Clipmarks | haraya's Reading collection

The Secret History of Star Wars

Thu, 22 May 2008 11:47:28 GMT

clipped by: haraya
clipper's remarks: *check out the battle for "nerd credentials" at the site.

lennier writes "How exactly did George Lucas develop the script for the first Star Wars? Why were the prequels so uneven when the originals were so good? Did he really have a masterplan for six, nine, or even twelve episodes, and why did the official Lucasfilm position keep changing? And just how big an influence were the films of Akira Kurosawa on the whole saga? Michael Kaminski's The Secret History of Star Wars, Third Edition is a free, thoroughly unauthorized, e-book that brings together a huge amount of literary detective work to sort fact from legend and reveal how the story really evolved. Download it or have your nerd credentials revoked."

Tags: star wars, book, ebook, download, history, details, entertainment, opinion, nerds, uh huh

The Vanishing Personal Site

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 15:10:43 GMT

clipped by: haraya
clipper's remarks: The entire article is interesting.

Clip Source: www.zeldman.com

Our personal sites, once our primary points of online presence, are becoming sock drawers for displaced first-person content. We are witnessing the disappearance of the all-in-one, carefully designed personal site containing professional information, links, and brief bursts of frequently updated content to which others respond via comments. Did I say we are witnessing the traditional personal site’s disappearance? That is inaccurate. We are the ones making our own sites disappear.

Obliterating our own readership and page views may not be a bad thing, but let’s be sure we are making conscious choices.

outsourcing the publication of our own content has long-term implications that point to more traffic for the web services we rely on, and less traffic and fewer readers for ourselves.

This is not necessarily a bad thing.

But if world domination is your goal, think twice before offloading every scrap of you.

Tags: content, blogging, web, writing, blogs, internet, audience, performance, fragmentation, voice

Why the Young Men Are So Ugly

Sun, 30 Dec 2007 10:37:15 GMT

clipped by: haraya
clipper's remarks: continued...

it is only because of the tractors,
the tractors in their blood,
revving their engines, chewing up the turf
inside their arteries and veins
It is the testosterone tractor

constantly climbing the mudhill of the world
and dragging the young man behind it
by a chain around his leg.
In the stink and the noise, in the clouds
of filthy exhaust

is where they live. It is the tractors
that make them
what they are. While they make being a man
look like a disease.

I wish I didn't have to cut the poem. Anyway, some women can be so ugly too.

Clip Source: www.ndsu.edu

They have little tractors in their blood
and all day the tractors climb up and down
inside their arms and legs, their

collarbones and heads.

That is why they yell and scream and slam the barbells
down into their clanking slots,
making the metal ring like sledgehammers on iron,

like dungeon prisoners rattling their chains.

That is why they shriek their tires at the stopsign,
why they turn the base up on the stereo
until it shakes the traffic light, until it

dryhumps the eardrum of the crossing guard.

Testosterone is a drug,
and they say No, No, No until
they are overwhelmed and punch

their buddy in the face for joy,

or make a joke about gravy and bottomless holes
to a middle-aged waitress who is gently

setting down the plate in front of them.

If they are grotesque, if
what they say and do is often nothing more

than a kind of psychopathic fart,

Tags: tony hoagland, poem, poetry, literature, people

Food history timeline: culinary history of the human race

Fri, 07 Dec 2007 19:35:42 GMT

clipped by: enbar
clipper's remarks: Very cool. Plots the emergence of various kinds of food over historical time. Includes some recipes and reference articles.

Clip Source: www.foodtimeline.org

Ever wonder what foods the Vikings ate when they set off to explore the new world? How Thomas Jefferson made his ice cream? What the pioneers cooked along the Oregon Trail? Who invented the potato chip...and why?

Welcome to the Food Timeline! Food history presents a complicated buffet of popular lore and contradictory facts. Some people will tell you it's impossible to express this topic in exact timeline format. They are correct. Most foods we eat are not invented; they evolve. About culinary research.

almonds--10,000BC---
sheep ---9,000BC---
apples & lentils---8,000BC---
pork ---7,000BC---
beans: old world & new---7,000BC---
walnuts old & new---7,000BC---
pistachios---7,000BC---
cattle domestication---6,500BC---
wine---6000BC---
maize & tortillas---6000BC---
spelt ---6000BC---
dates & broccoli---6000BC---
honey---5500BC---
chickpeas & lettuce ---5500BC---

Tags: food, history, cool, reference, post:tumblr, recipe

The Kurt Vonnegut Library

Tue, 19 Jun 2007 22:25:38 GMT

clipped by: skwirlinator

Clip Source: vonnegut.cultish.org

This website contains all of Kurt Vonnegut’s novels in .pdf form, hosted by the amazing Scribd.

When you click on a link to a book from the “Archives” page, you will be directed to a page that contains the book in Scribd’s Adobe Flashplayer based .pdf viewer. The .pdf player allows you to view the book through TKVL’s website, or to download it in several different formats that include .doc and .pdf. Enjoy!

Tags: the kurt vonnegut library, ebook, pdf, books

Crazy Children's Book On Drugs

Fri, 15 Jun 2007 03:57:43 GMT

clipped by: haraya
clipper's remarks: Another book to add to these ten and these two. Other page scans at the source.

Clip Source: forums.somethingawful.com

Some fun things to count:
-The number of proper nouns used versus the number of pronouns used
-Number of repetitions of the concept that drugs are bad. Especially on the last page.

-Number of things mentioned that never actually matter to the story.

This book is not a joke, unfortunately. It really exists. The ISBN number is 0-533-09102-0, and the publishing date is 1991. 1991.

Honestly, I don't even know what to say about this.

Well that explains who she is, I guess. Note that this book has never been checked out. Also, note how she repeats herself. This will happen a good deal more throughout the book.

Tags: funny, humor, children, books, drugs, entertainment, weird, life, parenting

Send Your Baby To Bed With An Iver Johnson Revolver

Wed, 13 Jun 2007 18:07:38 GMT

clipped by: haraya
clipper's remarks: Vintage ad for a .38 caliber Iver Johnson revolver from Harper's Weekly in 1904.

Clip Source: neatorama.cachefly.net

Tags: advertising, safety, kids, ads, revolver, guns, newspaper, vintage

Etymology Dictionary

Wed, 24 Jan 2007 15:32:02 GMT

clipped by: Socratoad
clipper's remarks: I clipped this some time ago, however it never really took off, so to speak.

IMO this is a great resource and one can spend quite a bit of time learning, and even being surprised. So here it is again.

Clip Source: www.etymonline.com

This is a map of the wheel-ruts of modern English. Etymologies are not definitions; they're explanations of what our words meant and how they sounded 600 or 2,000 years ago.

The dates beside a word indicate the earliest year for which there is a surviving written record of that word (in English, unless otherwise indicated). This should be taken as approximate, especially before about 1700, since a word may have been used in conversation for hundreds of years before it turns up in a manuscript that has had the good fortune to survive the centuries.

The basic sources of this work are Weekley's "An Etymological Dictionary of Modern English," Klein's "A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language," "Oxford English Dictionary" (second edition), "Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology," Holthauzen's "Etymologisches Wörterbuch der Englischen Sprache," Ayto's "20th Century Words," and Chapman's "Dictionary of American Slang." A full list of sources used in this compilation can be found here.

Since this dictionary went up, it has benefited from the suggestions of dozens of people I have never met, from around the world. Tremendous thanks and appreciation to all of you.

Tags: etymology, word origins, language

The 10 Greatest Books of All Time

Sun, 21 Jan 2007 17:32:40 GMT

clipped by: haraya
clipper's remarks:

Each individual top 10 list is like its own steeplechase through the international canon.

List at the end of the clip, though I find Lev Grossman's intro more interesting.

Clip Source: www.time.com

Let's not mince words: literary lists are basically an obscenity. Literature is the realm of the ineffable and the unquantifiable; lists are the realm of menus and laundry and rotisserie baseball. There's something unseemly and promiscuous about all those letters and numbers jumbled together. Take it from me, a critic who has committed this particular sin many times over.

But what if—just for argument's sake—you got insanely rigorous about it. You went to all the big-name authors in the world—Franzen, Mailer, Wallace, Wolfe, Chabon, Lethem, King, 125 of them— and got each one to cough up a top-10 list of the greatest books of all time. We're talking ultimate-fighting-style here: fiction, non-fiction, poetry, modern, ancient, everything's fair game except eye-gouging and fish-hooking. Then you printed and collated all the lists, crunched the numbers together, and used them to create a definitive all-time Top Top 10 list.

Yes, it would probably still be an obscenity. But it would be a pretty interesting obscenity. And that's what we have in J. Peder Zane's The Top 10 (Norton; 352 pages).

There are several lifetimes' worth of promising literary leads here—544 books in all. An 85-page appendix providing enlightened summaries of all the works mentioned is worth the price of admission all on its own. But to get you started, here, in all its glory, is the all-time, ultimate Top Top 10 list, derived from the top 10 lists of 125 of the world's most celebrated writers combined. Read it and— well, just read it.

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald
In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
The Stories of Anton Chekhov by Anton Chekhov
Middlemarch by George Eliot

Tags: literature, books, list, entertainment, canon, reading

Fantasy, Myth, Science Fiction

Sun, 21 Jan 2007 00:35:44 GMT

clipped by: skwirlinator

Clip Source: mythsoc.org

Genres: Fantasy, Myth, Science Fiction

The Labyrinth

A huge World Wide Web server for Medieval Studies sponsored by Georgetown University. Can be searched for specific topics, with subject menus for various national cultures, Arthurian studies, Norse culture, religious history, and much more.

The Endicott Studio of Mythic Arts

Online journal featuring works -- essays, reviews, artwork and more -- by writers, painters, sculptors, photographers, and performance artists in the Endicott circle (including Ellen Kushner & Delia Sherman, Midori Snyder, Charles de Lint, Jane Yolen, Neil Gaiman, Charles Vess, Thomas Canty, and others).

Bulfinch's Mythology

Search or browse through the three volumes: "The Age of Fable or Stories of Gods and Heroes," "The Age of Chivalry or Legends of King Arthur," and "Legends of Charlemagne or Romance of the Middle Ages." Large collection of mythology links.

Encyclopedia Mythica
This is an encyclopedia on mythology, folklore, legends, and more. It contains over 6100 definitions of gods and goddesses, supernatural beings and legendary creatures and monsters from all over the world.

Myths and Legends

An excellent resource for web information on myths from all cultures (Anatolian to Welsh) plus folklore from Robin Hood to gothic horror. It's one-stop shopping for anyone starting to explore any of these areas.

Faerie Lands Forlorn

A lovely selection of poetry, art, tales and fonts from the Scriptorium (an online source of unusual fonts and graphic arts resources). Offers shareware and free downloads, as well as being a visual delight. Worth a visit!!

Science Fiction Resource Guide
A really impressive collection of information and links, which includes magazines, art, writers' resources, and music in addition to more easily available information on the genré.

Science Fiction and Fantasy Research Database
An online index to over 60,000 historical and critical items about science fiction, fantasy and horror. Includes Mythlore.

Tags: fantasy, myth, science fiction, reading, books, scifi

GREAT BOOKS INDEX

Sat, 20 Jan 2007 02:24:14 GMT

clipped by: Socratoad

Clip Source: books.mirror.org

GREAT BOOKS INDEX

HOME PAGE AND AUTHOR LIST

An Index to Online Great Books in English Translation

AUTHORS/HOME . TITLES . ABOUT GB INDEX . BOOK LINKS

INDEX BY AUTHOR

Aeschylus . Apollonius . Aquinas . Archimedes . Aristophanes . Aristotle . Augustine . Marcus Aurelius . Austen . Francis Bacon . Balzac . Bergson . Berkeley . The Bible . Bohr . Boswell . Calvin . Cather . Cervantes . Chaucer . Chekhov . Conrad . Copernicus . Dante . Darwin . Descartes . Dewey . Dickens . Diderot . Dostoevsky . Eddington . Einstein . George Eliot . T.S. Eliot . Emerson . Engels . Epictetus . Erasmus . Euclid . Euripides . Faraday . Faulkner . Fielding . Fitzgerald . Fourier . Freud . Galen . Galileo . Gibbon . Gilbert . Goethe . Hamilton . Hardy . Harvey . Hegel . Heidegger . Heisenberg . Herodotus . Hippocrates . Hobbes . Homer . Hume . Huygens . Ibsen . Henry James . William James . Jay . Joyce . Kafka . Kant . Kepler . Keynes . Kierkegaard . Lawrence . Leibnitz . Locke . Lucretius . Machiavelli . Madison . Mann . Marx . Melville . Mill . Milton . Moliere . Montaigne . Montesquieu . Nietzsche . Newton . Nicomachus . O'Neill . Orwell . Paine . Pascal . Planck . Plato . Plotinus . Plutarch . Poincare . Proust . Ptolemy . The Quran (Koran) . Rabelais . Racine . Rousseau . Russell . Schroedinger . Shaw . Shakespeare . Adam Smith . Sophocles . Spinoza . Sterne . Swift . Tacitus . Thoreau . Thucydides . Tolstoy . Tocqueville . Twain . Veblen . Virgil . Voltaire . Whitehead . Wittgenstein . Woolf

Tags: authors, great books, literature, books

Those were the days!

Fri, 29 Dec 2006 23:01:37 GMT

clipped by: smagnolia

Clip Source: www.rawfoodinfo.com

How Things Used To Be

Baths consisted of a big tub filled with hot water. The man of the house had the privilege of the nice clean water, then all the other sons and men, then the women and finally the children - last of all the babies. By then the water was so dirty you could actually lose someone in it. Hence the saying, "Don't throw the baby out with the bath water."

When it rained it became slippery, and sometimes the animals would slip and fall off the roof, hence the saying, "It's raining cats and dogs."

The floor was dirt. Only the wealthy had something other than dirt, hence the saying "dirt poor." The wealthy had slate floors that would get slippery in the winter when wet, so they spread thresh (the straw left over after threshing grain) on the floor to help keep their footing. As the winter wore on, they kept adding more and more thresh until when you opened the door it would all start slipping outside. To prevent this, a piece of wood was placed in the entrance way - hence a "thresh hold."

Bread was divided according to status. Workers got the burnt bottom of the loaf, the family got the middle, and guests got the top, "the upper crust."

Tags: origins, quotes

When Life Becomes Scentless

Thu, 28 Dec 2006 23:11:24 GMT

clipped by: haraya
clipper's remarks:

The film Perfume portrays the world of a man who has an unparalleled, acute sense of smell. But what is life like for the millions of people who have lost it?

The entire article is worth reading, whether you've read the novel or not.
(I hope Das Parfum is as good as the novel.)

Clip Source: news.bbc.co.uk

Perfume, the film released this week adapted from the novel by Patrick Suskind, follows a murderer, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, who has no odour but possesses an unparalleled, acute sense of smell which he uses in his pursuit of power.

Recovery depends on the cause

It is a story of 18th Century life in France, told in all its stinking glory, through repeated reference to smells - people's odours, street filth, country air, food and musky scents. A time and a world away from life for the 2% of people that researchers say lack the olfactory sense.

The causes range from severe head injuries, to viruses and nasal congestion conditions, to degenerative diseases including Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. Some suffer from anosmia, which means no sense of smell; hyposmia is a decreased ability; and dysosmia is when things smell differently than they should.

Our sense of smell is an underestimated life sense (albeit the basis of a hugely profitable perfume industry).

We use it to detect chemicals in the air, and its receptors contribute to our ability to distinguish flavour - those unable to smell have very little sense of taste. It plays a role in mental and physical health, emotion, sex and relationships. It helps people guard against bad or off food, and helps warn against dangerous situations.

You have lost a whole dimension of your life - we constantly sample the atmosphere for smells

Professor Tim Jacob

When sight or hearing go, it is immediately obvious. With smell, its absence can take longer to sink in. Robert's went because of nasal polyps - protrusions that blocked the inside of his nose - cutting him off from the kind of world Suskind's anti-hero occupies.

Apart from the most serious practical effect - exposing him to danger - eating has lost its sensual pleasure. And, a keen gardener, he can no longer smell the roses.

Tags: literature, reading, science, novel, movie, entertainment, senses, scent, biology, perfume, patrick suskind

Shakespeare is good for your brain

Tue, 19 Dec 2006 11:36:34 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: fascinating, if true

Clip Source: www.lse.co.uk

Shakespeare used advanced brain theories

Reading Shakespeare excites the brain and could help stave off old age forgetfulness, research has shown.

The Elizabethan playwright took advantage of theories of brain consciousness to wow the audience in their heads as well as on stage, claim scientists.

Researchers from the University of Liverpool found the unconventional structure and words of Shakespeare's plays and poetry surprises the brain, which produces a sudden burst of activity, or excitement.

They claim it could help keep the brain healthy and lively.

Professor Philip Davis, from the University's School of English, said Shakespeare's technique was known as a functional shift that puts something regarded as familiar in an unfamiliar situation.

He said: "By throwing odd words into seemingly normal sentences, Shakespeare surprises the brain and catches it off guard in a manner that produces a sudden burst of activity - a sense of drama created out of the simplest of things.

"It works in a similar way to putting a jigsaw puzzle together. If it is easy to see which pieces slot together you become bored of the game, but if the pieces don’t appear to fit, when we know they should, the brain becomes excited.

"Research has shown that there are parts of the brain that are responsible for the processing of nouns and others for the processing of verbs.

"This is believed to happen automatically, but if you throw something in that looks like a noun, but is used as a verb, a new level of consciousness might have to be created as they talk to each other.

"For example, Shakespeare uses the phrase, ‘he godded me’ in the tragedy Coriolanus. Godded looks like a noun, but is a verb and the brain is confused by the anomaly."

The team of researchers, also from Liverpool's Magnetic Resonance and Image Analysis Research Centre (MARIARC), monitored the brain activity of 30 volunteers as they read passages of ordinary text and compared the results with examples of classic literature.

Tags: science, research, shakespeare, brain, mind, neurology, consciousness

Mahfouz’s grave, Arab liberalism’s deathbed

Tue, 28 Nov 2006 13:35:39 GMT

clipped by: haraya
clipper's remarks:

The Arab world's passage from progressive secularism to conservative religiosity in the last fifty years is illuminated by the work of Egypt’s greatest writer, says Tarek Osman.

More at the source. Tarek Osman gives an interesting reading of culture and the text.

Clip Source: www.opendemocracy.net

The death on 30 August 2006 of the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz - the sole Arab writer to receive the Nobel prize in literature - was marked around the world, and by many of those unable to read a word of his work in its original language. This universal moment, however, was primarily an Egyptian and Arab one, and for more even than the loss of a great writer. For Naguib Mahfouz's death is also a symbol of the demise of Arab liberalism. It is a century's story, and the "Dostoyevsky of Cairo" was the one whose books embodied it.

A century ago, the west was not worryingly eyeing the Arab world, with a fear of suicide-bombers and plane hijackers. It was colonising the Arab world - for a number of reasons: the strategic location, the Suez canal, securing trade routes, access to the Indian subcontinent, protection of minorities, exploitation of economic resources, building empires, civilising the savage Saracens.

In resisting the colonists, the Arabs were broadly divided into two camps: the rejectionists and the integrationists.

The rejectionists were predominately Islamists and Salafis: the group that saw the Arab world's humiliation and defeat as a consequence of its abandonment of the righteous path prescribed in the Qu'ran and the Prophet Mohammed's sunna.

The integrationists, on the other side of the intellectual spectrum, saw the Arabs' defeat as a consequence of their lagging behind in all aspects of modern thinking; they saw a dire need for the integration of western modernity into the traditional Arabic/Islamic culture. As one notable integrationist - Taha Hussein, the legendary Egyptian education minister in the early 20th century - put it: "it's the enlightenment".

This implied that Europe's embracing of science, art, humanism and the separation of the state from the church, and thereby the liberation of the European mind from the confines of theology, were the causes of Europe's supremacy in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Tags: literature, mahfouz, liberalism, novel, reading, writing, death, egypt, arab, books, society, politics, culture, postcolonialism