Two word. Great evening.

-M.

To even begin to explain the happiness welling up in my heart today seems quite impossible.  Currently I’m sitting in my best friend Meghan’s sunny living room, gazing at her so cute and so her Christmas tree, and every once in a while glancing in the kitchen as she and Blair prepare our main course for tonight’s progressive dinner.  It finally feels like Christmas, now that The Nine gathering is here.

We’ve been planning for today for a while.  The 3 course progressive dinner (Appetizers at Katie’s, Dinner at Meg’s, and Dessert at Noe’s).  The annual ornament exchange.  The surprise DVD I’ve put together of the pictures of us since college.  Now the day is here when we will feast together, share together, love together and laugh together.  We are so blessed.

M.

P.S. I’ll post recipes from the dinner later.  And of course pictures of our silly selves embracing the gift of friendship in this thing called life.

Heading to Columbus today for the wedding of a dear friend.  I’m sure she will be a beautiful bride and her groom isn’t too shabby either.  Best wishes, Courtney.

-M.

Check out the bride and groom. They'll make a beautiful couple!

Yesterday, at 8PM EST, the reimagining of 1983 miniseries ‘V‘ piloted on ABC, pulling in just over 13.9 million viewers,  beating new favourite and dubbed ‘Lost replacement‘, ‘Flashfoward‘ by 1.5 million viewers. Unfortunately for most UK viewers, ‘V‘ will not be released until 2010.

The cast of V may seem ever recognisable with stars from such programs as Lost, Smallville, Firefly and 24. These stars include; Elizabeth Mitchell (Lost, E.R, Time Of Your Life), Lourdes Benedicto (24, The Nine, NYPD Blue), Laura Vandervoort (Smallville, Instant Star, Into The Blue 2), Morena Baccarin (Firefly, Serenity, Stargate SG-1) and Alan Tudyk (Serenity, Firefly, Dollhouse), with newcomers; Morris Chestnut (The Game Plan, The Perfect Holiday, Anacondas), Joel Gretsch (The 4400, National Treasure: Book Of Secrets, Minority Report) , Logan Huffman (America, Circledrawers, Lymelife) and Scott Wolf (The Nine, Party Of Five, Everwood). Goodness, I apologize for all the reading you have to do.

Anyway, the pilot for V was very unique, and definitely one of the better pilots I’ve seen in a while, possibly matched by my love for Supernatural or Lost in terms of favourites and the quality throughout the episode never ceased to amaze, with special effects equal to that of a Hollywood blockbuster, and enough content to cause indescribable thinking for a period of several weeks, it certainly has enough to keep you hooked. Even in the first five minutes. However, the have been claims by President Barack Obama’s supporters that the program acts as an allegory to the Obama Administration, purely based on the mention of words and phrases throughout the pilot such as ‘Hope‘, ‘Change‘ and ‘Universal Health Care.‘ Quite a large accusation there, don’t you think? Whilst producer Jeffrey Bell states ‘it’s simply a show about spaceships‘. Despite recent and belittling allegations, I highly recommend this show, which features the coming of an extra-terrestrial race to earth with 29 spaceships hovering over the world’s major cities, at which point the ‘Visitors‘, as they’re referred to, claim to make peace. At the same time, not all the humans seem to think so and think that their ‘arrival’  is an attempt upon humanity, thus forming a rebellion. Should play out pretty well it seems.

Segunda parte de lo dicho la semana pasada y, para que no digáis que todo lo ponemos a caer de un burro, os damos el veredicto unánime sobre el mejor estreno: Glee. Ya tardáis en veros los casi diez episodios que se han emitido, afinar las voces y sacar los zapatos de claqué del armario.

Llegará el comentario sesudo extendido de esta tertulia, pero la podéis ir escuchando mientras tanto pulsando en la imagen o aquí.

This documentary is perhaps the most wonderful that I have seen showing the inside of the Supreme Court of the United States–the area in which “the nine,” the most prestigious Court in all of our land, hears cases of particular relevance–those in which the path, and the future, of our liberties are tested, won, and, in some cases, are lost as well.

I hope some of my readers will take the time to view this excellent video.  Special thanks to Professor Orin Kerr, an author at The Volokh Conspiracy, for providing this link.

Pra uns este tema pode ser difícil, complexo, até certo ponto digamos que sim, entretanto, quando você acredita 100% nele, é mais real do que você imagina. É a palavra que define perfeitamente o nosso blog; esta primeira postagem não poderia referir-se a outro assunto. Somos nove, The Nine; nove vezes mais unidas, nove vezes mais amigas, “um” só coração batendo ritmicamente nove vezes mais rápido! O que é uma vida sem amigos?! Nada; eles são simplesmente aquelas pessoas que lhe apoiam quando você está triste, aquelas pessoas que confessamos nosso segredos, aquelas pessoas que amamos mais do que a nós mesmos. Nossa amizade é assim; muito mais do que isso, é irmandade!

Portanto, se você está brigado (a) ou apenas discutiu com seu (sua) amigo (a), não perca tempo, vá de imediato conversar com ele (a) – nada melhor do que uma boa conversa né!? – dê um jeito das coisas ficarem em paz, e, aproveite 100% todos os momentos que você tem com seus amigos, eles são mais do que especial, são uma das razões de seu viver!

“Vida sem elas (The Nine) não é vida,

seria apenas meu inferno particular,

onde eu existiria somente por existir.”

Amanda L.

“Juntas e misturadas, mas nunca emboladas!”

Iasmim A.

I came across this phrase while looking up the term Prague Summer, a phrase used in Jeffery Toobin’s The Nine.  The Prague Spring, according to Wikipedia, was “a period of political liberalization in Czechoslovakia during the era of its domination by the Soviet Union after World War I.”  In January 1968, with the rise of power of Alexander Dubček, Czechoslovakia began a period of reform to decentralize the economy and grant democratic rights.  By August, the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact members invaded the country and put an end to the reforms.

Toobin used his version of the phrase to refer to the politcal liberization of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy.  Kennedy,after spending a summer abroad working with international courts, returned the SCOTUS with a much greater leftward shift.

Orotund, as it relates to prose, means overblown or pompous language.  Not necessarily verbose, but just flowery or, one of my favorite words, magniloquent.  I came across this word in Jeffery Toobin’s wonderful observation of the Supreme Court, The Nine. Orotund is used to describe the overblown wording of decisions written by Justice Anthony Kennedy.

The Fourth of July is more or less the halfway point of summer, meaning we’re virtually halfway through the biggest movie season of the year. And yet for a while now we’re been just trying to stay awake. Far from anything really memorable, summer 2009 will likely go in the books as more memorable for what it wasn’t than what it ever was. Films are making money, by and large: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen had its 200 million dollar opening week, putting it on a fast track to top the summer’s current money maker Star Trek. But there’s no surprise, crossing-demographic runaway blockbuster this year, compared to 2008’s The Dark Knight or even Iron Man. The big summer movies, immediately recognizable as such, are marching through the theatres with dreary precision, one giving way to another like multimillion dollar dominoes.

Still, movie news keeps accumulating. The following list includes some observations, ideas, and occasional snarky remarks we’ve compiled while working on longer pieces. All the opinions are just our own, of course.

1. Is the lowest common denominator approach that’s been stifling the selection of available Blu-Ray format titles finally beginning to thaw? Recent weeks saw such classics as The Seventh Seal, Dr. Strangelove, and Last Year at Marienbad making their debut on the high-def medium, classing up shelves usually dominated by much lower brow fare. Fans of foreign cinema will be glad to know that Akira Kurosawa’s Kagemusha makes its Blu-Ray debut August 18, while Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing debuts just this week. We imagine Sal’s Pizzeria looks great in high definition.

We expect lots of this.

2. Meanwhile, the Lord of the Rings trilogy seems to be inching closer to a release of its own, according to this report, even though a release of the films’ straight-to-DVD expanded versions will wait until the 2011 premiere of The Hobbit. The three films collectively made just shy of three trillion dollars in worldwide box office receipts, so why Warner Brothers would drag heels on releasing a full edition in the meantime is anyone’s guess. Maybe they’re as pessimistic about Hobbit co-director Guillermo Del Toro’s vision for the LOTR prequel as we are?

Box office 'Deliverance': Ferrell in LOTL

3. In a summer with no surprise hit (yet), what about the bombs? So far Terminator: Salvation, Angels & Demons, Land of the Lost, and The Taking of Pelham 123 have all fallen short of expectations, while the mid-range budgeted Year One also seems destined not to recoup its money. Poor word of mouth hurt Terminator, and Pelham 123 likely should have come out later in the year, when more adults frequent multiplexes. As for Land of the Lost, Angels & Demons and Year One, we’re blaming audience shtick fatigue in all cases. We’ll tempt fate here and predict that Bruno also disappoints: previews make it out to be nothing more than Gay Borat, and audiences may take a “been there, done that” attitude as a result.

Just dandy: Depp

4. If Universal pushes Public Enemies any harder they’re going to risk a groin injury. The seemingly relentless advertising campaign, already somewhat misleading in depicting Michael Mann’s reported character study as an action-adventure romp, has commercials all over television, mostly featuring Johnny Depp’s good looks. We expect very good things from the film, but if early audiences feel baited and switched the film could likely join the crowd of turkeys mentioned above. It’s also not a good sign that all the rave critical comments used in the TV ads are from Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers, who’s essentially the go-to guy for movie critic testimonials.

The cast of The Nine

5. DirecTV deserves some applause for bringing two of HBO’s most acclaimed dramas that aren’t The Sopranos to a wider audience. Last month the satellite provider began airing reruns of Deadwood and Barry Levinson’s landmark 90s-era prison drama Oz on its The 101 channel, presenting them uncut and without commercials. Coupled with its resurrection of worthy but prematurely cancelled network dramas Smith and The Nine, the all but unknown The 101 offers better summer programming than the major networks.

Not your father's G.I. Joe - and that's the problem.

6. The rumors about fired directors and other postproduction crises surrounding G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra only throw fuel on a bonfire of backlash for a film that’s due to premiere for another five weeks yet. Part of the cynicism, and a big chunk of the problem, is that the creators have violated a lesson that Hollywood seems to finally have learned about adapting comic books: don’t screw with what endeared the subject matter to audiences in the first place. Past superficial costuming similarities in some of the characters, the film bears little resemblance to the 80s cartoon and toy line, trading loyalty to that nostalgia for some generic looking Michael Bay-style histrionics. The producers should know better. And knowing is half the battle.

7. Continuing his long odyssey through the entirety of genre flick purgatory, Nicolas Cage will appear next March in Swordfish director Dominic Sena’s sword and sorcery horror adventure Season of the Witch. Cage plays a knight transporting a witch to a group of priests who will determine if she started the Black Plague. Ron Perlman (Sons of Anarchy) and British actress Claire Foy (Little Dorritt) co-star. Hard to believe Cage was once considered one of America’s most potent leading men, with versatile turns in Leaving Las Vegas and Red Rock West. But, films like this, Knowing and Bangkok Dangerous must be making money somewhere, because they keep getting made.

8. Finally, Ang Lee returns to theatres with August’s Taking Woodstock, a based-on-true story about the small Upstate New York town that more or less played host to the Woodstock music festival (the original one in 1969, not the corporate crap in the 90s.) Though comedy is probably no one’s first thought when discussing the meticulous Lee (Brokeback Mountain, The Ice Storm) the unpretentious feel and goofy spirit in the trailer below looks all kinds of promising. The broad ensemble cast includes Eugene Levy, Emile Hirsch, Zoe Kazan, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, and Paul Dano. It also stars Liev Shreiber as a gun-toting transvestite, which we hope was actually a common sight at the over-revered music concert.

Join us Friday for our review of Public Enemies. Thanks for reading.

- Michael Kabel
:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

test

With Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings approaching, the whirlwind of commentary, questions and allegations is beginning to heat up. In addition to the accusations of racism from the far-right talk show circuit, Ms. Sotomayor has already been accused of “judicial activism”, the popular conservative catch-phrase for liberal judges who, they believe, disregard the constraints of the law in order to impose their own vision of the world onto the disputes before them. This phrase is repeated often in the conservative commentariat, driven by their never-ending unhappiness with the Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade. And the criticism isn’t limited to conservative media. It has become a favorite refrain from Republicans, whether in exit poll interviews or dinner table discussions, as a means of de-legitimizing decisions of the Court with which they disagree.

Ross Douthat, in the New York Times, does an excellent job of showing the fallacy of this complaint. In an editorial calling for the placement of some limits on the power of the Supreme Court, he shows that the surest distinction between “liberal” and “conservative” judges is that the former are prone to invalildate federal law and the latter are more likely to find fault with state laws. An important distinction, to be sure, but not one that will result in the tyranny of the robes that conservatives warn us about. Instead, it reveals the allegation of “judicial activism” (which would be, and is, a serious problem when a judge does actually engage in it) to be mostly a short-hand label that gets attached to a judge or court who does something Republicans don’t like.

The truth is that, while the court may legitimately be described as becoming more likely to find statutes to be unconstitutional over the past fifty years, the increase has not been driven by any particular ideology or party. In fact, Douthat points out that one of the more conservative courts in recent memory was one of the most active:

Under Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, the Court invalidated federal statutes at an unprecedented rate — and by the barest of majorities, in many cases. In one eight-year period, the University of Michigan’s Evan Caminker has noted, the Court invalidated 16 Congressional statutes by a 5-to-4 vote, something that had happened just 25 times in the previous two centuries.

There are, of course, profound reasons to monitor the Supreme Court and to disagree with its composition, its methods, its reasoning and its findings. It is the only branch of our government, after all, that is both powerful and unelected. But the consistent criticism made by those on the right–that the Court engages in liberal “judicial activism” (especially when, as Jeffrey Toobin has pointed out in his book “The Nine”, the current court contains four of the most conservative Justices in the history of the Court)–is not meant to be an analytical critique of the federal judiciary. Instead, it is a political phrase meant to energize the base by injecting fear into the process of selecting judges…the fear that judges on the left will take away your most basic rights simply because they disagree with you. And raising that fear only has one purpose: to prevent the President from nominating, or the Senate from confirming, Justices with whom conservatives disagree. This may be a politically skillful maneuver, but it is a particularly cynical approach to our judiciary, especially for the “law and order” party that proclaims such devotion to our founding documents and system of laws.

Now you can watch professionally edited excerpts of the April 30th Student Q&A with Jeffrey Toobin, online.

Or check the APS’ Channel 70 program guide to see when the full program is aired – the next broadcasts will be this coming Friday, May 22nd, at 9pm, and Saturday May 23rd, at 10am.

Jeffrey Toobin, author of “The Nine”, a book about the current Supreme Court, its decision in Bush v. Gore and its historically conservative membership, takes a closer look at Chief Justice John Roberts, a well-qualified, undeniably smart, arch-conservative jurist who will likely be on the court for decades to come. The impact of George W. Bush’s appointment of this one judge is likely to have a significance that far outweighs most, if not all, of his non war-related decisions. And, if his votes since joining the court are any indication, his jurisprudence has produced one truly reliable result: supporting the policies of political conservatives. An excerpt:

Roberts’s hard-edged performance at oral argument offers more than just a rhetorical contrast to the rendering of himself that he presented at his confirmation hearing. “Judges are like umpires,” Roberts said at the time. “Umpires don’t make the rules. They apply them. The role of an umpire and a judge is critical. They make sure everybody plays by the rules. But it is a limited role. Nobody ever went to a ballgame to see the umpire.” His jurisprudence as Chief Justice, Roberts said, would be characterized by “modesty and humility.” After four years on the Court, however, Roberts’s record is not that of a humble moderate but, rather, that of a doctrinaire conservative. The kind of humility that Roberts favors reflects a view that the Court should almost always defer to the existing power relationships in society. In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff. Even more than Scalia, who has embodied judicial conservatism during a generation of service on the Supreme Court, Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party.

LOST llegará a su fin el próximo año con su sexta y última temporada por lo que se le va a acabar el pan de piquito a la ABC, es por ello que la cadena ya está buscando posibles sustitutas.

Flash Forward es lo que se está cocinando para sustituir a la exitosa serie.

El piloto, basado en una novela del escritor Robert J. Sawyer, cuenta la historia de lo que ocurre después de que todos los habitantes del mundo se desmayen durante 2 minutos y 17 segundos y tengan una visión extraña sobre el futuro.

Aunque hasta el momento sólo tenía la categoría de piloto, es decir, la cadena aún no había decidido darle luz verde al proyecto en formato serie aún, todo parece indicar que la serie va con todo.

¿Cómo adaptar la novela al formato serie? Todavía no se tienen muchos detalles, pero al parecer podríamos ver más visiones del futuro coincidiendo con los finales de las temporadas, que permitirían la introducción de nuevos personajes y que actualizarían la situación de los ya conocidos.

O sea la misma formulita de LOST que resucitó la serie y que tan bien les funcionó.

Está por ver si Flash Forward estará a la altura de suplantar a Jack, Sawyer y compañía. Con tal no sea un embarque como The Nine, que en su día intentaron vendérnosla como el acompañamiento perfecto para LOST y fue cancelada poco después por falta de audiencia.

The news of Supreme Court Justice David Souter’s retirement rekindled my longstanding love for this discreet, low-key man. The love began when I became obsessed for a brief period with the U.S. Supreme Court in the aftermath of the 2000 election as it became clear that the Bush v. Gore case as would essentially decide the fate of the presidency. Knowing almost nothing about the Court, I decided to read a book by former clerk Edward Lazarus called Closed Chambers. In it, he bursts the myth of the Court as a rarefied environment of collegial relationships between justices and clerks mainly concerned with interpreting the law with integrity. According to Lazarus, who clerked for Justice Harry Blackmun, a “liberal” Nixon appointee who authored Roe v. Wade, an ideological rivalry reigned instead, and it was most pronounced between the clerks: on one side were those who worked for “liberal” justices like Blackmun, Thurgood Marshall, and William Brennan; on the other were those who worked for “conservative” justices like Antonin Scalia, Byron White, and William Rehnquist.

Souter ascended to the court in this environment, to replace the retiring William Brennan. Brennan was known as one of the greats of the Warren Court of the 1960’s, which had expanded individual rights with its broad interpretations of the First, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments. In 1990, when George H.W. Bush nominated Souter, liberals and conservatives expected he would join the group on the court that wanted to overturn Roe v. Wade, though he had made no rulings about the case as a New Hampshire Supreme Court judge. Most of what was known about the quiet judge and former Rhodes Scholar from New Hampshire was that he was a law and order type who had never been married.

And then Souter joined the court and voted with the “liberals” who upheld the fundamental holding of Roe v. Wade when it was challenged by a case called Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992. Clarence Thomas he was not.

Souter is by all accounts an individualistic fellow who is impatient with Washington culture and spends a lot of time in his native New England. According to Jeffrey Toobin’s The Nine, which I plan to read this summer, Souter almost resigned from the court after Bush v. Gore, where his “conservative” colleagues abandoned their longstanding commitment to states rights and narrow interpretation of the equal protection clause. What kept Souter on the court, it seems, was the threat that Bush would appoint someone in his place. Now that Obama is president, Souter can flee.

My classmate just told me a great story about Souter that comes out of The Nine and illustrates why he seems awesome. Souter was at a gas station in New Hampshire and was spotted by a guy who recognized him as a Supreme Court Justice. “You’re Stephen Breyer, right?” the guy said. Souter responded in the affirmative, thinking, whatever. Then the guy asked Souter what his favorite part of being a Supreme Court Justice was, and Souter responded, “Working with David Souter.”

Anyway, cheers to David Souter, one of my many old man crushes. I’ll never be able to clerk for him, as was once my dream, so I hope he has many restful years at his house in New Hampshire.

How did it go?  Did you get to ask a question? Did you enjoy the author talk?

Toobin addresses the audience

A packed Central Auditorium for Toobin

People who couldn't fit into the auditorium watched Toobin on video from the lobby

After the talk, Toobin signed lots of books

Jeffrey Toobin, author of The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, will give an author talk tomorrow evening at Central Auditorium, 7pm.

What do you want to ask Jeffrey Toobin? Here’s what we’d like to know:

1. What was it like to actually sit down and talk to the Justices?  Did they meet your expectations in person?  Did any of them surprise you?  (alternate question: which Justice was the biggest Rock Star to you?)
2. What made you want to write The Nine?  And how long did you think about it before you started?
3. How hard was it to get people to talk to you about the Justices?  Did anyone refused to do so?
4. Did your opinion of the Justices and the Court change through your research and writing of The Nine? (okay, that one’s boring and predictable, but it does need to be asked….)

What would you ask?  Add your questions, and we’ll try to get them answered!

Hip Hop Not Bombs Benefit Show, April 30th @ Pharaohs Den in Riverside. Hip Hop helping feed the homeless, show starts at 8pm, 18 performers, 2 live bands, 2 producer beat showcase and 3 DJs. This is one crazy looking hip hop event!

Buy them for me here and here!

Okay, in other news…

First of all, sorry for the hiatus.  I am notorious for neglecting blogs.  I don’t really have a good excuse, except that I got the job I interviewed for in the last post (yay!) and I’ve just been busier in general.  Anyway, you didn’t come here to read my lame apology, so let’s move on.

So I’ve been reading more lately, probably because I work in a bookstore and I’m tempted by them all day (and a good slice of my paycheck goes into buying them).  Here are some of the latest ones I’ve read, along with the ones I’m most excited about reading next:

In the Woods by Tana French

I couldn’t put this book down, I finished it in a day and a half (probably would have sooner if I didn’t have work).  It’s set in Ireland and it’s about a murder detective who is assigned a case that drags him back into his past and an unsolved mystery from his childhood.  After I read it, I lent it to my aunt and cousin and they both enjoyed it, too.  It leaves some loose ends, but there is a sequel that ties them up (or so I’ve heard.  It’s called The Likeness, and I haven’t read it yet).

Dreamers of the Day by Mary Doria Russell

Confession: I have a bit of an obsession with anything related to Egypt, or really any romanticized version of the Middle East.  In film, I loved Lawrence of Arabia, one of my favorite movies is a silent one called The Son of the Sheik, and I liked Kingdom of Heaven more than it deserved (not only because of Orlando Bloom).  So I was predisposed to enjoy this novel about an Ohio schoolteacher who visits Egypt in the 1920s and meets T. E. Lawrence, Winston Churchill, Gertrude Bell and others involved with the Cairo Peace Conference.  I also am a really big fan of the author – I read The Sparrow in high school (which is a completely different genre, it’s about the implications of interacting with life on another planet) and I really love her writing style and fall in love with her characters.  Needless to say, this book comes highly recommended!

The Nine by Jeffrey Toobin

This is probably really weird, but here it goes: Have you ever had a dream about someone, and when you wake up you have an irrational crush on them?  Like random people that you hadn’t really thought of before?  I used to have those all the time in middle school.  Anyway, so I seriously had a dream about this book, and when I woke up I was like, “I need to read this book, I have to have it!” So as soon as a used copy came into my bookstore, I snatched it up and I’m currently reading it.  It’s about the Supreme Court, which I know almost nothing about, and it is a lucky combination of interesting and informative.  I was worried that it might be a bit dry, but it’s really a compelling read and it’s inspiring me to read more nonfiction.  So maybe my crush isn’t so irrational after all.

Okay, last one for now, although I’m probably going to make book recommendations regularly.

Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature by Linda Lear

This is the book I’m probably going to read next.  In a nutshell, I basically wish that I was Beatrix Potter – a published and successful author of children’s books, a badass watercolor painter (can badass be used in that context?), and conservationist of England’s Lake District  (I’ve been there and it’s breathtaking).  I had to order this book online because my bookstore didn’t have it in stock, and when it arrived it almost felt like my birthday.  It’s a thick book (not that books have to be thick to be good, but I was hoping for a thorough biography and it looks like it will be perfect), and it has several pictures of both Beatrix Potter and her paintings, which is also nice.  Anyway, that’s a lot of talking for a book I haven’t read, but I am very excited about it!

Alright, so that’s all for now.  I’ll try to post much more frequently (like, sooner than three months from now), so keep checking back in.  And if you feel like commenting, please do!  Maybe it will inspire me to update more often.

Oh, one last thing.  You may have noticed that my links above are to Better World Books rather than Amazon.  I’m not sure if you’re aware of the recent fiasco at Amazon (this article gives a better explanation than I could), but basically they had a “glitch” (right…) that caused several gay and lesbian themed book titles to lose their rankings (which is very important because it makes searching for them more difficult and affects their sales).  Anyway, I’m sure that anyone reading this could have any of several differing opinions on homosexuality and this incident, but two things I know are that bookburnings are wrong, even digital ones, and this book should not be the first one to appear in a search for the term “homosexuality” (true story, try it).  Anyway, I’ve decided not to let Amazon have any more of my business.  Anyway, those are my reasons but even if you don’t share them you should consider ordering from Better World Books – here is some information about what they do and why they are so great!

Update: Another alternative to Amazon is IndieBound – I should have mentioned them before because my bookstore is a member.  Shopping locally is a great idea for so many reasons.