sunday short stack

"Man is a marvelous curiosity. When he is at his very very best he is a sort of low grade nickel-plated angel; at his worst he is unspeakable, unimaginable; and first and last and all the time he is a sarcasm." - Mark Twain

• Get in on the First Annual Secret Santa Gift Exchange to support independent literature.
• As the comment says, it's "porn for freaky cat-loving literature fiends."
• In my Thanksgiving cleaning spree, I've given a lot of thought to my overflowing bookshelves. Laura Miller collects others' thoughts on the subject (their bookshelves, not mine).
• Meh will now be in the Collins English Dictionary.
• I am not among the Best Women Bloggers of 2008.
• Maybe because GenderAnalyzer originally thought I was a guy (but now, a week later, is 99% sure I'm a woman).
  
• "Some oxygen molecules help fires burn while others help make water, so sometimes it's brother against brother" and more quotes collected from the science exams of elementary school students.
• Albert Einstein had a messy desk, but he was not involved in any of The Biggest Pranks in Geek History.
• Take a time out today to read The 7 Greatest Stories in the History of Esquire.
• Next stop on the Douchebag Express...
• ...people freaking out about the Motrin Moms commercial.
• Mitt Romney thinks we should let Detroit go bankrupt.
• Sleater-Kinney's Carrie Brownstein tries out Wii Music.
• Also at Slate earlier this month, New York Times headlines that read like Zen koans.
  

I am surrounded by ayn rand

In addition to a student devoting her term topic to Ayn Rand (still very popular among college freshmen), I have also recently been exposed to Rand fan personal ads and Atlas Shrugged updated for the current financial crisis.

bucks and bucks and diamonds and diamonds

From The New Yorker archives via Maud Newton: John Cheever's 1949 short story "Christmas Is a Sad Season for the Poor"

Christmas is a sad season. The phrase came to Charlie an instant after the alarm clock had waked him, and named for him an amorphous depression that had troubled him all the previous evening. The sky outside his window was black. He sat up in bed and pulled the light chain that hung in front of his nose. Christmas is a very sad day of the year, he thought. Of all the millions of people in New York, I am practically the only one who has to get up in the cold black of 6 a.m. on Christmas Day in the morning; I am practically the only one...

also home to all the best of lists you could ever need

Via largehearted boy:

Literary Rock Band Names

I don't know how long this will be going on, but Amazon has its top 50 mp3 albums on sale for $5.

The University of Texas has a new litblog: ShelfLife@Texas

her voice is full of money

Slate's Audio Book Club reads The Great Gatsby. (Infinite Jest is up next.) On a related note, my favorite new misanthropic Fitzgerald quote: "It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won't save us any more than love did."

can you pass those croutons?

Dave Eggers's four-part play "Thanksgiving at Dan and Jane's: Four Acts in Four Rooms" - written in the actual layout of four rooms - appeared in yesterday's New York Times.

See also in the Times: 100 Notable Books of 2008

give thanks for a new and brighter day

Obama's weekly address was released early for Thanksgiving.

unspeakable

Two hotels, the city’s largest train station, a movie theater and a hospital. A hospital.

I will end you

Andy Samberg debuts his Rahm Emanuel impersonation.

I've gotta eat my words with special sauce all over them

The Washington Post profiles Onion Nation. (The article is written by someone with the ubercool, possibly made up name of Wells Tower.)

The choicest material -- the staff writers' ideas -- had been pitched this morning, and the writers were sorting through the chaff, the jokes sent in each week by part-time contributors, known in local editorial parlance as "the [expletive] list." The writers fidgeted and slumped in their chairs, visibly oppressed by the haze of failed hilarity thickening in the room.

Fallen cannon fodder included: "Face Of God Seen On Bus Ad For God"; "California Courts To See What Else They Can Marry"; "Meter Attendant Accidentally Tries To Collect Change From Vending Machine"; and the following op-ed: "You're Breaking The Human Half Of My Cyborg Heart," which caused senior writer Dan Guterman to groan and offer a counter-headline, " 'I Suck,' By A Joke."

queridas amigas, queridos amigos

Joining the blogging world...José Saramago. Of course, the site's in Portuguese and he doesn't write it, but Condalmo has a link to a translated version.

pork and beans