{"id":5167,"date":"2021-09-30T01:58:27","date_gmt":"2021-09-29T19:58:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/falseducks.com\/theblahg\/?p=5167"},"modified":"2021-10-02T02:19:32","modified_gmt":"2021-10-01T20:19:32","slug":"the-sound-of-my-own-voice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/falseducks.com\/theblahg\/?p=5167","title":{"rendered":"THE SOUND OF MY OWN VOICE"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0\u00a0 Here it is the end of September of 2021 and I’m working on another blahg. \u00a0<\/span><\/strong>\"September<\/a>If you’ve been following along, I celebrated 100 blahgs not that long ago and did a review of the last fifty in my two most recent blahgs.\u00a0 This is number 102 if you’re counting but who’s counting?\u00a0 I wonder if anyone ever wonders what inspires me.\u00a0 The truth is that I was going to sit down and write about something completely different but then the topic for this blahg started to nag at me and I thought I could getting some traction with the theme.\u00a0 We’ll see.\u00a0 <\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0 Recently I started reading a book that my daughter Emily gave me for Father’s Day.\u00a0 Before I get to that, let me divert for a minute and talk about the most recent book I just finished reading before I started this new one.\u00a0 I had been on a sort of kick in reading the first three novels in the “Cool and Lam” series by Erle Stanley Gardner.\u00a0 Cool and Lam is a fictional American private detective firm run by Bertha Cool with Donald Lam as her main operative.\u00a0 Gardner published 29 books in the series from 1939 to 1970.\u00a0 The first book in the series was “The Bigger They Come”\u00a0 followed by “Turn On The Heat” which was the second published book in the series.\u00a0 I discovered, however, that this wasn’t the second book written in the series because Gardner had written \"The<\/a>“The Knife Slipped” after “The Bigger They Come.”\u00a0 Here’s what Wikipedia says about it:\u00a0 “Originally written to be the second book in the Cool and Lam series but rejected by Gardner’s publisher, The Knife Slipped was found among Gardner’s papers and published for the first time in 2016.”\u00a0 <\/em> \u200e <\/span> Hard Case Crime<\/span> published “The Knife Slipped” and after reading it, and enjoying it even more than “The Bigger They Come”, I was drawn back in again to that gritty thirties Los Angeles noir.\u00a0 I don’t have the next book “Gold Comes In Bricks” so I decided to look around for something else to read.\u00a0 <\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0 I love shopping at thrift stores because sometimes you find great records by artists you never heard of or biographies about great hollywood stars.\u00a0 \"Pickford:<\/a>Recently I was at a local thrift store and came across a copy of the book “Pickford:\u00a0 The Woman Who Made Hollywood” by Eileen Whitfield.\u00a0 I thought that I would add it to my collection of biographies and autobiographies of famous actors and actresses but didn’t expect to get to it for a few years.\u00a0 I started perusing it on the ride home, luckily my wife was driving, and I was hooked by page one.\u00a0 The author, Eileen Whitfield, did an amazing job detailing the life of the great Mary Pickford.\u00a0 It’s a fantastic read and I certainly didn’t want it to end.\u00a0 I don’t usually write reviews of books but I had to hop over to Amazon and write a glowing review.\u00a0 Buy, steal or borrow this book.\u00a0 You won’t be disappointed.\u00a0 <\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0 After I had finished the Pickford book I was going to take a break from reading for a while.\u00a0 \"\"<\/a>A couple of days later, however, I had to go have blood-work done and I grabbed up the book my daughter gave me for Father’s Day, “The Anthropocene Reviewed” by John Green.\u00a0 Green is the author of “Turtles All The Way Down” and “The Fault In Our Stars.”\u00a0 I hadn’t heard of the first book but I was aware of “The Fault In Our Stars” and that it had been made into a movie.\u00a0 I believe my daughter Emily and my son Noah read “The Fault In Our Stars” and enjoyed it.\u00a0 I haven’t read anything by Green before so picking up this book to read while waiting for blood-work seemed a good idea.\u00a0 Frankly, I just wanted to be able to say to Emily that I read it.\u00a0 I’m about half-way through the book and I don’t like it.\u00a0 That’s unfortunate.\u00a0 It’s basically Green reviewing a number of topics from Canada Geese to Diet Dr. Pepper to Scratch and Sniff Stickers.\u00a0 He writes about each of the topics and adds a bit of personal insight or narrative and then gives each topic a rating on a scale from 1 to 5.\u00a0 <\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0 The problem with this book, so far of what I’ve read, is that the information that Green supplies on each topic is superficial and feels like it’s skimmed from Wikipedia.\u00a0 His personal narratives ramble and sometimes have no point or are just not that interesting.\u00a0 I was telling my wife about the book and remember saying that it was “god awful” and that this guy likes the sound of his own voice.\u00a0 Now, we get to the theme of this blahg.\u00a0 Saying that someone likes the sound of his own voice is not a compliment.\u00a0 It’s akin to saying he’s full of himself.\u00a0 Maybe Mr. Green’s two novels are better reads but “The Anthropocene Reviewed” feels like he was flaunting his fame by offering up something that he was sure his followers would read just because he wrote it.\u00a0 Most of the topics are not his own and there’s better information to be found on each topic without Green’s narrative bogging it down.\u00a0 I’ll finish the book but the only good thing I can say at this point is that it at least inspired this blahg.\u00a0 <\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0 I’m done with Mr. Green for now.\u00a0 I want to talk about me, now.\u00a0 I don’t think the sound of my voice is more important than anyone else’s or that what I have to say on anything is better than what anyone else has to say.\u00a0 I try to add insight to what I post here and I try to add information that isn’t just culled from one source.\u00a0 Yes, I’ve been known to quote Wikipedia but there’s lots of other information out there to be found and if you’re going to do your research, do it well.\u00a0 Eileen Whitfield’s book on Mary Pickford proves that point.\u00a0 A well researched and well written book will grab readers and keep their interest.\u00a0 I try to do that in these blahgs.
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\u00a0\u00a0 I’ll be honest, I’m not always a fan of my own voice but sometimes I do take pride in the things I say.\u00a0 I’m a performer at heart and I guess there’s a need in me to be able to have people see or hear me perform.\u00a0 Recently my son Noah posted a video on his Analog Resurgence account on YouTube.\u00a0 He was reviewing a 1970’s 16mm broadcast camera that he had picked up earlier this summer.\u00a0 When he was home around the beginning of August he did a test role with me as the star.\u00a0 When he posted the video, the comments section blew up with comments about the “comedy gold” of his dad.\u00a0 You can check out that video below.
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