In 1965, author J. D. Salinger retired with the world heavyweight book-writin’ title belt. By the early ’80s, his Catcher in the Rye was simultaneously the most-banned and second-most-taught book in American schools. He died this week at 91.
Holden Caulfield says: “Boy, when you’re dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you’re dead? Nobody.”
The iPad
To paraphrase Dee Dee Warwick and Mike Tyson, iPad’s gonna make you love iPad. Need one good reason to convince yourself that you’ll never fall for it? How about twelve?
The iPad is crap futurism whose lack of Flash compatibility might give us a future without Flash. That would be fantastic. The future also promises nine tablet computers that might wind up being as good, better, or cheaper than the iPad. (As with MP3 players and smart phones, Apple wasn’t the first or necessarily the best; they were the loudest biggest and shiniest most magical.)
Holden Caulfield says: “It’s funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they’ll do practically anything you want them to.”
Also relevant:
Howard Zinn
Howard Zinn, who also died this week, shoehorned all history into a single narrative and avoided citing his claims — which you can get away with if you’re writing a history text like this, but not if you’re writing one like this. He didn’t exactly become a historian’s historian. But he achieved a harder thing; he made young people see history for what it is: an evolving story with unreliable narrators, usually written by the winners.
Holden Caulfield says: “People always think something’s all true.”
A word:
Has anyone checked on Matt Damon this week? Good Will Hunting was basically Catcher in the Rye: Math Version, and Damon’s character is a big Zinn fan. In fact, Damon was Zinn’s real-life neighbor growing up, and was one of the first people to read a draft of A People’s History.
Heads up, friends: This post is part of ENGINE’s decade-closing blogsplosion. Click here to witness the rest of the damage. The aughties!
Everybody’s seen 100,000 or so 10 Best Movies of the Decade lists by now. But how many Top 10 Superhero Deaths lists have you seen?
While building yesterday’s monster list of the worst-of-the-decade lists, I came across plenty of oddball lists that contribute mightily to the art and science of original listmaking. Here are 10 of the best and uniquest*.
Heads up, friends: This post is part of ENGINE’s decade-closing blogsplosion. Click here to witness the rest of the damage. The aughties!
It’s time for the exhaustive list of the Worst _____ of the Decade lists.
We try to be positive. But come on. When Pew concludes it was the worst decade in 50 years, and Time drops the 10 Worst Things about the Worst Decade Ever, it’s hard to forget this decade kicked off with Y2K — not just a fail fail, but the biggest fail fail ever — and has only gotten more and more bailouty and wardrobe malfunctionous since.
Would love to list nice things; just filling a void here. Kottke’s already got the best lists list covered. It has some worsts too, but isn’t nearly as horrific as what you’re about to endure Also, Fimoculous has the 2009 list of lists up and running — perfect for those getting the shakes at staring down the barrel of all ten years at once.
Our next entry in our series will be as pleasant as can be. But it’s darkest before the dawn. Wade into the shock and awful.
Who says a grocery store has to stock Pepsi? Every grocery store stocks Pepsi. If anybody really needs Pepsi, they can get it at a gas station. But if they want hard-to-find and high-quality, they go see this guy:
There’s something to be said for offering customers something they can’t get anywhere else…
but sometimes that means not offering them what they can get everywhere else.
Dan Brown’s 20 worst sentences: Most literature snobbery is nothing but player-hating. We say, if a crappy author makes $1M/paragraph, well, good for them. But after reading these passages by Da Vinci Code bajillionaire Brown… How would you react if a high school student asked you for writing help and showed you these lines? Where do you begin? Just take one look at “He could taste the familiar tang of museum air” and start envisioning barrels of money? Elsewhere in books: Classic Book Titles, if They Were Written Today.
The best thing written about Kanye this week: “As a society, we must come together and root for Kanye West to continue to create content & headlines … This is more than about needing ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ to create conflict and news. We need a stream of content that we can continually reflect upon. This is why we miss Michael Jackson so much, we had the opportunity to have fun watching him fall apart together. It was legitimately a bullying process that rallied all humans together.” Elsewhere in rudeness: Thank Kanye, Individualism Interrupted Your Speech, Taylor Swift!, Why the shock about Joe Wilson?, and Michael Jordan: The Man, the Myth. Whew!
Finally, a little heartwarmer. Oft-wayward NFL player Vince Young has taken on a big-brother role in the lives of two fatherless young boys: the sons of his mentor, fellow quarterback Steve McNair, who was murdered this summer. It’s a touching story, but when you add in the other sad circumstances — McNair was killed by his mistress, and Young has struggled with maturity issues since becoming a pro (to put it lightly… at one point, he was on suicide watch) — it’s easy to get a little misty. Elsewhere in heartwarming: that’s all I have. Sorry.
Also, did you hear Mattel (the world’s largest toy company according to Wikipedia) has switched to Drupal? It was all over CNN. No, it wasn’t.
We try to be positive. But come on. When 
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