52 Books for 2013

New Year's Resolutions?

Only 2, and they're pretty much the same resolutions I make every year.

First is to lay off the fast food.  I'm a grownup, goddammit.  Time to eat like it.  Enough said, i reckon.

Second?

How about a book a week for 2013?  Kinda involves less watching useless dreck on teevee, anyway....

World War I: In which I show a staggering knowledge of history

Over on Ye Olde Facebooke, a cousin who teaches asks:

Let's play, "Are you smarter than MY fifth graders?"
Question from tomorrow's test... What events lead to WWI?

To which I respond:

 Well, first there were dinosaurs. Much later, the pyramids were built in Egypt, and then Charlton Heston said "Let My People Go!" Brutus stabbed Caesar on the Ides of March, and tenth graders all the world over would be forced to relive it. Not long after, the wisemen brought gold, frankincense and myrrh to Bethlehem. A few years passed, and William the Conqueror got himself sewn onto the Beyeux Tapestry Not long after Galileo was getting excommunicated the Ayscoughs came to the New World, and they begat us, eventually. There were a couple of major revolutions shortly thereafter (on this continent, and an especially bloody one in France) that started to give people the world over the CRAZY idea that royalty wasn't the end all be all that they'd been made to believe for all these years. Why let these Royals be all Imperialist when We the People could be Imperialists? Long story short, those ideas were allowed to ferment for more than a century until a Yugoslav national assassinated an Austrian archduke who had a name similar to a bull of the stories of my youth...

I'm probably going to get a butt kicking at the next family reunion.  

I usually do...

Best Interview Ever