etsy

so on the website www.etsy.com where you can buy pretty much anything, it's like ebay but you are not bidding on the products. if you want it, you just buy it. most of the stuff is hand made, which makes it even cooler. so while looking around on the site i found a charles bukowski altered antique plate. just awesome! hehe. here's the link if you'd like to buy it. hehe. here's a picture of the plate.

teefury

so there's a great website called teefury that every day it sells a new tshirt. the shirts are designed by different artists and are only available for 24hrs. but the cool thing is that they are original shirts and they are only $9. and the shirts are available for both men and women. today's shirt is this:

edgar allan poe oil painting

so on entertainmentearth.com you can buy an edgar allan poe oil painting. i don't know if i would want it, but it's pretty cool looking. it's just a portrait of the writer. but it's still cool looking. here it is...

computer wallpaper

so there's a website called simpledesktops.com and there are some cool desktops. well one of them is one for a clockwork orange. here it is.

perry bible fellowship

there's this great comic called the perry bible fellowship. there are no new comics being made for it, but it's a great comic. here is a wonderful one of the comics. here's the comic's website for more comics.

america's most literate cities

central connecticut state university listed america's most literate cities. they were rated in 6 subcategories, bookstores, educational attainment, internet resources, library resources, newspaper circulation, and periodical publication. here's the full list.

number one was washington dc. 
chicago was ranked at 28. 
the last rank (75) went to stockton, ca.

hockey goalie masks

over the years hockey has let the goalies paint different pictures on their masks. and there has been great goalie masks. in the 90's goalie curtis joseph for the st louis blues (1995) had stephen king's cujo painted on his helmet. cujo was his nickname from teammates combined the first two letters of his first name and his last name. while the rabid beast has appeared with more detail on joseph's different teams over the years, it all started with his first team, the blues.

quotables

here's another installment of quotes. hope they inspire.

- "no matter how fast light travels it finds that darkness has always gotten there first and is waiting for it." - terry pratchett
- "the difference between friendship and love is how much you can hurt each other." - ashleigh brilliant
- "the most intimate emotion two people can share is neither love nor desire, but pain." - the surgeon by tess gerritsen
- "change is the essence of life. be willing to surrender what you are for what you could become." - ?
- "people are always telling me that change is good. but all that means is that something you didn't want to happen has happened." - meg ryan
- "it is never too late to be what you might have been." - george elliot
- "the worst part of holding the memories is not the pain, it's the loneliness of it." - the giver by lois lowry
- "these streets are filled with memories. both perfect and in pain." - secondhand serenade
- "the friendship that can cease has never been real." - saint jerome
- "to be loved, to be loved, what more could you ask for. to be loved, to be loved, everyone wants to be." - the academy is...
- "your the reason why i burst and why i bloom" - motion city soundtrack
- "you don't know how much i'd give or how much i can take just to reach you." - melissa etheridge
- "what you really value is what you miss, not what you have." - jorge louis borges
- "i lay down on the cold ground and i pray that something picks me up and sets me down in your arms." - snow patrol
- "and that's when your song calls me from way up in a tree and i look up and the whole world is as it should be." - ani defranco

quarter of a century

yesterday was my 25th birthday. i had a great day. i worked (which was no fun) but then i went to the blackhawks game that night which was great. they won in a shoot out and two of my favorite players scored; kane and toews. so over all it was a great birthday.

every day i get an email from the new york times with the days headlines. and yesterday one of the headlines was called this: light out, huck, they still want to civilize you. and it was written by michiko kukutani. the article was about how alan gribben, a professor of english at auburn university, at montgomery, alabama, has produced a new edition of mark twain’s novel, huckleberry finn, that replaces the word “nigger” with "slave".  Never mind that attaching the epithet slave to the character Jim — who has run away in a bid for freedom — effectively labels him as property, as the very thing he is trying to escape.


Nigger, which appears in the book more than 200 times, was a common racial epithet in the antebellum South, used by Twain as part of his characters’ vernacular speech and as a reflection of mid-19th-century social attitudes along the Mississippi River.


Haven’t we learned by now that removing books from the curriculum just deprives children of exposure to classic works of literature? Worse, it relieves teachers of the fundamental responsibility of putting such books in context — of helping students understand that “Huckleberry Finn” actually stands as a powerful indictment of slavery (with Nigger Jim its most noble character), of using its contested language as an opportunity to explore the painful complexities of race relations in this country. To censor or redact books on school reading lists is a form of denial: shutting the door on harsh historical realities — whitewashing them or pretending they do not exist.


Mr. Gribben’s effort to update “Huckleberry Finn” (published in an edition with “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” by NewSouth Books), ratifies the narcissistic contemporary belief that art should be inoffensive and accessible; that books, plays and poetry from other times and places should somehow be made to conform to today’s democratic ideals. It’s like the politically correct efforts in the ’80s to exile great authors like Conrad and Melville from the canon because their work does not feature enough women or projects colonialist attitudes.


Efforts to sanitize classic literature have a long, undistinguished history. Everything from Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” to Roald Dahl’s “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” have been challenged or have suffered at the hands of uptight editors. There have even been purified versions of the Bible (all that sex and violence!). Sometimes the urge to expurgate (if not outright ban) comes from the right, evangelicals and conservatives, worried about blasphemy, profane language and sexual innuendo. Fundamentalist groups, for instance, have tried to have dictionaries banned because of definitions offered for words like hot, tail, ball and nuts.


In other cases the drive to sanitize comes from the left, eager to impose its own multicultural, feminist worldviews and worried about offending religious or ethnic groups. Michael Radford’s 2004 film version of “The Merchant of Venice” (starring Al Pacino) revised the play to elide potentially offensive material, serving up a nicer, more sympathetic Shylock and blunting tough questions about anti-Semitism. More absurdly, a British theater company in 2002 changed the title of its production of “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” to "the bellringer of notre dame."


Ballantine Books published an expurgated version of “Fahrenheit 451,” Ray Bradbury’s celebrated sci-fi classic about book banning, in which words like “hell” and “abortion” were deleted; it was reportedly 13 years before Mr. Bradbury became aware of the changes and demanded that the original version be restored.


Whether it comes from conservatives or liberals, there is a patronizing Big Brother aspect to these literary fumigations. We, the censors, need to protect you, the naïve, delicate reader. We, the editors, need to police writers (even those from other eras), who might have penned something that might be offensive to someone sometime. 

books into movies

so my way of bringing in the new year, i went to see the movie true grit by the coen brothers. which was an awesome movie! the acting was great. the directing was great. the landscapes in the movie were beautiful. i defiantly suggest everyone to go out and see this movie! and i knew there was a true grit that john wayne was in, but what i didn't know was that true grit is a book. and that got me thinking about how many movies that are originally books. and so i though i would list a bunch of them. and there are tons. but i just find it interesting that so many books have been made into movies.

- the hobbit by j.r.r. tolkien
- lord of the rings by j.r.r. tolkien
- memoirs of a geisha by arthur golden
- along came a spider by james paterson
- a room with a view by e.m. forester
- american psycho by bret easton ellis
- a clockwork orange by anthony burgess
- the notebook by nicolas sparks
- the accidental tourist by anne tyler
- hitchhikers guide to the galaxy by douglas adams
- the green mile by stephen king
- fight club by chuck palahniuk
- trainspotting by irvine welsh
- the virgin suicides by jeffery eugenides
- fear and loathing in las vegas by hunter s. thompson
- 2001 a space odyssey by author c clark
- breakfast at tiffany's by truman capote
- the prestige by christopher priest
- the children of men by p.d. james
- no country for old men by cormac mccarthy
- do androids dream of electric sheep by philip k dick
- the godfather by mario pazo

and there are so many more. this is just a small list of them. some of them i knew, some of them i had no idea.

happy new year!

happy new year everyone! hope your year is filled with joy.