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The Brits Are Making Top-100 Book Lists Again

June 24, 2011 | Comment

A few years back, I blogged about a Facebook meme concerning a list of 100 books. The meme stated that the average person would have read only six of the 100 books listed, and invited you to compare your own tally. It was an alluring falsehood, surely designed to engender a feeling of superiority among the decently educated. Its allure, however, was dwarfed by its falsehood: the list in the meme was shown to have been significantly altered from its original form (the result of a “favorite books” survey by the BBC) and the 6-out-of-100 statistic was a fabrication.

Two years later, “List-mus Test: How Well-Read Are You?” remains one of the most frequently visited posts out of the nearly 200 on this blog. So when a recent article in the Guardian entitled “The 100 greatest non-fiction books” came to my attention, I couldn’t help but think, “hey, it worked once.”

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Top Ten Videos of 2010: 6. The Daily Show, “Male Inequality”

January 2, 2011 | Comment

2010 was a big year for Jon Stewart, and thereby for The Daily Show. I didn’t think Stewart could top the October 30 Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear he and Stephen Colbert led, which drew a crowd of over 200,000 to the National Mall in Washington.

billboard

Billboard welcoming RNC attendees to
Minneapolis in 2008
(Photo: Flickr/The Zeppelin)

As it turned out, Stewart outdid himself in December with an impassioned shredding of Senate Republicans’ unconscionable filibuster of the Zadroga Act to provide medical and financial aid to afflicted Ground Zero emergency workers.1

In 2010 The Daily Show also continued to do one of the things it has done brilliantly for several years: point out and mock people who claim to be oppressed, but clearly aren’t. Examples of such people might include certain investment bankers, Christian mega-churches, professional athletes, or many others that generally have it pretty good. In the case of my number six video of 2010, this treatment is given to a richly deserving group: middle-aged white men.2

Samantha Bee, the Daily Show correspodent in this segment, has long been one of my favorites. She had a few things of her own going on in 2010, most notably the publication of her memoir I Know I Am, But What Are You? Her promotion of the book included a wide-ranging interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air and a cute feature piece in the New York Times Magazine. Daily Show video clips featuring her are here; among those that especially crack my shit up are “Shame Parade,” “John McCain’s Air Quotes” (start at about 2:03 into the clip), and “Long Island Wants to Secede.”


No Government Takeover of Public Safety!

April 24, 2010 | Permalink

You remember Richard Clarke. He was the counter-terrorism adviser to Presidents George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and (briefly) George W. Bush. He’s the guy who implored the second Bush Administration in January of 2001 to keep a close eye on Al Qaeda, and move forward with measures to that effect which were still in place from the recently departed Clinton administration. In response, the Bush administration blew off Clarke’s warnings and demoted him to non-cabinet level status.

Richard-Clarke

photo: Aude/Wikimedia Commons

He was later made Special Adviser to the President on cybersecurity, but resigned from the G.W. Bush administration in 2003. A year later Clarke testified before the 9/11 Commission; the Bush White House, knowing that his testimony would reveal their fuck-ups, undertook one of their trademark Karl Rove-style campaigns of character assassination. Some would disagree, but I believe an objective eye would conclude that the smear tactics damaged the Bush administration’s credibility far more than Clarke’s.

These days, Clarke runs a security consulting firm and serves as an adjunct lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. This past Monday he was interviewed by Terry Gross on Fresh Air, principally about his new book Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It.1 After describing the serious threat posed by internet-based attacks, Clarke had this to say about the present state of our defenses against such attacks:

CLARKE: …Now, who’s defending us? Who’s defending those pipelines and those railroads and the banks? The Obama Administration’s answer pretty much is, “You’re on your own.” [The Pentagon's] Cyber Command will defend our military. Homeland Security will someday have the capability to defend the rest of the civilian government — it doesn’t today. But everybody else will have to do their own defense.

That is a formula that will not work in the face of sophisticated threats.

GROSS: When you’re saying everybody else is on their own, does that include the electricity grid, the power grid, banking…? Read the rest of this entry »


Top Ten Videos of 2009: 1. Storm Large, “8 Miles Wide” [NSFW]

December 22, 2009 | Permalink

Here it is, the moment you’ve all been waiting for… my number one favorite web video of 2009. Some of you know of my affection for this video, and may therefore not be surprised that I gave it my #1 ranking. Others of you who have not seen it, well… you’re welcome. Read the rest of this entry »


Twitterings: Failed Children’s Book Titles

July 29, 2009 | Permalink

This particular Twitter meme has been such fertile ground for me that I’m going to report my own contributions, instead of picking out favorites tweeted by others. Then I’ll open it up to submissions of further silliness in the comments.

  1. Curious George and Daddy’s Browser History
  2. Little House on the Auction Block
  3. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. When Are You Going to Get a Fucking Cell Phone? Read the rest of this entry »