50 Greatest Villians in LIterature

From the Telegraph:

50. Helen Grayle/Velma Valento from Farewell, My Lovely, by Raymond Chandler

49. Steerpike from Titus Groan and Gormenghast, by Mervyn Peake

48. Shere Khan from The Jungle Book stories, by Rudyard Kipling

47. Long John Silver from Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson

46. Moriarty from The Final Problem, by Arthur Conan Doyle

45. The White Witch from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C S Lewis

44. Milo Minderbinder from Catch-22, by Joseph Heller

43. Fred from The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood

42. Grendel's Mother from Beowulf

41. O'Brien from Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell

40. Captain Hook from Peter and Wendy, by J M Barrie

39. Moby-Dick from Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

38. Gil-Martin from The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, by James Hogg.

37 Surtur in A Voyage to Arcturus, by David Lindsay

36 The Judge from Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy

35 Mrs Coulter from the His Dark Materials trilogy, by Philip Pullman

34 Clare Quilty from Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov

33 Count Fosco from The Woman in White, by Wilkie Collins

32 Signor Montoni from The Mysteries of Udolpho, by Ann Radcliffe
31 Tom Ripley from The Talented Mr Ripley, by Patricia Highsmith

30 Bill Sikes from Oliver Twist, by Charles Dickens

29 Marquise de Merteuil from Les Liaisons Dangereuses, by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos

28 Quilp from The Old Curiosity Shop, by Charles Dickens

27 Alec d'Urberville from Tess of the d'Urbervilles, by Thomas Hardy

26 Cthulhu from The Call of Cthulhu, by HP Lovecraft

25 Sauron from The Lord of the Rings, by J R R Tolkien

24 Don Juan in (among others) El Burlador de Sevilla, by Tirso di Molina

23 The Joker from Batman, by Bob Kane, Bill Finger and Jenny Robinson

22 Ernst Stavro Blofeld from the James Bond novels, by Ian Fleming

21 Augustus Melmotte from The Way We Live Now, by Anthony Trollope

20 Mr Hyde from Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson

19 Edmund from King Lear, by William Shakespeare

18 Mrs Danvers from Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier
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17 Patrick Batemen from American Psycho, by Bret Easton Ellis

16 Ferdinand from The Duchess of Malfi, by John Webster

15 Svengali from Trilby, by George du Maurier

14 Hannibal Lecter from Red Dragon, by Thomas Harris

13 Count Dracula from Dracula, by Bram Stoker

12 Barabas from The Jew of Malta, by Christopher Marlowe

11 Pinkie Brown from Brighton Rock, by Graham Greene

10 Vindice from The Revenger's Tragedy, by Thomas Middleton

9 Mr Kurtz from Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad

8 Claudius from Hamlet, by William Shakespeare

7 Ambrosio from The Monk, by M G Lewis

6 Robert Lovelace from Clarissa, by Samuel Richardson

5 Voldemort from the Harry Potter series by JK Rowling

4 Iago from Othello, by William Shakespeare

3 Cruella de Vil from The Hundred and One Dalmatians, by Dodie Smith

2 Samuel Whiskers from The Tale of Samuel Whiskers, by Beatrix Potter

1 Satan from Paradise Lost, by John Milton

Doris Kearns Goodwin - Team of Rivals (3)

This is the best book on Lincoln I've ever read. It provides the clearest account of Lincoln's rise to power, his views on slavery, the path to the Civil War, and how he governed. How Lincoln guided the North through the war is amazing. I never ceased to be amazed at how this country endured a war in which we killed 620,000 of ourselves.

Lincoln is the greatest American. No Lincoln, no country as we know it today.

Will we ever be blessed by another Abraham Lincoln?

Does Google Dumb Us Down?

By DAMON DARLIN
Published: September 20, 2008
EVERYONE has been talking about an article in The Atlantic magazine called “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Some subset of that group has actually read the 4,175-word article, by Nicholas Carr

To save you some time, I was going to give you a 100-word abridged version. But there are just too many distractions to read that much. So here is the 140-character Twitter version (Twitter is a hyperspeed form of blogging in which you write about your life in bursts of 140 characters or fewer, including spaces and punctuation marks):
Google makes deep reading impossible. Media changes. Our brains’ wiring changes too. Computers think for us, flattening our intelligence.
If you managed to wade through that, maybe you are thinking that Twitter, not Google, is the enemy of human intellectual progress.
With Twitter, people subscribe to your “tweets.” Those who can make life’s mundane details interesting garner a large audience. Several services have been created to compete with Twitter. Others have been started to help people manage the prodigious flow of information from Twitterers.
There is even a version, Yammer, for use inside companies. You follow the word bursts of particular employees. (“In the weekly staff meeting. Good bagels. Why is everyone wearing khakis? All staff must file their T.P.S. reports on time, O.K.?”) As if there weren’t already enough to distract us in the workplace between meetings, phone calls, instant messages, e-mail messages and those Google searches.
If people question the benefit of Google, which has largely liberated us from the time-wasting activities associated with finding information, there is outright hostility to a tool that condenses our lives into haiku. The co-founder of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, was asked by M.I.T.’s Technology Review magazine — in a tweet, of course — why when people who aren’t familiar with Twitter are told about it, they are “uncomprehending or angry.” His response was brief and unsatisfying: “People have to discover value for themselves. Especially w/ something as simple & subtle as Twitter. It’s what you make of it.”
It is hard to think of a technology that wasn’t feared when it was introduced. In his Atlantic article, Mr. Carr says that Socrates feared the impact that writing would have on man’s ability to think. The advent of the printing press summoned similar fears. It wouldn’t be the last time.
When Hewlett-Packard invented the HP-35, the first hand-held scientific calculator, in 1972, the device was banned from some engineering classrooms. Professors feared that engineers would use it as a crutch, that they would no longer understand the relationships that either penciled calculations or a slide rule somehow provided for proficient scientific thought.
But the HP-35 hardly stultified engineering skills. Instead, in the last 36 years those engineers have brought us iPods, cellphones, high-definition TV and, yes, Google and Twitter. It freed engineers from wasting time on mundane tasks so they could spend more time creating.
Many technological advances have that effect. Take tax software, for instance. The tedious job of filing a tax return no longer requires several evenings, but just a few hours. It gives us time for more productive activities.
But for all the new technologies that increase our productivity, there are others that demand more of our time. That is one of the dialectics of our era. With its maps and Internet access, the iPhone saves us time; with its downloadable games, we also carry a game machine in our pocket. The proportion of time-wasters to time-savers may only grow. In a knowledge-based society in which knowledge is free, attention becomes the valued commodity. Companies compete for eyeballs, that great metric born in the dot-com boom, and vie to create media that are sticky, another great term from this era. We are not paid for our attention span, but rewarded for it with yet more distractions and demands on our time.
THE pessimistic assumption that new technologies will somehow make our lives worse may be a function of occupation or training. Paul Saffo, the futurist, says he could divide the technology world into two kinds of people: engineers and natural scientists. He says the world outlook of the engineer is by nature optimistic. Every problem can be solved if you have the right tools and enough time and you pose the correct questions. Other people, who can be just as scientific, see the natural order of the world in terms of entropy, decline and death.
Those people aren’t necessarily wrong. But the engineer’s point of view puts trust in human improvement. Certainly there have been moments when that thinking has gone horribly awry — atonal music or molecular gastronomy. But over the course of human history, writing, printing, computing and Googling have only made it easier to think and communicate.

Doris Kearns Goodwin - Team of Rivals (2)

I continue to enjoy this Lincoln book. Especially have I enjoyed Goodwin's account of the tense days leading up to the firing on Fort Sumter. This is the clearest account I've read, reinforcing the point of view that Lincoln acted correctly and in accordance to what he said he would do in his inaugural address.

Doris Kearns Goodwin - Team of Rivals

I am into this book and thoroughly enjoying it. It seems that I can't get enough of Lincoln, my favorite President. For the first time, I read that Lincoln was a bowler during his term in Congress 1846-48.


For recreation, Lincoln took up bowling with his fellow boarders. Though a clumsy bowler, according to Dr. Busey, Lincoln "played the game with great zest and spirit" and "accepted success and defeat with good nature and humor." When word spread "that he was in the alley there would assemble numbers of people to witness the fun which was anticipated by those who knew of his fund of anecdotes and jokes." As ever, his quick wit and droll geniality provided a source of "merriment" for everyone around him.

P. 120

The Late Great City of San Francisco

I returned from my latest soiree in San Francisco thinking that the most exciting days of this great American city are probably behind us. I am not saying that San Francisco is in decline; I AM saying that its glory is most likely in its past.

I’ve read about and seen footage of that cataclysmic event of 1907 when The City collapsed like a house of cards. How many cities can claim to have been totally destroyed by an earthquake and then rebuilt from scratch? The sheer thrill of it all!

It was in San Francisco in 1955 when Allen Ginsberg first publicly recited his poem “Howl.” I have no first-hand report from that reading, but I’ve read about how awed the crowd was. If I had been there, THAT would have been something to tell my grandkids about.

We associate Kerouac and The Beats with San Francisco. Though I came along too late to consider myself a Beat, I do identify strongly with their innate philosophy. The word “beat” came from their feeling of being beaten down by the conformity and repression of American society in the 50’s. I feel beaten down by American society in 2008.

In 1966 thousands of young people descended on The City with flowers in their hair heading for Haight-Ashbury. Sex, drugs, & rock and roll was born here. I do have a first-hand report on this one. My former roommate, Young Boozer III, was there, albeit a little late---in 1970. Young grew up in Tuscaloosa---his father Young Boozer, Jr., was on the U of Alabama Board of Trustees---but his Dad sent him to Stanford. Young told me how he visited Haight-Ashbury in that year. By then all you saw, he said, were hippie wannabes, with everyone running around yelling, “Peace, Peace”! and giving the peace sign with one hand while trying to pick tourist’s pockets with the other hand. The fun, he said, was separating the hippie wannabes from the FBI and the CIA operatives who spent their vacations milling around the area in training to be wannabes.

I like to think that in 1966 it was “real.” But then John Lennon said in his song “Strawberry Fields Forever” that “nothing is real.” So who knows.

If something new and novel does come along in San Francisco, the problem is that 400,000 tourists would be there to see it the next day. If you hear of something new and interesting in S.F, better get there early before the herd shows up.

In 1967 we Sixties People had the Summer of Love. Growing up in a small town in Alabama, I had to experience most of it vicariously, but in my mind I associate that summer with San Francisco and Monterrey, Mexico (the Monterrey Pop Festival). Since Mexico is in the process of moving to California, it has all come together in 2008. (The more fortunate South-of-the-Border up-and-comers make it to Alabama)

Rolling Stone magazine was founded in San Francisco in 1967 and remained there for 10 years before removing to New York. If nothing else, S.F. will always have a warm spot in my heart for being the birthplace of all-time favorite magazine. I still have old copies from the 70’s that I pull out of the trunk and read on occasion.

While in San Francisco this time I went looking for a “San Francisco Liberal.” The term seems to be in common usage. The only one I know for sure is Speaker Pelosi, and unfortunately, I did not see her while I was there. I asked the desk clerk when I checked into the hotel if she knew where I could find a San Francisco Liberal, and later I asked the concierge, but neither seemed to know what I was talking about. I asked the bellhop who took my luggage to my room. At least HE laughed, knowing what I was talking about, but said he didn’t know any San Francisco Liberals. You would think that hotel help would be better trained. San Francisco Liberals should be icons along with that bridge they talk so much about and the cable cars. I left S.F. disappointed at not finding a bona fide San Francisco Liberal.

I used to think that if I had the McCain’s money---if I had married a woman with a $100,000,000 beer nest egg---I might have one of my houses in the Bay Area. But no, I think I would pass now. I might have ONE of my 7 houses (was that the last count?) in California, but not in San Francisco. That city’s most exciting days are in the past.

Of course the San Andreas Fault can decide that its next hiccup will be in Northern Cal rather than Southern Cal. In that case, all bets are off.

Ernest J. Gaines - A Lesson Before Dying

This is a strong novel set in Louisiana in Cajun country in the late 1940's about a black man unfairly sentenced to death and the jailhouse friendship between him and Grant Wiggins, a local school teacher. Jefferson, the young black man, has an aunt who wants him to become a man before he dies in the electric chair and Grant is given the job making Jefferson a man. Grant, with personal issues of his own, and Jefferson forge a bond leading to the inevitable conclusion. Both men come to understand the simple heroism of resisting and defying the expected. This is powerful stuff and well worth reading.

CBS says Obama's poll lead grows

(CBS) Democratic nominee Barack Obama's lead over Republican John McCain has grown after the Democratic convention, which 71 percent of Americans say they watched. Obama and his running mate Joe Biden now lead McCain and Sarah Palin 48 percent to 40 percent, according to the latest CBS News poll. This is the first CBS News poll to include the vice presidential candidates in the