The TIME 100

Librarianna has an interesting little exercise on her blog. How many of the The TIME 100 | The People Who Shape Our World can you identify?

  • J.J. Abrams
  • George Clooney
  • Dixie Chicks
  • Ellen DeGeneres
  • Nicolas Ghesquiere
  • Wayne Gould
  • Philip Seymour Hoffman
  • Arianna Huffington
  • Ang Lee
  • Renzo Piano
  • Rain
  • Rachael Ray
  • Jeff Skoll
  • Kiki Smith
  • Will Smith
  • Zadie Smith
  • Howard Stern
  • Meryl Streep
  • Reese Witherspoon
  • Rob Pardo
  • Daddy Yankee
  • Tyra Banks
  • Dane Cook
  • Matt Drudge
  • Stephen Colbert
  • Mike Brown
  • Kelly Brownell
  • Nancy Cox
  • Richard Davidson
  • Kerry Emanuel
  • Jim Hansen
  • Zahi Hawass
  • Bill James
  • John Jones
  • Ma Jun
  • Jim Yong Kim
  • Steven Levitt
  • Jacques Rossouw
  • Andrew von Eschenbach
  • Jimmy Wales
  • Geoffrey West
  • Muqtada al-Sadr
  • Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf
  • Hugo Chavez
  • George W. Bush
  • John McCain
  • Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
  • Ayman al-Zawahiri
  • Hillary Rodham Clinton
  • Pope Benedict
  • Condoleezza Rice
  • Wen Jiabao
  • Ehud Olmert
  • Pervez Musharraf
  • John Roberts
  • Ismail Haniya
  • Angela Merkel
  • Jigme Singye Wangchuk
  • Archbishop Peter Akinola
  • Junichiro Koizumi
  • Oprah Winfrey
  • Bill & Melinda Gates
  • Bono
  • Michelle Wie
  • Wynton Marsalis
  • Angelina Jolie
  • Bill Clinton & George H.W. Bush
  • Steve Nash
  • Orhan Pamuk
  • Elie Wiesel
  • Jan Egeland
  • Joey Cheek
  • Chen Guangcheng
  • Ian Fishback
  • Wafa Sultan
  • Pernessa Seele
  • Ralph Lauren
  • Mukhtaran Bibi
  • Paul Simon
  • Al Gore
  • Katie Couric
  • Vikram Akula
  • Tom Anderson & Chris DeWolfe
  • Franz Beckenbauer
  • The Flickr Founders
  • Sean Combs
  • Jamie Dimon
  • Brian France
  • Tom Freston
  • Huang Guangyu
  • Omid Kordestani
  • Eddie Lampert
  • Patricia Russo
  • Sheikh Mohammed
  • Anne Mulcahy
  • Nandan Nilekani
  • Jim Sinegal
  • Steve Wynn
  • The Skype Guys
  • Dieter Zetsche

I knew forty-five, and I misidentified one. (I was a little vague on some: “politician” for instance.)

Bloggers give thumbs down

There’s a report on the critique of mainstream media’s coverage of Iraq over at Global Voices Online

The conclusion of the panelists seemed to be that the media isn’t presenting a full picture of what’s happening in Iraq, but there were no concrete ideas as to what can or should be done about this problem. Problems with the coverage include: It’s too politically polarized. There isn’t enough background and context due to space and time limitations in news outlets. News organizations are businesses and must tailor their reports to the interests and sensibilities of their audiences (which explains why non-Iraqi victims get more play than Iraqi victims in the Western media). There are physical limitations on what Western, other Middle Eastern, and Iraqi journalists can physically report on because the situation is so physically dangerous. Etc.

No big surprises in the post, but I am alarmed by the comments suggesting that editors are not journalists.

Asking the Blogosphere: Is the media telling the real story on Iraq?

Great project underway at Global Voices Online:

In your country, how does the media’s Iraq coverage rate? Fair and balanced? Biased? Which way? How about bloggers’ reporting and discussion of the issue? Have blogs helped clarify things or added to the confusion? We want to bring the opinions of the world’s bloggers on this issue directly into the debate.

Ten times four things

OK, so it’s a day late to be a Friday Ten (more observed in the skipping than the posting), but it is a ten. And it’s the Four Things meme that’s been going around. No one’s tagged me (that I’ve noticed), but I’ve really liked reading other’s lists, so I just decided to do it.

Four jobs I’ve had:
  1. boll-weevil trap checker
  2. account executive compensation specialist
  3. deli counter clerk
  4. editor
Four movies I can watch over and over:
  1. Top Hat (really, anything with Astaire and Rogers)
  2. Philadelphia Story
  3. Bringing Up Baby
  4. The Thin Man
Four books I could read over and over
  1. The Lord of the Rings  by J.R.R. Tolkien
  2. Little, Big by John Crowley
  3. A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin
  4. Heritage of Hastur by Marion Zimmer Bradley
Four TV shows I love:
  1. Lost
  2. Stargate SG‑1
  3. Battlestar Galactica
  4. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Four places I’ve lived:
  1. Brawley, California
  2. Blokzijl, Overijssel, Netherlands
  3. Camden, New Jersey
  4. Dorchester, Massachusetts
Four places I’ve vacationed:
  1. London
  2. Key West
  3. Grand Tetons
  4. Montreal
Four of my favorite dishes:
  1. chicken tikka masala
  2. potato (potato salad, potato pancakes, aloo chat, . . .)
  3. cheese
  4. dark chocolate
Four sites I visit daily:
  1. Pepys’ diary
  2. Astronomy picture of the day
  3. Guardian Unlimited
  4. Wim van der Meij Etsen’s photoblog
Four places I would rather be right now:
  1. London
  2. Lerwick, Shetland
  3. Amsterdam
  4. Forbidden City
Four bloggers I am tagging:
  1. docsmartypants
  2. black thorn
  3. not-so-fresh
  4. insert your name here

Ten things in London

Since I’ve been totally negligent about the Friday Tenâ„¢, I thought I’d post these ten things I’m looking forward to doing while I visit London for the next eleven days:

  1. Love Revealed: Simeon Solomon and the Pre-Raphaelites (which is the reason for the trip)
  2. Visiting my friend John and meeting his partner Nick
  3. V&A: Style and Splendor and Arts and Crafts collections
  4. Neal’s Yard Dairy
  5. New Year’s Eve in Brighton
  6. Rubens exhibit at the National Gallery with a fellow member of Copyediting‑L
  7. Favorite museums: National Portrait Gallery, Tate Britain
  8. British Library
  9. Eating and drinking: Indian food and bitter
  10. Theater: Billy Elliot — The Musical, Edward Scissorhands, or maybe a preview of Gutenburg! The Musical   

 

Ten fortune cookies

  1. A dose of adversity is often as needful as a dose of medicine.
  2. A man can fail many times, but he isn’t a failure until he gives up.
  3. Make serious decisions in the last few days of the month.
  4. The mightiest oak in the forest is just a little nut that held its ground.
  5. Regenerate your system through diet and exercise. Save the cookies!
  6. Plan your work and work your plan.
  7. Luck will visit you on the next new moon.
  8. Common sense is not so common.
  9. Courage comes through suffering.
  10. Hold faithfulness and sincerity as first principles.

Numbers one and two were characterized by my dining companion as being part of the “New England Series” when we got them one Sunday night. I’d say five, six, eight, and nine would also qualify (all, in fact, are printed with the same blue ink, with the same registration marks, and all include lucky numbers and “learn Chinese” on the back). Note that only one is a fortune. And one of these isn’t really from a cookie, but from the Analects of Confucius.

Ten things I got from my ancestors

A Friday Tenâ„¢ list just a bit early:

  1. From Grandma Tracey: an interest in publishing. Grandma Tracey wrote a history of Imperial Valley, where I grew up, and published a newspaper.
  2. From Grandma Sutton: a love of sweets. At least I think that’s where it came from. She gave us fresh-baked bread with butter and white sugar on it. I remember her loading up toast with lots of jam. She would take “half” the last slice of pie until there was a tiny sliver left.
  3. From my mother: a love of salty things.
  4. And high blood pressure.
  5. From my father: a bad temper.
  6. From both my grandfathers: an agrarian sensibility.
  7. From my parents: a sense of safety and of being loved.
  8. And a college education.
  9. And a need to be right (or is that a need not to be wrong?).
  10. From all my ancestors who just kept moving West: a sense of independence and self-reliance.

Ten yucky things about Zathura.

Doc Smartypants, Larry, and I saw Juman...er, Zathura last night. There were some definite good things about it: We saw it for free. The astronaut was cute. The special effects were great. I want to live in a house like that in the worst way. But in the end I found it a disappointing movie.

  1. Scary parts that aren’t scary: the entrance of the astronaut, for instance.
  2. Really obnoxious kids: flip, bratty, dim.
  3. Gratuitous teenage girl: totally irrelevant to the plot, even more of a cardboard stereotype than the boys.
  4. Tim Robbins wasted: what a dud role. (But I did like it when he finally blew up at the boys. See #2.)
  5. Why does the astronaut wear a space suit if you can breathe in space?
  6. Spoiler: It was totally lame who the astronaut turns out to be.
  7. Spoiler: The special effects just after you find out who the astronaut is were lame, lame, lame.
  8. Preachy, moralistic, predictable.
  9. The sound was too loud.
  10. There was an asshole sitting behind me who talked all the way through.