I’ve recently revised and reorganized my favorite books page. I also added links to the selections at amazon.com so you can grab your own copy.
Never tell me the odds!
Divorce Pending for Co-Author of Time-Tested Secrets for Making Your Marriage Work Well … just the headline should be funny enough to make you want to read the rest of the article. But! Good heavens! Did you read the ten tips? By the time I got to the third one I thought for sure it […]
This is a take-home test for AML 3124 from the fall of 1995. I might have not exactly addressed the questions as they were presented, but if I had wanted to be a journalist or a writer-for-hire, I never would have majored in English…read away…lemme know what ya think, too…
How could you not want to buy a toy that blows cheese-scented soap bubbles?! I found this amazingly awesome, incredible book last year and loved it. (I can’t seem to find my copy anywhere …) I bought the daily-planner version for my friend Chris for Christmas. both links via wwink’s web log
If you, like me, are a fan of Douglas Adams‘ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, you will enjoy h2g2. link via Ryan
The bonus question @ sylloge.com is: “Does anyone know if there are an infinite number of chess games? If not, what the limit is?” The answers are “no” and “I couldn’t tell you off the top of my head, but I suspect it’s a great big number”. This is a topic tackled in Prisoner’s Dilemma […]
Wow! I got my second Christmas present today, thanks to the Weblogger Gift Exchange (created by bjb) and Tara @ ratcrap.com. Adcult: The Triumph of Advertising in American Culture. It’s a great book! It was written by one of my professors at UF and is an excellent read. Thanks, Tara!
A few days ago I received my first Christmas present of the year! It came from an unlikely source, and it is certainly appreciated. It’s a book called Prisoner’s Dilemma by William Poundstone. The book is about game theory and its relevance to nuclear proliferation and the Cold War and it is excellent. I’ve read […]
You and a person you love deeply are placed in separate rooms with a button next to each of you. You know that both of you will be killed unless one of you presses your button before sixty minutes pass; furthermore, the first person to press the button will save the other person, but will […]
I’m about 2/3 of the way through Stephen King‘s Hearts in Atlantis and I am surprised by how much I am enjoying it. The last few King novels … I don’t know … I just couldn’t inhale them like I did everything else he’s written. I never finished Insomnia or the last one in the […]
Congratulations to Matt! He knew almost all of the random references I posted on Monday. He and Dan are the only ones who even attempted, and Dan admitted that he researched most of them on line. Here are the answers: 1984 – George Orwell The Rime of the Ancient Mariner – Samuel Taylor Coleridge You’ve […]
I used to love making secret codes and sending secret messages when I was a kid. There is a great Edgar Allan Poe short story – I think it’s called The Gold Bug – about a secret message. I must have read that three or four times when I was in elementary school. link via […]
The previous post got me thinking about all the continuing hullabaloo about content. Continuing? Yeah. Continuing as in, the same thing people were debating 300 years ago. I took entire classes in college about content and what it is and where it originates and why it’s good or bad. What I learned was that nobody […]
A friend of mine told me to read Naked by David Sedaris and so I am. I bought it over two months ago and have been gallumphing through it at about two pages per day. Tonight, in a fit of crazed eyeball-roving, I read almost five pages! This is killing me. A book like Naked […]
I finally got around to updating my list of books to read before you die. See if you have been through some of the same ones as me. Let me know. I’m interested. But do me one favor? Read Lempriere’s Dictionary by Lawrence Norfolk as soon as you can.
So yesterday, while I was reading this, I ate an entire bag of microwave popcorn. No, I’m not a slow reader, you dork. I am an extremely fast popcorn-eater. I in-freakin’-hale the stuff. I love popcorn. Then when we went to see X-Men I consumed a Large bag during the previews. So by like nine […]
From For Shame: The Loss of Common Decency in American Culture, by James B. Twitchell (p.186, 1997, St. Martin’s Griffin) In my estimation, ten minutes under the dunce cap may have done more than vials of Ritalin for those suffering from attention deficit disorder, dysrationalia, or whatever affliction du jour is conjured up by counselors […]
From Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences, by Edward Tenner (p.11, 1996, Vintage Books) When innovation opens a new space, there is at first a euphoria of endless horizons. Somehow, though, a new frontier is never stable. Either people lose interest and it becomes a series of literal or metaphoric […]