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This volume gathers twenty-one Dick stories, including "Faith of Our Fathers", "Paycheck", "The Minority Report", and "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale". This is a good, representative Dick collection that spans some of his early works to his later classics. All of the famous Dick tropes are in this collection: paranoia, shifting realities, pulp culture, dystopia, authoritarian states, and machines.

Tehanu is the fourth novel in the Earthsea Cycle and is more of a simple and understated story than the previous Earthsea novels. The story revolves mostly around Tenar, now a widow facing obscurity and loneliness, who rescues a badly burned girl from her abusive parents. Ged, now broken and without magic, seeks refuge with Tenar and attempts to learn how to live with the great loss he suffered at the end of the trilogy. Overall, while I appreciate Le Guin's attempts at infusing new threads of feminism into the Earthsea series, I found the novel a bit boring and bland.

The World is Flat has been over-hyped a bit, but I think overall the text is well-researched and provides a good overview of globalism and the implications of a global, flat world. Friedman does maintain a clear technological determinist bias throughout the text, but I think he's pretty upfront about that and does a good job at presenting contrasting viewpoints to his arguments.

Imperial Ambition includes a collection of Chomsky interviews with radio journalist David Barsamian. In these exchanges, Chomsky offers his views and analysis on the invasion and occupation of Iraq, US propaganda, and the US doctrine of preemptive strikes against so-called rogue states.

You can likely read My Friend Leonard as a true-life story, a wildly embellished memoir, or as a work of pure fiction, shamelessly masquerading as a memoir. Ostensibly a continuation of James Frey's A Million Little Pieces, My Friend Leonard focuses on Frey's attempt to start over after rehab, and his relationship with Leonard, a classic Italian impresario who Frey befriended in rehab. The problem with the text is not in the writing or the story -- the text is engaging and evokes emotion, although it lacks the edge of A Million Little Pieces. No, the issue with the book, at least for me, was that I found it impossible to separate the narrative and story from the recent revelation that Frey embellished many details in his writing. One of the inside pages in My Friend Leonard states in very small type that "some details and sequences of events have been changed". That added to what we know Frey altered made me wonder while reading the text what really happened and ...

Isaac Asimov (1920 - 1992), was the author of the speculative fiction classic Foundation Series, and hundreds of other books, spanning nearly every subject, from fiction to science to history to humor. http://www.ravenweb.net/writing/isaac-asimov/

Ranting Nerd is a blog with rants about science, technology, politics, science fiction, and whatever else comes to mind.

The Schopenhauer Cure is a wide-ranging and exhilarating exploration of psychotherapy, philosophy, and humanity. The plot centers on Julius Hertzfeld, a successful therapist in San Francisco, who is shocked to learn that he suffers from terminal cancer. Moved to reassess his life's work, he contacts Philip Slate, a former patient who he was unable to cure of sex addition. Much to Julius's surprise, Philip has become a philosophical counselor and requests that Julius provide him with the supervisory hours he needs to obtain a license to practice. In return, Philip offers to tutor Julius in the work of Schopenhauer. Eventually they strike a bargain: Julius agrees to supervise Philip, provided that Philip first joins his therapy group. What follows is Philip's entrance into the weekly therapy group and a gripping exploration of loss, suffering, sexual desire, death, and the search for meaning. Throughout the novel, Yalom weaves Schopenhauer's life and work into the na...

The Tony Award winning comedic stage show Dame Edna was in Buffalo this past week, and I was fortunate enough to attend one of the shows. For the unfamiliar, Dame Edna is one of the alter egos of Australian actor Barry Humphries. Edna's humor is decidedly British in its acid-laced, sugar-coated content. Edna does a great job of interacting and playing to the audience, including calling out latecomers, bantering with the crowd, and bringing a couple onstage for some marriage counseling. In the end, it was all silly, hilarious fun.

Consider Phlebas is the first of Iain Banks' speculative fiction Culture novels. It is space opera on a grand scale, set in the middle of an immense war between two galactic empires, the Culture and the Idirans. The plot centers around Horza, a humanoid shapechanging agent of the Iridans, who undertakes a clandestine mission to a forbidden planet in search of an intelligent, fugitive machine whose actions could alter the course of the conflict. The book is very compelling, in large part because it is morally ambiguous. While Horza despises the machine intelligences and moral laziness of The Culture, his embrace of and alliance with the Iridans reveals them to be intolerant, racist, religious zealots.

Betty Friedan, whose manifesto "The Feminine Mystique" became a best seller in the 1960s and laid the groundwork for the modern feminist movement, died Saturday, February 5, her birthday. Friedan asserted in her 1963 best seller that having a husband and babies was not everything and that women should aspire to separate identities as individuals. The feminine mystique, she said, was a phony bill of goods society sold to women that left them unfulfilled, suffering from "the problem that has no name" and seeking a solution in tranquilizers and psychoanalysis.

Quake 4 is an enjoyable shooter with a very lengthy single-player campaign that delivers level after level of solid PC shooter action. Though its storyline was not as immersive as the recent outstanding shooter, F.E.A.R., I would recommend Quake 4 for anyone looking for a fast-paced, satisfying action game.

Rob is a column I wrote last December about the passing of my cousin.

Now this is an offbeat and funny sitcom. In " My Name Is Earl ", Jason Lee plays a lowlife redneck who loses a lottery ticket and becomes convinced that his luck won't change until he makes amends for all his bad deeds. If the show's premiere is any indication, this promises to be one of the funniest and decidedly different comedies on television. It will also be interesting to watch Jason Lee over the course of an entire television season.

The strength of the The 40 Year Old Virgin is that it resists the trappings and low denominator junk humor of a crude sex comedy and instead is surprisingly insightful, with a good heart and a lovable hero. Definitely recommended.

The original Star Wars feature film premiered in May 1977. At the time, I was six years old and just reaching the age when I could sit still and appreciate a two hour movie. More