Book meme

/
drdrA tagged me with the book meme.

So here goes.....boldface = read, italics = never finished, regular type = not yet read.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia

34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I gotta make my billions and retire soon so I can catch up on all this reading---and keep up with all the new stuff!
/

Still breaking the news

/

There were two deaths that got some significant coverage in the news today.

1) The death of Dr. Michael DeBakey, a renowned heart surgeon believed by some to be "the greatest surgeon ever", who performed over 60,000 surgeries himself, and whose surgical innovations have probably saved millions of lives worldwide.

2) The death of Tony Snow, who was a 'journalist', Fox News Anchor and Dubi-ya's White House Press Secretary, i.e who was essentially a propaganda maven/tool.

There was a trend to this coverage, of course. Virtually every news outlet gave big-time splashy front page status to one of these two people. The other received also-ran status from some outlets while he was completely omitted from the front pages of the rest.

Here are some screencaps, from the front/home pages of some major news outlets, from around midday today. (Since the screencaps may be crappy when thusly reproduced, I have framed the Snow coverage in red and the Dr. DeBakey coverage in green for, hopefully, rapid clarity. Click on the image if you want to see the larger version).

Let's start with the 'liberal' cable TV news giant, CNN.

Big splash, with pic, for Snow. Two bonus video links.
Dr. DeBakey gets first-runner-up status.







CBS does a little better. Dr. DeBakey gets about a fifth of the room that Snow does. Also, Dr. DeBakey merits an itty-bitty thumbnail pic! About a 2oth the size of Snow's, but a pic nevertheless. I guess if he'd just done more with his life, like Snow for instance, maybe we could have seen a better pic of him upfront!













The Google News homepage gave about equal billing to the two, but Snow ranked first. If you can read the screencap you'll see why---936 news articles about Snow, 443 about Dr. DeBakey.














Anyway, so you get the idea. This was the trend in the news outlets that reported both events on the front page. But at least they reported both on the front page, and I suppose we should be thankful for that.

Of the ones I saw, only one news outlet seemed to recognize, somewhat, the proportion of newsworthiness of the two people. The NY Times.














Finally, the Hall of Shame: ABC, MSNBC, Yahoo News and the LA Times had no mention of Dr. DeBakey on their main pages (at the time I checked and saved all these screencaps...and yeah, I got caps of their pages too) while they carried prominent, top-billing, spreads on Tony Goebb...errr...Snow.

This is typical of what we have as the mainstream media today.
1) They have no idea of what's newsworthy anymore. Catering to the basest in human instinct all the time must take its toll.
2) They more incompetent they are, the more their sense of pompous self-importance. Much like the famous attention-whore Terrell Owens, our mainstream media live by the credo "I love me some me!"

/

Greatest hits of Johnny Credit: #1776

/

"I tap the line"

I keep a close watch on this kingdom of mine
I keep my ears wide open all the time
I keep Gitmo stocked up with the ties that bind
Because you're mine, I tap the line

I find it very, very easy to intrude
I listen in a phone when I'm feeling blue
And you vote that I must rule for you
Because you're mine, I tap the line

As sure as your reps can't stand and fight
I keep spying on you both day and night
And the pardons I give just prove it's right
Because you're mine, I tap the line

You've given away your freedom out of fright
You give me cause to think that I’m bright
For you I know I'd take away every right
Because you're mine, I tap the line

I keep a close watch on this kingdom of mine
I keep my ears wide open all the time
I keep Gitmo stocked up with the ties that bind
Because you're mine, I tap the line

/

d r i f t g l a s s, as usual, says it best...

/

Take a moment to read this post by d r i f t g l a s s .......then stay a while and read some of the archives.

/

The American Dream

/

Rush Limbaugh gets $400 million or so over the next 8 years or so....

Work hard, be a productive member of society, provide for your family with an honest day's work? You pathetic loser sucker!

Limbaugh is reported to have said once, "You are worth what you earn!" So by Limbaugh's standards most people, including members of the armed forces, are relatively worthless....wait a minute....they do treat most people including the armed forces like worthless meat, so I can't accuse them of hypocrisy in deed (just in word/propaganda), in that instance.

But anyway, it is all a matter of supply and demand....... hey, the people/consumers decide.....if there wasn't a market for it, it wouldn't flourish.....etc...etc...etc. Correct?

Funny thing is, powerful narcotic drugs and pornography are also billion dollar industries. But Rush and his ilk support wars against these things. If there wasn't a demand, there would be such rewards for the supply, correct?

But I guess spreading and perpetuating hatred and bigotry across generations is A-OK so long as there is a stupid muthafrakin consumer for it. Hey, it worked for organized religion for centuries, so why just pick on Limbaugh, huh?

And while I'm commenting, let me add this....Barack Obama is for FISA, for the supreme court gun ruling, for the death penalty, wants to expand 'faith-based' initiatives (9/11 was a faith-based initiative, you know), and now apparently he will be willing to reconsider his position on withdrawal of our troops from Iraq. AND HE'S THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CANDIDATE.

Congratulations Rush. It is indeed your goddamned country.

/