Mad World | Kelsey Timmerman

Dildo or Firework?

By Kelsey

Have you ever noticed that the names of fireworks are a little too dildo-like?

I just flipped through an online catalog of fireworks and found the following firework names: Aerial Avalanche, Burst and Bloom, Untamed Retribution, Bada Bing Bada Boom, Komodo 3000, Phantomizer, Bone Breaker, White Knight, Midnight Monsoon.

And the list goes on, but I should probably stop before Annie hollers up and asks what I’m doing. “Oh I’m just trying to find fireworks which have names that sound like dildos. (I’m thankful this is the first time this has ever occurred to me…but is the plural dildos or dildoes?)

Mad World

Death by Google Maps

By Kelsey

(You can get the graphic above – Map Marker of Death – on a T-shirt here)

It took a little while to realize I might get shot. If I was, I vowed to write a message in blood to my wife revealing the identity of my killer. With a blood stained finger, I’d scrawl: Google Maps.

I was in Beverly Hills at a speaking engagement and needed to get back to my hotel near LAX. I had tried to rent a car with no success, so I was traveling by bus. I was using Google Maps on my iPhone to navigate L.A.’s bus system.

I followed the directions exactly without a second thought, as one is apt to do with technology. Unlike a local friend, a kind passerby, or a gas station attendant, Google Maps doesn’t mention info that is just as critical as getting from A to B as right turns and wrong turns, such as pot-holed-filled streets or the presence of gang violence.

To get from Beverly Hills to LAX I had to change buses twice. The first bus stop was nearly my last.

I grabbed my laptop bag with my shiny new Mac inside and headed for the bus door. The bus lady gave me a look in her mirror as I exited.

“Maybe she’s just admiring my new blue sweater,” I thought. “Or maybe she’s giving me props for doing such a fabulous job of navigating L.A.’s public transit system.”

The bus pulled away and left me alone on Crenshaw Boulevard.

What you need to know – and what I was so blissfully unaware of – about Crenshaw is that it’s the neighborhood that the movie Boyz ‘n the Hood was based on. The “hood” has been mentioned in songs by Easy-E, Nas, Wu-Tang Clan, and Dr. Dre. It is an area very, very unlike any that I could stumble upon in my hometown of Muncie, Indiana.

Dr. Dre on Crenshaw in “Stranded in Death Row”:

What don’t you bring you’re ass on over to Crenshaw and Slauson
Take a walk through the hood, and we up to no good
Slangin’ on things like a real ho
G should, I’m stackin’ and mackin’ and packin’ a ten so
When you’re slippin’, I slip the clip in
But ain’t no steady tripppin
Cause it’s Death Row, rollin like the mafia

The Damu Ridas on Crenshaw from their album “How Deep is Your Hood?”:

On Crenshaw and Century the Mafia has made history, and even know punk [n-word] wanna do shit.

“Oh. My God. I’m going to die.”

The seriousness of my location set in when I saw the bars over the windows on the nearby McDonald’s. In case you are thinking that a fast food restaurant is some oasis of peace when it comes to gang violence, and I had nothing to worry about: three days ago a man was shot and killed in the drive-thru of a Taco Bell on Crenshaw. The bullets got him before the tacos did.

According to Google Maps I was doing everything right. According to evolution I wasn’t. The look the bus driver gave me was actually like the one that the farmer gives the lamb when he takes him to market, “Well, it’s been nice knowing you.”

“Act like you belong here. Act like you belong here.”

I was wearing a pair of shoes that resemble Chuck Taylors. My jeans had a fashionable hole in the knee. I shouldered a Timbuk2 laptop bag the color of moist moss that sits next to mountain biking trails frequented by weekend warrior yuppies.

And my sweater…Lord help me…my sweater. It was blue!!! I was in Crips & Blood country wearing Crips’ colors. Or as they say, “trued up” in Crips’ colors.

I tried my best not to look like a gang-initiation prerequisite. Wide-eyes equal fear, so I squinted like Clint Eastwood. I acted like this was my normal commute. I whistled. I checked my watch even though I wasn’t wearing one.

On the inside I was panicked. I pondered escape routes and places to grab cover. I held my laptop bag in such a way that it could be used as a weapon.

All this to say: I looked like an idiot.

As cars pulled into McDonald’s, the passengers did double-takes, undoubtedly wagering if I’d come to my final resting place on the sidewalk, in the street, or in the McDonald’s landscaping behind me.

In 2010 a pedestrian sued Google after Google Maps directions on her Blackberry told her to cross a dark street in Park City, Utah. She crossed. There wasn’t a sidewalk. She got hit by a car and sued Google for $100,000.

Would my wife have a case?

Using GPS makes us dumber. Researchers at McGill University found that GPS users have a higher chance of damaging the part of the brain knows as the hippocampus. The hippocampus tells humans where they are and where they are going. Atrophy of the hippocampus can expose a person to a higher risk of cognitive diseases like Alzheimer’s.

Whether led by brain damage or blind faith, I shouldn’t have been standing on a street corner in Crenshaw.

I sat my mind to the task of finding words that rhyme with Hoosier: loser, boozer, snoozer, cruiser, doozer, newser, ruser, muser, woozer.

Standing on the corner like a Hoosier
Holding my laptop like a muser
About to go down like a loser

L.A. buses require exact change. My wallet had credit cards heaped with frequent flyer miles, a one-dollar bill and a ten-dollar bill, and an Indiana license announcing I was an organ donor, but it didn’t have exact change. I pondered running into the McDonald’s to break the ten, but what if I missed the bus?

The wait was supposed to be ten minutes, but twenty long minutes went by, each passing like a dog year and being subtracted like a cat’s life.

Finally, the bus rolled up and the driver threw open the door.

“Hello, mam,” I may as well have said howdy. “I don’t have exact change…” I paused allowing her to fill in the blank with, “I don’t have exact change, but I’m scared shitless and really need to be anywhere but on this street corner holding thousands of dollars of electronics ‘trued up’ in my Crip colors. Please, oh please, let me have a ride.”

“Honey, just get on,” she said.

My life, nearly brought to an end by Google Maps, was spared and I learned an important lesson: I need to pull my head out of my GPS.

Mad World

My first gay bar

By Kelsey

I love being married to my wife. And I’m happy for those in New York who will now be able to tie-the-knot. Although, I wouldn’t be surprised if the bill is overturned within the next 12 months by a state constitutional amendment. However, I’m confident that in my lifetime gay men and women across the country will have the right to marry just like the rest of us.

You might disagree with my view on this. Maybe you feel so strongly against gay marriage that you have one of those anti-gay marriage bumper stickers, or you don’t feel the need to examine the issue any further than, “It’s Adam and Eve! Not Adam and Steve!!” Maybe it’s a faith thing for you. That’s fine.

For me it’s not a faith thing; it’s a human rights thing. And more than that — a love thing. I have gay family members and gay friends. For those who haven’t found that someone they want to spend the rest of their lives with, like I have, I hope that they do. And for those who have, I see a love that is no more right or wrong than the love I share with my wife.

In honor of the state of New York legalizing gay marriage, Slate has a feature today titled The Gay Bar. Slate asked “eminent gay, lesbian, and bisexual writers to tell…about their first visit to a gay bar.”

I’m not eminently gay, lesbian, or bisexual. In fact, I’m eminently heterosexual, but I’ll never forget my first gay bar. I dusted off the ol’ Travelin’ Light (the column I wrote from 2002-2006) archives and pulled out the column below on some of my gay bar experiences.

Have you been to a gay bar? I’d love for you to share your story in the comments.

(Oh and this piece is Kelsey circa 2002, so forgive any clumsiness in the writing.)

Light-Hearted Bars

I’m Kelsey, a single white male, straight as a prize-winning stalk of corn at an Ohio county fair.

Melbourne, Australia- I’m in a bar sipping on a cold one and discussing the finer points of Australian beer with some travel companions. After a hard day of driving from Sydney to Melbourne, we’re winding down. The Prince of Wales Pub stands up to our rigorous requirements- it is the first bar we come to and the beer is cold. Everything seems so right, but then…

I begin to notice a skewed demographic of patrons- they’re mostly men. After a quick canvas the realization begins to set in- I’m in a gay bar. No problem, you have gay friends. There is nothing to worry about. Oh, shit. That’s when I saw them, a group of guys hawking in a half circle, looking in my direction. After some final words of encouragement and a few pats on the back, a small Asian man weaves his way through an imaginary set of cones set in place on the floor by a few too many drinks.

His eyes stare out beneath a pair of droopy eyelids and some snot occupies his upper lip. Stay calm.

“Hi.” Snot lip spoke first. What do I do? A man has never hit on me before.

“Hello.” I am anything but flattered. I would not be interested regardless of his appearance, but he could have at least wiped the snot off his lip. The room closes in upon me. The music is loud and the steady hum of conversation with its waves of laughter echoes off the walls.

Oh no he’s going to speak again. Do I let him down easy? Do I run? It looks like he is on some kind of drug. It undoubtedly fills his loins with unrelenting passion while giving him exceptional strength and speed. Escape is futile.

“You look naughty.”

Naughty! The word hits me in the gut like a sucker punch and on the forced exhale my voice raises an octave in disbelief, “I look naughty???”

“No!” He points to my head of blonde curls. “I said you look Nordic. Not naughty, but Nordic.” He slowly pronounced and emphasized each syllable, “NOR-DIC.”

A vice begins to crush my head and a knife slowly twists in my chest. I’m an idiot. “Oh,” I nervously laugh, “I’m neither.”

Key West, Florida- I work as a SCUBA instructor on the island and I have been told that the drag show is a “can’t miss.” “Yeah, you should definitely take your mom and cousin there.”

At the back of the room my mom, my cousin Brice, a few of his friends, and I look through the bar and up to the small stage.

I am the first to admit that some drag queens are beautiful- not that I go for that kind of thing, I am just an honest guy- but the one performing has a bit of what Brice refers to as a “Dogface.” She struts out on the stage a petite 6’5” muscle cut diva, and provocatively dances to a Cher song.

Beside me Mom is smiling and moving to the music, having a good time. I’m glad I brought her here, a little something that you can’t experience in rural Ohio. The song ends and Dogface steps off the stage with a collection bucket.

Earlier that night I had embarrassed Brice’s friend, Mary, when I asked a Cuban man, who she had been eyeing all night, to salsa with her. She danced and returned with a large grin that fell to a scowl when she reached me, “I owe you. You better watch your back.”

These are the words that haunt me as Mary slips a twenty into Dogface’s bucket, whispers in her ear, and points at me. The room is wall-to-wall people. I am wedged between mom and Brice with nowhere to go.

Soon a bucket is shoved into my face. I look up, a tall drink of water if I ever saw one, into a toothy grin bordered with bright red lipstick. This is bad, very bad. The large red lips begin to move. She’s talking to me. I can’t hear, especially in pressure situations- either my mind flies away instead of fighting to comprehend or something in my ears shut down. I should get it checked out.

I later discovered the question was a simple one, “Are you gay?” A wrong response would have surely led to a life scarring experience and a lifetime of embarrassment.

She’s waiting for a response. Think…think. Play it safe. “I’m Kelsey.”

Dogface cocks her head to the side in question before finally shrugging her shoulders and slowly leaning towards me. There are times in life where a guy requires his mother for protection and/or guidance. This is one of those times and lucky for me, mom is standing right beside me.

Time slows. I turn in mom’s direction in desperation, seeking maternal shelter. The drag queen’s face nears. I hold my breath. Mom’s head deliberately drifts back and out billows long, slow, deep laughs from the gut, “HA…HA…HA…,” the laugh of the devil.

The lips impact my cheek as I back against the wall crawling in my skin. Nowhere to run. The devil laughs beside me. My back is against the wall. Before me in six-inch stilettos is a man the size of a professional wrestler. It’s just a kiss on the cheek…take it like a man. That’s when the suction begins.

My eyes go blank and I stare at my kin laughing hysterically. An animal being eaten alive, my mind drifts from my body, separating itself from the pain and horror.

I gaze down at Kelsey, a dog-faced drag queen stuck to his face, and weep.

Mad World

Jon Stewart hates the news

By Kelsey

Did you see Jon Stewart on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace? He was pissed. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen him not funny for that long.

“The embarrassment is that I’m given credibility in this world because of the disappointment that the public has in what the news media does,” Stewart said.

“I don’t think our viewers are the least bit disappointed with us,” Wallace said. “I think our viewers think, finally, they’re getting somebody who tells the other side of the story.”

“Who are the most consistently misinformed media viewers?” Stewart shot back, his voice rising. “The most consistently misinformed? Fox, Fox viewers, consistently, every poll.”

Here are some thoughts on the polls Stewart was talking about.

Wallace was trying to get Stewart to say that FOX News has no more of a conservative bias than the mainstream media has a liberal one. Instead, Stewart hammered FOX News and said that the mainstream media is obsessed with sensationalism, conflict, and laziness.

I would like to see a poll on how many other news sources FOX viewers turn too. Many of the FOX viewers I know feel like the network is the only one that “gets them.” I guess what I’m saying is that I believe that FOX viewers are the most loyal and their unwillingness to look for news elsewhere contributes to the damning poll numbers Stewart referenced.

I watch FOX. I also watch CNN, MSNBC, BBC, Al-Jazeera, and tap into a world of news outlets via Twitter. I don’t always agree with the politics or viewpoints provided by all of these outlets. But whenever I find myself immersed in a world of people and pundits who see the world exactly like I do, I know I need to poke my head out of my bubble. I’m in danger of drinking some spiked Kool-Aid.

Agreeing with someone who thinks like you is easy. Considering an alternate viewpoint actually requires thought and may lead to learning.

I explore media stereotypes here.

Mad World

Tom Hanks on Faith & Fear

By Kelsey

Tom Hanks gave the commencement speech at Yale this year. He shared some interesting thoughts on Faith & Fear.

Since Saving Private Ryan he’s become a bit of a history buff, and I appreciate the fact he takes a longer view on current events. We’re in a rough patch and, unless you are graduate from Yale, you might’ve noticed it’s not easy finding a job these days.

The talking heads on TV spout the latest fears at us (America is done, move to China, the earth is toast, buy gold because when the economy collapses and no one has anything to eat or drink it will be worth a lot!!!!) or they are spouting off, red-faced about Weiner-Gate. (By the way I’m totally against the use of -gate to describe a scandal. If Weiner-gate doesn’t kill the usage, nothing will.)

Every generation has their tough time or six. My parents hid under their desks in school, practicing in the event their was a nuclear attack. My grandparents were too young to know they were poor, but late in life they heard their parents talk about the tough times of the depression.

As Tom Hanks says history is a “Yin and Yang thang!” That’s important to remember. So why is it that we act as if there are more of us that have faith that the world as we know it is ending than those of us who have faith in tomorrow.

(Start at 9:30)

Mad World

Colbert to the world: F**K off!

By Kelsey

“I believe we just build a wall at the border and tell the world (whistles and flips off the world).”
- Stephen Colbert in an interview with Tea Party Express founder Amy Kremer

Jon Stewart will call out his guests and argue with them somewhat respectfully. But Stephen Colbert will totally eviscerate a guest by agreeing with their stance more than any other person in the world ever has…ever. And in doing so, Ms. Kremer’s position was left in a puddle of stupitude along with the failed presidential run of Donald Trump.

You should watch the whole interview (below), but the moment quoted above was by far my favorite and the scariest. The whole “let’s get our crap in order before we start concerning ourselves with the world’s problems” is idiotic. The worlds problems are our problems. There’s no border.

This hits right at the heart of why I’ve launched the Go Glocal Project. We live in tough times and budgets are being slashed, but we can’t turn our backs on one another.

If we tell the world to f—off!, in the long run we’re just f—ing ourselves.

And that’s the Word.

Glocal, Mad World

CNN won’t cover the rapture

By Kelsey

My son is due any day now. A man at a recent talk I gave mentioned that he saw a billboard that predicted the 2nd coming of Christ on 5/21. I joked about being the Messiah’s father and how much of a surprise that would be.

Maybe he wasn’t the one to joke around about such things with because he started to quote scripture about the second coming and how we had no idea where on earth it would happen, but somehow we’d all see it, hear it, and know it.

Again (I’m dense), I joked that regardless of where Christ lands (rises, appears), we’d all find out about it on CNN from Wolf Blitzer.

“Probably not CNN,” he said, with an obvious dislike that the three letters just passed his lips. “I don’t think they would cover it. We’d hear about it on Fox News.”

Are we really this divided? Are networks nothing more than teams? The 2nd Coming would be the biggest news story ever, and you can bet your darn Neilsen ratings and your eternal soul that Anderson Cooper will be there in a too tight T-shirt amid horsemen, raining frogs, earthquakes, or whatever else is going down.

The fact we equate religiosity more to some networks than others is just one of the signs that our media has some issues.

Mad World

Just Add Water Underwear!

By Kelsey

Saw this

Wrote this

Dear Archie McPhee,

I’m one of the top 10 living underwear journalists in Indiana and I would like to review your Instant Underwear and other novelty underwear products. Of course, I’m joking about the top 10 underwear journalist bit, but I’m not joking about writing about your underwear. I’ve written about disposable underwear for the Travel Channel and about anti-flatulence underwear for the Huffington Post. I also read the essays when I visit college campuses to talk about my book Where Am I Wearing? A global tour to the countries, factories, and people that make our clothes.

If you’re interested, I’d love to take a crack at your underwear.

All the best,

Kelsey

–
Kelsey Timmerman
Author / Speaker / Touron

Now I wait.

Mad World

Bin Fibbin’

By Kelsey

We got him. I’m glad.

As the details of Bin Laden’s death started to come forward, something didn’t smell right. Nope, I’m not one of those who thinks Osama’s not actually dead. In fact, I don’t want to see photos or video or any other proof than we’ve seen already. I’m good. He’s dead. Got it.

There were several claims that I didn’t buy into from the get go. They just seemed too fantastic.

He used his wife as a human shield!!!

This makes him look like a coward and belittles him as a man. It just fits the narrative too perfect. Why not say that he was playing with Barbies and listening to Hannah Montana when the Seals invaded his transgendered slumber party?

He had a gun and was going all Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid?

Err…maybe he didn’t have a gun after all.

I’m not trying to defend Bin Laden or give him credit in any way, but I’m asking to be told the truth. We long for simple, clean-cut narratives so much that we create them when they do not exist. (I’m looking at you Greg Mortenson.) It’s almost like we are utterly incapable of understanding a story more complex than an old western where the bad guy wears a black hat and the good guy wears a white one.

Navy Seals put a bullet through the brain of the boogieman. It’s an accomplishment. Why do we need to sully the accomplishment with little white lies to make the story better? We probably won’t know what went down in that compound for a long, long time. Yet we are lapping up the details without question as if we’ve never been fed a spoonful of crap before (Pat Tillman, Jessica Lynch). And soon as we realize what we swallowed, we shake our heads and say, “You know, that didn’t taste right.”

Mad World

The problem with “Three Cups of Tea” and the 60 Minutes attack

By Kelsey

“It’s a beautiful story and it’s a lie,” said Jon Krakauer at the beginning of yersterday’s 60 Minute piece attacking Greg Mortenson, his books Three Cups of Tea and Stones into Schools, and the Central Asia Institute.

It didn’t stop with Krakauer.

“Totally false. He’s lying,” said a man pictured as a terrorist in Three Cups, but who is actually a respected academic in Pakistan.

“Greg uses CAI as his private ATM,” claimed a former board member of CAI.

“Grossly exaggerated.”

“Outright fabrication.”

“A steaming load of horseshit peppered with corn kernels of wisdom.” Me.

Thee Cups of Lies

After a failed summit attempt of K2, Mortenson stumbled into the village of Korphe where he was nursed back to health and promised a little girl he would return to build a school.

How touching.

Too bad it didn’t happen like that. Mortenson admits to having “compressed time” and 60 Minutes even showed a pre-book article by Mortenson for the American Himalayan Foundation with the true order of events: Mortenson hiked off K2 just fine and first stepped foot in Korphe a year later.

Compressed time equals lying. So does reordering events or any other time shenanigans that don’t involve a flux capacitor, 1.21 gigawatts of power, and a DeLorean.

Nothing drives me crazier than a short author’s note at the beginning of a book stating that some of the events have been reordered for the narrative’s sake, still Three Cups should’ve had one.

(Warning: Some of the following has been reordered to make my life more interesting in an effort to sell more books.)

I was on SCUBA at 200’ and I couldn’t feel my body. There was a great white to my right, a hammerhead swimming straight at me, and I was circled by 200 reef sharks. The heart of the diver next to me gave out. He drowned in his own blood. Another diver gave up on life and let his regulator fall from his mouth. I shoved it back, grabbed him by the tank, and navigated my way through the sharks to the surface. It was just another day at the office. And, oh yeah, I was five.

(The following paragraph has every shark I’ve ever seen in it, and recounts nearly every dramatic experience that has happened in my 800+ dives. And I was five, one time.)

Hey, lazy! Here’s an idea. Ever heard of verb tense? You can use it to talk about things that happened before, during, or even after an event. It’s like time travel, but you don’t have to lie to the reader and you aren’t in danger of causing a rip in the fabric of time. You should try it sometime.

I was especially disappointed that David Oliver Relin’s name wasn’t mentioned. Did 60 Minutes try to contact him? I can understand Mortenson – not a writer – being lazy and compressing the narrative, but Relin studied at the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop and should have more than enough writing tools and ethics to not “compress time” of real life events.

60 Minutes also claimed Mortenson wasn’t captured by Taliban fighters for eight days. They interviewed a few of his “captors.” This seems a little less provable on both sides. After all, what happens in Waziristan, stays in Waziristan.

Stones into Thin Air

60 Minutes visited thirty some schools that CAI claimed to build and support and found that half of them were either no longer being used, were built by someone else, were supported by someone else, or never existed in the first place.

Ouch! What good is building a school if it’s not being used?

Which brings us to the money trail. 60 Minutes poured into CAI’s 2009 tax return and found some pretty ugly findings:

The group spent more on promoting Mortenson’s books than on educating girls in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Mortenson gets $30K/talk, but CAI pays his travel expenses to speaking engagements. That doesn’t make sense. I get paid a fraction (a fraction!) of that for speaking and schools always pay my travel expenses.

60 Minutes’ 20-minute hack job

This is a big story. It involves a national hero, one of the bestselling books of the decade, and claims of lies and fraud. This story is so big that 60 Minutes dedicated a whopping 20 minutes to it. If they would’ve focused on some of the known truths in addition to some of the maybe falsehoods, the piece should’ve been twice as long.

The segment ends with a quote from Krakauer: “He’s not Bernie Madoff. I mean, let’s be clear. He has done a lot of good. He has helped thousands of school kids in Pakistan and Afghanistan….He has become perhaps the world’s most effective spokesperson for girls’ education in developing countries. And he deserves credit for that…”

The show spent 19 minutes and 30 seconds lobbing grenades at Mortenson and in the very last quote they add, “he might be lying about a lot of stuff, but he’s done a lot of amazing things too.” They should’ve visited a school that was up and running to get the opinions of teachers and students who had been impacted positively by Mortenson.

Mortenson earns $180K salary from CAI and gets 50-cents for every book he sells not to mention a $30K honorarium for speaking. If Mortenson is fabricating schools out of thin air and using CAI as “his personal ATM” what is he doing with all that money? I’ve heard that Mortenson spends more than 200 days in central Asia each year. The piece does a good job of tackling the If and the Maybe, but they don’t touch on or speculate on the Why. Is he just a greedy bastard who likes to caravan around Taliban controlled regions for shits and giggles? That doesn’t make any sense to me.

Yes, 60 Minutes poked a lot of holes that needed poking in Mortenson’s story, but they left plenty of holes in their own.

My Take

I’m not surprised that parts of Mortenson’s story have been altered from reality. As a writer I roll up to the crossroads of truth now and again. It can be really tempting to alter a story a bit. In an early draft of Where Am I Wearing? I altered when we bought a flatscreen TV for our home. It had little relevance to the story and no one would ever know differently, but every time I came to the part about the TV, it bugged me. I knew. It would’ve been easier to just leave it as it was, but I changed it.

As a writer, or as a kindergartner, for that matter, you have to know that if you don’t tell the truth all the time then everything you do or say will be doubted.

Now we’re doubting the good that Mortenson has done. And no doubt he’s done a lot of good. The fact that the military often consults with Mortenson is more than enough endorsement for me that he is doing some of what he claims to do and, at the very least, really knows what he’s talking about.

Last summer I was invited to talk in Columbus, Indiana. The town was using Three Cups of Tea for their annual community reading program. They couldn’t afford Mortenson, but they could afford me. I was honored to stand in his place. Still am. If half of what he’s written is true, he’s a great man.

I suspect we’ll discover in the next few weeks if he’s greater than his flaws.

What’s your take on the Mortenson story?
–

I was at Target yesterday and found the placement of these books to be rather ironic.