Carl Wells Books

“Garage Sale Mystery” was a Canadian/American TV series produced by Hallmark Movies & Mysteries from 2013-2018. It gained enormous fame–but for a very wrong reason. Its star, Lori Loughlin, and her husband Mossimo Gianulli, were arrested for having paid a $500,000.00 bribe to get their two daughters into Stanford University.

It didn’t stop with just arrest, however. Both were sentenced to prison, and actually served time, Ms. Loughlin for two months (late October through late December of 2020). She also was fined $150K, and sentenced to 100 hours of community service. Mr. Gianulli was imprisoned for about four and a half months (mid-November 2020 through early April 2021), and had to pay a fine of $250K, plus, to add injury to insult, to complete 250 hours of community service.

“I paid $500,000.00 and all I got was this lousy t-shirt and a stay in prison.”

I doubt if they got their bribe money back. And one does have to wonder about the practical wisdom of people who spend a fortune in bribes to send their children to college. If they had spent the $500,000.00 keep their children out of college, we might begin to sit up and take notice. That would have made more sense.

I would never have become involved with Lori Loughlin and “Garage Sale Mystery,” except for chance (call it Providence, perhaps). For several of these most recent years I watched DVDs with my Aged Parent. Occasionally my sister Peggy would join us, although not often. Peggy decided to vary our options, so she began to pick out some films at the public library. One of the DVDs she picked out was collection one of “Garage Sale Mystery,” which featured the first four “GSM” films. We tried them out.

Well, the films didn’t go over very well with my mother and with Peggy. I think they watched a couple, then bailed out. I, on the other hand, found myself interested enough to keep watching. I watched all of the four films. It is not the kind of thing I would usually watch, but I found myself intrigued. Collection two was not available at our library, but through inter-library loan I was able to obtain it. Over time I have seen all the collections, and the single films trailing on at the end with belated release.

At the point of my introduction to “GSM,” I knew nothing about Lori Loughlin’s troubles with the law. Eventually I found out that the star of “Garage Sale Mystery” was supposedly headed for prison. Not what you expect from your typical TV star.

Moreover, her troubles with the law meant the end of the TV series. She was fired. Two of the films already completed were eventually released, one only as recently as 2020. Another film supposedly needed only another week of filming to be complete, but that week never took place. And so far Hallmark has not announced that Lori Loughlin and “GSM” will make a triumphant comeback. Personally, I have not given up hope.

This blog post is not intended to generate donations for the Gianulli family. Ms. Loughlin has a reported net worth of $8,000,000.00. Her husband, a designer, has an approximate net worth of $80,000,000.00. They will muddle through, somehow or other.

The sixteen films which make up the series “Garage Sale Mystery” are not great art. But they were fun and I’m glad I watched them. Eventually I will see if they bear up to a second watching.

The idea for the series was prompted by the book Garage Sale Stalker (2010) by Suzi Weinert. That was the beginning of a series of books with the same heroine. I have read the first book. The TV series goes its own way, rather than follow the plot and atmosphere of the first book. And I think the TV people made a wise decision. The book is much darker than the TV series. Hallmark was not going to be able to have a multi-show series of garage sale mysteries, if they copied the tone of the book. Let the book stand on its own, among books. The TV series competes with other TV series. Its artistic arc is different–but not necessarily worse. I won’t be rereading Garage Sale Stalker. (I even found myself annoyed that Ms. Weinert insists on spelling the name of God as god.) The book was not enough to my taste to warrant rereading. But the TV shows may be worth re-watching, and certainly all sixteen segments held my interest the first time around.

There are a couple factors which make the TV series worth watching–at least worth watching for me. For one thing, Jennifer Shannon (Lori Loughlin) is happily married to her husband Jason, a successful builder. They have a profound affection for one another, and treat each other with respect. They have two children, a girl and a boy. The girl is in her late teens perhaps into her early twenties. The boy is of high school age. And here’s what is fascinating about the young people. (Sit down before you read this.) The kids are not smart alecks. The family gets along, affectionately. There is not a hint of Christianity anywhere in the films, of course. But even so it is kind of refreshing to find young people who are not sophisticated wise acres who are ten times smarter, and ten times more morally hip, than their parents.

Then there is the person and personality of Jennifer Shannon. I don’t know how closely Jennifer approximates Lori Loughlin. LL is, after all, an actress. She may be an unholy terror in real life. But in the movies of the series, Jennifer Shannon is a genuinely likeable person. She is of course physically attractive–always an advantage (I blush to say it). She made the shows during the years when she was between the ages of about 49 and 54. She continued to be a physically beautiful woman through all those years. (If I wasn’t supposed to notice, I have messed up again, because I did notice.)

But part of Jennifer Shannon’s beauty arises from her kind and generous personality. She genuinely tries to help other people, and she does so with a radiant smile. She is the kind of person with whom one would want to spend time. Which may be why the series was a success for so many years. And why it might have gone on many more years, if Lori Loughlin had not been stuck in Folsom Prison doing hard time with Johnny Cash in the next cell block.

Lori Loughlin is supposedly a Roman Catholic. Here is one quote from Ms. Loughlin, after her famous troubles with the law : “I ignored my intuition and allowed myself to be swayed from my moral compass.”

Very succinct, and to the point. Well said.

The sixteen films (about 1:25 each in length) which make up the series “Garage Sale Mystery” are not going to be to everyone’s taste. I repeat: they are not great art. Sadly, the DVDs lack subtitles. They are expensive to buy. Today I saw where the complete 16-film series costs $104.90 (free shipping) at Amazon. That is a lot of money for most of us. (I have not been tempted to buy them. I can make do with inter-library loan, for the ones our library does not carry.)

Here’s a link to the Wikipedia article on the series, if you feel like reading more about the show: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garage_Sale_Mystery.

Hallmark, as far as I am concerned, Lori Loughlin has paid her debt to society. I think she is ready to go straight and make something of her life. I hope you will give her another chance. Jennifer Shannon has a knack for solving murders while remaining a generous-spirited lady, and she needs to put that knack to work again.

Did Lewis Carroll (b. 1832-d. 1898) visit the United States, via a time machine, in our year 2021? Reading some of what he wrote in 1865 (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland) and 1871 (Through the Looking Glass), the question arises naturally. It seems unlikely, of course, since there is no record of him having created and used a time machine. Still, he was a scientific type, a mathematician of some scholarly achievement, and his writings give us a hint that he got to 2021 U.S. & A., observed us carefully, then returned to 19th century England to write down what he saw–without, of course, confessing where and how he got his information. Always a man of mystery, about whom there is still much controversy, this may simply be another mystery about Lewis Carroll which needs exploration.

There are at least three places–there could be more–in Carroll’s books that supposedly are only about the the strange world of Alice, but seem more to be about the United States as we currently are. I will quote the three passages, and comment briefly after each one.

In Through the Looking Glass (Chapter 6) we read:

“‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornfull tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean neither more nor less.’

“‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

“‘The question is’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master–that’s all.'”

This puzzles Alice, but we understand Humpty Dumpty completely. Words are a weapon in the war for civilization. The Powers That Be will define what words mean. They intend to be master, and so they will tell us what words mean. They will make up words, if they feel it helps their cause. Think of all the categories of sexual orientation, brand new in the last few years. We are required to go along, or we are in danger of being cancelled. Who is to be master? The Powers are telling us who is to be master. They fully intend to be master.

Somewhere in his voluminous writings, Theodore Dalrymple has pointed out that totalitarians use words in a manner that requires us to bow to nuttiness. The object is not to persuade us that the words make sense. The object is to humiliate us, and to make us feel powerless, and to make us bow to the worldview of the Powers, to acquiesce in lies.

A second passage comes from Chapter 12 of Alice.

“‘Let the jury consider their verdict,’ the King said, for about the twentieth time that day.

“‘No, no!’ said the Queen. ‘Sentence first–verdict afterwards.’

“‘Stuff and nonsense!’ said Alice loudly. ‘The idea of having the sentence first!’

“‘Hold your tongue!’ said the Queen, turning purple.

“‘I won’t!’ said Alice.

“‘Off with her head!’ the Queen shouted at the top of her voice.”

This is our world today, in the U.S. Sentence first, verdict afterwards. I will give just three examples. Did Hillary Clinton’s reckless use of emails when she was in the State Department, rise to a crime worthy of imprisonment? Her sentence was, “Hillary, you are free to go.” A trial and verdict would be redundant.

Is it possible that the Democrats helped concoct the Steele dossier, in order to have something on which to base the charges of Donald Trump colluding with Russia? The sentence was, “Democrats, you are free to go.” No need for a trial and verdict. The media has already given us the sentence. No need for an honest trial and honest verdict. We already have the sentence. What more could we want?

Joe Biden/Hunter Biden foreign adventures with money at stake? “You are free to go.”

If we, like Alice, think this is all stuff and nonsense, then we are low intelligence conspiracy theorists, and it is time for off with our heads. Since our heads are so empty, we won’t miss them much. Right now it is still metaphorically off with our heads. In the future? Stay tuned. We are already being cancelled when possible. From cancelling to off with our heads, may be a short trip.

The third passage I have in mind is from Through the Looking Glass, Chapter 5. The Queen makes a claim about her age, which Alice can’t believe.

“‘Ca’n’t you?’ the Queen said in a pitying tone. ‘Try again: draw a deep breath, and shut your eyes.’

“Alice laughed. ‘There’s no use trying,’ she said: ‘one ca’n’t believe impossible things.’

“‘I daresay you haven’t had much practice,’ said the Queen. ‘When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.'”

Being able to believe six impossible things before breakfast, is something we can do standing on our heads, in 2021 in the U.S. On Nov. 7, 2019, I devoted a blog post to listing six impossible things which we have believed. I went into some detail on each one of the six. Here I will only summarize.

1/The separation of religion and state is possible.

2/Evolution is a true explanation of how life unfolds in history.

3/The U.S. is the hope of the world, and the U.S. military is protecting us from harm by foreign countries.

4/Democracy is the only legitimate form of government.

5/Public education is a good thing and helps people learn.

6/Any attempt to take a high view of the law of God is to create a works/righteousness brand of Christianity.

For why those are six impossible things to believe before breakfast, please see the blog post for Nov. 7, 2019.

The trouble is, we have not limited ourselves to believing only six impossible things. Here are six more impossible things we have believed. I will not discuss each one; I will simply list them. I will designate them 1a, 2a, etc., since we already have six impossible things listed above.

1a/Black Lives Matter riots and Antifa riots were mostly peaceful.

2a/Derek Chauvin was guilty of murdering George Floyd, a man with a fatal dose of fentanyl inside him.

3a/There is no possibility whatsoever that the Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election.

4a/A man “assigned” as being male at birth, can be a woman, and a woman “assigned” as being a female at birth, can be a man.

5a/Russia, a country with an economy smaller than that of Texas alone, is a powerful existential threat to the U.S.

6a/Systemic racism is the cause of the failure of black people in the U.S.

7/Wait, what am I doing? I said I had six more impossible things to believe. What do I mean by listing a seventh? Well, I’m sorry, I just couldn’t stop. I came up with a few more. So bear with me. Number 7 is below.

We create wealth by printing money out of thin air; gold and silver are relics of barbaric times.

8/It is okay to kill unborn children; it is not really murder.

9/Abraham Lincoln saved the union and is a hero.

10/Donald Trump, if he were president, would rescue the people of the United States from the Deep State.

Of course each one of the ten is worthy of discussion, but this blog post is going on long enough. (Adrian Monk of the TV show “Monk” would be proud of me for coming up with an even ten.) So far I have listed sixteen things. We have, as an American people, believed all sixteen, and we did it even before breakfast. I have no doubt many more could be listed.

Two final points.

First, it is impossible to prove that Lewis Carroll invented and used a time machine to get to 2021. If I had to guess, I would guess that he did not have our era in mind as he wrote. Most likely he just unconsciously tapped into his knowledge of mankind’s capacity for self-deception, and wrote things that he knew were strange, but still felt right to put down on paper. He was not a George Orwell writing 1984. He was Lewis Carroll following his instinct. It worked out. If further research does eventually reveal that he used a time machine to get to 2021, well, you heard it here first. I’m not claiming it happened, mind you. Just noticing the possibility.

Second, the Powers That Be will never back off. They will never say, “Oh, gosh, sorry, we realize we’ve gone too far.” No, they want us to believe lies, so that they can continue to tell us what to do, and so that we continue to do what they ask (or order) without complaint. Their ideal world is described in Orwell’s 1984: ‘”a boot stamping on a human face–forever.”‘ They, of course, will be the stampers. We will be the stampees.

Maybe, after all, they are right about us. If we are content to believe six (sixteen, twenty-six) impossible things before breakfast, maybe we are just stupid and morally corrupt, and sort of deserve all the misery they want to give us.

Look at the list of sixteen above. Some of us have believed all of them, some of us have believed some of them. That includes Christian people.

As for me, I stand with Alice. It’s all a bunch of stuff and nonsense. I am going to try to not believe impossible things. I will try to allow words to mean what they really mean, and I will try to have an honest trial and honest verdict, rather than have the sentence before the verdict.

Here’s an example of how that might work out in real life. I believe Donald Trump won the 2020 election. But what happened is what happened. If Joe Biden won, I can live with that. I just want the truth. I will deal with the truth. I don’t want to lie to myself, or to lie to others, and I don’t want to manipulate others. Give me an honest trial and an honest verdict, and I’ll be happy as a clam. Well, maybe not as happy as the proverbial clam, because I think Joe Biden is despicable. But if despicable Joe Biden really was elected, so be it. Give me an honest trial and an honest verdict, and I’ll accept the sentence.

Lewis Carroll, did you visit us from 1865? I wish I knew.

Reading sometimes seems to be dying out, but every now and then I notice something that tells me that it is not time to shovel the last dirt on the corpse just yet. Some people are still reading, and perhaps in numbers that might be surprising.

I have felt some encouragement when I contemplate the website Goodreads. Goodreads is a place where readers can go to rate and even review books. Type in Goodreads and the name of the book you are wondering about, and the chances are good that someone has read the book and has commented on it, or at least rated it.

There are exceptions to this. For example, I have tried to find Goodreads ratings or comments on the excellent children’s book, The Rookie Fights Back, by Burgess Leonard (1954), but so far the book has not been noticed. Also unrated is Nikolaj Velimirovic’s thoughtful short book, The Agony of the Church (1917), a book which makes clear the Christian church’s responsibility for World War I.

I am writing a book titled Books I Have Loved, in which I discuss 46 books which have been important in my life. Rookie and Agony were the only two books which no one else had heard of or read. My beloved Life Is Life: And Other Tales and Episodes, by Gwendoline Keats (pen name Zack) had only one review, an unfavorable 2 stars (out of 5), but at least the book was there, and someone had read it. Maybe I can register with Goodreads and give the book a 5 star review, moving the needle a little bit more toward justice. (Full disclosure: I have written a book about Gwendoline Keats and her books, so I am quite prejudiced in her favor. My book about her is By Noble Things She Stands: The Fiction of Gwendoline Keats/Zack.)

Even a book as forgotten (undeservedly forgotten) as Clancy Carlile’s As I Was Young and Easy has had three readers. There are only ratings and no reviews, but at least three people know about the book, and the ratings averaged out to 4.0, which is decent.

Other books which I might be tempted to think I am the only person remembering, turn out to have a handful of readers. Two examples are Tammy Out of Time by Cid Ricketts Sumner (40 readers), and Sam Small Flies Again by Eric Knight (43 readers). I recorded the number of readers some time ago, for all these books, and the numbers could be higher by now.

A writer we might think is being completely ignored by readers is Anne Bronte. She is the forgotten Bronte sister, an afterthought when compared to Charlotte and Emily. Except that she is not forgotten at all. Her classic book The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, which every Christian could read with immense benefit, had 92,641 ratings. Ninety-two thousand! You could have knocked me over with a feather, when I discovered that fact.

Of the books I looked up–my 46, and a small handful of others–the two which had gained the most ratings were 1984 by George Orwell (3,340,927 ratings), and Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (3,166,454 ratings). People may be reading 1984 in large numbers because they recognize that the people running our country are increasingly like the people running England and the world in 1984. So it is a good thing that people are reading the book and trying to think such issues through. The rating average was a good 4.19.

Pride and Prejudice is the book I often bring forward as a book countless people would enjoy if they only read it. And, to my surprise, many people have taken my advice unbeknownst to me. And the rating is a very high 4.27, one of the highest ratings I encountered for fiction. So I have to be encouraged.

The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger is another book with a lot of readers–2,845,708. I was surprised at the relatively tepid overall rating, 3.81. “Tough crowd,” as comics sometimes say when the response is not too enthusiastic. In fact, “tough crowd” often describes the response of Goodreads readers, especially for fiction. But at least they are reading.

Some non-fiction books which I think are very good, got strong ratings. The number of readers was often relatively small. But the ratings were strong. Only highly motivated people with an interest in ideas are reading some of these books. But the ones who are reading are appreciative. Then I think they are motivated to give high ratings, rather than just read the books and give no response, knowing that these books deserve recognition. That is a guess on my part.

Here are several non-fiction books which had under a hundred readers, but gained relatively strong ratings: A Man of Letters (Thomas Sowell), The Breakdown of Nations (Leopold Kohr), The Green Stick (Malcolm Muggeridge), Politics of Guilt and Pity (R. J. Rushdoony), Ain’t My America (Bill Kauffman), Leftism (Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn), Dissent on Development (P. T. Bauer). All the ratings were strong, from 4.16 upward to 4.67! (Only three readers for Dissent, but it got two fives and a four, 4.67. P. T. Bauer, some of us still admire and love you.)

The revised version of Leftism had exactly a hundred readers, and was also respected.

Here is a shocker, and it’s a good shock. Frederic Bastiat’s short masterpiece The Law had 10,942 ratings, and the response was overwhelmingly favorable: 4.37. Christian civilization is not dead, when 10,000 people are reading The Law and appreciating it.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago had 21,623 ratings, with an excellent 4.28. Christian civilization is not dead, when 21,000 people are reading Gulag and appreciating it. (Is there an echo in here?)

Theodore Dalrymple’s Life at the Bottom has had a significant number or readings, 2,223, and a quite high rating at 4.22.

Many of the fiction books I love and respect, definitely fell in the category of facing a tough crowd. Charles Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop gained 18,182 ratings, so people are still reading it in fairly large numbers. But the reader response was only 3.78. Wow. Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer Abroad, which I am used to thinking of as the most perfect short novel of humor in world history, got a decent number of ratings (2,223), but the reader response was unfavorable: 3.36. Tough crowd. Twain’s Puddn’head Wilson got more ratings (21,422), but the response was poor: 3.79.

Believe it or not–I have trouble believing it–Twain’s Huckleberry Finn received only a 3.82 rating, right up there, I mean right down there, with The Catcher in the Rye.

Reading the comments of reviewers at Goodreads can be frustrating for me. Often people are not thinking about these books in the right way, that is, in the way I think about them. So I have to try to calm down, and just try to be glad that at least people are reading books. I am trying.

I have never tried to rate or review a book at Goodreads. I want to publish my book first. Then I will probably try to do some rating/reviewing at Goodreads. I can give my widow’s might toward seeing that books unjustly treated, get at least a lump of sugar from me. It won’t move the needle much, in every case except one. (Life Is Life is the exception. My 5 rating will at least move the average rating from 2 to 3.5.)

The fact that I have never rated a book at Goodreads, is another fact which should encourage us that more reading is being done than we sometimes fear. There must be countless people like me, who read quite a bit, but never record their response at Goodreads. So if The Tenant of Wildfell Hall has received 92,641 ratings, the odds are strong that in reality many tens of thousands more people have actually read the book. How many? I don’t know. It could be several times as many as those who take the time to rate the book at Goodreads. It has been previously unsuspected by me, but it is possible there are hundreds or even thousands of Anne Bronte groupies out there. That is a comforting thought. Christian civilization is not dead.