publish it himself, but he used the book’s web site to market and […]

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I’m barely 40 pages into Chuck Klosterman’s Killing Yourself to Live and I’m already feeling jealous. Not of his talent for comic writing, though he has plenty of that. I’m feeling strangely jealous that I’ve never been able to go on a solo road trip with 600 CDs like he’s doing. You see, I’ve never […]

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Flipping through the Canadian Oxford Dictionary this morning, I discovered that a liger (favourite animal of Napoleon Dynamite) is not only a real animal, but that it is specifically the offspring of a male lion and a female tiger. The corresponding offspring of a lioness and a male tiger is called a tigon.
Good to know.

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Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life, by Steve Martin

Brooke picked this book up for me a few weeks ago, knowing I’d been a huge fan of Steve Martin during his standup years. You could even say that as a teenager, I idolized Martin. To this day, I’m in awe of people (including myself!) who can […]

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Theodore Dalrymple, writing in City Journal, nails my discomfort with the “new” atheism (Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, etc):
What The New Atheists Don’t See

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Jesus Land: A Memoir, by Julia Scheeres
It seems that I’ve been immersing myself in stories about toxic Christianity lately. Julia Scheeres’ memoir of growing up with her adopted black brother David in a hellish “Christian” home hasn’t made me feel any better about the evangelical subculture. In fact, I am beginning to wonder if Christianity […]

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Gord done gone and book-memed me! Here are the rules:

Grab the book closest to you
Open to page 123, go down to the fifth sentence
Post the text of next 3 sentences on your blog
Name of the book and the author
Tag three people

Here’s mine:
“I had built a reputation for preaching and writing , both at the local […]

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Author David James Duncan has a new book out, entitled God Laughs and Plays. He calls it “a collection of what I call “churchless sermons” united by my belief that the way of life preached and embodied by Jesus in the Gospels is meant to be an example to Christians.” I’ve read his collection of […]

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My review of Andy Budd’s new book, CSS Mastery, has been posted over at Digital Web. Enjoy!

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I’m very excited about the release of Simon Reynolds’ book Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984. This is exactly the period I’ve considered writing about before, though only about the local Toronto scene. This was not only an incredibly fertile period for music in general, but it corresponded with the exact years I […]

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