Friday around the interwebs

 

- Maker’s Mark Bus Not Actually Pouring Whisky Shots [Bostonist]

- Coldplay’s video for Violet Hill:

- When I saw Colin Meloy play solo at the Paradise in 2006, he asked the audience to talk about their favorite item at Trader Joe’s while he tuned his beastly 12-string guitar. I think the consensus was Pirate’s Booty. Yelp is currently asking the same question.

 - I dug Malcom Gladwell’s article on innovation in last week’s New Yorker. So will you.

- Did you know that Decemberist John Moen was once the drummer for Elliott Smith and Stephen Malkmus and the Jinks? I didn’t. Did you know that he released a solo record on Tuesday? I didn’t. He’s recording under the name Perhapst.

- My photo doesn’t do justice to the ridiculousness that was the Apple Store opening on Boylston Street in Boston yesterday. For  better, click here to read about the opening and a dude who stayed up all night to be the first person in the store. [Boston Herald]

Don’t follow me

Here’s the latest video from The Odd Couple.  Gnarls and Danger Mouse continue to put together some of the most progressive tunes from whatever-genre-you-might-consider-them.

I hope you’re as captivated by this video as I was.

Of books and lists and other intellectual snobbery

 

If you want to kill an hour AND hone your lit snobbery, check out 3M’s list of the 1001 works of fiction you must read.

 

Naturally my “want to read” list outpaces my “have read” list (at least in intellectual value), and I did give up once I reached the 1700s (because really, Friedrich Hölderlin’s Hyperion does not sound like bedside reading), but here are my results:

 

Have Read (thanks due largely to Murphy’s 20th century fiction course):

Everything is Illuminated – Jonathan Safran Foer

Atonement – Ian McEwan

The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen

Pastoralia – George Saunders

Disgrace – J.M. Coetzee

Whatever – Michel Houellebecq

The Things They Carried – Tim O’Brien

Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro

White Noise – Don DeLillo

The Sea, The Sea – Iris Murdoch

The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald

Everything That Rises Must Converge – Flannery O’Connor  

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey

Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison

The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner

The Good Soldier – Ford Madox Ford (ugh!) 

The Jungle – Upton Sinclair

A Room With a View – E.M. Forster

 

Want to read (thanks largely to name recognition, bookshelf envy and the Brookline Booksmith’s Bmail):

Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides

Youth – J.M. Coetzee

Blonde – Joyce Carol Oates

A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth

The Temple of My Familiar – Alice Walker

Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel García Márquez

The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco

Invisible Cities – Italo Calvino

The Book of Daniel – E.L. Doctorow

Slaughterhouse-five – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

The Trial – Franz Kafka (fro?)

V. – Thomas Pynchon

Rabbit, Run – John Updike

Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov (bought, not yet read)

The End of the Affair – Graham Greene (bought, not yet read)

 

[image of the best wire ever (sent at 6 a.m.!) from Brookline Booksmith's used book cellar find-of-the-week archive]

Fun with YouTube’s high quality feature

A lot of YouTube videos are available in HD format (better if your computer supports it), but it will render a pseudo-HD look if you click the ‘view in high quality’ link. Here a few of my picks:

 

Craigslist founder to give UC Berkeley commencement speech

Read more about it here.

More interestingly he said he’s going to “ad lib” his speech, saying:

“Never read a prepared speech unless you’re really good at it; for a genuine perspective on corporate life, read Dilbert; and brevity is the soul of wit.”

I think if you’re able to set up a web server that receives more than 9 billion page views per month (56th in the world) with 24 employees…you’re allowed to just throw together any old speech off the top of your head.

Update: If your world headquarters looks like this even though you serve > 450 cities in 50 countries you’re allowed to ad lib the speech.