Absolutely hilarious. Logic FTW.

St. Louisans can’t complain when we get 3 inches anymore.

To age is to embrace a slow hurt inside and out, to collect scars like rings on a tree, dark and weathered and sometimes only visible if someone cuts deep enough. Scars keep the past just close enough to touch, but healing is forgetting. Healing invites another cut. Healing is the tide that smoothes away our line in the sand. For life to begin, the damage must be permanent.
– Dale Sampson, The Samaritan

Thanks to the great people over at Blank Slate Press I received an advanced copy of their debut novel, The Samaritan by Fred Venturini. I wasn’t sure what to expect after reading the description on their site.

Dale Sampson is a nobody. A small town geek who lives in the shadow of his best friend, the high school baseball star, it takes him years to even gather the courage to actually talk to a girl. It doesn’t go well. Then, just when he thinks there’s a glimmer of hope for his love life, he loses everything.

When Dale runs into the twin sister of the girl he loved and lost, he finds his calling–he will become a samaritan. Determined to rescue her from a violent marriage, and redeem himself in the process, he decides to use the only “weapon” he has–besides a toaster. His weapon, the inexplicable ability to regenerate injured body parts, leads him to fame and fortune as the star of a blockbuster TV reality show where he learns that being The Samaritan is a heartbreaking affair. Especially when the one person you want to save doesn’t want saving.

The Samaritan is a brutally funny look at the dark side of human nature. It lays bare the raw emotions and disappointments of small town life and best friends, of school bullies and first loves, of ruthless profiteers and self-aggrandizing promoters—and of having everything you know about human worth and frailty questioned under the harsh klieg lights of fame.

I started reading the book and instantly knew it would be something right up my alley. Dale, the main character, is painted in such a way that I immediately related with his middle and high school social struggles. I really felt for Dale when he was unable to speak to the girls in his class (and as we learn, this never went away). Because the character felt so authentic, I could picture myself (or almost any of my friends) in his situation. Dale wasn’t the only character spewing authenticity. His best friend Mack encompassed parts of many of my friends as well. It felt like I really knew these characters as I read the novel.

The setting was also something that seemed to take on a life of its own. Perhaps it’s because I’m also from the Midwest, but I could picture any number of the places described in the book perfectly. In fact, the only issue I had with it is how quickly it jumped from location to location. One minute he’s in a town fighting the local meth dealer and the next he’s meeting with a studio executive to create a television series. I really think that the stories that took place in each of those settings could have been developed more. Perhaps some more confrontations with the abusive husband meth dealer and his wife or perhaps a bit more conflict with Doc before Dale jetted off to California. It would have really been great to see Dale suffer a bit more while in California. Sure, his battle with his inner demons and the people creating the show were apparent, but it could have used a little more story development to show how truly conflicted Dale was.

All in all it was a great read. I really enjoyed it and can’t wait to read more from Venturini. Venturini’s story and style reminds me a lot of Chuck Palahniuk, and that’s a good thing. I’m constantly looking for authors that can tell a story where everything about it feels real. This is one of those. I don’t want to go into great detail about the story and plot, read it for yourselves, it’s worth it.

A Holiday Message from Ricky Gervais.

When I decided to leave Google Apps for Rackspace Email for a couple of my domains, I switched from a webmail user to an IMAP user. I set up the new email accounts in Outlook and within hours decided to remove them. Because Outlook pretty much sucks I decided to use Thunderbird as my IMAP client at work. There was one thing that wasn’t working correctly, one of the things I liked most about Thunderbird, unified folders.

I love that you can have a unified inbox but for some reason my copy of Thunderbird was only showing me the contents of one inbox. After a quick Google search I was able to find the solution. If you are experiencing the same issue, simply follow these instructions.

1. Launch Thunderbird and right click on your unified inbox folder and click properties.

2. Click on Choose for which folders Thunderbird should search for the unified inbox.

3. Select which IMAP folders should be included in the unified folder. In this case, I’m going to choose all Inbox folders.

4. Click OK to save the choices, then OK to exit out of the folder properties. Your unified inbox should now be working (you may need to restart Thunderbird to see the changes).

Of course, this can be done with any folder that you want to make unified (unified sent folders or draft folders, for example), you would just need to select the IMAP folders you want to include the same way as we did the Inboxes.