Big Read

Image by jakebouma via Flickr

The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

Instructions:
Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien X
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible X
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman X
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens X
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams X
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll X
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis X
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis X
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini X
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell X
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown X
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert X
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley X
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon X
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold X
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens X
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson X
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno - Dante X
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens X
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker X
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom X
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan X
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton X
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas X
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Ronald Dahl X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

(via My Own Little Region of Space)

I thought I saw a Tweetie Bird

Image by phxwebguy via Flickr

With the spate of celebrity Twitter stories in the media at the moment there's always been some debate as to whether these accounts are real, fake, or just an intern working at a publicist's office. When Shaquille O'Neal tweeted that he was eating at a Phoenix diner, Jesse Bearden and a friend decided to see if it really was Shaq.

Returning to our hushed whispers I asked Sean, "Should we go talk to him now?"
"I don't know, should we?"

"Yes, you should" a very deep voice entered our conversation from 2 booths over.

My own twitter account is here, though I can't promise to be in any diners.

Happy Emergency Christmas

In the Crisis of Credit visualised, media design student Jonathan Jarvis takes a simple approach in showing how the US banking system has plunged the global economy into recession. How long will it take before all the Obama supporters start calling for his resignation because he took too long to undo years of greed and short-sightedness?

Happy Emergency Christmas everyone.

ISTJ - The Duty Fulfillers

Via Metafilter, Typealyzer reckons the Myers-Briggs type of my writing appears to be INTJ:

The responsible and hardworking type. They are especially attuned to the details of life and are careful about getting the facts right. Conservative by nature they are often reluctant to take any risks whatsoever.

The Duty Fulfillers are happy to be let alone and to be able to work int heir own pace. They know what they have to do and how to do it.

Oddly enough, I usually test as INTP.

Saturday Night at the Movies

Image via WikipediaJason Kottke links to Film Addict which takes a list of the 250 top-rated films on IMDB and scores you on how many you've seen. My score is 47.6%, what's yours?

The world's in a state of chassis Juno

A couple of nights ago we were settling down for the night when this thing on the left started dive bombing the bed. With no clue as to how an insect managed to survive this long into the winter or even that night, when the outside temperature was a couple of degrees below freezing we assumed that it came back with us from a week's holiday in Malta. Turns out it was a Peacock Butterfly and was probably asleep in a cupboard somewhere but thought it was spring when the heating came on.

I'm nervous about what else might be lying dormant...

"An bhfuil tusa ag leabhairt lomsa?"

Image by jodimarr via FlickrHere's a great video about a bored Chinese shop worker who learns Irish before moving there, without realising that very little Irish is used in day-to-day life.

Highlights include the Taxi Driver reference and a cameo from Frank Kelly (better known as Father Jack in Father Ted) and the result is a touching short film that's equal parts hilarious and shaming. Maybe I'll try and find my old Inter. Cert. course books and have a refresher before I start Cognitive Psychology.

Flipping Great

Demitri Martin presents the findings from his life's research without needing to resort to Powerpoint or indeed data measurement.

Write on

Rob Caron points to a great post from Dumb Little Man, a Lifehacker type blog.

If only it could be enforced before anyone is allowed to write anything.

How can so much awesomeness exist?

Joss Wheedon, Neil Patrick Harris, Super Heroes, Super Villains, and a theremin.

This only way this could get any more awesome would be if it tied in with How I Met Your Mother.