You’d think that on Hawthorne Boulevard — oft-cited as one of the most liberal neighborhoods in Portland — just about any place that sold books would have jumped on the chance to peddle a few copies of Al Franken’s best-selling Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. Oddly enough, it took the Hawthorne Fred Meyer over a month to put any on display. Their bestseller book table has had books by conservatives Bernard Goldberg, Dinesh D’Souza, and Michael Savage. This month, Bill O’Reilly’s latest, which was released two weeks after Franken’s, made it onto Freddy’s mixed fiction/non-fiction bestseller rack, despite its ranking behind Franken’s book on both the "New York Times" and "Publisher’s Weekly" non-fiction rankings earlier in October (the release of Michael Moore’s Dude, Where’s My Country? knocked Franken’s book out of the top position in this week’s NYT hardcover non-fiction list [2 Nov 03]; both Moore and Franken are ahead of O’Reilly in PW‘s ranking [24 Oct 03]). Neither Franken’s or Moore’s books are on Freddy’s October bestseller list.
A Toast to the Oregonian—Non!
[UPDATED 10 September 2021 to include image and new link.] The Oregonian published an editorial cartoon by the Akron Beacon Journal‘s Chip Bok on August 30, 2003 that made light of the more than 11,000 deaths of mostly elderly French citizens in this summer’s heat wave. Pretty funny stuff (Bok apparently thinks so, because he returned to the subject in mid-September). Darrel wrote a letter to both the editorial board and the Oregonian‘s public editor which, of course, they ignored. Sure, they might apologize about a racially-insensitive “Wizard of Id,” but apparently the French are open for ridicule even when their casualties are nearly 4 times US losses on 9/11.
Long Odds
Since they first went online in 1995, the most requested article from the archives of Plant’s Review of Books has been a 1992 review of a book published in the ’70s, about a political figure from the ’20s and ’30s. Go figure.
Macromedia MAX 2003
Macromedia MAX 2003, the sort-of-annual get-together of Macromedia users of all stripes is November 18-21. Darrel’s travelling there with Flash über-guru Phillip Kerman.