The Man Who Conned Oprah: “Book Club” author’s best-selling nonfiction memoir filled with fabrications, falsehoods, other fakery, TSG probe finds.
Author: Newley
Hi. I'm Newley Purnell. I cover technology and business for The Wall Street Journal, based in Hong Kong. I use this site to share my stories and often blog about the books I'm reading, tech trends, sports, travel, and our dog Ginger. For updates, get my weekly email newsletter.
This Top Ten Weirdest USB Drives list contains some gems. What I wouldn’t do for this fried shrimp one. Although I also love the dimsums and the sushi drives, too. Hell, the sake bottle is fantastic, as well.
(Via Kottke.)
Don Norman’s In Praise of Good Design is a site that highlights usefully-constructed and aesthetically-pleasing products, like the measuring cup above (which, incidentally, I recently saw in my friends Bill and Carri‘s kitchen and promptly became envious of).
Last night Faye and Jake and Chad and I launched into a discussion Chris D. and I have had occasionally in the past: How many cats would it take to pull a dog sled*?
I find this conundrum to be an especially intriguing thought experiment. How many cats does it take to pull what a typical dog can pull? 50? 100? I argue that a direct ratio of cat to dog pulling power is problematic, as my feeling is that cats cannot pull with as much torque compared to body weight as dogs can.
Anywho, we had a laugh about it last night and then Faye posed the question to Google this morning. She emailed me the following incredible Web site on which the above photo can be found: SledKitty.com.
Quoth the anonymous Northern Virginia resident who I admire for his/her sense of humor and desire to see a ridiculous project through to its absurd end:
One day, reading about how even small dogs can pull sleds, I got an idea. Sled cats! More specifically, sled cat. One of my cats, Socky, is a very special animal. He, unlike most cats, has been trained to do a variety of activities…Anyway, if small dogs can do it, I thought, why can’t Socky? So I set about training the world’s first sled cat.
Don’t miss the site, which contains additional hilarious photos of Socky competing in the “Hallditarod.”
*I am well aware that felines are much less obedient than canines. To those who say, “But Newley, you dumbass, cats would never pull a dog sled like pooches would — they’d all take off in different directions,” I respond thusly: The question is not if they’d be willing to pull the sled, but rather how much power they’d generate if they did. Besides, I believe cats might be made to all head in the same direction if you implemented a sort of catnip-and-stick apparatus, which would be, like, a big long stick with a sack of catnip hanging off the end.
My Bloggers’ Favorite Books of 2005 Round-up continues to attract mad eyeballs due to some additional links from various fine folks:
— Jason Kottke at Kottke.org
— Gadling
And don’t miss the comments to the survey, in which Richard Lewis (blogging from Bali), Seeking Irony, Joe at Book Covers from the NY Times Book Review blog, and John Williams at A Special Way of Being Afraid weigh in.
UPDATE: Gothamist has also provided a link.
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Some Links
Some stuff of note:
— I’ve posted three new items over at Gridskipper of late.
— Here’s a license plate my brother Colin and I saw here in DC the weekend before X-mas. I wanna know who’s in charge of VA vanity plate obscenity screening. Someone is sleeping on the job. (Weird side note: a bumper sticker on this car featured the word “abortion” with a line through it and said “Slavery: it was legal, too.” Um, okay.)
— Culture Bully’s 10 Favorite Mash-ups of 2005 looks promising. (Especially the Flaming Lips/Snoop Dog joint.)
— This came out before X-mas, but it’s still interesting. Andres Oppenheimer asks: “Will Bolivia’s Morales follow good or bad role model?”:
Bolivia, which has an estimated 55 percent indigenous population, will enter a new era of majority rule following last weekend’s landslide election of Evo Morales, a leftist coca growers’ leader of Aymara descent. The big question is whether indigenous-ruled Bolivia will follow the steps of South Africa or Zimbabwe.
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Off to the South Carolina sLowcountry
I’m leaving DC later today for Xmas at home in Beaufort, South Carolina. Posting will be light or nonexistent next week; great things await after the new year, fine friends. Great things, I tell you. Stay tuned.
And Godspeed and happy holidays and all that stuff. Give yourselves a big hug and a kiss from ol’ Uncle Newley.
Hasta 2K6, mis amigos.
CNN:
RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil — Diego Maradona made a remarkable return to the football field when he played for 68 minutes in a charity match in Rio de Janeiro.
But he was later arrested by police at Rio de Janeiro airport, for causing a disturbance after missing his flight to Buenos Aires.
Reason’s Kerry Howley says the much-hyped $100 laptop isn’t what people in the developing world really need:
Gifting, we discover every Holiday Season, is an incredibly inefficient mode of exchange. The first week of January is a customer-service-line filled nightmare, our collective attempt to correct judgments people who love us make about what we really want: sweaters two sizes too big, gadgets we have no use for, toys too uncool to engage in public. The developing world, too, has a closetful of gifts it never asked for and couldn’t use: Free food diverted to feed the militias responsible for hunger in the first place, anti-malarial bed nets turned into wedding dresses, newly dug wells abandoned because no one knew how repair them.
…
The laptop wasn’t welcomed with complete uniformity in Tunis; as CNN summarized some complaints: “What people in the developing world really need are water, food, jobs, decent healthcare and sanitation.” But perhaps what people in the developing world really need is for bureaucrats to stop telling them what they really need. As Americans tear open a host of well-intentioned, slightly-off presents this week, the good people at the OLPC might consider the familiar plea of cash-strapped people everywhere: Please just send a check.
Big ups to the folks who’ve linked to the Bloggers’ Favorite Books of 2005 round-up so far:
— Dana at #1HS
— Mark F. at BoingBoing
— Wendy
— Nick at Blogebrity
UPDATE : more links from Maud Newton and Ben’s Journal.
UPDATE 2: Baylen Linnekin at To the People and Library Autonomous Zone pile on the linklove.
UPDATE 3: Kristen Murray and some person in Japan have also provided links.