Category — Quick Reads

Above: One of the entries on Postsecret.com, which has been shortlisted for the Blooker

When is a book not a book? When it’s a blook, of course.

OK, it might seem a bit of silly word but it does describe an increasingly common process — turning popular blogs into books.

Not only does putting your blog into dead tree form mean that there’s a copy in the British Library, but it brings some coffee table gravitas to the otherwise ephemeral world of the interweb.

And so it is that this year’s Blooker Prize — sponsored by on-demand publisher Lulu — rolls around again.

Oh, and did we say the top prize was worth $US15,000?

‘Ah, ye knights of the pen! May honour be your shield, and truth tip your lances! Be gentle to all gentle people. Be modest to women. Be tender to children. And as for the Ogre Humbug, out sword, and have at him’

William Makepeace Thackeray, 1861

Thanks to Roy Greenslade at the Guardian

Worth bookmarking: Worldometers - real time world statistics.

Here you’l find live statistics for world population [including births, deaths, absolute population growth for the day], world expenditure on military, education, production [cars, bicycles, computers, year to date], and details statistics for education, the environment, food, water, energy and health.

Fascinating and absorbing, and scary.

You won’t read it on the front of the New York Times (although they were eager to place under a microscope every salacious inquiry into the marriage of the Clintons).

But you will find it blaring as the front-page stories of the tabloids read by Bush voters in the fly-over states.

“Bush Marriage Over! Laura Erupts After Drinking Binge,” is the cover story of the October 23, 2006, National Examiner.

Read the Buzzflash new analysis here.

“They rediscover bin Laden every two years right before the election. If you had a business strategy that worked all the time that was premised on scaring the living daylights out of people, you just keep doing it.”

– Bill Clinton, in an interview on Bloomberg Television’s Political Capital with Al Hunt, about the Republican strategy for the midterm elections.

A well-hidden secret, the Green Room is a series of opinion pieces on environmental issues running weekly on the BBC News website. Here’s a link to one of the more recent contributions — “The fair choice for climate change” by Aubrey Meyer.

Check the site’s right-hand column for more lively reading. The comments are also well worth a read.