Rintrah roars & shakes his fires in the burden'd air

My favorite new-year pastime, the Buffalo Beast‘s annual “Most Loathsome” list, is now up. It’s a little more brief (and tame) this year, but still a funny read. Some highlights:

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§4940 · January 29, 2010 · (No comments) · Tags: , ,


I became a fan of A.J. Jacobs when I read his debut book, The Know-It-All. The idea of reading the entire encyclopedia was a bit preposterous, but overshadowed by the sheer joy of trivia; I never really thought of it as an experiment per se. Things changed a bit with The Year of Living Biblically, [...]

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§4915 · January 27, 2010 · (No comments) · Tags: , , , , ,


Last Words took about 17 years to write. As the story goes, Carlin commissioned it in 1993 with Tony Hendra, but it wasn’t until Carlin died in 2008 that Hendra finally pulled together all of his recorded conversations, notes, and other materials and cranked out the more or less definitive semiautobiography of George Carlin, and [...]

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§4843 · January 12, 2010 · (No comments) · Tags: , , , , ,


It occurred to me recent that I’ve read and reviewed Al Franken’s 2005 The Truth (With Jokes) three times since the start of this meme (1, 2, 3), but never its predecessor, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, which is arguably an even better book. Conservative pundit Bill O’Reilly hates Media Matters, a [...]

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§3617 · February 28, 2009 · 5 comments · Tags: , , , , , ,


When last we saw a George Carlin book here in A Modest Construct, I was pretty harsh, but I take nothing back: When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops wasn’t a very good book. It was unfortunately indicative of the George Carlin we saw in the few years before his death; gone were the elaborate [...]

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§3602 · February 21, 2009 · 1 comment · Tags: , , ,


I read this book once in 2005 when it came out, and then again in 2006. As this is my third time reading The Truth (With Jokes) since this meme began, it holds a record (as of now) as my most frequently-read book in the 52 Books in 52 Weeks meme. Why read it a [...]

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