Deeds & Words

I got two fantasy books for Christmas; The Bards of the Bone Plain by Patricia McKillip and a slim Charles de Lint book, Medicine Road. Spouse got the book on the Royal Society, Seeing Further, which was edited by Bill Bryson, and the latest Sue Grafton mystery, V is for Vengeance.

Spouse also miraculously “found” in his duffle bag A Game of Thrones, which he insisted I must have given to him. (Him: “Well, if you didn’t give it to me, how’d it get in my duffle bag?” Me: “Exactly my question!”) He is currently reading it and I have told him he can’t talk about it until I have.

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We each got a gift card to the Four-Eyed Frog, and I picked up Prague Cemetery, by Umberto Eco. It hasn’t gotten great reviews, but dude! It’s Umberto Eco! I looked for the second volume of A Song of Ice and Fire, for the larcenous spouse who absconded with my copy of Game of Thrones, but they only had Books Three and Four. (Spouse:  “It’s one of three?” Me: “No, more like one of six. So, do you want to give it back?” Him: “No.”)

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This was not a Christmas book, but I am thoroughly enjoying Inside of a Dog, by Alexandra Horowitz. This is nonfiction, a scientific and loving study of the animal we call our best friend. Horowitz affectionately and gracefully debunks many of our myths about dogs – and wolves, too, for that matter. Last Christmas I read The Philosopher and the Wolf – this year, a similar topic, a very different approach.

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Not a Christmas book either, but it’s hard not to blog about Haruki Murakami’s latest tome, 1Q84. I say “tome” because is it 924 pages long. The Guardian UK reviewer liked it; the Washington Post liked it; the New York Times reviewer didn’t like and, in my opinion, didn’t get it. To be fair, it’s a flawed book, with several large story lines unfinished, seemingly, at the end, but that is by design. Murakami is one of those fantasists, or surrealists, who presumes that if your main character leaves a reality, they no longer will know what’s happening in that reality. There’s no scrying pool, magic mirror or convenient re-cap for you if you jump dimensions. This is internally consistent, but not particularly pleasing.

Many, many things about this long and wonderful book are pleasing though. On one hand, this is another of Murakami’s “simple love stories;” two people who belong together and the question of whether they will find each other. The book unfolds over nine months, following each of these characters; Aomame, an attractive young physical trainer, female, who also performs a select and dangerous service for a wealthy widow, and Tengo, a “cram school” math teacher who writes novels. The year is 1984. Aomame, late for a critical appointment, is stuck in gridlock on the elevated freeway in Tokyo. Following the rather strange instructions of her helpful cabbie, Aomame clambers down a rickety emergency access stairway (in bare feet and a miniskirt). When she reaches the surface, the world around her is different. She notices more and more serious differences as time goes on, although others around her are unaware of these changes, such as the fact that the moon now has a follower, a smaller, lumpy mossy green moon.

Tengo, meanwhile, has been sucked into an unethical and probably illegal scheme masterminded by Komatsu, a brilliant, eccentric editor. Tengo, who was judging a fiction contest, discovered a novella called Air Chrysalis. The book is completely original, innovative, maybe even brilliant, but the prose is terrible. Komatsu commissions Tengo to work with the author, an enigmatic 17 year old girl, to rewrite it. As he throws himself into this morally murky assignment, Tengo begins to notice differences in the world around him, such as the appearance of two moons in the sky, just like in Air Chrysalis.

That’s all perfectly straightforward, but I haven’t written about the widow and her mission; about the “spiritual society” of Sakagaki, from which the author of Air Chrysalis fled, and its disturbing treatment of prepubescent “shrine maidens”; about the Little People, characters in Air Chrysalis which the author says are real; about the cable bill collector; about Ushigawa; about the crow that visits Tengo’s house every evening; about the recurring theme of violence against women, whether it is the suicide of Aomame’s best friend in the past or the suspicious death of her police-woman drinking-buddy in the present, the questionable death of the widow’s daughter, who was trapped in an abusive marriage or the strangulation of an unnamed woman with an historical connection to one of the main characters. I haven’t written about Aomame’s childhood in the Society of Witnesses (we call them Jehovah’s Witnesses), and how she repudiated that belief system when she was ten. And I haven’t written at all about Murakami’s writing; by turns simple, homely (in the sense of being “like home”) hard-boiled, suspenseful, funny or lyrical.

At times the book is pure science-fiction – the air chrysalis and the entities it produces, the maza and the dohta – are not unlike scifi props we’ve seen before. At times, like with the “town of cats” and the scary cable bill collector, we seem to have wandered into a dark fantasy. Or, if Tengo’s work on Air Chrysalis has wrought changes in the world, or at least in Aomame, then we are squarely in the middle of downtown meta-fiction.

I won’t say any more about the story, except to give you this as a study question: the cabbie says something important to Aomame before he directs her to the stairway. What does he mean?

I do want to talk about the book itself. In Japan, these three books were published in two volumes; Books One and Two in one volume, Book Three separately. In America, they supersized it. The bloody thing must weigh eight pounds. It is not only a book, it’s an excellent defensive weapon. The publisher also pulled out all the stops to make this book beautiful. It has a fancy cover with a dust jacket that interacts with the cover art in a specific way, and lots of little nice – and maddening—details, like mirror-imaged page numbers. This is lovely and goes with the story but can be irritating if you wonder what page you are on.

If you got it on Kindle you would lose the cover detail, and the elegant section breaks, but it might be worth waiting for the paperback, if you can hold out that long. Obviously, I could not.

Christmas Eve day we walked on the beach at Schooner Gulch. The sky was ceramic blue, but the ocean was a froth of silver and white. The beach was covered with rolls of sea-foam that looked like soap suds, and piles of kelp. The tide was rushing in. We stood and took in the power of the ocean, then made our way back to the trail. Forty feet up on the headland and we were looking at meadows and trees.

The turkeys, for whom I had made a special trip to a feed store before we left, were complete no-shows, but the stellar jays and a variety of small, colorful woodpecker were very pleased with the cracked corn.

There was one other woodpecker enjoying the last of the apples from the antique orchard that stands in the middle of “The Meadows.” You can see its head here in this picture –

–and here is it from the back. It is easily twice the size of the corn-eating, jay-scaring woodpeckers.

Of course we brought books.

Spouse actually got a book for a solstice present; Three Stations, by Martin Cruz Smith. He finished it Christmas Eve.

I was delighted to finish Haruki Murakami’s long literary science fiction novel, IQ84. This book is 900 pages long. In Japan, it was published as three novels, over time (much the way we in America publish trilogies). I was trying to sum up the book in one sentence; not possible. It’s a love story, a story about alternate realities; it’s about meta-fiction, parents, domestic violence and its impact on a society; the nature of reality. And women’s breasts. There is a lot about women’s breasts, actually.

I also read Shade’s Children, and early Garth Nix novel. This YA science fiction novel is nowhere near as detailed as his outstanding Abhorsen trilogy, but it is fast-paced, with a good premise. It was kind of the reading version of a decent 90-minute B-movie adventure. (Let me be clear, I’m not talking Syfy Original here, but a good B-movie.)

We spent the Christmas weekend at St Orre’s. After a frantic Friday morning picking up wine, chocolate and corn-oats-barley (COB) for presents (hey, even wild turkeys get presents!) we got on the road about 2:30. It was a beautiful, bright blue day, and chilly.

Rosemary’s tree, with its gingerbread and cookie-dough ornaments, was beautiful again this year, and the sunlight lanced through the stained glass to create a spectacular sunset.

After we unpacked in our cabin – Treehouse – we walked back down to the lodge for our 7:00 reservation for dinner. The dining room was practically empty. At the window table across from us, a young Russian man ate by himself, reading a book. Apparently he had a room in the lodge, but we didn’t see him again all weekend.

I had the chili relleno appetizer and Spouse had the mussels in garlic and white wine sauce. The relleno is sprinkled with finely diced red and green peppers, like confetti. The crust is crisp and very light, with the pepper showing through. This appetizer never tastes like breading; I’m not even sure what they dip the chili in. When I cut into it, a river of molten jack cheese flowed out. The white wine sauce provided just enough sharpness for the mussels, Spouse reported.

He had the chilled pumpkin soup, which was like pumpkin mousse, because he is not a big fan of fennel. I chose the fennel soup because it was the warm soup and I was having trouble getting warm. The texture was velvety, with a little mound of tiny shoestring potatoes as a garnish. The flavor was very subtle. One might even say “bland.” I liked, but did not love, the soup.

The “salad” made up for anything even approaching disappointment with the soup. A poached pear stuffed with lightly candied nuts perched atop a stack of endive, drizzled with a pear vinaigrette, finished with a surprisingly mild gorgonzola, a delicious parade of flavors.

I had the pheasant. Andouillie sausage and pistachio nuts are stuffed under the skin and the bird is roasted. The sausage and pistachio stuffing is a perfect complement to the light, sweet meat. The pheasant rests on a pair of risotto pancakes with truffles. The rich earthiness of the truffles was almost too much, actually.  A serving of steamed baby vegetables rounded out the plate.

The rack of boar, Spouse informed me, was not “the other white meat.” The dense, slightly spicy meat was served with a spiced apple and apple-potato latkes. It was tender. One bite, and the flavors rolled across my tongue in layers. Baby vegetables also rounded out his dish.

Spouse had the crème caramel. When we first discovered St. Orre’s in the late 1970s, they wowed us with their chocolate decadence. Chocolate decadence is an amazing dessert and our sentimental favorite. The crème caramel surpasses it.

I had the huckleberry bread pudding with whiskey caramel sauce and vanilla cinnamon ice cream. Huckleberries are about the same color as blueberries but I think they are actually in the gooseberry family. These little sapphire gems added a sparkle of tartness to the dense pudding. The caramel sauce was so intense it was almost smoky in flavor. The ice cream balanced the other flavors.

That was our first dinner. Bundled up in coats, vests and scarves, we hurried through the star- scattered darkness to our cabin. Spouse built a big fire in the Franklin stove. I had coffee with dinner, but with the meal, and the dancing fire, I soon fell asleep.

My primary emotional response to Rosemary and Rue by Seanan McGuire is disappointment. I’ve been told by people whose opinions I respect that she is the quintessential urban fantasy writer. She sets the standard against which other urban fantasies are measured. This may be true for subsequent books, but I’m not seeing all the glory in this one.

Let me talk first about the things I do like, and there are plenty of them. I really like the title, evoking remembrance and bitterness, since to some extent that is the theme of the book. On a line-by-line basis I enjoy much of McGuire’s writing, and a couple of action sequences, like Mister Toad’s Wild Ride the wrong way up a one-way street, are great. McGuire gets most of the details of the San Francisco Bay Area right. The endless hierarchy of the Faerie is well thought out. The idea that the Fae Folk live among us in disguise stays faithful to fairy-and-folktale traditions. Secondary characters like Tybalt, the king of the cats, are well drawn.

Most of the time I like how information is released in this book. With a couple of glaring exceptions McGuire provides enough information to help us navigate the story, without overloading us. Some information serves no purpose in this book and is there to set up future conflicts in subsequent volumes, but that’s okay.

What I didn’t particularly like , in this first October Daye adventure, was the character of October Daye herself. When you don’t like the main character and the main character is also a first-person narrator, that’s a tough hurdle to clear.

October “Tobey” Daye is a changeling, half human and half fae. When the book opens, she is working as a private investigator, happily playing house with her human lover Griffin and their three-year-old daughter Gillian. Tobey is also a knight sworn to the fae lord Sylvester Torquil. Investigating the abduction of Sylvester’s wife and daughter, Tobey runs into an ambush and is trapped by a spell that imprisons her for fourteen mortal years.

When the spell mysteriously ends and releases her, Tobey wallows in self-pity, pursing a twilight existence and avoiding the faerie court – even though she has information Sylvester could definitely use. It appears that she did contact Griffin, but he told her that he and Gillian didn’t want to see her. Despite the fact that one-quarter changeling Gillian may have unusual power and may be in serious dangerous because of her heritage, Tobey does not question or challenge this edict. She gets a job on the night shift at Safeway and lives with two cats.

The brutal murder of Evening Winterose, a powerful faerie noblewoman, drags Tobey back into the world of faerie, especially because Evening laid a geas or curse on Tobey compelling her to solve the murder.

Tobey, in addition to being self-pitying, is not a very good detective. Clues are handed to her rather than her pursuing them. It is obvious to the reader very early in the story who the likely villain is, but Tobey blithely ignores clues that pile up around her. Tobey has a raft of magical friends who want to help her, but it is hard to understand what they see in her. It seems as if many of them are helping her because of some loyalty to Tobey’s mother, Amantine, but this is not explained. In the course of the book, as a result of exposure to a magical artifact, Tobey’s powers begin to grow, so presumably she is going to become more powerful as the series progresses.

Tobey also indulges in a masochistic relationship with a Faganesque character who takes in changelings who have been abandoned by the faerie. This relationship is highly troublesome and calls Tobey’s judgment into question again.

One of the smaller, but more baffling puzzles of Tobey’s behavior surrounds her relationship with Griffin. Tobey has memories of fun human times with her mother when her mother was “playing faerie bride.” Tobey’s human father is named once; he never shows up in the book. Tobey ruminates on the fact that some fae folk distrust her mother (who is still alive and well in faerie-land,) because she did play faerie bride – yet that distrust does not extend to Tobey, who did exactly the same thing. Tobey never contemplates these inconsistencies.

The mystery is too easy and Tobey does not have to work to solve it, although she does get into some great fights. At the end of the book she has acquired a third pet, a rose goblin, that is pretty cute.

So; as a detective, Tobey is not perceptive; as a mother she is unprotective; as a person she is passive and self-pitying. I don’t see why I would want to follow this person’s adventures without a pretty good guarantee that she is going to grow.

The book is not terrible, but I really don’t understand what people are responding to when they say McGuire is the queen of this subgenre. The faerie world has been handled just as well in the old Emma Bull book War for the Oaks, and in Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden books. I have to wonder, what am I missing?

My comments on this 2009 novel by Ursula LeGuin are posted at fanlit.

My favorite holiday is Solstice – both summer and winter. It’s the most astronomically interesting holiday. Winter solstice is mostly about darkness, but the dark nights are clear, filled with bright stars. Usually around winter solstice, some little thing happens that feels magical. This year was no exception.

For my coolly rational friends who read this blog, I will say that I am an open-minded sort and I am at least as willing to consider coincidence as magic; but only as willing.

After the farmers’ market today I stopped at the East West Café for breakfast. I was reading Rosemary and Rue, which I picked up used at Copperfield’s Books. This is an urban fantasy by Seanan Maguire  McGuire that comes highly recommended by several of my fantasy reading friends. More about the book another time. There was an older man eating at the table next to me. He was also alone. He was reading the Sonoma County Gazette, a free paper with lots of local news and opinions. He wore a light flannel shirt and a fleece jacket. I could see he had a hearing aid (I found out later he has two). He finished up his meal and I was drinking the last of my orange and carrot juice, and he said, “Is that a mystery you’re reading? You look so intent.”

I said it wasn’t mystery, although it appears there is a mystery in the book. I showed him the cover and said it was fantasy.

He said, “I just wrote a book with fantasy in it, but only a little bit. There’s time travel at the beginning, when four characters go back to medieval times.”

I asked what it was about. He started to explain by asking if I’d heard of the Chronicles of Narnia. I said yes, of course. Well, his YA novel is a response to Narnia. He is calling the first book “Tentacles of Marnia.”

He had me right there.

Jim McCormick’s his name. He started talking about how he never liked the Pevensey children in the Narnia books, and how surprised he was to find out that there were people who didn’t see the Christian allegory in the Narnia books. (Amazing, but apparently true.)

He knew a lot about Lewis; about his childhood, with his mother dying of cancer, him and his brother being sent to boarding school at a tender age – about his pact with a fellow soldier in World War I and Lewis’s subsequent support of the soldier’s mother and younger sister, and apparently a sexual relationship with the mother. (Debate rages to this day about whether Mrs Moore and Lewis did have a sexual relationship.)  He started to tell me about the Inklings, but of course I already knew about them. We discussed the differences between Tolkien and Lewis. He was very focused on Lewis’s spiritual journey, but he thinks the Pevensey children were “stuffy” and “prissy.” He knew a lot about Lewis’s letters and non-fiction, and thought that with the exception of the Narnia books, Lewis’s fiction was pretty bad.

Then I asked him about his book. Four modern-day teenagers get thrown back in time, onto an island in the North Sea, in what sounds like the mid-thirteenth century. After the Norman invasion, a Norman knight was given this island as his demesne. The original ruler was quite progressive, but now his grandchildren rule, and they are awful. When the modern-day kids show up, they connect with local rebels, who tell them the  tentacles of control must be severed: army, police force (I’m guessing more like espionage or secret police) the Church influence, etc. He didn’t list all the tentacles.

He has just finished the first book. He is in a writers’ group and they like it, he told me. He is getting ready to start the second book and market the first one. I made a couple of suggestions and told him he most likely would need an agent.(My main suggestion was that he do both start the second book and begin marketing the first one.)

He was very interested when he heard that I reviewed books. I pulled out a piece of paper and tore it in half—half for him and half for me to exchange e-jail addresses on. His ISP is rockisland.com.

“You are not from the San Juans!” I said.

“You knew that from the email address? I live on San Juan Island,” he said.

My parents retired to the San Juans and lived on Orcas, the second-biggest island in the archipelago. Their e-mail was also through rockisland.com. Jim is down visiting his two daughters who live in Santa Rosa. What are the odds, really, of me meeting someone who is writing a fantasy novel and lives 30 miles from where my step-mother does?

Even more strange is that East-West Café was not my first choice for breakfast today. The place I wanted to go to had no tables, and I didn’t feel like waiting. Coincidence? Or solstice magic? I’m voting for magic.

The Gypsy Café moved into the old Pine Cone space and decorated it, not in a gypsy theme particularly, but more of a stage door/theater look. Breakfasts and lunches are good, and the owners are now offering a fixed price fried chicken dinner on Fridays.

The meal costs $20.00 including beverage. The entre is pan-fried chicken, with braised winter greens, asiago bread pudding (a savory pudding) and a Caesar salad.

I have wanted to try this for a month, and I finally made it in night before last. The place was about two-thirds full, and because I wanted a table instead of a seat at the counter, they put me in the back room, which is small. It soon filled up. There was a guitarist up at the front playing flamenco music and singing. He wasn’t the best singer-guitarist I ever heard, but he was enthusiastic. It may just be the acoustics, but I’ve heard music in there before that’s sounded better. Nice guy, though.

The Caesar salad came first. The lettuce was crisp and fresh (the torn bases of the stalks were white with no hint of browning), and the dressing was creamy but not too heavy. It had a faintly lemony bite. The salad had a sprinkle of Romano cheese. I liked it. I ordered an Ace pumpkin hard cider. I haven’t had hard cider before. The alcohol content was 5% and the drink was fizzy and sweet, almost like a soft drink. I wasn’t really getting much of pumpkin flavor—it was mostly apple. This was a beverage that proves the fallacy of “sip tests,” like they have in the malls. The first two draughts were great, but about halfway through the glass I found it a little cloying and really wanted some water. Okay, though, I can check the box—I’ve had hard cider.

There was a bit of a glitch and I waited for a long time between my salad and the chicken. It was okay; I had a Murakami novel. Eventually, though, they brought my plate. They serve three pieces of chicken, wing, breast and thigh. The crust was pan-fried to a dark brown, nearly chocolate color. It was not burned; this was the desired color. The chicken was not greasy and in my case that the breast piece was a little bit dry. I didn’t taste any particular spices or herbs. The crust was crunchy. The greens, chard I think, were earthy and very, very tasty, but the star of this plate was the asiago bread pudding. It had plenty of cheese and sprinkling of stewed tomato, and a silky, melt-on-your-tongue texture. Evenly cut chunks of bread balanced the silkiness of melted cheese and the tomato.

For dessert the server brought around mini-cupcakes, with green and red sprinkles.

The kitchen was hopping. I peered in as I left and saw a six-foot tall rolling rack loaded with breaded chicken parts.

I think this is a clever way to test the water for dinner service. It’s also a good time of year to launch this limited service because shops are open later for holiday shopping. The big front room has mostly tables for four or six, so around holiday time, here’s a relatively inexpensive way to spend time with family and friends. Very low-stress, too; people are friendly, no big decisions about what you’re going to order, and you know exactly what you’ll pay.

The Gypsy Café is trying to carve out some new territory on a Main Street packed with eateries. They have community tables, and the live music creates a social, convivial atmosphere. Fried chicken, I was reminded, is not one of my favorite things, but the meal was good overall.  The Café has a less ambitious and more consistent menu than the people in that space before them; they run the front of the house better and in general seem to have greater business confidence. They also have good food. I think they’ll make it.

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My review of Cassandra Clare’s Victorian Shadowhunter book is up at fanlit.

For this weekend and next weekend, the farmers’ market has moved into the plaza instead of the parking lot, leaving parking for the local merchants who expect the local holiday shoppers. It makes for a very… cozy market.

Last week a fellow shopper, a very ill-tempered red-haired woman in her thirties, walking with a stick, snapped at me that carrots were out of season when I asked a farmer if he had any. She didn’t work in the booth, just took it upon herself to educate me. Of course she was wrong and they aren’t out of season, they’re just slowing down. Last week they were sold out of carrots, but this week three vendors had them and I got a bunch from Armstrong Farms before they disappeared. Dave the fishmonger was there and I got halibut and Alaskan king salmon. At Orchard Farms, the farmer suggested that it would be good weather for potato-leek soup. He had leeks (First Light Farms had various types of potatoes). He also recommended adding some parsnips for sweetness, so I got some of those too. Young beets for two dishes—sauteed beet greens and a beet salad later in the week.

Hector was there, with onions, squash, peppers, eggs and, of course, honey.

The musicians were, apparently, some kind of Gordon Lightfoot tribute group, since out of the six songs I heard them play, five were his – including all 457 verses of “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” They might have played it to warm up. It only took them about ten minutes to complete. Darned fine guitar players, though.

Occupy Sebastopol is still there–all one tent and three participants of it. I’m not sure what point they are making by occupying us, but I admire their dedication. They seem like nice people.

I stopped at the used bookstore on my way back and found a copy of a Mervyn Peake biography. I’m searching for Titus Groan, the first book of the trilogy, but this looks like an interesting diversion.

Spouse watches Fox News. I don’t try to explain it or excuse it; he just does. Anyway, the blogs and Fox are jumping with the story of a house or mobile home that burned down in Tennessee. A fire truck and crew sat a short distance away watching the structure burn but did not intervene, because the home-owners had not paid the $75 annual subscription fee for fire services and they live outside the city limits.

The owners of the building went back into it in order to try to retrieve some of their belongings. The authorities assured the public that if the firefighters had thought that anyone was in danger, they would have attempted to rescue them. They just don’t save property if you haven’t paid your membership fee. They can’t afford to.

A show Spouse thinks is called “The Fabulous Five” had this as a topic, and the Fox pundits were incensed that those firefighters didn’t rush in and save the structure. He quoted them as saying things like, “Couldn’t they put out the fire and then collect the $75?”

Typically, Fox blamed the firefighters instead of the municipality or even the state of Tennessee, which I guess does not collect taxes and provide fire-safety services. Even more baffling, to me, is their reaction at all. This is “small government” Fox. They should be thrilled. Here is small government in action. Hurray! Not only that, it is looking forward, striding bravely into the  nineteenth century, when city-dwellers posted the medallions of their private fire companies on their walls, so that their houses would be saved in the event of a conflagration. Live in a tenement and can’t afford the cost of a fire company? Better be careful with your candles and your coal fire, then.

As a taxpayer and a homeowner in California, I pay taxes and I expect fire protection. And I get it. Even though we live at the edge of a rural area and many of the firefighters are volunteers, they are well trained,have excellent equipment, and a network of mutual aid contracts. (Mutual aid, apparently a socialist idea Tennessee does not embrace.)There are streets in my county that have designated themselves somehow “privately maintained roads” but to my knowledge they still pay parcel taxes and still have fire protection.

Of course, California is teetering on bankruptcy. Maybe Tennessee is right and only people who live in the city or are wealthy enough to pay an annual membership fee “deserve” fire-protection. For that matter, why do we have to pay taxes for water treatment? Can’t we all buy bottled water? Or those of us with money could pay “memberships” in water treatment plants and we could have clean water. Those slackers who just mow our lawns and watch our kids, pave our roads, mix our coffee drinks, nurse us back to health, teach us and sell us our clothes would just have to take their chances. Instead of paying for everybody, even those dratted poor people, to get water, why don’t we just drill some holes and put some standpipes in the town square. That’d work, right?

And don’t even get me started on education! How dare all those people think they have a right to learn! Don’t they understand the meaning of privilege? Well, if they don’t, they can go look it up.

Fox’s “Fab Five” or whatever they are lack the courage of their own convictions. A family’s house burning to the ground is the logical consequence of a government “so small you could drown it in a bathtub.” Grumbling? Complaining? Acting shocked? You should be celebrating! This is the Fox’s vision of America. Rejoice in it, Fox pundits. Sip expensive wine  and toast some marshmallows in its lambent glow.