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Top Ten Videos of 2009: The Full List

December 26, 2009 | 1 comment

As promised, here’s a re-cap of my full top ten list. Click on any item to see the original post.

  1. Storm Large, “8 Miles Wide”
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  2. The Muppets, “Habanera”
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  3. The Onion, “Mexican Border Wall”
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    4. Read the rest of this entry »

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Top Ten Videos of 2009: 8. “Learning is Fundamental”

December 15, 2009 | 1 comment

What’s funny about the current economic crisis? At the root of it, nothing. I have spent most of 2009 as one of the who-knows-how-many millions struggling with unemployment and dwindling resources. One side effect of unemployment is that it gives you additional time for pondering (a mixed blessing, to be sure). I’ve periodically wondered whether the crumbling of public education in America is the chicken or the egg (so to speak) relative to our national economic woes… which leads me to number eight on my Casey Kasem-esque video countdown, the Colbert Report clip “The Word: Learning is Fundamental.” Read the rest of this entry »

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List-mus Test: How Well-Read are You?

February 27, 2009 | 4 comments

Here’s what happened: the seemingly endless succession of Facebook memes had produced one intended to measure how well-read you are in terms of a list of 100 classic works. It read:

The BBC believes most people will have read, on average, only 6 of the 100 books listed here. How do your reading habits stack up? Look at the list and put an ‘x’ or a ‘*’, or otherwise highlight the ones you have read. Tag some people.

Geek that I am, I dutifully went down the list and checked off the 25 of them that I had read, and posted it in a Facebook note with the added comment

This list is a bit Brit-centric. Not that it ignores American classics or anything, but I count no fewer than four Jane Austen books on here and six by Dickens, whereas I see but two Steinbecks, one Fitzgerald, and zero Hemingway. Plus, as Hemingway would point out, only chicks read Jane Austen. ;-) … On the one hand, I’ve read just 1/4 of these classics, which seems kind of pathetic for someone who claims to be educated. With that in mind, I’m still four times more well-read than the BBC gives me credit for being – so suck on that, crumpet monkeys!

That’s where the controversy began. And it didn’t even have to do with my comment about Jane Austen, nor my calling the major press outlet of the land of my forefathers “crumpet monkeys.” Read the rest of this entry »

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