Interesting Reading in the Interweb Tubes
- What Jock Culture Does To Pukes Like You (“Jock Culture is a distortion of sports. It can be physically and mentally unhealthy, driving people apart instead of together. It is fueled by greed and desperate competition.”) (via)
- The History of Torture—Why We Can’t Give It Up (“Torture by military forces was thought a thing of the past. Indeed, the American historian John Fiske in 1889 declared it almost ‘as extinct as cannibalism.'”) (via)
Blog Headline of the Week
Bookish Linkage
- I had not been informed that passive voice was “the feng shui of grammar“?
- How to swear like a librarian. (via)
- The greatest bookstore ever.
- Then there’s the bicycle-powered Street Books library for the homeless in Portland. (via)
- NPR has posted its listener-voted list of the Top 100 Science Fiction, Fantasy Books. With the possible exception of American Gods, I’m not surprised that any of the top 10 got enough votes to be there. And, as far as my “old-timers” memory lets me, it looks like seven or eight of my 10 votes appear somewhere on the list.
- Here’s the new afterword to the 10th anniversary edition of Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America.
- Can books bridge political and religious divides?
- See who made it into The Library of America’s 50 Funniest American Writers*. (You can see the meaning of the asterisk at the link.) The book is set for release in October.
- Chapter ??? on “professional” book critics vs. the reader-reviewer.
- Spoiler Alert: Stories Are Not Spoiled by “Spoilers”
- The PEN American Center has announced the recipients of the 2011 PEN Literary Awards. I’ve read the prose Translation Award winner and have both the Biography and Science Writing winners on my Nook (a device which has created an electronic “TBR” list comparable to the physical one in the TBR bookcase).
Nonbookish Linkage
- First it was flooding of Biblical proportions (and the water just recently started to go down). Now it’s an earthquake. Think someone is sending any messages to state government or the legislature?
- Turns out tin foil hats actually magnify radio waves, instead of blocking them, particularly at frequencies allocated to the government. This study is undoubtedly proof of a government/New World Order plot to keep tabs on tin foil hatters.
- Evidence you have too much money
- 360-degree panoramas of Hiroshima after the atomic bomb. (via)
Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage.
Ray Bradbury, The Meadow (1947)
