Kanye West

• 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.

(Via Reddit, who I’m really happy for)

3. Fan-made video for Kanye’s “Robocop.” Count the references… I spotted Battletoads, Double Dragon, and Punch-Out!, and maybe Contra and Metroid. Obviously Mega Man. The slickest thing about this video is how, by including Kanye’s bear mascot thing as the boss, it hits the big secret of Kanye’s relationship songs: he’s not exactly the good guy.
2. Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive
   
1. One of Seth Godin’s best ideas yet—his call for open-source scholarly databases to replace the useless textbook industry. Too good an idea to happen, of course.