View From the Bushes

Various people were complaining that my blog, how shall we say.. sucked last week. I can easily see this -- I didn't feel very creative, nor energetic last week, and my entries obviously reflected that. Hopefully I'll be better this week, but I can't promise anything. Mediocrity got me this far and I'd hate to abandon it now. I finished Angels and Demons last night. It was pretty good; if you like Dan Brown I would certainly recommend it. If you don't, then my next question would be how do you feel about the Catholics? If you have any affection at all for them, then you probably shouldn't read anything Dan Brown writes, but that goes without saying.

The one thing you cannot claim about Angels and Demons is that it lacked ambition. The book had quite possibly the single most ambitious plot ever, and as you might imagine it failed in a number of respects, but given how ambitious it was, I suppose that was to be expected. While cleaning my office (something that still isn't even close to being done, and may account for my overall writing malaise) I found an early edition copy of the first Horatio Hornblower novel, so now that I'm done with Angels and Demons, I can read it.

In international news, the situation in the Netherlands (where I lived for two years) is developing into a real crisis. For those of you not familiar with the story, it all started when a great-grand-newphew of Vincent Van Gogh made a movie critical of the way Muslims treat women. Shortly afterwards he was murdered in broad daylight by a muslim. Suddenly, the century-old culture of tolerance had reached its breaking point. People accurately point out that while "western" culture has tried repeatedly to be tolerant and understanding of Islam, that the reverse had never been true. I read something along these lines earlier today in Slate that made my blood boil:

Meanwhile, as American Humvees broadcast messages yesterday guaranteeing that insurgents who surrender will not be harmed, a mosque blared a caustic reply: "We ask the American soldiers to surrender and we guarantee that we will kill and torture them."

Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero
Ross