Big Trouble, Butte, America: The Saga of a Hard Rock Mining Town, and video games

Big Trouble by J. Anthony Lukas is about the murder of Frank Steunenberg, probably by members of the Western Federation of Miners in Caldwell, Idaho in 1905. Throughout the awesome book, he weaves in Ethyl Barrymore, Walter Johnson, Clarence Darrow, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, William Borah, and many more well-known people of the time, all of whom had some connection to the trial. Really, it's an amazingly well-researched book, and it's a shame that Lukas committed suicide before the book was published. I am a huge fan of sprawling historical epics, about society at the time as much as the "plot". This one has sections on theatre agents, detective agencies, baseball, lawyering, labor strife, forestry, the Spanish American War, racial strife, journalism, and... well... it really just covers so much. It may be a huge book, and it took me a few months to read it (with breaks for comics), but it's really good. I saw that PBS's Independent Lens was going to air a documentary about Butte, Montana and the mining industry there. Butte, America was only an hour long, and it focused much more on more recent labor troubles rather than the labor troubles that lead to Steunenberg's assassination, so I wasn't as into it as I thought. I wanted it to be much better than I got. Not to say it wasn't good, but I felt like it didn't go very deep at all. Ugh. Terrible pun.

Well, in the last three months, I've purchased five video games for the PS3 (The Beatles: Rock Band, Katamari Forever, Fallout 3, Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time, and Lego Rock Band) and one for the PC (Torchlight). Apparently, I do have too much money. I am singlehandedly keeping the video game industry alive. Well, at least I haven't purchased Dragon Age: Origins or Assassin's Creed II or any other games I've been tempted by, because my games are certainly taking up more than enough of my time as it is. Because that's why it was so long between posts. I am enjoying all of the games, and regret none of the purchases. Well, except for their effect on my ability to do anything else.