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I like the way you think. You should take this post and post it as a comment on Card's Rhino Times column http://greensboro.rhinotimes.com/ . This is a great idea.

As a parent who recently bought a home deliberately OUTSIDE the Charlotte-Mecklenburg system, let me assure you, these people don't have any idea what they're doing. This school district has been in the crapper for years and years. No small part of my wife's and my decision to move OUT of Charlotte was the schools. You can check CMS's test results or you can find lots of interesting facts, not to mention things like this or this. The list goes on and on.

Orson Scott Card is a great writer, but he's also an insane rightwing religious fanatic. Since I found out, it's hard to enjoy his taking me on a tour of another person's mind.

Actually, Uncle Orsen writes for the Rhino Times, an independent conservative newspaper here in Greensboro, North Carolina (a free weekly that gets better numbers than the for-pay newspaper here). You pick them up any any decent bar or eatery. Quite big for a free paper.

His style is always like that, but he's actually pretty easy to read once you get used to that. He writes like some people talk. Or think.

He's kind of a mix of the non-irritating parts of Andy Rooney, and the uncle you wished you had growing up. Ultra practical. And yes, he reviews everything, from movies to new cars to restaurants to new TVs.

If you think that's bad, you should read some of his other columns. He writes a column called uncle Orson reviews everything for a local paper. This is not a man whose opinion you want to trust. His political columns aren't much better. I love the ender series, but it's hard to match them up with the man who writes these sorts of columns.

Card writes a column for our local Conservative Weekly that is the most bland thing I've ever seen (except when he's justifying his hatred of homos).

The first year or two of it's publication, I thought for sure it was an ironic bit of humor that was going over my head, as he wrote endlessly about his latest great snack cracker find, or how wonderfully written the latest Sandra Bullock vehicle was...but it has become painfully clear in recent years that he just sucks. I just can't even pull his books off of the shelf anymore.

The big problem with Orson Scott Card is that while is ideology is disgusting, he wrote some marvellous fiction.
The Alvin Maker series is full of lovable, entertaining, soulful, compassionate characters... And he is a master of storytelling.
I never understood how he could write so incredibly good books, being so incredibly prejudiced.
You can find some of his bad non-fiction writing there : http://greensboro.rhinotimes.com/ or there : http://www.hatrack.com/ .
For his fiction, I don't have an online source, but you can always check your local library for the Alvin Maker series, or the Ender one, or for some of his short fiction.

Eric

Not to mention a movie critic.

SharkJumper