Literated

It's always comforting to find other folks who've not read all the "classics", but have a similar number of 'em under their belts as I do. That's one reason it was cool to come across this post on Wren's site. Another is just that I dig teh memes.

;-)

With a little help from cut/paste, here're the directions, the list and my own emphasisations. Have at it for yourselves.

Copy the list of books, then bold the books you have read, underline the ones you read for school, and italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish. As Wren did, I'll add a wee bit o' commentary next to some of the titles. Enjoy!

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina (Always wanted to, but maybe that's just cuz I love her name.)
Crime and Punishment {shudder}
Catch-22 (I think everyone but me has read this book.)
One Hundred Years of Solitude (Hmmm... Sounds familiar, but I don't think so.)
Wuthering Heights (I'll probably approach this one some time.)
The Silmarillion (Tolkien)
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose (No, I guess watching the movie [w/ Sean Connery] doesn't count)
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses ("Lucy says Joyce is effing incomprehensible. I totally agree." And I heartily concurr!)
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey (For school and I'm glad as I loved it!)
Pride and Prejudice ("Another Great Book my English teachers didn’t assign and so I’ve never read". What she said.)
Jane Eyre (There's a series by a guy named Jasper Fford about a woman who "goes into" books, and this is one of 'em. I don't think I'll read it though. Of Fford's novels, though, I can't get enough. )
The Tale of Two Cities (Depressing or I'd own it. Maybe I will yet.)
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad (Same as for the Odyssey.)
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (On the list to read)
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a Memoir in Books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales (Saw a movie version then loved the book!)
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (The only Joyce I did get through, though how I'm not sure.)
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula (Not read, but... you know)
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King (Worst of the Arthur stories. Go with Marion Zimmer Bradley's for historical realism.)
The Grapes of Wrath (Took me forever to get to it, since it wasn't assigned in school. WELL worth the read.)
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels and Demons
Inferno (Attempted, but bored me quickely.)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist (Ummm... I really think I've read this...)
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : A Memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-Present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere ("I love this title. I’d better read the book." I'm with Wren! lol)
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Really enjoyable writing.)
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots and Leaves
The Mists of Avalon (Well, there ya go!)
Oryx and Crake
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (Note to self; Add it to the list)
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and its Consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield

Just as Wren did on her post, I gots to list "some of my own old favorites, read over and over:" or which were simply some of my all time faves.

The Lord of the Rings (read at least 7 or 8 times.)
Ringworld (Series by Larry Niven)
Thieve's World: Sanctuary Anthology (Edited initially by Robert Lynn Aspirin, then by several others.)
The Mote in God's Eye More Larry Niven. Dude is my All Time Favorite author!
Anything by Ben Bova, Greg Bear, Arthur C. Clark, Jerry Pournelle or Kage Baker.

What Was Lost Shall Be Found

Study one's own spine
Sooner or later revealed
Questions unanswered

Errr.... Or somethin' like that. VERY cool, regardless.

Missing matter found in deep space

...
Now about half of the missing baryonic matter has turned up, seen by the orbiting Hubble space telescope and NASA's Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer, or FUSE.

"We think we are seeing the strands of a web-like structure that forms the backbone of the universe," said Mike Shull of the University of Colorado, who helped lead the study published in The Astrophysical Journal.

The matter is spread as superheated oxygen and hydrogen in what looked like vast empty spaces between galaxies.

However, observations of a quasar -- a bright object far off in space -- show its light is diffused much as a lighthouse can reflect on a thin fog that was invisible in the dark.

"It is kind of like a spider web. The gravity of the spider web is what produced what we see," Shull said in a telephone interview. "It's very thin. Some of it is very hot gas, almost a million degrees."

This is where the dark matter comes in. The dark matter is heating up the gas, Shull said.

"Dark matter has gravity. It pulls the gas in," Shull said. "This causes what I call sonic booms -- shock waves. This shock heats it to a million degrees. That makes it even harder to see."

The atoms of oxygen are in a stripped-down, ionized form. Five of the eight electrons are gone. It emits an ultraviolet spectrum of light that instruments aboard FUSE and Hubble can spot, Shull said.

These web-like filaments of matter are the structure upon which the galaxies form, he said.

[Where shall we go from here?]

.. and I can't it get it outta my head.

Heheh... Maybe.

PUDDLE OF MUD


On that note;

Wishes as fishes
Lost in the aquarium
Old habits die hard

No Pill's Gonna Cure This Ill

From Public Agenda

It's been more than 15 years since Bill Clinton's campaign advisors confidently declared "it's the economy, stupid," to sum up the public's mood of the moment. For the past few years, foreign policy and the war in Iraq in particular have been at the forefront of public concern. But the economy is reasserting itself as a priority�and economic concerns are shaping how the public views foreign policy.

The most dramatic example of this is the public's worry about the cost of energy. Fully 7 in 10 say they worry "a lot" about the rise in the cost of energy, a 16-point jump from six months ago. But for the public, economics and security are tied together on this issue. Becoming less dependent on other countries for our supply of energy is now the public's first choice as a national security strategy, with 6 in 10 saying it would do "a great deal" to make the country more secure.

[Getting it Right without guns. What a concept!]

Normally, what the Pollsters show the Public is thinking doesn't mean a whole lot in regards to what Policies are needed. Sure I love seeing $hrub's approval numbers being the worst of any President's since polling began, but that's because it gives me hope that the Public will force their Representatives to do something about it.

{sighhh} Well, anyway...

Whether for good or ill, well, we'll be to see.

Note: Hmmm... I'd referenced the Consumer Confidence index, but realized that I had it confused with another system, so pulled it. Fun stuff... Need vacation...

L8

Two Haiku

My foot, tasting burned
Still I munch it. Ecstasy!
No rare occurrence

For a friend.

Sanity subsumed
True/False light envelopes me
Hopeless? Not as such

For me.

Me fo' Mo!

Yet another spam mail from mi hermano, Lee Long.

Is (just about) All I'm Sayin'...

No Matter What Is Said . .

*

". . (i)ts about context people and we are not so important that we need to inject our cause into every sentence that comes out of everyone’s mouth."

[From a commenter on Qweerty*, as quoted in NYT political blog, The Caucus]

There are much better ways to deal with bigoted speach than by lettin' our anger manage our reactions; even when the speech is from politicians. I like the quote because it gets to the Unequivocal Real Problem with human beings: distorted self-importance.

You can defend yourself without deluding yourself into thinking that a person expressing themselves poorly by showing off their down-home flavor of ignoramia is an unrequited and socially worthless bigot. They - WE - are dangerous; no doubt about it. Such is life, and it takes a little more effort than a reactionary lashing out to alleviate the damage such ignorance does cause.

Personally, I think the NC Gov'nor should've gone with pushover instead of pansy. He didn't because society demeans homosexual peops fairly casually, even though that's seriously not a very rational state of affairs. But look at society's priorities; at the death and carnage we allow our government to inflict upon other peops in order to merely protect our horrifically wasteful and destructive, and incredibly consumptive and unsustainable way of life, and go figure.

Then think of a more productive way of pointing out how the Gov's use of "pansy" as a pejorative might actually be tactless and impolitic.

Then again, ranting and raving is a rocking way to get shiite out of one's system. And nobody gets hurt if we just remember to lash out in safe venues, and especially to always try to fight subtle battles with subtlety, and the big ones with more intensity.

If we realize that, then we can care what others think about us when it's negative, without succumbing to our own self-doubts.


* I kind of doubt it, but have been unable to get confirmation as, well, ... meh! You figure it out. {-;


* I can't even check the site from work: Weighted Phrase Limit Exceeded says my work's Interwebs software. {sigh}

'-)

Everyone Has Hopes to Dash

No.. I don't think it does.

"The sentence 'Women want men who have power and money' works just as well if you erase the words 'men who have.'"

--Meredith Small, What's Love Got to Do With It?, 1998

From the PBS Evolution website

Which, as a Great Equivocator, I must be quick to add does not mean that it doesn't work for all women. I just think that, irrespective of their being every bit as unavoidably human as men, most women are at least smarter enough ;) to prefer that their man be the one to hold the Wealth and Power, whilst they access it via the holding of their man.

A biologically originated situation which is culturally well cemented for a majority of majorities.

Is this a sexist analysis on my part? Well, considering that the two sexes, though each definitionally of the same species, and each inescapably possessed of both our greatest virtues and weakest faults, are spectacularly and irresolvably different from each other, I don't believe it can be helped. IMO, such knowledge just needs to be utilized in a manner which benefits each half of our single, though constantly evolving, species.

Facts for Thought

Everyone can aspire to "having it made." In the U.S.A., opportunity has always been the watchword; the motto, the credo.

The illusion, or delusion, depending on one's depth of belief (or gullibility.)

Reality, not only unregulated, but purposefully manipulated, is far less Democratic.

Economic View
The Wealth Trajectory: Rewards for the Few

---

They report that one out of every 10,000 American families has income in excess of $10.7 million. These lucky duckies number less than 15,000. Put together, they could all fit into a modest-size town. (We could call it Aspen or Nantucket.)

What’s more, the superrich have been getting an increasing slice of the economic pie. In 1980, the top 0.01 percent of the population had 0.87 percent of total income. By 2006, their share had more than quadrupled to 3.89 percent, a level not seen since 1916.

[The Land of Delusion Welcomes Your Wealth!]

Oh! Ye of Too Much Faith

Whilst there are surely those who practice an atheistic philosophy, adherence, whatchamacallit thingy, (I know that I used to be fairly evangelical in my own atheism) most of the folks whom I've met or have really related to online, tend to just not believe in gods and such.

Just sayin'.

Don't Meditate, Medicate!

My bro emailed that to me and it had me LOL. Thing is, I always wanna try and find the source, but a google search on Sarcasma appears to have just turned up others using it w/o a ref. Who knows, though, maybe the source was in there but .. whatevs... They don't sign 'em, I won't 'em.

{sigh} C'est la vie, eh.

(BTW: The bleeding from me eyeballs is well worth the resulting dearth of bloodied, headless co-workers!)

;-]

Addendum: Thanks to Nava for the link to the originating site. Funny stuff o'er yonder!