Building Castles on the Beach

I just watched the movie We Bought a Zoo , and I'm not ashamed to admit I cried. Granted, it was a single, shallow tear welling in the far corner of my left eye, but I'll count it. That brings the total to five. I've cried at five movies in my life. But that's not the point. The point is that, though my twelve-year-old daughter called it "the most touching movie" she's ever seen, it is a gooey gumdrop of a movie, and I would never have cried had it not been for Jonsi. Jonsi hails from the Icelandic band Sigur Ros (which means Victory Rose in Icelandic), and I cannot gush about them enough. Several years ago, I heard this song late one night on a Denver radio station which I never listen to but did that day. It was kismet. The song was the "Untitled 3" track from the album ( ) . (That's the album title: two parentheses. For those in the know it's called "the parentheses album.") The song builds slowly with the repetition of...

I have to keep the blog coals smoldering, as it were, so I'm going to post another something that's been on my mind recently. A week or two ago, my beloved  Entertainment Weekly  published  a review of the book  Fifty Shades of Grey  by E L James . And it wasn't just a short blurb. It was the main book review for the week. Which is a sticky wicket for a variety of reasons. Not the least of which is the fact that this is a self-published book that took off through word of mouth and e-editions and now has garnered the author a multi-million-dollar deal through a real publisher and a multi-million-dollar option from a Hollywood studio. I'm in a quandary about it. Aside from the money, there's the subject matter of the book. First of all, it's romance, which is to say, erotica, which is to say, pornography.  I don't think I'm exaggerating. The EW review itself calls the book pornographic. (This is  not  to say that "romance" equates...