I recently finished Atlas Shrugged. I didn’t even mean to bring it home, I went to the library looking for an atlas, and the book looked the right size. I kid, I kid.

But it is a long book. Seriously.

It’s a book with a purpose though… Ayn Rand is putting together a defense or maybe an explanation.of her philosophy in fictional form.

Let me get the easy part out of the way. I think she’s wrong. Not all wrong, but wrong in some pretty important ways.

But, where she’s right, she has some important things to say to the world we live in today. Where’s she right?

Well… first, there are things that are true absolutely. It was funny to read her “Bad guys” who insisted that there were no absolutes. They come off as totally ridiculous (Because they are)… and yet, I know that there are people in our world who hold the same views and are taken quite seriously.

Second, for a man to know anything, he must use reason. He must think for himself. The apathy that leads people to simply adopt the views of others as their own is as problematic in the real world as it is in her book.

Third, she’s right that a man’s actions ought to be governed by what makes him happy.

For essentially the last 200 pages of Atlas Shrugged, I thought…. hmm, so close, but so far away. As the characters in the book remind each other, if something doesn’t seem to add up, you have to check your premises. I wanted to shout, “Check your premises” when a main character railed against spirituality because God was inherently unknowable and therefore irrational and dangerous.

While I concur that God is unknowable (and dangerous), there’s a fatal flaw in their assumption. They presume that because God is unknowable (that is, we cannot know Him perfectly because He is eternal and we are finite), we cannot know what He’d have of us.

This, then, is the Christian response: We agree that man needs a rational, absolute basis to his morality. We also agree that man should be governed by that which makes him happiest.

However, God has revealed Himself to man. In revealing Himself to man, God also gave man the information needed to understand what God would have of him. And, the Christian affirms that man ought to be governed by happiness… but not a short-term, earth-oriented happiness. The first answer in the Westminster Shorter Catechism reads “Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him for ever.”

If Ayn Rand or her characters were standing here today, I’d tell them how right they were and how wrong they were. I’d hope that they’d see the light. And even if they didn’t immediately, I’d probably be encouraged by them, because their worldview, at the very least, hinges on rationality. That means that at least we’re starting from the same place and we might get there eventually.

Ah, my dear wife will cringe at this topic. She knows where I’m going with this. It seems like everyone has some band, album, or genre of music that they like but don’t necessarily want to admit to liking. I don’t think it’s pretension, I think it’s just sincere embarrassment.

Take yours truly, for instance. I don’t have longish hair that sweeps down over my eyes. My jeans aren’t inordinately patched. I don’t dye my hair. I don’t wear eyeliner. But, I do, on occasion, sing along ridiculously to whatever pop-punk I can get my hands on. It might be Blink182, it might be ReliantK, it might be Brand New… but whatever it is, it’ll make my wife roll her eyes (rightfully so) and it’ll make me play air drums.

Whew. I just admitted it. So, now I’ll put the question to you… who or what is your guilty pleasure listening?

I’ve gotta go find Rebecca’s eyeliner.

Some days the internet puts things together for you. Not often, because, it’s mostly an inanimate object or something. But, sometimes, you read a story and then read another one, and think… hey, weren’t those connected?

This very thing happened to me the other day. I was reading about TechDirt’s CwF+RtB=$$$ (connect with fans + reason to buy = cash). It’s essentially their attempt to show the music industry (or the movie industry, or the book industry, or the news industry) how to develop a sustainable business model in an era where access to your content pretty much has to be free (and if it’s not, consumers will find a way to make it so).

Pretty neat idea. It makes sense too.

• Fans get content without a forced package.
• Pay for premium content / special access / special gifts
• Fans pay because they like you or the site — not because they have to
• Fans are more likely to return (and potentially spend more dollars)
• Business model doesn’t predicate itself upon your ability to turn every transaction into a billable event.

That’s good for you and good for everybody.(Sidenote: like TechDirt, I’d be willing to take down my website and not contribute to a blog for a year in exchange for $100,000,000.00. My email address is in the sidebar. Contact me there. Check must be given time to clear. Sultan Whomever from Arganistan, I still haven’t received the first check you promised me in exchange for access to my bank account so you could clear those funds, so don’t even offer this time. Whatever.)

So, I finish reading about TechDirt’s plan, and I get an e-mail from a google alert I’ve set up. It e-mails me items about electronic publishing. CBS had published an article on its website entitled, “Will Readers Ever Pay for Online News.”

The article talked about various platforms for charging for online access to news. It talked about how they just needed to come up with something that would work like the old model (advertising + subscription) because the new model (online advertising) isn’t working.

The whole time I read, I thought back to TechDirt, and they way they’re giving their readers ownership and options instead of alienation and coercion.

The people who are getting ready to make a push for pay-for-access online news remind me of something a bank president once said to me… “As long as one bank in this market has their staff still wearing ties, we’ll all still wear ties.” As long as one news outlet is giving away content, the others will struggle to charge for the same content.

Why? There are just so many different (and free) sources of news out there that these news providers have provided us with no real reason to want to buy their content.

They’re going to have to start thinking differently. They’re going to have to give us, the consumers (you know, the ones with the wallets they want to stick their hands in) a reason to let them have our money.

They’re going to have to think like TechDirt… because, until they connect with their fans, and give us a reason to buy, there will be no $$$ for them.

I’ve confessed in the past a tendency to read things because people say they’re great. Sometimes this results in grave disappointment (Hello there Toni Morrison, I’m looking at you), sometimes in indifference (Yeah, the three times I’ve read the first 100 pages of the Grapes of Wrath come to mind), and sometimes in abject delight.

Which, in reality, doesn’t prove anything at all except that enjoying a book is tied more to personality than to the book itself.

I’m reading Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. I started it because, well, it’s a classic. I realized 20 pages in that “it’s a classic” is a dumb reason to read a book. I gave her 30 more pages to make me care about the story. She did that, by proving the environment to be interesting, the characters to be interesting — not in a human sense, but in an archetypal sense.

So, I’ll let you know how it goes, but I’m glad to say that I’m reading it for the story, not for the “classic.” Here’s hoping the story delivers.

I’m rejuvenated… it’s a Monday morning and I’m psyched. Why am I psyched? Well, I guess I’m experiencing how much doing a job you love instead of a job you like can improve the quality of your days. I had worked in banking. I hope to write a novel about it one day. Banking wasn’t the worst career that you could pick. In fact, I worked in the best individual bank branch in West Virginia. I loved the people I worked with.

But, while I do possess a somewhat analytical mind, number crunching is not primarily my idea of a fun time. Dealing with customers who feel like they’ve been robbed, even less so. One day I’d like to do a blog post about that. We’ll see. But I did my best at that job, and I feel like I did well.

Anyway, now, I work for BelieversPress (www.believerspress.com), and I have to tell you, it’s a joy. It’s challenging, it’s rewarding, it’s all the things you hope a job will be. And it’s all motivated by a sincere desire to serve the customer best… not the best that we can, but best.

That’s motivating. Doing my job and enjoying it at the same time… that’s something I can wake up on Monday for!

I won’t even mention that preseason hockey starts tonight. Shoot, I just mentioned it, didn’t I?

Hockey’s about to start! Whoo hoo. You’ll remember that at the end of last season, I was doing a terrible job of trying to explain the game a little. As an exercise in patience for you and learning how to write instructively for me, I’m going to continue! (Party hats and whistles will be handed out on your way out the door. Please no confetti… it freezes in the ice, eh?)

So, the most exciting thing about the 2009-10 NHL Season has little to do with NHL — except that many NHL players will be involved… that’s right… the 2010 Winter Olympics will take place somewhat in the middle of the 09-10 NHL Season. Exciting? Absolutely… especially since this time around, the Olympics will be held in Canada.

Now, we Canadians take our hockey pretty seriously. It’s never more serious than on the Global stage… we like it when a Canadian team wins Lord Stanley’s cup, but we love it when our boys (and girls) win gold.

So, prepare yourself for fever-pitched hype. I’m prepared to trash talk every country’s team in advance of the olympics. Okay, not really… but I may take aim at a couple. Like the Czech Republic. You think you’re tough? You don’t know what tough means! In your face!

I had the privilege recently to review a couple of stories by friends of mine. I love to read things that I have personal connections to, even though I know it can add to the challenge of impartiality. Bah, who’s ever really impartial anyway?

Anyway, the reason I bring it up is that one of those friends wrote a bad guy in a particularly good way. Not that the bad guy was good–he was effectively, over-the-top, bad. I mean, oozed evil. Horrendous. Terrible. Capriciously evil. (I sure hope I used that word right… careless/motiveless about being bad?) He was just bad. I could genuinely dislike him without any effort at all. He lent himself to it.

It helped me to form some ideas about what’s really “evil.” I guess that we write evil as we know it. For me, it is one thing to do bad things, but it’s wholly another thing to do bad things without any cause whatsoever.

Maybe it says something about me as a reader rather than a writer that I’m so quick to forgive bad things done by people who were forced to it by a lousy situation. There is a part of me that says “It doesn’t matter why–if they did something bad, that’s all there is to it.” But then, motive has to come into play somewhere, doesn’t it? First degree murder is worse than manslaughter, isn’t it?

No answers, really… just questions. One day, when I write a story featuring a manslaughter suspect conversing with a first degree murder convict, I’ll trace it all the way back to this.

This was going to be a picture of lice… but lice pictures are really gross. After 30 seconds looking at pictures of lice, my head started to itch and I needed something to redeem my mind, so you’re getting a hummingbird taking a little drink. I like to think that if there were a massive lice outbreak, the hummingbirds would come and save us by picking the lice off our heads. Because again, lice are pretty gross.

So, no, not actual nit-picking. Just the generic type that we tend to mean when we say the term. I have a terrible, evil tendency to tear apart the way people I love say things. It’s not very nice; it’s actually kind of smart-alecky. But, it also makes for good practice when it comes to editorial work… I guess the question is, how do I split the difference?

When is it okay for someone to correct an error? When should they keep their mouths shut?

I tend to think in namby-pamby terms about things like this… “Oh, it’s okay when your intention is right.” But, in reality, isn’t it when the correction will serve the person better than letting the error stand? My intention has to do with my attitude, my sinful nature… but the benefit of the correction versus the harm of the error is pretty much the extent of the transaction for the correctee.

Does that make sense, or does it sound like Petty Self-Justification 101?

Michael Hyatt has posted three videos he recorded interviewing Donald Miller. Now, I know that Mr. Miller is a somewhat-controversial character, particularly among us conservatives. My take on it is that, while he and I may not agree on everything — and even what we’d disagree on is probably hard to nail down — there are beneficial things to be found in his work. Also, he’s a brilliant writer. I’ve consistently thoroughly enjoyed reading his work.

He’s also interesting to listen to. I’d encourage you to listen to him and Michael talk. It was beneficial to me as a writer to observe how he sees story in  real life.

No, not on vacation… but about vacations. My friend Sam just got back from a vacation with his family, and his post about it was beautiful.

Seems like some revelation of wisdom should be fired off at this point starting with “On vacation God taught me that…” but really I just feel  gratitude and am aiming to direct that gratitude (and help lead my family to do the same) in a Godward direction.

A good reminder there that sometimes the most important things don’t seem the most over-the-top. Gratitude toward our Maker ought to be the most immediate of our responses to His great mercy to us; I’m thankful for the reminder this morning.