From Hoyden About Town comes this post about the 106 most often unread books

What we have here is 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, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish.

I didn’t underline (just because I read it for school doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have read it otherwise) My list after the jump

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 I’m reading it now
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 Who with half a brain could finish this book? Aside from the incredibly stupid idea of objectivism, Ayn Rand is just a phenomonally BAD writer. It reads like fanboy rape fiction
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
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 : a memoir Another really dumb book- I think anyone from a background of poverty could write this book, yet somehow we think Irish poverty is more noble and interesting that our own.
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 I HATE KUNDERA and am sad I read this.
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 Favorite. Austen. Ever!
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

After seeing Cake last night all I want to do is listen to other Spaghetti Western bands with horns.

So here’s a few videos from the Spaghetti Western masters- Calexico

First- Crystal Frontier

And their most awesome cover of Love’s Alone Again Or…

And the Ballad of Cable Hogue

I didn’t get your standard Mother’s day brunch and card this year (thank gawd!). Instead I got free tickets to see Cake at the Paramount and then lots of boozy good times over pitchers of beer and greasy pub food. That is the best Mother’s day present this Mother’s day hating mom has ever recieved.

And I forgot just how many Cake songs fucking rock. So here’s a few to remind you all.

I Want To Love You Madly (for a very special Farm Boy-should you be reading about yourself again)

And of course- How do you afford your rock and roll lifestyle ( I’m friends with the musicians or with the ushers- that’s how I do it)Remember kids- excess ain’t rebellion.

(BTW the above video makes me totally think of the college age Obamabots)

And finally, for Ms. Jay and her fab ghetto bootay. For taking me to the show here is a video just for her.

(I’m not actually kidding about the usher part- at one point I dragged Ms. Jay past the easiest entrance to our seats because “I may have taken that poor usher’s virginity and then not called him back after he asked me if I played Halo”)

Hi Kids! Did you miss me?

I missed you.

So I have some tiny powers of observation even without power (you might have noticed that I knew we had a megatroll boring us all to sobs). RQ is slightly omnipotent.

Let’s all give thanks to our darling mediatrix and a special thanks to the ghost who published my letter to a certain troll for me (from a text I sent to her email no less).

I have always wanted to be the bastard love child of Dorothy parker and Mae West and hold salons full of sharp wit and good manners. I find trolls to be very, very uncouth, much like pissing in the punchbowl. I don’t tolerate atrocious manners from people in real life (you should see me tear into line cutters and parking spot stealers)so someone who comes into a place that I consider my second home behaving badly is a definite no no.

But you, my darling friends and readers, have all shown yourselves to be full of charm and wit and intellect and that is always a plus.

Thanks,
RQ

So i guess posting by phone sucks. Sorry peeps and i’ll try to fix these tomorrow.

Bad news first- I will probably be without power when I get home.

Good news- I can post from my phone. But typing on a tiny phone is rough.

Wish me and the kid luck. At least it’s not January.

While chatting with teh Hot Bulgarian (I wonder if he knows I was bragging about him in a post at Dr. Socks? I also wonder if he knows that according to the media he and I can’t possibly have sex because I am a Hillary supporter, but that’s another topic). Anyways, he asked what a recovering economist was and I thought the best way to describe it was this post from last summer.

HE had to read it so now you do too

Assumptions about power

A good friend once said to me “Economics is the math of self-fulfilling prophecies”. Since she can’t remember saying it (blames red wine) I am stealing it for myself.

Maybe a better way of explaining it is that economics is all about assuming that all actors start from a completely equal place and that all actors follow all the rules all the time.

Tell me, where in history have people ever actually acted like that? Can you? No, because people don’t act like that and people don’t start from the same equal playing field. There is no “law of gravity” when it comes to people’s behavior.

In economics when exceptions start pilling up to disprove a theory (like “trade benefits everyone”) instead of rethinking the theory economists will say “they weren’t following the rules”. But not following the rules is exactly what happens when power is concentrated. Look at any human system- be it politics, education, sex and relationships, employment, sports- anything where there is section of people with enough power (financial, physical, whatever) to alter the rules to their benefit- they will. Women live under the daily fear of rape from all men(when statistically is a small number of men who do most of the raping), employees (who massively outnumber employers) have little ability to alter their pay or benefits on their own, politicians are much more easy influenced by powerful lobbies than individual constituents, sports stars get away with rapes and murders- etc (but not with dog fighting- cause dogs have so much more social capital than women these days).

So a better way of saying “trade benefits everyone” is saying “trade benefits the more powerful actors in a situation”. That is decidedly different from everyone.

I’ll give you an example using corn- my favorite to pick on subsidized crop. We subsidize the hell out of corn, that’s why in America everything is sweetened with corn syrup instead of sugar cane and why ethanol additives in gasoline are from corn products instead of some other plant. Under NAFTA we were going to start shipping out super subsidized (and therefore super cheap) corn to Mexico. Now Mexico is not a corn-free country. You might have had these things called corn tortillas- they come from Mexico, and tamales, also Mexico. For a good chunk of the population, corn is a staple food and a staple crop. But it is not subsidized by the Mexican government. Corn farmers in Mexico do not have a giant agri-business lobby. They are mostly small family farms, the kind we romanticize, but filled with brown people who speak Spanish instead of white people in Iowa.

So the Mexican government agreed to import the subsidized corn as long as the US agreed to pay tariffs on the corn for several years so that corn farmers in Mexico would have a chance to transition to some other form of employment. That’s nice, a little band-aid for the family farms.

But that’s not what happened. Instead Mexican ranchers that wanted cheap feed, tortilla factories and businesses that wanted to switch from locally produced, unsubsidized sugar cane to cheap corn sweeteners got the Mexican government to ignore the tariffs as soon as NAFTA went into effect. Mexican corn farmers were reduced to subsistence farming.

Now an economist would say- they weren’t following the rules (either by subsidizing the corn in the first place or by ignoring the transition tariffs) except that is how most international trade agreements end up. Rules that are meant to protect those with less power are ignored while those with more power benefit. Actually, that phrase right there sums up our entire social structure.

There is an old joke about a chemist, an engineer and an economist stranded on a dessert island with one can of food. The chemist creates a solution that will open the metal of the can. The engineer builds a contraption open the can. The economist says “Assume there is a can opener”.

By making assumptions of a perfect world in order to study economics, we are trying to open a can with an imaginary can opener. There are too many exceptions to economic rules. That is why “math of self-fulfilling prophecies” is so fitting. In math or any other branch of science, if your results didn’t match up to your theories, a new theory would have to be created. In economics, when you results don’t match up to your theories, you can simply discard the parts that don’t fit by claiming they didn’t follow the rules. Therefore all your theories will match your findings regardless of the actual outcome.

UPDATE: After thinking about it some more I really think it should be “Economics is the science of self-fulfilling prophecies” since economics is a social science and is supposed to follow the scientific method (you know, until you start throwing everything out because it didn’t follow the rules).

So my rotten child gave me some horrible version of the flue. I am chock full of snot, I hurt everywhere and I’m not happy.

And my famn damily (namely my brother) is taking his own sweet time getting back to me about helping keep the power on. If I know him, we’ll go a few days with no lights so he can feel righteous before he helps. Or he just won’t help. Wev.

And the Obamabots may have rigged the vote in Gary, IN. And Donna Brazile doesn’t think the Democratic party needs white working class voters or latinos (or women by the way we’ve been treated).

I’m going to bed. Wake me when the revolution starts.

A certain boy (who did not start out with a website whose main focus is the soft core objectification of women) and who thinks he KNOWS more about misogyny than, oh say, ME has been removed from the blogroll.

Apologies to anyone who may have clicked through to there.