Jacques Rogge is a dicque

I just thought I'd say that first, and that's all you're gonna get about the Olympics. Rogge, the President of The International Olympic Committee, didn't like it when Usain Bolt celebrated after his incredible victories. You don't get too many reasons to get on Yahoo! nowadays, but this article is worth it.


Congratulations, Rachel Maddow.



An Erection Day Special: of course I was completely (half) joking about that whole Hottest Daddy Blogger thing, but I'm not going to say no to this Hot Blogger Calendar thing after Shelli nominated me. So go there and nominate me again. Show them it's better to be follicly challenged than not to be challenged at all.

Remember, we’re taking nominations up until August 25th, at which time we’ll narrow down the field based on the number of nominations for each blogger. And then the voting begins!

Come on. You know I'm (half) joking.

And finally, knowing that with great power comes great responsilibity, I saw this book thing a while ago on Dan's blog, and I've been meaning to do it. Now, I could erase silly books like The Silmarillion and instead put great books like Three Men in a Boat, or the original blogger, Diary of a Nobody. Whatever. I'll just keep the list as it is. Maybe I'll add a comment if it's warranted.

The rest of the rules are the ones used by Dan: "The books I have read are highlighted in bold, the books I have started but abandoned are crossed out."

• Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrel
• Anna Karenina
• Crime and Punishment -- I was supposed to read it in high school but going to the beach was more fun. Did my finals by reading the cliff notes. Decided to give it a chance a few years ago. What an amazing book.
  
• Catch-22 -- Just didn't happen. I respect this book, don't get me wrong, but I just never finished it.
  
• One Hundred Years of Solitude -- Boooorrriiinnnggg.
  
• Wuthering Heights -- You know how it is. I read the good parts. The second half is redundant anyway.
  
• The Silmarillion -- Stopped reading it because I have self-respect.
  
• Life of Pi : a novel
• The Name of the Rose
• Don Quixote
• Moby Dick -- I wish I could say I was strong enough to quit this after a hundred pages, but I kept going. I could have spent the time better picking my nose.
  
• Ulysses -- Tried many times. I'm not ready. Not yet.
  
• Madame Bovary
• The Odyssey
• Pride and Prejudice
• Jane Eyre
• The Tale of Two Cities
• The Brothers Karamazov -- Okay okay, I have about fifty pages left.
  
• Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
• War and Peace
• Vanity Fair
• The Time Traveler’s Wife
• The Iliad
• Emma
• The Blind Assassin
• The Kite Runner
• Mrs. Dalloway
• Great Expectations
• American Gods -- Gaiman... We meet again... I did read Neverwhere, which means you owe me a couple of days of my life.
  
• A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
• Atlas Shrugged
• Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
• Memoirs of a Geisha
• Middlesex
• Quicksilver
• Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
• The Canterbury tales -- Or did I read it? I think I did.
  
• The Historian : a novel
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man -- Awesome. Brilliant. Great. Amazing.
  
• Love in the Time of Cholera -- I did like it, but I was a romantic sixteen-year-old when I read it. I don't think I would have liked it now.
  
• Brave New world
• The Fountainhead
• Foucault’s Pendulum
• Middlemarch
• Frankenstein -- Shitenstein
  
• The Count of Monte Cristo -- My favorite book.
  
• Dracula -- It's cool. I liked it.
  
• A Clockwork Orange
• Anansi Boys
• The Once and Future King
• The Grapes of Wrath
• The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
• 1984 -- Also had to read it for school, but this one seemed more manageable so I did read it.
  
• Angels & Demons
• The Inferno
• The Satanic Verses -- The only book here I read twice.
  
• Sense and Sensibility
• The Picture of Dorian Gray -- In my twenties, I was Dorian Gray. I don't think I was supposed to identify with him, but I lived a "the hell with anyone over thirty" kind of life, which meant Dorian Gray was my hero.
  
• Mansfield Park
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
• To the Lighthouse -- I'm not afraid of Virginia Woolf.
  
• Tess of the D’Urbervilles
• Oliver Twist
• Gulliver’s Travels -- Read it in the library in elementary school.
  
• Les Misérables
• The Corrections
• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time -- I don't usually read these new best sellers because I'm too pretentious to give an honest opinion. But someone bought me this book so I had to read it. Didn't like it, but that could be because I'm indeed pretentious.
  
• Dune
• The Prince
• The Sound and the Fury -- Tried three times before successfully getting over the confusion of the first few pages. It was worth it.
  
• Angela’s Ashes : a memoir -- 'tis silly.
  
• The God of Small Things
• A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present -- I can handle the truth.
  
• Cryptonomicon
• Neverwhere -- Gaiman!!!
  
• A Confederacy of Dunces -- Awwww. Another favorite.
  
• A Short History of Nearly Everything -- I know I'm not alone on that one.
  
• Dubliners
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being -- Required reading for teenagers. Preferably read while listening to Pink Floyd's The Wall.
  
• Beloved
• Slaughterhouse-five
• The Scarlet Letter
• Eats, Shoots & Leaves
• The Mists of Avalon
• Oryx and Crake : a novel
• Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
• Cloud Atlas
• The Confusion
• Lolita -- Okay, half-way there.
  
• Persuasion
• Northanger Abbey
• The Catcher in the Rye -- Of course.
  
• On the Road -- The book is guilty of making millions of wannabe writers think they can get away with writing about crap they think about when they're stoned. That aside, it's a fun book as long as writing students stop trying to imitate it.
• The Hunchback of Notre Dame
• Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values -- One day...
  
• The Aeneid
• Watership Down -- Many many many many years ago.
  
• Gravity’s Rainbow
• The Hobbit -- I hope the movie won't ruin it for me like the Lord of the Rings movies did.
  
• In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
• White Teeth
• Treasure Island -- I think I read it. But maybe I read the picture book version. Does it count?
  
• David Copperfield
• The Three Musketeers -- I swear, I have less than fifty pages left.