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heisted from keifus, here’s my tally (bolded) of what i’ve read on the list of 100 best banned books of the 20th century:

1. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
2. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
3. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
4. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
5. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
6. Ulysses by James Joyce
7. Beloved by Toni Morrison
8. The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
9. 1984 by George Orwell
10. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
11. Lolita by Vladmir Nabokov
12. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
13. Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White
14. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
15. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
16. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
17. Animal Farm by George Orwell
18. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
19. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
20. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
21. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
22. Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne
23. Their Eyes are Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
24. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
25. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
26. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
27. Native Son by Richard Wright
28. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
29. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
30. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
31. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
32. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
33. The Call of the Wild by Jack London
34. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
35. Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
36. Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin
37. The World According to Garp by John Irving
38. All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren
39. A Room with a View by E. M. Forster
40. The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
41. Schindler’s List by Thomas Keneally
42. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
43. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
44. Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
45. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
46. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
47. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
48. Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
49. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
50. The Awakening by Kate Chopin
51. My Antonia by Willa Cather
52. Howards End by E. M. Forster
53. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
54. Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger
55. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
56. Jazz by Toni Morrison
57. Sophie’s Choice by William Styron
58. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
59. A Passage to India by E. M. Forster
60. Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
61. A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor
62. Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
63. Orlando by Virginia Woolf
64. Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence
65. Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
66. Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
67. A Separate Peace by John Knowles
68. Light in August by William Faulkner
69. The Wings of the Dove by Henry James
70. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
71. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
72. A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
73. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
74. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
75. Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
76. Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe
77. In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway
78. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein
79. The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
80. The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
81. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
82. White Noise by Don DeLillo
83. O Pioneers! by Willa Cather
84. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
85. The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells
86. Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
87. The Bostonians by Henry James
88. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
89. Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
90. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
91. This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
92. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
93. The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles
94. Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
95. Kim by Rudyard Kipling
96. The Beautiful and the Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald
97. Rabbit, Run by John Updike
98. Where Angels Fear to Tread by E. M. Forster
99. Main Street by Sinclair Lewis
100. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie

a bunch of these were for class.  d. h. lawrence, for example.  some, i’ve read stuff by the author, but not the specific books listed.  some, i was young and foolish (ayn rand, for instance).  anyway, i suppose i should feel like my count is higher, but i don’t.  besides, i’ve got discworld books and a re-read of brother cadfael mysteries to attend to before hitting something like ulysses.

just picked up TMBG’s “here comes science”, supposedly for my son.  i suspect i may also have gotten it for myself, as listening to it just puts a big smile on my face.  highly recommended to TMBG fans (even moreso if you actually have children).

folks, this is what happens when you decide “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” in regards to keeping your damn software up-to-date.  when it does finally break, nearly a decade and a half later, no one can fix it.  why?  because you have a vendor app that was written with Borland C++ 4.5, and i can’t get my hands on that to create a debug version of the exe, that’s why.  and XP doesn’t want to let a 16-bit windows debugger run (there is probably a workaround for that, but dear fucking god!  you’re still using a 16-bit system!). 

honestly, we even keep the damn cobol on the back end at the current version, and that language used to use punch cards.  not to mention that it pre-dates, well, me.  but no.  i’m stuck supporting your shitty little system and learning all about obsolete versions of languages, since you never saw fit to upgrade from FoxPro 2.6a and your app apparently uses Clipper to read dBase III tables.  it’s not even comprable to learning latin; i’m learning etruscian instead.

i’d smack whomever is responsible for this system never being upgraded or having the business moved to a different system.  but i don’t know who they are and i suspect they are in iowa.

keifus is behind it.  don’t worry, i’ll get him…but first, The Pharyngula mutating genre meme!

There are a set of questions below that are all of the form, “The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is…”. Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them in a limited way, carrying out no more than two of these operations:

You can leave them exactly as is.
You can delete any one question.
You can mutate either the genre, medium, or subgenre of any one question. For instance, you could change “The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is…” to “The best time travel novel in Westerns is…”, or “The best time travel movie in SF/Fantasy is…”, or “The best romance novel in SF/Fantasy is…”.
You can add a completely new question of your choice to the end of the list, as long as it is still in the form “The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is…”.
You must have at least one question in your set, or you’ve gone extinct, and you must be able to answer it yourself, or you’re not viable.
Then answer your possibly mutant set of questions. Please do include a link back to the blog you got them from, to simplify tracing the ancestry, and include these instructions.

Finally, pass it along to any number of your fellow bloggers. Remember, though, your success as a Darwinian replicator is going to be measured by the propagation of your variants, which is going to be a function of both the interest your well-honed questions generate and the number of successful attempts at reproducing them.

My great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparent is Pharyngula.
My great-great-great-great-great-grandparent is Metamagician and the Hellfire Club.
My great-great-great-great-grandparent is Flying Trilobite.
My great-great-great-grandparent is A Blog Around the Clock.
My great-great-grandparent is archy.
My great-grandparent is Why Now?
My grandparent is Over the Cliff, Onto the Rocks.
My parent is Keifus Writes!
(edit) My other parent is Self-Absorbed Boomer

The best sociological novel in SF/Fantasy is: The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin

The best “bad” movie in scientific dystopias is: Mad Max

The best drinking song in pop is: Piano Man

The best romantic comedy in film is: Shakespeare in Love

alternatively:

The best sword and sorcery novel in SF/Fantasy is: The Lord of the Rings (trilogy).

The best “bad” movie in scientific dystopias is: Starship Troopers.

The best Gulf and western album in country music is: Living and Dying in 3/4 Time by Jimmy Buffett.

The best short story in speculative fiction is “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs”, by Harlan Ellison.

Grant Miller Media…
switters…
Constant Winter…
consider yourselves all tagged.

you too, miz actual size. on the off chance you swing by.

EDIT: apparently, the good claude scales, of Self-Absorbed Boomer, tagged me naught but an hour after Keifus did. can we consider him a step-parent? screw it, we are.

i give you a link to “the impossible quiz!“ mind you, it’s not actually impossible, but it is chockfull of trick questions. enjoy.

swiped from keifus

apparently i’m actually 4 muses. so i suppose it means it’s a mood thing. or their domains overlap. perhaps both.

You Passed 8th Grade Math

Congratulations, you got 9/10 correct!

don’t i feel accomplished? i still remember basic algebra! ah well, it was geometry that i tended to screw up on. and mid-to-high level calculus.

My Peculiar Aristocratic Title is: His Most Serene Highness Lord Twiffer the Sage of Molton St Anywhere Get your Peculiar Aristocratic Title

alternatively:

My Peculiar Aristocratic Title is: His Exalted Highness Duke Twiffer the Charming of Hardy St Thomas Get your Peculiar Aristocratic Title

can you sense a trend?

okay…so you want to have your name and address fields to be variable length. fine. that’s nice, and thanks for putting a delimiter in there for me. however, you stupid fuckwits, if you then put the data into a fixed length table, you have done NOTHING but make coding more complex.

look at this shit:

* THE FOLLOWING IS THE NAME AND ADDRESS FIELD. IT IS VARIABLE
* LENGTH, WITH A MAXIMUM OF 25 CHARACTERS FOR THE NAME AND
* A MAXIMUM OF 5 LINES OF ADDRESS AND A 5-DIGIT ZIP CODE
* THE FIRST 4 LINES OF ADDRESS MAY HAVE A MAXIMUM OF 25 CHARACTER
* EACH, AND THE FIFTH A MAXIMUM OF 20 CHARACTERS. THE LAST
* CHARACTER OF THE NAME AND EACH ADDRESS LINE IS FOLLOWED BY AN
* ASTERISK. THE LAST NAME IS FIRST AND IS
* ITSELF FOLLOWED BY AN ASTERISK.
10 NAME-ADDR-AREA.
20 NAME-ADDRESS-X PIC X OCCURS 156 TIMES.

fine, fine. but, you see, if you want a variable length table in cobol, you need to write: OCCURS 1 TO 156 TIMES DEPENDING ON NAME-ADDR-AREA-LEN. or somthing akin to that. otherwise, you have a fixed length table. such as above. in which case, you’d have been better off just defining the fucking field names so i could do simple moves, instead of having to write a routine to unstring the fucking name from the address. more over, if you and moving variable length data into fixed fields, there is no point. a variable table takes up the maximum defined size in memory when you run the program. you aren’t saving any space in working memory. you certainly aren’t saving space in the database. the only time variable length tables are useful in cobol is when you have a variable length OUTPUT. otherwise, it’s just a pain in the ass.

i hate these morons.