Ravenweb Blog

I love the Half-Life franchise , so I thought this short movie was great (not to mention remarkable considering the budget).

Ordinary Heroes is an introspective WWII action drama that follows a young US Army JAG Corps lawyer assigned to investigate the alleged insubordination of a Major in the CIA-forerunner OSS. I don't read many WWII novels and had never before read anything by Turow, but I enjoyed the book, and would recommend it to any fan of war fiction.

The conceit of Dear American Airlines is brilliant: a novel in the form of a complaint letter to the airline from a man who missed his flight to the wedding of the daughter he's not seen since she was a baby. Of course, the letter begins as a rail against the airline and missed flight and then devolves into a fugue that encompasses everything that went wrong in the narrator's life that led him to this point. Jonathan Miles is a talented writer and there's no doubt that the novel is clever, but it felt a bit too indulgent at times, and I had no sympathy whatsoever for the narrator. Perhaps that was the point, but at times it made reading his account not unlike being stuck on a long layover.

I've added a link to Mike "Mish" Shedlock's Global Economic Trend Analysis blog in my Blogroll. For the unfamiliar, Mike Shedlock is a registered investment advisor who blogs just about every day about the U.S. and/or global economy, and he cuts through all manner of economic double-speak, forecasts, and other seemingly abstract financial information with hard data and clinical acumen. His blog was recently selected as one of the best 25 financial blogs by Time Magazine . In these grim economic times, his blog is an invaluable resource for economic straight-talk. I should note that Mish does not pull any punches and his posts are not for the faint of heart who may not want to know the depth of the problems with the global financial system.