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Sean Hannity plans to blame liberals for his mis-use of video

Predict what excuse Sean Hannity will use to explain why he misused old video to back up his claim that a large crowd came to Washington to protest the health care bill. (One rule: his excuse must somehow blame the liberals)....

Graph compares rock music quality with US oil production 1949-2007

From GOOD: "The remarkable similarity between the arcs of U.S. oil production and songs in Rolling Stone's ?500 Greatest Songs of All Time? by year is staggering."...

Eleven myths of de-cluttering

Gretchen Rubin, author of the forthcoming book, The Happiness Project, offers several good de-cluttering tips in a blog post titled "Eleven Myths of De-Cluttering." Here are the first three: 1. "I need to get organized." No! Don't get organized is your first step. 2. "I need to be hyper-organized." I fully appreciate the pleasure of having a place for everything, and perhaps counter-intuitively, I believe it's easier to put things away in an exact place, rather than a general place (?the third shelf of the coat closet,? not ?a closet.?) However, this impulse can become destructive: if you're spending a lot of time alphabetizing your spices, organizing your shoes according to heel height, creating eighty categories for your home files, etc., consider whether you need to be quite so precisely organized. I find this particularly true with toys ? I've spent hours sorting pretend food, Polly Pockets pieces, and tea sets, only to find everything a jumble the next day. 3. "I need some more inventive storage containers." See #1. If you get rid of everything you don't need, you may not need any fancy containers. In short, she's a fan of getting rid of stuff. Me, too! Eleven Myths of De-Cluttering...

Pratchett's "Unseen Academicals" - a gift to Discworld lovers and an argument for the importance of sport

I always celebrate when a new Terry Pratchett novel hits the stands -- doubly so now that health problems are slowing him down from his normal superhuman output to a merely impressive one. But I confess I was a little less excited to learn that the newest Pratchett Discworld book, Unseen Academicals, was about football (AKA soccer). I'm not a sports fan. I wasn't a hockey fan when I lived in Canada. I wasn't a baseball fan when I lived in the US. I'm not a footie fan now that I live in the UK. But I gave it a whirl: this is Terry Pratchett, after all. I'd read his grocery lists. A word about Pratchett for the uninitiated. Terry Pratchett is an incredibly funny, warmly human British fantasy (mostly) novelist. He writes at an impossible rate. Most of his books are part of a sprawling, infinitely varied fantasy series called Discworld, about a flat, disc-shaped planet that is carried on the backs of four gigantic elephants who tramp in slow circles around the back of a vast, interstellar turtle called A'Tuin. On Discworld, everything happens. There are imperial battles and barbarians; witches and trolls and dwarves in the hills; animist spirits on lost continents; and there is a vast and wonderful and terrible city called Ankh-Morpork. Ankh-Morpork is presided over by a tyrant called Lord Vetinari, who is quite progressive as tyrants go. For one thing, he's let the trolls, vampires, medusae, dwarves, werewolves, zombies, and assorted other nonhumans into the city. For another, he's organized the thieves into a guild to whom one can pay an annual license and be guaranteed a life free from official thieving (freelance thieves are dealt with most firmly by the guild). You can read the Discworld books in almost any order. Some of them run in little trilogies that follow the same characters, but even if you picked up the second or third volume of these, you'd probably get along OK -- Pratchett is quite good at getting newcomers to Discworld up to speed on its basics. Back to Unseen Academicals. Here's the setup: the wizards of Unseen University have discovered that a key grant from a former Archchancellor requires them to keep a football team that plays regular matches. It's been decades since the last UU team was fielded, and they're in imminent danger of losing a substantial source of funding. Meanwhile, football itself -- as played on the streets of Ankh-Morpork -- is a vicious game that is more riot than sport, and the wizards of UU have no intention of getting involved in that mess. So they cook up a plan to reform football -- and to field a team of their own, coached by Nutt, a mysterious (and erudite) goblin who has been heretofore employed as a candle-dribbler (no self-respecting wizard wants to do magic by the light of a pristine, unmarked candle) in the cellars of UU. That's the setup. Here's the payoff: it's brilliant. The novelist's best trick is to make you care about stuff you don't care about. It's what Fever Pitch does. And it's what Unseen Academicals does, too. Pratchett shows us how sport is part of the emotional life of a city, and how its significance resonates across generations, across regional parochialism, across social strata, uniting us behind something that transcends the mere game. What's more, Pratchett shows us how fragile a thing this is, how vulnerable it is to greed and thuggishness and venality, and how those who defend the game do so for the best reasons imaginable. As Pratchett says, "The thing about football is, it's not about football." I wouldn't call this the best Discworld novel ever (I think my vote for that honor would go to Monstrous Regiment, which, incidentally, can be read without having read any of the other Pratchett novels). But it's in the top five. A word of warning: it's also one of the most inside-baseball (you should forgive the expression) of the Discworld books, requiring a fair bit of familiarity with the previous books in the series to be fully appreciated. It's a real gift from Pratchett to his fans, in other words, and I, for one, am grateful for it. Unseen Academicals (Amazon US) Unseen Academicals (Amazon UK) Previously:Pratchett's Discworld: a reading-order guide - Boing Boing Terry Pratchett's "Making Money" -- economic comedy - Boing Boing Pratchett's "Going Postal": Graft, hackers, and a semaphore ... Terry Pratchett's NATION: moving and sweet young adult novel about ... Discworld "Luggage" prop on eBay for Alzheimer's - Boing Boing Terry Pratchett gets a knighthood - Boing Boing Terry Pratchett's NATION: moving and sweet young adult novel about ... Match it For Pratchett! Raising £500000 for Alzheimer's research ... Terry Pratchett fan-afghan -- the Pratchgan - Boing Boing Pratchett donates $1 million to Alzheimer's research - Boing Boing...>
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Make Volume 20 features Adam Savage

MAKE, Volume 20 is out (and will be on newsstands and in bookstores next week) and it's one of my favorite issues. The special theme of this issue is kid-friendly projects. Our projects editor, Paul Spinrad, sat down with Adam Savage to talk about his childhood as a maker. Adam is on our cover, which was illustrated by our pal Ape Lad (aka Adam Koford). Here's an excerpt: Paul: I think of enthusiasm as the opposite of coolness, and adolescence is a turning point for this. Children are all enthusiastic, they're into what they're into, and it's great and they love it. But then something happens, and suddenly some of the kids start looking down on that enthusiasm and seeing it as immature or dorky. So they invent coolness as an alternative. I always gravitated away from that because I was interested in too many things. Adam: Yes, and enthusiasm also makes you vulnerable. When you like something, someone can take it away from you. I once gave a sculpture to some friends as a wedding present, and they turned it down. That was really upsetting to me. And that vulnerability itself is also embarrassing. The two emotions are deeply linked, which is why people try not to cry in public....