In looking for the definition of "teme" yesterday, I came across "Meme, Counter-meme", a great, short, older Wired article by Mike Godwin on the "Nazi-comparison meme" (and countering it):
It was back in 1990 that I set out on a project in memetic engineering. The Nazi-comparison meme, I'd decided, had gotten out of hand--in countless Usenet newsgroups, in many conferences on the Well, and on every BBS that I frequented, the labeling of posters or their ideas as "similar to the Nazis" or "Hitler-like" was a recurrent and often predictable event. It was the kind of thing that made you wonder how debates had ever occurred without having that handy rhetorical hammer...I developed Godwin's Law of Nazi Analogies: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one... (read whole article)
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Oprah.com's got a list of "Five Books Everyone Should Read at Least Once". Her choices (or Oprah.com writer Vince Passaro's choices?): Lolita, T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, The Wisdom of the Desert: Sayings from the Desert Fathers of the Fourth Century, Waiting For Godot, and Things Fall Apart. Huh. I've tried to think of five books I think everyone should read and can't seem to do it. Everyone? Everyone? One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish floats to mind, or maybe Buber's I and Thou. You?
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A list of the top 100 classical hits based on their exposure in "today's pop culture". Also, on Metafilter, What is that song they always use when…?--a list of musical cliches.
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Brilliant idea, so-so execution until the last minute or so (which is worth waiting for): Buffy V. [the creepy] Edward Cullen, a video remix by Rebellious Pixels
2 comments:
very interesting mix of stuff. i didn't know godwin's law was an intentional meme...but i'm not really surprised.
It would be difficult to limit myself to just five books that everyone should read. But I would start with Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein.
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