Back from choir tour in Japan, which was GREAT. Many ridiculous stories to follow. I'm still catching up on LJ backlog, but for now you get this nerdy meme from aelithes:

What we have here are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read and underline the ones you started but didn't finish (or are on the shelf waiting for a free week). [Incidentally not all of these are exactly intellectual... what was this person thinking?]

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
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
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
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
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
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield

The ruling on Thursday focused in large part on the centuries old writ of habeas corpus (“you have the body,” in Latin), a means by which prisoners can challenge their incarceration.

( Justices Rule Terror Suspects Can Appeal in Civilian Courts - New York Times, 11/6/08)

Tsk, tsk, New York Times! A mistranslation! Subjunctive, anyone? Someone has forgotten their "Let's Beat That Friar" vowel rules.

British Airways has ditched beef for economy class passengers this summer in an attempt to appeal to a more international passenger base.

The familiar cabin crew inquiry of “chicken or beef?” will not be heard in economy after the airline ditched the national dish in favour of what it calls a lighter, healthier option.

Critics will suspect that the relentless pressure to cut costs that all airlines are facing is behind the move, although BA said cost was not a factor.

A spokesman for the airline told The Times: “We were looking for something with broad appeal. Research trends have shown us that fish pie is very popular in supermarkets so we decided to go with that and chicken and tarragon for the summer. (Full story here

Fish pie??? What the hell???????? IF you're trying "to appeal to a more international passenger base," why are you basing your menu choices on what sells in *British* supermarkets? In my personal opinion, an opinion shared by every international student I know, fish pie exemplifies exactly what is wrong with British cuisine. It's one of the most disgusting dishes they could have picked.

Mascot's theft frankly disturbing

Try to tell me I don't have the best hometown ever. Unfortunately I never shop for food in Earlysville, so I am not personally acquainted with Harry.

For some reason, this analogy made me chuckle - perhaps because I think it's the first time I've ever run across Fitzgerald in a classics article:

"Christian chronologers resemble nothing more than the Great Gatsby in Fitzgerald's novel. Though they are pleasant enough to meet and heroically energetic, their eyes remain fixed less on the past, where complex truths must lie, than on that ever beckoning green light at the end of Daisy's pier, the millennium which they expect to arrive at any moment, and the arrival of which was often the chief point that chronological scholarship aimed to determine. Though their libraries, like Gatsby's, contained 'real books'-a fact that has surprised modern
readers of Christian chronicles as well as guests at Gatsby's party-there is little evidence that they understood these as their authors had intended."
-A.T. Grafton and N.M. Swerdlow, "Calendar Dates and Ominous Days in Ancient Historiography." JWI 51 (1988): 29


Anyway, back to actually writing my thesis. I have 500 more words to crank out before I'm allowed to go home for the day.

Cool article on Oxford pubs

Macedonia sounds like an amazing place.

Tell me this is not the most hilarious thing ever: Inside the Bizarre World of Japanese Pickup Schools

Does anyone else think this little guy is really, really cute? I want one for a pet.

Sparrow-sized Pterodactyl Was Smallest Ever

Just in time for Valentine's day, this song came on my iPod and I was happily reminded of its existence.

'Title of the Song' by DaVinci's Notebook. Parody of sappy boy-band songs of my high school years. $0.99 on iTunes. You won't be sorry.