Banned Books week!

Of course, everybody is posting the list, and inviting discussion.

And most discussion is along the lines of "BOOK? But that's my favorite book! What could they possibly have against BOOK?"

This is where I pipe up and list all the things the sillies have against BOOK, whatever book BOOK happens to be. Just to interject a little, sometimes the sillies' complaints aren't totally silly - when people say, for example, that a Roald Dahl book is too violent for their precious child to read, I can only nod and go "yup, it's a bit violent", because they do tend that way. I don't consider that a reason to keep a child from reading it, certainly not children other than your own, but I will agree with the premise that the book is violent.

But is it scary that I can recite the reasons against most of these poor books?

Incidentally, I rather wish there were divided lists - children's books and non children's books (normal fiction would fall into that category because that's likely to be read in high school, and most censorship efforts focus on the precious children anyway) just so the likely reasoning could be compared. Some books might be on both lists.

A few random, non-connected thoughts...

1. This rocks.

2. I want to see Serenity again. I keep thinking of my favorite parts from the movie, and quotes... I wanna see it again. ( Read more... )

3. One of the yogurt companies is busily advertising the fact that they'll stop putting plastic lids on over the foil ones. In order to do this, before they take away the plastic lids, they're printing the fact that they'll do this on top of the foil lids, with the phrase 'what can you do with" (I don't remember exactly the rest). Now, this is irritating on two counts. Firstly, I can think of a perfectly good use for a plastic lid on a yogurt container - if I don't finish my yogurt, I can put the lid on and then eat it later. It makes the yogurt container portable. Secondly, and more importantly, if they *really* cared about the environment as they claim, they'd print the message on their foil lids - and have already removed the plastic lids. But they're currently just printing "no more plastic lids as of this future date!", which seems a bit wrong mihi.

4. Ana's definitely coming down with something, sleeping a lot and coughing and sneezing. Perhaps it's some sort of psychic skill. Today, she kept playing with her umbrella, and insisted we take her raincoat with us as we went outside, even though it was so sunny and warm that I whined about it. And she wanted to play wth her mom's umbrella as well, as we left the house. But by the time we're in Manhattan, it's rainy. And I go "screw this, this is why we have a raincoat, we did NOT come all this way just to not play in the playground", so we stayed there until the rain turned from periodic drizzle into actual windy squally weather, then we went home. She had fun having the playground by herself, even when she (for the first time) fell off the ladder. She cried, but then went back on. We played that game where I pretend I'm scared to do anything on the playground and require her help to do such simple things as going across a bridge or walking on one of the hammocky thingies or going down a slide. She thought that was really funny - and, more importantly, it helped her be braver about those things as well. Honestly, though, that kid's barely scared of anything. She's *cautious* about things like going across the hammocks or on the swinging bridge, but she's not actually *scared*. I admire that trait of hers, though it scares *me*!

Here you go, guys...

Reasons for the bannings and all. All reasons are dumb, but some reasons are dumber than others.