What happens when you combine these two books?
You get this...
Monday, July 26, 2010
Sunday, July 25, 2010
The World is Fat
Today the Demon shifts his attention from the world of fiction to nonfiction in order to lampoon a popular book by Thomas Friedman, The World is Flat...
This book, which has been a popular business read, begins well enough with a first chapter entitled, “While I Was Snacking.” The author, Mr. Freedme, discusses his experience sitting on a couch, his coffee table littered with debris from McDonald's, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Starbucks, Taco Bell and Baskin-Robbins. At that particular moment, he happens to be watching the world championships of Sumo wrestling when, lo and behemoth, Torsten Scheibler, a 440-pound wrestler from Germany captures a gold medal.
Initially Mr. Feedme’s observations are lucid, acute and scintillating. He asks provocative questions about globalization, the retail economy and vividly paints parallel trends in international sports and the fast food industry as a metaphor for more broad-reaching sea changes. He astutely explores how a sport such as Sumo, whose very essence is Japanese, has become become embraced internationally, attracting both fans and athletes from around the world.
From there, the book’s promising beginning is utterly obliterated as Feedme launches into a bloated and turgid premise that gives rises to a series of distended chapters entitled, “Ten Forces that Fattened the World.” The author have may begun with the belief that the Sumo wrestlers he saw on the TV screen that day, alongside with fast food debris on his coffee table, could be woven into a coherent set of ideas. Alas, Feedme's intellectual drawbacks become abundantly evident as one peruses the chapter titles for each of the Fatteners:
- Fattener #1. 4/19/75 – Double-Stuff Oreo’s introduced
- Fattener #2. 11/8/87 – First online menu appears
- Fattener #3. The blueprint is drawn for a Starbucks within a Starbucks
- Fattener #4: Weird Al releases his music video, Fat.
- Fattener #5. The Jenny Craig Heresy
- Fattener #6. The Global Calorie
- Fattener #7. The Cooking Channel in High Definition
- Fattener #8. Ingesting, inhaling, insourcing and indigestion
- Fattener #9. Boink: Eating without thinking
- Fattener #10. Atlas bulks up on steroids so he can shrug more easily
This is a book filled with cute inanities and readers are more likely to find intellectual substance in an assortment of Twinkies and Devil Dogs.
Monday, July 12, 2010
Sunday, July 11, 2010
Gulf oil spill spreads to Amazon.com
The catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf continues to spread. I just visited Amazon.com and was horrified to see crude oil washing over their website. This is truly a disaster!
Okay, this was created by visiting Instant Oil Spill, a project of A Cleaner Future. Instant Oil Spill brings the Gulf crisis right to any computer screen. Go to Instantoilspill.com, enter in the URL of any website, hit the "Spill Now" button, and watch the page fill with swirling crude (digital, of course).
Disclaimer: No books or websites were harmed in the making of this post.
Saturday, July 10, 2010
Monday, July 5, 2010
Classic books for young readers, revisited
I grew up reading Mad Magazine, so it's easy for me to imagine the following "classics" for young readers.
The Black Scallion by Wally Fearley:
A rare Arabian legume helps a talented but traumatized teenage girl win an international cooking competition.
James and the Giant Leech by Raul Dahli Lama:
A gigantic but compassionate leech starts growing in the yard by a house on a hill. Occupying the house is James, a little boy whose parents died in a tragic incident involving a vacuum cleaner and a blood transfusion.
Bored of the Flies by Willy Leading:
A group of 21st Century boys wash up on a deserted island. Without their Wii, Playstations and Xboxes, all they can do watch the flies that inhabit the island. Boring!
Thursday, July 1, 2010
The Poet Laureate and Stephen Colbert
First, congratulations to the next U.S. Poet Laureate. The Library of Congress announced Thursday that William S. Merwin will become the 17th U.S. Poet Laureate this fall.
While we're on the subject, let's revisit a former laureate, Robert Pinksy, and his notable appearance on the Stephen Colbert show where he moderated a " Meta-Free-Phor-All" contest between Colbert and actor, Sean Pean.
While we're on the subject, let's revisit a former laureate, Robert Pinksy, and his notable appearance on the Stephen Colbert show where he moderated a " Meta-Free-Phor-All" contest between Colbert and actor, Sean Pean.
| The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Meta-Free-Phor-All: Shall I Nail Thee to a Summer's Day? | ||||
| ||||
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Thrice Upon a Time: Inflationary Language with Victor Borge
What if the English language evolved to reflect inflation? Victor Borge provides the answer!
Sunday, June 20, 2010
An Extremely Dangerous Word
Armageddon. Apocalypse. Cataclysm. These are words used to describe the end of the world and while they invoke images of doomsday, the words themselves are harmless. You can say them as often, and whenever you want, and no devastation will occur.
There is, however, another word, a most unlikely word, if misused, could result in total annihilation. The word: tattarrattat. Originally coined by James Joyce, it is believed to be the longest palindrome in the English language. It is also an onomatopoeia. You may say the word once, but take the greatest care not to repeat it too many times.
Why?
An upcoming article in the prestigious scientific journal, The Journal of Irreproducible Results, reveals the terrifying findings of a recent study. The prominent physicist, Helvetica Edison, while conducting research at the Large Hadron Collider, happened upon a strange quirk involving palindromic onomatopoeias – words that are simultaneously palindromes and onomatopoeia. The discovery, he noted, “frightened me to the core of my being.” If you were to recite a word such as tattarrattat a thousand or more times in a row, the world would come to an end. Edison’s calculations demonstrated that a rip in the fabric of the space/time continuum was highly probable and the resulting black hole would swallow the earth.
“The odds of any one person being able to correctly pronounce tattarrattat a thousand times consecutively is extremely low, but it only has to happen once – and poof! – we’re toast.”
There is, however, another word, a most unlikely word, if misused, could result in total annihilation. The word: tattarrattat. Originally coined by James Joyce, it is believed to be the longest palindrome in the English language. It is also an onomatopoeia. You may say the word once, but take the greatest care not to repeat it too many times.
Why?
An upcoming article in the prestigious scientific journal, The Journal of Irreproducible Results, reveals the terrifying findings of a recent study. The prominent physicist, Helvetica Edison, while conducting research at the Large Hadron Collider, happened upon a strange quirk involving palindromic onomatopoeias – words that are simultaneously palindromes and onomatopoeia. The discovery, he noted, “frightened me to the core of my being.” If you were to recite a word such as tattarrattat a thousand or more times in a row, the world would come to an end. Edison’s calculations demonstrated that a rip in the fabric of the space/time continuum was highly probable and the resulting black hole would swallow the earth.
“The odds of any one person being able to correctly pronounce tattarrattat a thousand times consecutively is extremely low, but it only has to happen once – and poof! – we’re toast.”
Friday, June 18, 2010
Grammar Pet Peeves from Huff Post. Your, err, you're going to love this!
From HuffPost: Their readers chose the worst grammar, spelling, punctuation, and malapropism mistakes ever.
People who break the rules of grammar
will end up in the GRAMMAR SLAMMER!
Sunday, June 13, 2010
Saturday, June 12, 2010
Taming Your Characters
My favorite scene in Antoine Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince takes place when a fox asks to be tamed by the Little Prince.
The Prince asks, “What does that mean – ‘tame’?”
“It is an act too often neglected,” said the fox. “It means to establish ties.”
“‘To establish ties’?”
The fox goes on to explain, “To you, I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other…To you, I shall be unique in all the world.”
Maybe it’s all the coffee I’ve been drinking this morning, but the fox’s explanation seemed especially relevant to character development. For any character an author writes about, odds are, there are thousands and thousands of similar characters in thousands and thousands of other books. The question becomes: how does the author establish ties between the character and the reader, make the reader feel a need for the character and, above all, make that character unique in all the world?”
Ah, to succeed in creating ties to the reader and to tame my characters! Hmmm…how the heck am I going to do that? I’m not sure, but I suspect it will involve drinking a lot of coffee!
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