Palin resigned today while I was up in Iowa, and the speech she gave about her decision is borderline incomprehensible and pretty hilarious. Brings back good ol’ memories of freshman-year public speaking class.

Follow along with the transcript! This clip starts about 2/3rds through the speech.

My favorite part? A tie between the random wildlife sounds in the background and the end-of-speech pan to show the less-than-a-dozen people in the audience.

• Interested in the book reviews I’ve posted recently? Well, all the ones I’ve written so far have been nicely categorized using the tag function, ready for your perusal.
• I also have a Goodreads account now, in case you prefer that to Tumblr.
• Unfortunately, my reading pace is set to abate somewhat as I dig into some side-projects in July. This recent spate of book-reading was mainly an experiment to see if I could maintain the focus necessary for it, and I kinda succeeded in that. So it’s on to bigger and not-better-but-more-necessary things.
• I am in Iowa today for some sort of extended family gathering, and hopefully I’ll come back with at least one or two interesting pictures. But no more posts today.
• Mindy’s visiting Manhattan (KS) this weekend and bringing back her brand of awesome to our fine town, so I’ll be scuttling back there tomorrow for that.

Yesterday I finished Columbine by Dave Cullen and it’s incredibly, incredibly good. So good that I slammed through it in an afternoon and evening, only stopping for dinner and a mandatory scheduling meeting.

I originally heard about this book as the first complete accounting of the shootings at Columbine High School. And it succeeds on that count, deftly deconstructing the events of April 20, 1999, even as they confused the media, the police, and the student population while they happened. To tell the story of that day is an impressive feat of journalism in itself, but Cullen doesn’t stop there.

Out of a 350-page book, only the first 100 pages is devoted to a conventional recounting of the attack. For the remainder of the story, Cullen pursues twin narratives: Dylan and Eric as they slipped down into being ready for the attack, and the aftermath of the attack on both media and survivors. It seems gimmicky at first glance - like a parody of a New Yorker article - but works out tremendously well thanks to Cullen’s larger goal.

Using Columbine as the title of the book isn’t a blunt tool to lure sales in airport bookstores, but an uncannily subtle statement about the real subject; Cullen isn’t just talking about the shooting here, but what meanings the event and the word “Columbine” have for everyone involved.

To the media, it was a pair of loners and goths looking to wreak vengeance on those who had bullied and shunned them. To the police who responded that day, it was designed as a school shooting. To Cassie Bernall’s parents, it was the summation of their daughter’s spiritual journey as she bravely professed her faith to the gunmen. But all these explanations were categorically wrong.

The real drama here isn’t the incident itself, but instead how each person sought to work out the meaning of that incident. To Eric Harris, it meant a display of tyrannical superiority over everyone. To Dylan Klebold, it meant having an outlet for the internal pains that wracked his psyche.

Everyone, in the course of the book, ends up working out their own meaning as to what happened. Columbine - which started out the novel as the name of the high-school and surrounding community - starts to fracture both literally and figuratively. Differences in meaning lead to different factions within the community of victims, factions who often argue over how they should interact with the county government, the media, and the watching nation.

It’s incredibly interesting and touching and heartbreaking stuff. I’d recommend it to almost everyone from casual readers to “serious” book nerds like myself, and will be shocked if it doesn’t clean house when awards season swings around. Regardless of whether you’re interested in the shootings themselves, the larger world evoked by this book is amazing.

BobRossCam is the new PuppyCam, I’m telling you.

(link via laydownyourburdens and yourdp)

The Book of Dead Philosophers by Simon Critchley was hugely disappointing, and probably because it’s not that good.

The premise of the book is actually pretty interesting: illustrate the various philosophies to death by recounting the personal deaths (and lives) of famous philosophers throughout history and how that compared or contrasted with their philosophy. However, there are a few mistakes that Critchley makes in telling the tales:

• Trying to tell the stories of over 190 different philosophers… in a 250 page book.
• Unable to decide whether the capsule biograpies are meant to be read in sequence or at will.
• Immediately - and with little supporting evidence - imposing his own viewpoint in the picture and allowing it to warp his histories without any apparent consideration of alternative stances beyond mere recounting.

As a result, Critchley rarely manages to eke any depth out of the philosophers discussed. This isn’t too much of a problem early on in the greek philosophers, whose differences can be bluntly hashed out without too much loss in detail. But once he gets to medieval times, the enterprise starts to fall apart. (More later.)

Critchley’s prose is merely middling, despite being specifically praised by Lewis Lapham (who normally has excellent taste as showcased in Lapham’s Quarterly). His tone is so bland that it seems equally ill-suited to discussing philosophy or humorous anecdotes, despite being employed in the service of both. Sometimes there enough transitions between sections to indicate they were meant to be read as a whole, but other times they seem almost slapdash. Even when we’re being given the These Are Connected signposts, there doesn’t seem to be much added by their juxtaposition.

Finally, the whole book is semi-stifled by Critchley himself, who declares his position from the beginning and never ceases to remind you whether he agrees or disagrees with the author at hand. This is ok when it comes to constructing philosophy, but not when you’re laying claim to exegenesis (deciphering the meaning of texts) or recounting their lives in a historically-accurate manner. But yet it does, and the result is that I was deeply suspicious of everything Critchley said. And because he slammed all 190 people into only 250 pages, there’s very little given in the way of corroborating evidence. Yuck.

I almost wrote this negative review last night at about 100 pages in, but decided to persevere in hopes that it would get better once we reached more modern philosophers with better documentation of their personal lives. It did get better, but only mildly. There were moments that made me laugh, but only a handful in the whole book.

The Book of Dead Philosophers would be far better served as a two-part arrangement: a quick survey of the deaths of philosophers, followed by a deeper examination of the handful of philosophers whose work Critchley truly finds valuable. As is, it seems too much like Critchley wants to impress you with his research and then slip a fast one on you by sneaking in his own opinion as fact. I found it frustrating in the same way that I find it frustrating to read The Economist’s smug claim to stating The Way Things Are while cutting off at the knees my own ability to critically examine the claims.

In the end, the best praise I can give this book is that it was smoothly-written enough that I was over with it fairly quickly. Only a night and a morning spent, and I’m onward to greener pastures.

Jeff Goldblum’s posthumous appearance on The Colbert Report this Monday.

I love Colbert’s willingness to turn his show into surreal sketches like this one, which is one of many attributes that makes The Colbert Report much funnier than The Daily Show.

Three distinctly different transformations from present to past-tense:

• Slide -> Slid
• Glide -> Glided
• Ride -> Rode

What the heck?

Bonus homework: figure out all the words that end in “-id”. It seems like a pretty finite number at first thought.

So far, I’ve come up with the following: id, slid, bid, hid, lid, arachnid, fetid. Any others?

Richard Feynman explaining how trains stay on their tracks, which is a way more clever method than I imagined. He has a way of explaining science that’s so exciting, clear, and brilliant.

See also:

• Feynman talking about fire (original description I tried: “Feynman on fire”)
• More Feynman videos from that same YouTube user