Post bad book victory lap

It seemed to take forever plowing, through hundreds of pages of small print and bad prose, but I finally made it through Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead.

The main reason I decided to read it was that it seemed more sportsmanlike for me to take whacks at her ideology if I read some of her major works. It didn't take me too long to discover that my time would have been just as well spent taking whacks at her literary style.

What to say about it? Uhhh, it was about an architect or something.

The characters were pretty cardboard. It was a kind of morality plan pitting the Heroic Individual against the Conniving Collectivists. The relationships were really weird, including the "love"/hate connection between the architect Roark and his eventual wife Dominique. The man crush between Roark and the news magnate Wynand was even weirder, not that there was anything wrong with that.

I'm still not clear how other people messing with one's design justifies dynamiting a building that didn't belong to the dynamiter in question. And I get the feeling that the whole purpose of the book was to set up Roark's lengthy courtroom speech at the end. The character of Roark was pretty interesting when he was just an architect who wanted to do his own thing but toward the end he just became the author's mouthpiece.

I guess this was supposed to be Rand's answer to John Steinbeck. I prefer the Joads.

UPPER BIG BRANCH. Here's a Washington Post editorial on mine safety.

TAXES AND DEFICITS. If hedge fund managers paid more of the former, we'd have less of the latter.

FOR MICE AND MEN AND WOMEN TOO, here's some research about why exercise makes us feel better.

URGENT CHIMPANZEE AND DOLPHIN UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Targets

I think one of the things that people have liked about Thoreau's Walden is that it challenges the reader. Throughout its pages, the author continually argues that we can all do and be so much more than we ever thought possible:

...man's capacities have never been measured; nor are we to judge of what he can do by any precedents, so little has been tried.

One well-known passage puts it this way:

In the long run men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high.

I've always loved that quote. It has inspired me now and then to push things a little farther than I thought I could.

(It would be downright nitpicky of me to point out that it isn't literally true and that people hit all kinds of unintended things--as in "friendly fire" and "collateral damage." Last fall, for example, when trying to sight in the old 12 gauge, I hit a strand of our electric fence while aiming at a can, which is another reason why I should probably stick to karate.)

However, I'll concede the main point.

The question is, what, exactly are we aiming at?

STATES WILL BE IN A PICKLE unless the Senate amends H.B. 4213 to extend the federal Medicaid match (FMAP) to states. Also, unemployed people will need a COBRA extension to keep benefits.

If you haven't already done so, please call your US senators and say something like:

"Please amend HB 4213 to extend COBRA benefits for jobless workers and the Medicaid FMAP aid to states.” A toll free number to the US Senate has been provided for this purpose by Families USA: 1-888-340-6521.

WHAT RETIREMENT? The recession has taken a big bite out of workers' retirement savings.

URGENT DOLPHIN COMMUNICATION UPDATE here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED