Bulletin Board
- The deadline to apply to be a book-giver on World Book Night has been extended to Monday.
Interesting Reading in the Interweb Tubes (this week)
- Burning Man (“Kneeling there, on fire, he’d resigned himself to death. All he’d wanted to know was how long? How long would he have to burn? How many more torturous fractions of a second would he have to remain alive?”) (via)
- Stories don’t need morals or messages (“For some of us, however, reading is an end in itself, and what fiction has to offer isn’t lessons but an experience, a revelation, a sudden expansion of the spirit.”)
- A Message from Prison (“…the schizophrenic seeks salvation from his suffering the way a person drowning seeks a gulp of air.”)
More Interesting Reading in the Interweb Tubes (that I accidentally omitted last week)
- The Long Goodbye (“What’s so crazy is that medical science is keeping people alive longer. We just won’t be able to afford to live—we’ll be a nation full of immortal poor people.”) (via)
- How Much Is an Astronaut’s Life Worth? (“Neither Columbus nor Lewis and Clark would have imagined demanding 99.999 percent safety assurances as a precondition for their expeditions. Under such a standard, no human voyages of exploration would ever have been attempted.”) (via)
Blog Headlines of the Week
- Drug tests for welfare recipients, Sanity tests for legislators
- So Jonathan Franzen Hates eBooks…Who Cares?
Blog Lines of the Week
- “Reviewing books is often a good way to feel like a puppy-kicking sonuvabitch. And sometimes, when you find yourself the lone grump before a buzz juggernaut, you can feel like a crazy, puppy-kicking sonuvabitch.”
Bookish Linkage
- What I Hate About Being A Reader
- 25 Things I Learned From Opening a Bookstore
- The greatest books of all time, according to 125 famous authors
- Some photographers are planning a fine-art photo coffeetable book about life on the Cheyenne Indian Reservation. According to their web site, they probably won’t finish shooting until this fall.
- An Ivy Leaguer’s view of how to read the right books.
Nonbookish Linkage
- I REALLY want one of these.
- Naturally, golf etiquette requires rules in case the Nazis bomb the golf course while you’re playing.
- Conversations with the parents of Russia’s neo-Nazis (via)
Spam-bot Comment of the Week
- “These deppresants are wrongly sometimes writtenabated to as travelers? diarrhea.” (January 31 comment to my annual Christmas post)
Invent a past for the present.
Daniel Stern, The Rose Rabbi
