Six Gun Samurai by Patrick Lee is exactly what it sounds like.  It’s a pulp samurai/western novel.  If you like that kind of thing, this is a very entertaining book.  If the idea of reading a bloody samurai/cowboy, revenge fantasy, doesn’t already appeal to you, then I don’t think this book is going to convert you.  Nor will anything about it stay with you for very long.  Books like this are kind of like White Castle.  They are very enjoyable, but nothing about it is good for you in any way and it leaves your system remarkably quickly.

Next up is What We Say Goes by the brilliant Noam Chomsky.  It really is gratifying to see something you’ve been saying for years articulated by someone like Chomsky.  Reading page 44 was such a pleasant surprise because I’ve been scorned for expressing this very idea.  Here it is.  There is no fucking way Bush is as stupid as he comes across.  Yale educated people don’t say things like “disassemble, which means ‘to lie’” or “fool me twice, you can’t fool me again.”  People from New Haven, Connecticut don’t talk with a Texas accent.  Bush and his advisers understand the importance of having your enemy underestimate you.  In other words, the more we’re talking about what an idiot he is, the less time we’re talking about what he really is.  What is bizarre is how Texas has embraced him as one of their own.  Texans are very choosy about who they let in their clique.  So seeing the adoration they have for this New England, Ivy League elitist who decided to take up a phony accent and put on cowboy boots is nothing short of surreal.  It’s like waking up one morning to find that the hip-hop community has declared Vanilla Ice to be the most hardcore gansta-ass nigga ever.