Look at this! The last compendium was compiled late April… and in that seemingly short month, I’ve gone to my grandpa’s funeral, graduated from college, finished a week at my first after-college job, and rediscovered how to relax and kill time. (It’s called watching the TV series Doctor Who.)
As a consequence, I’ve not read much in the way of Internet nonfiction. But I do have a few enjoyable links for you this afternoon.
Five things you can tell from this guy’s iPhone custom dictionary – He’s a writer for the Atlantic, and his iPhone can tell you a lot about him; but on the flip side, I suspect there’s a lot you won’t learn, either.
To stay on the Atlantic theme, they’re coordinating a worldwide Twitter-based book club called 1book140. It’s a neat idea, and the first book chosen is a book I read last spring for my contemporary lit class: The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood.
20 unusual (and fun!) date ideas – for the poor souls with no imagination. Or just for people who like this sort of thing…
2. Go to a major chain bookstore and leave notes to future readers in copies of your favorite books.
4. Create photo evidence suggesting that you went on an adventure that didn’t really happen.
6. Build forts out of furniture and blankets, and wage war with paper airplanes.
And it goes on… quite fun.
A friend of mine with a great Southern twang read me the Cajun Night before Christmas one evening before graduation. It’s not something I can imitate but it’s highly entertaining.
On a more serious note, a New York Times writer highlighted how modern pop song lyrics reveal a growing narcissism among young people. Granted, it’s qualitative sociological type stuff—thus open to interpretation—but it’s fascinating nevertheless.
Now, after a computer analysis of three decades of hit songs, Dr. DeWall and other psychologists report finding what they were looking for: a statistically significant trend toward narcissism and hostility in popular music. As they hypothesized, the words “I” and “me” appear more frequently along with anger-related words, while there’s been a corresponding decline in “we” and “us” and the expression of positive emotions.
And finally, the amusing video….
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