Cory Doctorow believes the odds are stacked against us:

[T]he statistically super-rare terrorist attacks present, on average, a much lower risk to our health, safety and person than, say, depriving us of our liquid medications, or of requiring us to leave our bags unlocked in flight so that sticky-fingered handlers can make off with our laptops and financial data and valuables.

The everyday threat of having our goods stolen, our ability to travel and earn our livings curtailed, and our personal information harvested by every junior terrorist fighter who wants to see your ID before letting you do anything is overshadowed by the one-in-a-billion confluence of someone with terrorist goals, the means to accomplish them, and the intelligence to bring them off (hint: you can’t really blow up an airplane with hair-gel and iPods).

Unfortunately, as long as you, Mr & Mrs John Doe, continue to tune in Mr & Mrs Media Scumbag on the ol’ boobtube (whose job is to keep you glued to your screens through the power of fear and morbid curiosity), you’ll always believe that you, personally, are the terrorists’ No. 1 Target. Such insufferable arrogance. Especially in a country (ahem, USA! USA!) that does a better job of killing its own citizens with acts of violence than the terrorists do. 

Even though my Welsh relatives (cheers, Paul and Julian!) were in the Wembley stands, I must tip my hat to Harry and Pompey for winning the FA Cup, 1-0, versus Cardiff.

Hats completely off to David James, though, perhaps the Premier League’s finest gentleman.

Author Oakley Hall has died at age 87. He’s probably best known for Warlock, called “one of our best American novels” by Thomas Pynchon.

Once again, to pigeonhole Warlock as a genre novel shows the limitations of labelling. Warlock is a great novel that just happens to be set in the American West. Don’t dumb it down for readers . . . Ah shit, I’m growing tired of this argument.

Saner heads finally prevailed in the Windy City:

On Wednesday, Chicago’s aldermen voted, 37 to 6, to repeal their ban on sales of [foie gras], the fattened livers of ducks and geese. Since 2006, when this became the first major city in the United States to enact such a ban, it had been mocked by critics, including Mayor Richard M. Daley, who wondered whether aldermen should really be devoting precious time to telling Chicagoans what to eat.

No one has the right to tell you what you should eat . . . Ah, the self-righteous food nazis of the world must be wringing their hands over this one.

Yesterday, a little bit of good was delivered into the world:

Finlay Atom Kimbrough.

Mum’s alright, dad’s alright . . . baby’s got no idea how good he has it.

David Ulin of the Los Angeles Times doesn’t think much of James Frey’s new novel:

“Bright Shiny Morning” is a terrible book. One of the worst I’ve ever read . . . Two and a half years after he was eviscerated by Oprah Winfrey for exaggerating many of the incidents in his now-discredited memoir “A Million Little Pieces,” he’s back with this book, which aims to be the big novel about Los Angeles, a panoramic look at the city that seeks to tell us who we are and how we live . . . Ultimately, though, it is still what’s on the page that matters, and “Bright Shiny Morning” is an execrable novel, a literary train wreck without even the good grace to be entertaining . . . It’s just one of the ironies of this new book that his fictionalized memoir is a better novel than “Bright Shiny Morning” could ever hope to be.

Compare this with Janet Maslin’s glowing yet unreadable review in the New York Times:

James Frey loved Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski and maybe even John Fante but he didn’t sound like them, he didn’t sound beat or cool. He sounded hopeful. He sounded unguarded, tender. He quit posturing. He stopped romanticizing squalor. He found new energy. He sounded more like Carl Sandburg in love hate thrall with great maddening Chicago than like the usual tough gritty moody chronicler of California’s broken dreams.

Yeah, I get what Maslin was trying to do; it didn’t work . . . unless she was cleverly trying to dissuade me, in which case she beats Ulin hands down.

First, Lake Lavon and now Denton. The New York Times is busy dredging up the party spots of my late teens and early twenties.

With its Piggly Wiggly markets and dusty pawnshops, the Texas college town of Denton does not look the part of a Woodstock in waiting . . . But wander into the Panhandle House, a barnlike recording studio on North Locust Street, and you’ll find Midlake, a five-person band whose music the British newspaper The Guardian has called “a dreamy concoction of Neil Young, Fleetwood Mac, Tom Petty and the Yardbirds.”

Of course, back then, the band of the moment was Ten Hands, an even dreamier concoction of Frank Zappa and the Meat Puppets.