This modern world deserves a modern attitude.

  1. P.C. Load Letter, SIR!
  2. Anyone here read or seen Costa Gavras’ novel and movie Z?, well, it just happened in Turkey.
  3. The Lifetime Television Award for Patronizing and Insulting Media Intended for Women goes to Salon.com for “Introducing Salon’s cheeky new women’s blog”.
  4. Dreck auteur Uwe Boll is making a movie of the video game “Postal” starring Gary Coleman. That is all.
  5. Ladies and Gentlemen, your attention please. You have been mourning a chicken. Please adjust your shmerz appropriately.
  6. Why we fight: follow the money.
  7. Brainmaps.org has fascinating high-res maps of the brain in sections, etc. Great stuff.

Petrarch’s Fannypack: The Accessory That Changed Poetry

CitizenX just sent me a link to a book called “Napoleon’s Buttons: How 17 Molecules Changed History”. I’d probably like it; I enjoy that kind of boutique pop science book. They can be awfully precious, and the writer often believes that THIS ONE THING IS THE ROOT OF ALL EVERYTHING, but they’re fun like candy and I do learn from them. It’s like the enjoyable bits of college lectures.

Anyway I realized that there are about a hundred books out in the last decade with titles in the form: [FAMOUS PERSON]’s [NOUN] and they’re almost all this kind of book. Some of them are just [PERSONAL NOUN]’s NOUN

Examples: Galileo’s Daughter, Halley’s Quest, Miss Leavitt’s Stars, The Mapmaker’s Wife, Humboldt’s Cosmos, Kepler’s Witch, Einstein’s Heroes… Those are just from a quick look at Amazon’s “History of Science” category.

Maybe we should make a matrix of Famous Dead People and Nouns and write all the ones that aren’t done already. Dibs on “Kropotkin’s Bicycle”, here!