I saw this list the other day and thought it was really dumb. I think Buzzfeed and Cracked have created an insatiable need for lists, so you end up with shit like this. They seem unaware that Hitchens was not a devoted fan of Mother Teresa's.
Be Bold with Bananas is an awesome title.
1: Seriously, could we maybe get people to swear off posting Buzzfeed links on Facebook for one week, and then maybe they'll all realize they can live without it? I want Buzzfeed to stop devouring my internet.
Especially the links where every item is an animated gif and my whole browser freezes. That's mostly on the ipad, but still.
The biggest problem is that 1 time in 5, the list is amusing. We keep clicking, people keep linking. WHERE DOES IT END?!
They also seem unaware that people in the past were capable of irony and sometimes enjoyed kitsch - I was particularly struck by their assumption that the lesbian kitsch erotica cover was intended dead seriously.
It's interesting to see people who are so obviously astonished that language changes meaning over time - and yet who seem so confident that none of the innocent language they use today will ever come to have a sexual meaning.
Also they have never encountered the word "hoofbeat" and seem to think that this is not because they have an impoverished vocabulary.
It seems like there's a definite cultural gap between the Irish author of the list and the (probably mostly American) authors of the books.
It should have ended with "30 signs you're stuck between generation X and the millenials" which was targeting those born between 1976 and 1982, a range so narrow that the only exclusive cultural markers amounted to "remember middle school?"
Now here are some bad book covers (of otherwise generally good books).
The frank Frazetta-ish Princesss Bride is probably the best at the link in 10. But some real howlers.
10 is truly so wonderful that it's worth your re-linking.
I didn't even know about Buzzfeed, so I've never wasted time reading its lists.
Better book titles with existing covers.
I don't know if Regretsy has shown up here before. Pretty keen.
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A friend of mine made a surprising claim the other day: that one cannot idiomatically express, in French, the sentence "He is a good husband, a good father, and a good son to his father." This seems odd to me; shouldn't filiality be easy to describe in a Romance language? But she is far more fluent in French than I am, and this came up in a lesson she was having with a native Francophone. True? False? Meaningless? Quibblable?
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Seriously, could we maybe get people to swear off posting Buzzfeed links on Facebook for one week, and then maybe they'll all realize they can live without it?
Fixed.
I really don't get FB hate. I get tons of fascinating links there, some cute pictures of kids and vacations, some updates, and I get to boggle and make fun of people until I unfriend them, if they suck. I can get swearing off it if it's dominating your life and you need to re-establish normalcy, but it's not in and of itself an awful thing.
27: I have a straightforward version in my head but my French isn't that great so it might not be idiomatic. I'm curious what exactly doesn't work. It was pointed out to me at some point that you can't really say "twenty one men, women, and children" in Russian. (You would, of course, say it otherwise. Perfectly easy to say "twenty one people, among whom there are men, women, and children.")
Ditto to 30. FB is annoying in various ways, but overall I find it pretty useful.
Just today I was commenting to a friend that Facebook is fascinating, in that I know all these details about people I went to high school with but otherwise don't keep in touch with. It's like a portal into an ongoing high school reunion, without the awkward hotel party.
27 The first two are fine - just translate literally. The last is a bit problematic since 'il est un bon fils' doesn't specify father or mother while a literal translation would be getting close to the pejorative 'fils a papa'. But you can just say he's good to his father.
I like to imagine that the second edition of "How To Avoid Huge Ships" was prompted by someone following the first edition and smashing into a supertanker.
When I was young and in my prime, the other editors of the weekly newspaper I worked for and I would go out to lunch on Thursday, brainstorm list article topics, go to the library (as Wikipedia only had a few thousand subjects at the time), check out relevant books, and then bash out a list-based cover story over the rest of the afternoon/evening, which we then edited on Friday, and had laid out on Saturday/Sunday. Sometimes we'd even do a photoshoot for the cover image. Sigh. It's not like I was *happy* back then, but in retrospect it was a pleasant life. Also I got to see several movies per week for free, so that was fun. Good old list journalism.
36: And now you're crumbling! Show some conviction, young man!
When I got the cat, I had a sort of faute-de-mieux friend (Chicago was rough for me those first two years) who could never resist referring to the beast as "your pussy." It's the shallow end of the gay sensibility, double-entendre writ so large it's just one big entendre.
39: Did you refer to him as "Mr. Slocum"?
No, you know, I never watched that show. Is that her joke?
Too bad the Time Ninja franchise never took off. My kid would love that.
OT: Florida Executes Insane Man Because Lots of Christians Are Insane:
Florida has executed a schizophrenic man who believed that he was the immortal prince of God vested with superhuman powers including an ability to control the sun, despite the US constitution's prohibition against putting mentally ill people to death.
John Ferguson, 65, was killed by lethal injection at 6pm on Monday. Earlier in the evening the US supreme court declined to hear a final petition from his lawyers.... He was found in numerous medical examinations to be grossly psychotic, insane and incompetent.
In their petition to the US supreme court, filed last week, Ferguson's lawyer Ben Lewis chronicled the prisoner's persistent delusions. They included the belief that he could not be killed because he had powers drawn from the Sun, and a delusion that his prison guards were communists who were out to kill him because they knew that he was in fact the prince of God.
"John Ferguson is without a doubt mentally ill. He has a 40-year history of paranoid schizophrenia, we have more than 30 doctors diagnosing him as that over four decades. Yet Florida is close to eviscerating the US supreme court law that makes him ineligible for execution," Lewis told the Guardian....
Yet the state supreme court of Florida found that he was eligible for the gurney, making the interesting argument that Ferguson's belief in his own immortality was shared by millions of other American Christians. The federal appeals court for the 11th circuit concurred with the Florida courts and allowed the execution to proceed...."
(Emphasis added.)
I guess no one else found that interesting.
I found it interesting, urple. I can only assume this means the state of Florida has ruled him a god.
Also OT: the sitter did a "craft project" with the kids that consisted of taking three unopened bags of dried beans from our cupboard, opening them and having the kids glue them to prices of cardboard! These were rancho gordo heirloom beans! They were artisanal! What kind of lunatic glues someone else's heirloom beans to prices of cardboard?!
We have a big box of perfectly adequate arts and craft supplies for the kids. No dried beans, granted.
Might not be a good craft project, but man, that is Art.
Also OT: life without google reader sucks. I keep expecting it to get better as I acclimate, but instead it's getting worse.
They could still be salvageable, urple.
44: Wow. Florida's Christians ought to be flattered to learn that belief in an immortal soul is the equivalent of being a psychotic who thinks he's an invincible deity.
I hadn't seen 44, 47, and 49, but they are duly appreciated.