http://video.stumbleupon.com/#p=to9ocqk14u

1.  Why were the filiming the Hindenburg in the first place?  I mean, were they so hard up for entertainment that they filmed every zeplin to float around?

2.  There were 97 people on board and only 35 died.  Are those other 62 people the luckiest bastards in the world?  Take a look at that news reel and tell me how the hell those people survived - is this like that Bruce Willis movie Unbreakable?

3.  Plus, it happened in New Jersey - getting burned to death in New Jersey is like adding insult to injury.  Kind of like the 100 people that died at the Station nightclub fire in Rhode Island a few years back - bad enough you have to die in a fire, but does it have to be at a Great White concert?  

4.  That's probably enough disaster humor from me for the day.

The novel tells the story of five aristocratic families, particularly the Bezukhovs, the Bolkonskys, and the Rostovs, and the entanglements of their personal lives with the history of 1805–1813, principally Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812. As events proceed, Tolstoy systematically denies his subjects any significant free choice: the onward roll of history determines happiness and tragedy alike.

It's possible that someone you spout the above non-sense to will know more about the book than that, but highly unlikely.  If you happen to strike up a conversation with someone who turns out to be a professor of Russian literature, cause a diversion by feigning food poisoning and rolling on the ground while holding your stomach.  

Sometimes you don't even have to know what the book is about - you can merely throw out an interesting intellectual fact about the book.  Should the subject of Gravity's Rainbow come up, wait for someone to mention that it's a shame it didn't win a Pulitzer (don't worry - someone will mention it) and then you chime in with your disbelief that the three member jury on fiction unanimously voted to the 1974 Pulitzer to Pynchon only to be over-ruled by the other 11 Philistines that made up the board.  I mean, they chose to give the award to no-one that year.  WTF, dude?  

Actually, don't add the WTF, Dude.  That won't help your case that you are a sophisticated scholar.

What genius came up with the Wonder Twins' superpowers, anyway?  I mean, how random is it to find yourself with the ability to turn yourself into a bucket of water?  Which also brings up some strange conceptual issues, like why he can transform part of himself into a bucket when everything else about his superpower says he needs to be some kind of H2O based product.  Seems like for consistency purposes he should have needed to become an ice bucket filled with water, right?  

Of course, the ability to turn yourself into an animal is only slightly less random and marginally more useful.  Luckily, the idea seemed to be that she could turn herself into an intelligent version of the animal which is nice because it would have been a totally useless power to turn into, say, a monkey only to start masturbating wildly and flinging poo at the bad guys.  Granted, that would have been an awesome episode.  I certainly would Tivo that if I thought such a thing existed.

A tough call - vegans are really annoying and they make life difficult when you have a group of friends together and now all of a sudden your dining options are really limited because Johnny-Bacon-Is-Murder won't eat at at any restaurant that uses vegetable oil because Corn is also murder.  On the other hand, at least these people have convictions and they stick with them - not like those people who are all, "Oh, I'm a vegetarian.  But I eat fish.  And cheese.  And pork."  What the hell - make up your mind.  You're either in or out.  You can't be half a vegetarian - that's like being pregnant part of the time.  Do you eat meat?  You are an omnivore that prefers to minimize your meat consumption, not a vegetarian. 


Look, you don't see me wandering around pretending to be a Jew but only if you accept my modifiers that I still wear a crucifix and take communion.  Honestly, I don't understand you people.

I couldn't figure out how to get the video to appear under the poll.  I am lame.

Clowns.  Creepy, disturbing and entirely unentertaining.  Wikipedia states that "in most cultures the clown is a ritual character associated with festival or rites of passage," which is funny because I don't remember clowns at my confirmation, high school graduation or the first time I had sex.  And, frankly, I don't really think I was missing anything because of a lack of people in white face paint, red noses and enormous shoes.  

Plus, as the video implies, clowns have given us the single worst cultural phenomenon of the last 100 years, the Insane Clown Posse.  WTF, people?

Honestly, if I read one more article lamenting the death of the venerated institution that is the printed daily newspaper I'm going to storm down to the Boston Globe offices and destroy every computer in sight and make them go back to putting out their product using Underwood typewriters and setting the type by hand.  For the love of Pete, the only people who give a shit about this are the self-aggrandizing reporters complaining about it.  For one thing, the printed word is still a loooong way from disappearing entirely - technology still has  yet to come up with a perfect alternative to books, magazines and newspapers.  You know why?  Because even Amazon's Kindle, snazzy as it might be, is a lot more risky to be dragging around with you than a $15 book or a $.75 newspaper.  When I'm riding the T reading my Globe, I want to be able to dispose of it on the floor of the Green Line train like a good American - gettting my news with a Kindle means I have to drag that around the rest of the day no matter what I'm going to be doing and, quite frankly, when I'm stuffing dollar bills into the g-string of a stripper at Centerfolds I don't want to have to keep track of my Kindle.

When technology does finally figure out a way that I can get digital news media and still later enjoy myself at Boston's only gentlemen's club, that will be the end of printed newspapers.  And you know what?  Still nobody will care except reporters themselves.  Big deal, I say. 

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude 
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose 
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies*
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged 
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books*
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New world
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula 
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys*
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay*
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury (I've tried to read this three times and just can't finish it)
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything*
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves*
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers



I've read 26 and started but not finished 11 - all of the books I didn't finish were because I didn't want to finish them.  I doubt I'll ever pick up and read any of the 11 I stopped reading halfway through.  The starred titles are the books on the list I'd like to read if I ever get around to it.

Today at work we were able to save a guy who had been having a heart attack and I would have guessed was going to be completely gone by the time we even got there.  He had been at a canoe race down the Charles River and and was fairly out of shape.  During one of the portages across one of the mill pond areas, he collapsed several hundred yards into the woods.  When we were dispatched the caller sent us to the wrong side of the river so we lost valuable time there.  Luckily I had a medical call at this same race in the same area the year before so I was able to guess where, exactly, he probably was and I turned out to be right.

On the way in to the call in the back of the truck I had the foresight to check the oxygen level in our tank, knowing that we would be in the woods and away from the spare on the truck - turns out someone had left it on and it was nearly empty, so I was able to change it out before we arrived with no loss of time there.  When we got on scene, we grabbed the portable AED, the oxygen and bag mask and ran to where the guy was.  A physician and a nurse were on scene doing CPR when we go there and we immediately hooked him up to our defibrillator and a shock was instantly advised.  Everyone stood clear and the medic hit him with the defib and the guy immediately came to life and started breathing shallowly (he still needed to be bagged) on his own and had a weak but clear pulse.  We put him a back board, scooped him up and ran him out of the woods.  My captain jumped in the back of the ambulance with the medics and I drove us to the hospital.  By the time we got to the ER he was starting to come around, albiet in a violent and confused manner.

A lot of things happened just right to make this save possible and it was nice to see them all come together - competent CPR on scene before we arrived, knowing where he might be when the call to dispatch was wrong, gettting the oxygen bottle changed before we were in the woods, getting the leads on him quickly and properly.  All those things needed to happen just right and it was nice to see them all happen the right ways at the right times to save this guy.