Environment: The Green Guide's blog

National Geographic's The Green Guide, a source of green home tips, eco-product reviews, environmental health information and green living advice on such topics as earth-friendly products, green building materials, organic food and bottled water, the latest research is on mercury in fish, flame retardants, healthy wellness products or food-safe plastics and cookware (about The Green Guide) has added a blog, updated weekly. Here are links to topics in the current Green Guide: environment facts, green garden tips, summer reading, summer salad recipes, safe play sets, volunteer abroad, FSC wine corks, rent a hybrid, summer energy saver, plant a tree, food labels guide, find a green hotel, save water lawn, green laundry supplies, recycledpaper products, local foods guide, global warming and hybrid cars.
<http://www.thegreenguide.com/blog/lowdown>

Smackdown?: James Joyce vs Ayn Rand

For a good laugh, check out The 100 Greatest Novels lists at Random House

(the experts' top 10:

1. ULYSSES by James Joyce
2. THE GREAT GATSBY by F. Scott Fitzgerald
3. A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN by James Joyce
4. LOLITA by Vladimir Nabokov
5. BRAVE NEW WORLD by Aldous Huxley
6. THE SOUND AND THE FURY by William Faulkner
7. CATCH-22 by Joseph Heller
   
8. DARKNESS AT NOON by Arthur Koestler
9. SONS AND LOVERS by D.H. Lawrence
10. THE GRAPES OF WRATH by John Steinbeck

the people's top 10:

1. ATLAS SHRUGGED by Ayn Rand
2. THE FOUNTAINHEAD by Ayn Rand
3. BATTLEFIELD EARTH by L. Ron Hubbard
4. THE LORD OF THE RINGS by J.R.R. Tolkien
5. TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD by Harper Lee
6. 1984 by George Orwell
7. ANTHEM by Ayn Rand
8. WE THE LIVING by Ayn Rand
9. MISSION EARTH by L. Ron Hubbard
10. FEAR by L. Ron Hubbard

- and you wonder how George Bush became the leader of the Psychlos).

(Note that the presence of the amateurish To Kill a Mockingbird and the dated 1984 among the top 10 may be accounted for by the fact that for decades they were force-fed in high school, apparently the last time many people encountered anything that passably resembles literature.)

(Not that "the people" are afraid of big books: Mission Earth has got to be 4x the length of Ulysses.)

Speaking of Ulysses, it may be not only the greatest novel ever written (it is a masterpiece, though I'd plump for The Great Gatsby as near-perfect), but also the greatest dirty novel every written, so if you are allowed only one book on that desert island...

If you want to reread Ulysses, download it to your computer for free here (there's a hypertext version here). If you don't ever intend to read it, but you still want to pick up dates at Barnes & Noble, there's a quick overview of the book here and a really quick version (almost no words at all) here. Should you want to suffer the book in its entirety without actually reading it yourself, you can have it read to you here (it's only 32 hours long, perfect if you happen to be driving to Los Angeles, say, from Chicago).

Performance: Connie, 6, on "Britain's Got Talent " (YouTube)

On Britain's Got Talent, will mean-spirited Simon Cowell, already in a foul mood, be able to endure six-year-old Connie's assault on "Somewhere Over The Rainbow"?

For the record: George W. Bush

The Health and Medical History of President George W. Bush: <http://www.doctorzebra.com/prez/g43.htm>

Gaming: Spore

The video-game designer Will Wright demonstrates his long-awaited game Spore and discusses the art of game design with John Seabrook at “2012: Stories from the Near Future,” the 2007 New Yorker Conference.
The rest of the story: Seabrook’s Profile of Wright in The New Yorker.

Security: Firewalls

Check out the comprehensive Windows Personal Firewall Analysis to see how your firewall stands up to others. Best of show?: the free Comodo Firewall.

Pencil Sharpening: Women Depicted in Fine Art

New Media: Turn Your RSS Feeds into Podcasts

TalkR enables you to listen to your favorite text sources and blogs instead of reading them. Point it to an RSS feed and TalkR will convert the text to speech and provide you with a podcast to download at your leisure. Talkr can also keep tabs on your RSS feeds and send audio files to your device as they become available. The subscription options include both free and paid services. <http://www.talkr.com/>
<http://www.talkr.com/faq/what_is_talkr.html>

Anals of Commerce: Pee and Poo Dolls

Oh, yes, they did: <http://peeandpoo.com>

Search: FindSounds

You've got a surfeit of search engines to choose from if you're looking for articles on line. Photos and graphics, too, are easy enough to find with Google, Yahoo and NetVue image searches. But what if, amid the cacaphony of competing search engines, you're looking for a sound, a train whistle, say, a jackhammer like the one on the Lovin' Spoonful's "Summer in the City," or something more esoteric? FindSounds scours the web for AIFF, AU, and WAV files. From among its findings, you click on the nearby speaker icon to sample a returned suggestion, then choose the "Sounds Like" button to refine your search with a new list of noises that are related to the one you listened to. <http://www.findsounds.com/>

Pencil Sharpening: The Stickman Murders

"In the 'Stickman Murder Mystery Games' you play the role of a homicide detective who must solve one of five murder mystery cases. The murders have taken place in the crime-riddled city of 'Stickville'." -- from the website. <http://www.normandcompany.com/>

Photography: Teenie Harris Archive

Charles "Teenie" Harris' "photographs are unsurpassed in the range of subjects they portray and for their ability to evoke the spirit of an era and to display the humanity of a people. Harris' 40-year career with the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the largest and most influential Black newspapers in the country, began as the nation emerged from the Depression and ended with the Civil Rights Movement. Numbering upwards of 80,000 images, this archive represents the largest single collection of photographic images of any Black community in the United States -- or the world for that matter....in its breadth and in its rich documentation of the life and community spirit of Black urban America, the Teenie Harris collection surpasses that of any other African American photographer. In the long run, his photographs may cause Pittsburgh's Hill District to join New York City's Harlem in forming our view of urban Black life from the 1930s to the 1960s....Using the [Carnegie M]useum's online collection search page, you can now view over 18,000 images in the collection...." -- from the website. <http://www.cmoa.org/teenie/info.asp>

Periodicals: McSweeney's et al

McSweeney's, you need to know, is not so much a website as it is an "Internet tendency." The site aggregates the online presences of "Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, a journal created by nervous people in relative obscurity;" The Believers, a monthly magazine "where length is no object;" and Wholphin, a quarterly DVD of short films, docs, instructional videos, foreign sitcoms, and other cinema hybrids "designed to make you feel the way we felt when we learned that dolphins and whales sometimes, you know, do it." <http://www.mcsweeneys.net>