Not Quite So New!
But still a great gift! Get some holiday shopping done early! Order yours now!
"A rollicking ride of intellectual discovery and emotional growth... unlike his buzzer skills, his comic timing never fails"
-- The Wall Street Journal
"Pulls you in like a good sports story"
-- The New York Times Book Review
"Endearingly frank... jubilant... lighthearted and fast-paced"
-- New York Newsday
"A surprisingly touching memoir"
-- Entertainment Weekly
"Hugely funny"
-- Mental Floss
"Like Jeopardy! itself, it covers a lot of ground and in snappy and informative fashion"
-- Associated Press
"Down to earth and entertaining, even for non- Jeopardy! fans"
-- The New York Daily News
"A very funny writer... the book works like gangbusters."
-- Ken Jennings, 74-time Jeopardy! winner, holder of numerous other Jeopardy! records
"Effortlessly funny and informative... tender, human, and very wise... A must for anyone who loves Jeopardy!, or has ever seen it, or is breathing."
-- Joss Whedon, creator, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
"I haven't seen Jeopardy! since I was a kid, and yet I was charmed and amused by Bob Harris's fascinating and surprisingly suspenseful book. Through sheer force of personality, he takes this brainy TV show and makes it funny and easy to relate to."
-- Ira Glass, creator and host, This American Life
"Eccentric, energetic, and engaging"
-- Publishers Weekly
"The perfect gift for any Jeopardy! fan... I was thoroughly entertained"
-- USA Today, "Pop Candy"
"Surprisingly compelling... a funny and in-depth look at what it takes to win"
-- Long Island Press
"Wise, honest, and very funny... I wish I'd written it. Then again, I wish I'd won $127,000 and his-and-hers Camaros on Jeopardy!, too."
-- Jeff Greenstein, writer/producer, Desperate Housewives, Will & Grace, Friends
"Cleverly executed... solid entertainment"
-- Kirkus Reviews
"Answer: A hilarious, engaging and highly entertaining book. Question: What is Prisoner of Trebekistan? (All right... that was sort of a lame Jeopardy! joke. But what can I say? It's a great book.)"
-- Paul Feig, creator of Freaks and Geeks, author of Superstud and Kick Me
"A surprisingly intimate, entertaining book."
-- Orson Scott Card, author of Ender's Game
" Prisoner of Trebekistan is funny, enlightening -- and just might help you win a million bucks on Jeopardy!"
-- A. J. Jacobs, author of The Know-It-All
"If you don't buy this book -- this funny, learned, charming, and surprisingly moving book -- I will make it burst into flames in your hands."
-- Arthur Phillips, author of Prague and The Egyptologist
"A keeper for anyone who's even remotely a fan of Jeopardy!"
-- TVSquad.com
"If you enjoy... self-aware, geeky good humor, this could actually be your favorite book of the year."
-- The Stranger
"Highly entertaining... laugh-out-loud, absurdist funny... hilarious"
-- Akron Beacon-Journal
"Hilarious... a true treat for all Jeopardy! fans."
-- Strand Bookstore
"Everything you'd hope for... surprisingly compelling... deftly woven together... this sweet, fascinating book is a great read."
-- Book-blog.com
"If super-intelligent space aliens invaded our planet and demanded to interview one member of our species to ascertain whether or not we human beings were logical, bright, kind, and entertaining enough to be allowed to continue, I would nominate, with all my powers of persuasion, Bob Harris."
-- Emo Philips, comedian
"A masterful job of describing the feel of Jeopardy! in the heat of battle... I knew that Bob was a great guy and a fantastic Jeopardy! player. Now I've found that he's also a wonderful writer. I think I'm starting to hate him."
-- Brad Rutter, top money-winner in Jeopardy! history
|
“Revelatory... wryly funny about some very serious subjects... Harris's sly wit and infectious curiosity make understanding world chaos fascinating... witty, horrific, and necessary.”
— Boston Globe
“Only Bob could make a user’s guide to our increasingly hostile world this absorbing, this breezy, and—ultimately—this hopeful.”
— Ken Jennings, author of Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs
"Brave... irreverent... charges into the thick of the globe's myriad simmering wars... hilariously relaxed."
— New York Observer
“Fascinating, enlightening, and surprisingly: NOT TOTALLY DEPRESSING. A gimlet-eyed look at the world we endure that’s also suitable for enjoying with a gimlet.”
— John Hodgman, author of The Areas of My Expertise
and correspondent for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
|
Main
|
Travel
|
|
Friday, 16 May 2008 |
In 1973, Victor Jara was Chile's leading singer/songwriter, the local equivalent of Bob Dylan and more.
His songs mixed idealism, empathy, and hope, all in support of the popular movement that brought Salvador Allende to office -- and in defiance of the growing and often explicitly fascist opposition.
When the coup came -- September 11th, 1973 -- Gen. Augusto Pinochet's men arrested tens of thousands of people considered threats to the regime -- activists, union organizers, teachers, playwrights, and many who had nothing to do with politics at all but were just rounded up by mistake -- and turned the country's biggest football stadium into a giant internment camp.
The locker rooms and corridors were used for systematic torture and murder.
On this football field, thousands of people were held, awaiting their own turn to be taken away into the locker rooms, possibly never to return -- all for their own country's "security."
According to witnesses, every morning the blood stains would be washed away with hoses.
Outside, guards would pick through a pile of leftover shoes worn by victims of the previous night.
A 2003 official investigation identified a minimum 28,459 victims of political imprisonment and torture. 176 of these were children 12 years and younger.
Perhaps 100,000 people were eventually arrested nationwide. At least 3200 were murdered or "disappeared." A death squad known as the Caravan of Death even flew around the country by helicopter, executing people from town to town.
US citizens should know (as the world does) that the CIA and White House covertly supported Pinochet, even helping the regime track down dissidents who fled the country. To this day, Henry Kissinger cannot travel to several countries for fear of arrest.
In fact, on September 11, 2001, a criminal case against Kissinger, Pinochet, and several others was opened in Chile; this barely reached US newspapers, which were properly concerned with much more immediate horrors. But in Chile, September 11th still refers to the date of the coup. The main avenue through upscale Providencia was renamed by Pinochet's government to commemorate themselves. The memorial remains in this wealthy area even now.
Less than 24 hours into the coup, Victor Jara was arrested in a mass round-up at the university where he was working. He was taken not to the football stadium, but to a smaller boxing arena, where he was recognized by the guards and kept in a group of prisoners considered of special interest.
Jara had often played concerts in this very arena, leading thousands of people in song.
There, for three days, he was held captive and tortured, while around him fellow prisoners were beaten, deprived of food and sleep, and sometimes simply gunned down in fits of madness. Given the army's interest in him, Jara must have known he would never leave the building alive.
But to the end, Jara defied his captors, who at one point broke his hands, mocking him with orders to play his guitar. And still, Jara tried to rally his fellow captives' spirits -- at least once by singing, in full voice, from deep in the locker rooms turned into torture chambers, loud enough for other prisoners in the crowded arena to hear, still giving them heart with his voice.
On September 15th, he wrote what would become his last words, knowing he was soon to die, and that his loved ones were facing years of danger. Even after Pinochet's men had broken the bones in his hands, Jara still found the strength to write one last poem, hoping that someday he might share even this, telling us that these things do happen, warning us, crying on our shoulders, communicating with people whose faces he would never see. The words are desperate and despairing. But writing them... was a final act of hope. For all of us.
Jara's final words:
How hard it is to sing when I must sing of horror.
Horror which I am living, horror which I am dying.
To see myself among so much and so many moments of infinity
In which silence and screams are the end of my song.
What I see, I have never seen
What I have felt and what I feel
Will give birth to the moment…
And just as his poem turned toward renewal -- even now, turning toward hope -- Jara was picked out by guards. As he was taken away, he shuffled the scraps paper to another prisoner, who eventually smuggled the words out in his shoe. Jara was machine-gunned to death moments later.
Pinochet's men dumped his body with several others in a rail yard, from which it was picked up by a van that was already making frequent runs between the arena and the morgue, so numerous were the dead. From there, Jara would have been thrown in a mass grave -- becoming one of the thousands of "disappeared," fate unknown -- if morgue workers hadn't recognized his corpse among hundreds and quietly fetched Jara's wife.
Joan Jara claimed the body -- this itself was an act of courage, given how many people were being killed, for so little reason -- and brought it to the General Cemetery, where bureaucrats allotted a tiny slot along the cemetery's farthest back wall, almost a mile from the entrance, where 35 years later Jara's fans and mourners still come with fresh flowers to pay their respect, often festooning the site with graffiti, stickers, and slogans lifted from his lyrics.
The sticker excerpts one of Jara's last songs, begun shortly before his death while walking his daughter Violeta on a beach, looking for a place for his family to hide should the worst occur. Its final words (cancion nueva, "new song") play on the name of the artistic and political movement he gave his life to.
I don't sing for the love of singing or because I have a good voice.
I sing because my guitar has both feeling and reason.
It has a love of earth and the wings of a dove,
It is like holy water, blessing joy and grief.
My song has found a purpose, as Violeta would say.
A working-class guitar, but with a smell of spring.
My guitar is not for the rich, no, nothing like that.
My song is of the ladders we use to reach for the stars.
For a song has meaning when it beats in the veins of a man
Who will die singing, truthfully singing his song,
Not for fleeting praise, nor to gain foreign fame,
But for this narrow land, and to the depths of this earth.
There, where everything comes to rest and everything begins,
Song which has been brave will forever be new song.
Listen to it here:
The dictatorship ultimately banned Jara's music. They even banned some of the folk instruments often used to play it.
That day is over.
The boxing arena where he was murdered is now called Victor Jara Stadium.
Almost thirty-five years later, and nearly two decades after the end of the dictatorship, a Chilean court has found a retired colonel, Mario Manriquez Bravo, guilty in the murder of Victor Jara.
Unfortunately, they also closed the case, despite the clear involvement of numerous others. The Jara family's attorneys believe that the court is still protecting the rest for political reasons. Now come appeals.
In any case, the names of Jara's killers will be forgotten by history.
Jara's memory will live on.
When one puts one's heart, reason, and will to work at the service of the people, one feels the happiness of being reborn.
-- Victor Jara, August 1973, a month before his death |
|
Pudu
|
|
Friday, 16 May 2008 |
Okay, not really a mutant or a ninja. But a teenage pudu, nonetheless. About one foot tall.
Note the second pudu in the distance, relaxing. May your whole weekend be spent in some shady grass somewhere just like this.
Photo taken at Fernando's hideaway, the most peaceful place on this earth. |
|
Voting & Debates
|
|
Friday, 09 May 2008 |
My guess, anyway, if it's worth anything. Assuming Hillary can't hijack the nomination, McCain doesn't suddenly grow some actual integrity, and Bush doesn't have to be pried out of the White House with grease, two sixpacks, and a crowbar.
Bill Richardson: current Governor of New Mexico, former Secretary of Energy, U.S. Congressman, head of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., personally negotiated the release of Americans in Iraq and Sudan, adjunct professor at Harvard, nominated five times for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Really unique bird. Beloved by the libertarian Cato Institute yet reliably liberal on numerous issues. Has a concealed carry permit and favors medical marijuana. Great sense of humor, too. Not a perfect man, but he doesn't often bomb people just because the voices in his head tell him to, so it's a big step up from what we have.
Immediately delivers a swing state and improves Obama's ability to attract hispanics, a key Democratic constituency Obama needs to grow.
Plus, he and Obama like and respect each other, and not in the clenched-teeth politically expedient way Bill Clinton and Al Gore did. There are decent-to-great cases for a dozen other potential veeps, but Obama/Richardson seems a decent guess from here. |
|
Stuff I like
|
|
Friday, 09 May 2008 |
 A quick update on my buddy Mike:
If all those Comedy Caravan gigs couldn't kill him, bone cancer doesn't stand a chance.
Home from the hospital. Still a long climb, but he's on the path.
Chip in a few for the family if you get a chance.
Thanks. |
|
Pudu
|
|
Friday, 09 May 2008 |
"You know the Guanaco?" Fernando asked on the phone. "It is like a South American camel. You will love the Guanaco."
Sure enough, another awesome Andean animal. Good natured, lovely, generally friendly, a bit batty. These females all came bouncing out curiously at the sound of Fernando's truck.
It was like being surrounded by a gaggle Red Hat Ladies, all of whom want to kiss you on the cheek at once.
You must love and support Fauna Andina, Fernando's hideaway. I insist on it. |
|
Travel
|
|
Wednesday, 07 May 2008 |
If you've read about that Chaitén volcano that just went kablooey in Chile, it's one of hundreds down there. It's an amazing part of the world.
That's Villarica, a couple of hundred miles north of Chaitén, but it gives you some of the flavor. Of course, you have to be ready to bolt at the first sign of trouble.
In the town of Pucón, they even have a Volcano Alert Signal on the town hall. You can tell the volcano is exploding when the little red light comes on.
Alternatively, you can also look for the 20-mile plume of ash darkening the sky. Which makes it easier to see the little red light.
The only picture I have of Chaitén is this one, taken on the ferry to the island of Chiloe, from which the view of Andean peaks stretches literally across the entire horizon. (There's no way a jpg on the Internet can do this vista justice, but here it is, anyway.)
I'm pretty sure Chaitén is one of the prominent white peaks closest to the camera on the left. If this picture were taken today, there would be a monster ash plume extending high above those clouds.
Very lucky that the explosion was in a relatively remote area. There are similar volcanoes near Santiago and Quito.
|
|
Voting & Debates
|
|
Tuesday, 06 May 2008 |
Clinton just celebrated a short-term victory -- precisely as everyone else is starting to see she can't possibly win.
Say, who does that remind us of?
I wrote here on the very day she announced -- while she was still the presumptive frontrunner and the best-financed candidate by a wide margin, months before it was clear who might rise up and win instead -- that her campaign would probably founder largely on liberal opposition to Iraq, and rightly so. I had no idea Obama would rise so soon and so strong, but the math on Hillary's White House prospects seemed clear before this all started. (Of course, if grade-school arithmetic were held in higher esteem, the nomination fight would have been recognized as basically over weeks ago.)
Bonus: thanks to her increasing desperation to win, Clinton's record now includes Tuzla, threatening Iran with genocide, bold lies about NAFTA, and dozens of other future campaign ads for the opposition. All while she has alienated much of the activist base of her own party in the process.
Clinton not only can't win this trip to the White House -- now she probably can't win one, ever.
|
|
Media
|
|
Tuesday, 06 May 2008 |
Suddenly, the big touch-screen electoral map of the US goes kaplooey, for no discernible reason.
You go to live election coverage with the technology you have.
Full disclosure: I'm an Apple shareholder. Not hard to see why, though. |
|
Travel
|
|
Friday, 02 May 2008 |
The only snack that really seems appropriate.
|
|
Pudu
|
|
Friday, 02 May 2008 |
Horniest little pudu you may ever see. And smiling about it, too.
|
|
Travel
|
|
Wednesday, 30 April 2008 |
I'm no expert, so I may be misreading things, but this image from Santiago seems to sum up the competition between expanding social welfare and international investment, not just in Chile, but in much of the developing world:
That's Salvador Allende, the elected Marxist overthrown in 1973 after years of actions against his government by the CIA and several U.S. multinationals (ITT, Anaconda Copper, etc.).
Allende's memorial is right outside the presidential palace -- and right in front of Citibank.
Perhaps not quite what he had in mind. |
|
Travel
|
|
Wednesday, 30 April 2008 |
Also on the side of the road north to Santiago: possibly the strangest billboard ad I have ever seen.
I should begin by noting that IANSA is a Spanish acronym for "National Sugar Industry," although it was privatized toward the end of the Pinochet years.
 There is nothing sweeter.
That's probably true -- because Mom here is serving her daughter an entire bowl of pure white sugar.
While sitting on the kitchen floor, no less. No chairs in sight. Hey, I know what's sweeter -- buying some damn furniture, so your poor kid doesn't develop diabetes and lose all feeling in her butt in a single meal.
Can somebody please call Child Protective Services? No one even looks surprised. This is just how they roll. I mean, look closely -- does that kid even have any teeth? Mom does -- grinning like it's a pepper filet broiled with minced scallions and stone crab claws in lemon butter, and not weapons-grade glucose in a kitty dish.
Um, Mom? Can you get this kid, I dunno, a piece of raw beef, just for balance?
The artist has done interesting things with the details, too. That box has shadows and floor reflections as if it's actually in the photograph. Which means Mom keeps a box of sugar in the house almost as large as her own child.
The weirdest thought, to me: that this image, which actually gets more psychotic the longer you look at it, actually sells sugar. Successfully. Not, say, an urgent national commitment to children's nutrition, mental health advocacy, dental hygiene, and, I dunno, gift certificates to IKEA.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm making breakfast, and I need to get another oil drum of syrup to go with my pallet of Bisquick. And where did I leave my casket of jam...? |
|
Travel
|
|
Tuesday, 29 April 2008 |
< |
|
