Friday, September 10, 2010

Round-Up: The Rough, The Rad, & The Ridiculous

Friday round-up day, with Laura from Combreviations:

This week, friends and foes, I would like to start with the things that I found particularly and insanely stupid. Why? Because it's cathartic. Everyone likes to make that "Oh god why" noise in the back of their throat at work at least once for a non-work purpose. I figured I'd just help a little. First, Tony Blair—did you plagiarize from a play about you? That's kind of lame. You could have at least stolen from Wikipedia, which... doesn't count as plagiarism? What? I would say that's Orwellian, but I won't, because that's not what that means. Although maybe no one would notice, because apparently no one knows how to use "Orwellian" correctly. I know, let's get the sequel to The Secret to fix our problems: The Secret 2: For Real, This Is It. And I know this article on the best way to burn a book is in response to a reader question, but seriously, some people do not need help. Hey Florida, it may be time to pull a Governor Christie and just... distance yourself.

Of course, it's not all bad on the Internet this week. A girl read 325 books in 3 months, so hey, reading isn't dead! And this repurposed card catalog made me wish I lived somewhere with, you know, "space." I hear some places have that. For all you fontophiles, check out this database of over 70,000 free fonts, and for the bargain hunters, Groupons for books! Amateur etymologists (like myself, hey guys!) will like these food idioms, and the somewhat lost novice poetry reader should check out these toe-dipping recommendations.

So, okay. It's not all terrible. But it's not all sunshine and roses either, friends. How do we handle swearing in kids' books? Or novels about being fat? Do we condone skimming? Should we all, in fact, just man up? And dear lord, what will Oprah pick?

The world is a complicated place this week, and we've got these big, moral questions to contend with. Luckily, it can all wait until Monday. So let's all brush up on our Klingon to watch us some Shakespeare, get our geek on, cooking style, and study up for our Harry Potter final. See you next week!

2 comments:

  1. I took an actual "Harry Potter" course as a student at Pratt Institute in Fall 2009! They offered it as an English elective for the semester, it was by far the most engaging liberal arts class I took at college (and it came with a very serious workload, I swear). As close as I'll ever get to Hogwarts!

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  2. Oh my word...ask any Florida citizen and they'll say the biggest things about Gainesville are UF and the Gators. As if this state didn't have too much tourism already, bad press gets added to the mix. And...idiotic pastors, the rest of his own religion doesn't condone this!

    Yes, I found that the most incredibly stupid thing on the list. The girl reading that much is frankly amazing! I wonder where she found any social life between anyone but the characters on the pages.

    Skimming...that's interesting. I've probably done it at least once on a few sex scenes, but thats about it.

    This was a fun read and certainly a good time waster that got me educated at the same time. Bravo on roundups!

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