Written by Anthony Burch

The title is all the intro you should need.

Indestructibility

It almost goes without saying, but if your hero cannot possibly be killed in any instance which does not somehow involve an incredibly rare space-rock, then you’ve got one boring-ass hero. It’s sort of like watching Neo fight all the agent Smiths in The Matrix Reloaded: we know our hero can’t possibly die, and he doesn’t act like he’s in any danger whatsoever, so the entire fight is a foregone conclusion and the audience becomes bored out of their skulls.

I mean, yeah – we obviously go into most superhero stories more or less positive that the hero won’t die, but they still entertain us because the hero doesn’t know that. Spidey is always scared, even if only a little, that one of the Green Goblin’s pumpkin bombs will be the end of him; Daredevil is fully aware that a well-placed projectile from Bullseye could kill him. As a result, these characters act with restraint and forethought; since Superman knows nothing bad can happen to him no matter what, he acts with no such subtlety. He flies headlong into every conflict, fists thrust forward, because he knows he’s in no immediate danger. Thus, we know he’s in no immediate danger, and we get bored out of our fucking skulls.

Moral absolutism

Superman sez: all criminals are bad. All lawbreakers deserve punishment. If Superman were in charge of the DEA, roughly 70% of college students across the country would be serving time in prison right now.

Superman has no values of his own, so he’s content to just uphold the values of the ruling class; this prevents him from becoming a dangerous vigilante a la Frank Castle, but it also means he has no legitimate opinions of his own where crime is concerned. In Paul Dini’s storybook series on DC superheroes, Batman had to deal with gangland violence, Wonder Woman fights terrorism, and Superman tries to end world hunger. This is no accident – Superman is way too morally simplistic to deal with complex things like the “wars” on drugs or terror. In Batman: War on Crime, Bats comes up against a young boy holding a gun on him. Batman, understanding the complexity of crime and the reasons for its existence, talks the kid into dropping the gun and giving up a life of violence.

Superman would probably just use his heat-vision to melt the gun, then put the kid in prison where he’d become a hard-bitten thug who’d murder somebody a few months after getting out.

Truth, justice, and the Kryptonian way

While Superman represents and upholds the values of right-wing America, he never really earned the right to do so. The dude’s a foreigner who took it upon himself to act as mankind’s savior when, generally, mankind shouldn’t need him (note, of course, that a significant number of the catastrophes which assault Metropolis on a weekly basis are initiated with the intent of fighting Superman – if Supes wasn’t around, a lot of the criminal bullshit wouldn’t be, either).

In the movie Superman Returns, Lois Lane writes an article explaining why mankind doesn’t need Superman because we should be able to take care of ourselves, and the presence of an omnipotent superhero basically takes all responsibility off the human race and turns us into a bunch of helpless sheep, powerless to do anything but scream for help from our savior in times of crisis. She eventually decides this viewpoint is incorrect if only because she wants to bone Superman so badly, but the argument remains relevant no matter what.

Really, what lessons do the Superman comics teach? It says that mankind is full of dull, pointless weaklings and evildoers who can only be stopped by a white ubermensch from another planet, who didn’t work a day in his life in order to achieve his powers. Yeah, you could say he’s a symbol of “hope,” but not hope in human nature – hope in an all-powerful alien who saves the world daily so you don’t have to get off your butt and act like a moral person. What sort of message is that?

Powers given < powers earned

What’s the virtue in acting like a badass hero if you were born with the ability to be a badass hero? What’s more impressive: the football player who trains for years and years just to play one game of pro football, or the guy who was born with innate athletic talent?

The answer is obvious, of course – powers earned are infinitely more impressive than intrinsic superpowers. Even though many superheroes do not “choose” their powers – from Spider-Man to Green Lantern, it’s usually just happy accident that these normal schlubs get turned into superheroes – it’s still a hell of a boring cop-out to simply be born with the ability to leap tall buildings in a single bound. It’s just not terribly impressive, and requires zero effort. If Superman is capable of catching bullets with his teeth mere moments after landing on Earth, isn’t that a lot more boring than Bruce Wayne training for years and years, and using most of his fortune, to become Batman?

Hell, for that matter:

Batman > Superman

Batman had a much more tragic childhood (watching your parents die is infinitely worse than hearing your biological parents died without ever having met them), his crimefighting style is based more on intelligence and planning that Superman’s brute force, and he’s actually kicked the living shit out of Superman at least twice. Batman exhibits more moral maturity than Superman: Superman always upholds the status quo, but in Year One Batman goes on a crusade against Gotham’s corrupt elite. Batman is a detective, a scientist, a master of disguise, and a martial arts expert; Superman is a burly asshole in a red cape with big muscles.

And it’s not even a matter of Batman being a necessarily darker character than Superman, at least where it really counts. Both characters steadfastly refuse to kill their enemies under any circumstances; it’s just a hell of a lot harder for Batman, which makes his attitude toward mercy all the more admirable. It’s no problem at all for Superman to fly into the air holding a criminal by the scruff of their neck as their bullets bounce off him, but Batman has to disarm his baddies, then incapacitate them, then give them to the police, all while avoiding their knives and gunfire and explosives. It’s five times harder for Batman to do anything which Superman takes for granted on a daily basis, yet he often does it a hell of a lot better.

And let’s not forget The Dark Knight Returns, wherein Batman brilliantly beat Clark Kent almost to death (pausing only to fake his own) by using a mixture of planning and ingenuity that even Lex Luthor isn’t really capable of. Even if we were to judge superhero quality solely by who could beat who in a fight, then Batman still wins, hands down.

To fix these problems is to turn him into another superhero altogether

I used to be okay with Superman, if only because I believed that, one day, a writer might come along and turn Superman into a complex, three-dimensional being with flaws. A superhero with legitimate, kryptonite-unrelated weaknesses. A superhero who, every once in a while, actually loses.

Then I read the above strip from Dinosaur Comics and realized the futility of it all.

Superman represents hope and indefatigable strength, and any attempt to complicate these issues would no longer make him Superman. By definition, Superman has to be boring and morally absolute because if he isn’t, he ain’t Superman. I mean, in Kingdom Come he’s momentarily called to task for getting angry at the UN and threatening to kill the world leaders for killing Captain Marvel, but he’s talked down from doing anything irrational within, like, two pages of initially getting the idea to fuck up the United Nations. Heck, Superman’s arc in Kingdom Come isn’t even anything deeper than “America has forgotten me and I them, and we need to restore faith in one another.” Wow – real interesting. While you’re doing that, Batman will be over in the corner, contemplating suicide.

Written by Profiles Blog

Money, We all Want it, But those who Have it sure as heck don’t Photograph themselves standing in the mirror holding a couple hundred bucks with the caption “ima rich azz nigga”:

Here are todays Money hungry Profile Gansta’s:

This dude with a high school education, claims to make $250,000 a year. Pretty impressive for someone who wrote the following blog entry about Barrack Obama:
“I iz guna b votN repUblikaN dis elektion cUz obaMa b uh fraUd. dat dur neRd b uH wanNba OG GanGsTa, he nahT no waT eet B lyke awn da streeTz lYke mi n mI BOiz duz. He b Uh ImposTa n b Uh disGraCe 2 uz blaK peePz evreewhur”

——–

23 years old – Income over $250,000
“IM 23 YEARS OLD I LIKE CHILLIN GOING 2 THE CLUB N SHIT N IM A EASY GOING ASS NIGGA IF U DONT GET MY TIMING WRONG I GOT A GOOD JOB I WORK FOR THE CITY OF BOYNTON IM ASS REAL AS IT GOING TO GET!!!!!GET AT ME!!!!!”

Wow, who knew that the city of Fort Lauderdale offered college dropouts $250,000 a year job. Must be the Size XXXXXL shirt he’s wearing.

——–

Should be proud of himself. 19 Year old High school dropout with a gun and $380 in his hand. He brags about being crack dealer at 19!
——–

Caption under this Picture “GET CHA CA$H UP NIGGA”- CAUSE BITCH WE EATIN”
This guy 22 Year old, with no college education claims to make $250,000 a year. Learn to talk first!

——–

Wow about $350 in your hands, thats impressive. Graduated HS 8 months ago and already making over $250,000 per year. Come on man, if you are making $250,000 a yeah I would expect at least a few hundreds in there, or maybe a gold chain or something.

Collected by Telegraph

From classics and sci-fi to poetry, biographies and books that changed the world… we present the ultimate reading list. Illustrations by David Juniper

CLASSICS

The Illiad and The Odyssey
Homer

Set during the Trojan War, The Iliad combines battle scenes with a debate about heroism; Odysseus’ thwarted attempts to return to Ithaca when the war ends form The Odyssey. Its symbolic evocation of human life as an epic journey homewards has inspired everything from James Joyce’s Ulysses to the Coen brothers’ film, O Brother Where Art Thou?.

The Barchester Chronicles
Anthony Trollope

A story set in a fictional cathedral town about the squabbles and power struggles of the clergy? It doesn’t sound promising, but Trollope’s sparklingly satirical novels are among the best-loved books of all time.

Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen

Heroine meets hero and hates him. Is charmed by a cad. A family crisis – caused by the cad – is resolved by the hero. The heroine sees him for what he really is and realises (after visiting his enormous house) that she loves him. The plot has been endlessly borrowed, but few authors have written anything as witty or profound as Pride and Prejudice.

Gulliver’s Travels
Jonathan Swift

Swift’s scathing satire shows humans at their worst: whether diminished (in Lilliput) or grossly magnified (in Brobdingnag). Our capacity for self-delusion – personified by the absurdly pompous Gulliver – makes this darkest of novels very funny.

Jane Eyre
Charlotte Brontë

Cruelty, hypocrisy, dashed hopes: Jane Eyre faces them all, yet her individuality triumphs. Her relationship with Rochester has such emotional power that it’s hard to believe these characters never lived.

War and Peace
Tolstoy

Tolstoy’s masterpiece is so enormous even the author said it couldn’t be described as a novel. But the characters of Andrei, Pierre and Natasha – and the tragic and unexpected way their lives intersect – grip you for all 1,400 pages.

David Copperfield
Charles Dickens

David’s journey to adulthood is filled with difficult choices – and a huge cast of characters, from the treacherous Steerforth to the comical Mr Micawber.

Vanity Fair
William Makepeace Thackeray

‘”I’m no Angel,” answered Miss Rebecca. And to tell the truth, she was not.’ Whether we should judge the cunning, amoral Becky Sharp – or the hypocritical society she inhabits – is the question.

Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert

Flaubert’s finely crafted novel tells the story of Emma, a bored provincial wife who comforts herself with shopping and affairs. It doesn’t end well.

Middlemarch
George Eliot

Dorothea wastes her youth on a creepy, elderly scholar. Lydgate marries the beautiful but self-absorbed Rosamund. George Eliot’s characters make terrible mistakes, but we never lose empathy with them.

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POETRY

Sonnets
Shakespeare

Shakespeare’s sonnets contain some of poetry’s most iconic lines – and a mysterious insight into his personal life.

Divine Comedy
Dante

Dante Alighieri’s epic tale of one man’s journey into the afterlife is considered Italy’s finest literary export.

Canterbury Tales
Chaucer

These humorous tales about fictional pilgrims made an important contribution to English literature at a time when court poetry was written in either Anglo-Norman or Latin.

The Prelude
William Wordsworth

This posthumously published work is both an autobiographical journey and a fragment of history from the revolutionary and post-revolutionary years.

Odes
John Keats

Littered with sensuous descriptions of nature’s beauty, Keats’s odes also pose profound philosophical questions.

The Waste Land
T. S. Eliot

Eliot’s vision of dystopia became a literary landmark, and introduced new techniques to the modern poet. He remains one of the defining figures of 20th-century poetry.

Paradise Lost
John Milton

Since its publication in 1667, Milton’s 12-book English epic – in which he sets out to ‘justify the ways of God to men’ – has been considered a classic.

Songs of Innocence and Experience
William Blake

Blake’s short poems are simple in rhythm and rhyme, but sophisticated in meaning. Written during a time of political turmoil, they embody his radical sympathies and anti-dualist ideas.

Collected Poems
W. B. Yeats

Considered a driving force in the revival of Irish literature, Yeats fruitfully engages the topics of youth, love, nature, art and war.

Collected Poems
Ted Hughes

Although Hughes was a colossal presence among the English literary landscape – his work often draws upon the forbidding Yorkshire countryside of his youth – his personal life had a tendency to overshadow his talent.

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LITERARY FICTION

The Portrait of a Lady
Henry James

James’s mastery of psychology has never been more elegantly expressed nor more gripping than in his tale of Isabel Archer, a young American in search of her destiny, and Gilbert Osmond, the ultimate cold fish and one of literature’s most repellent villains.

A la recherche du temps perdu
Proust

A novel whose every sentence can be a struggle to finish may sound forbidding, but this masterpiece of modernity, taking us into every nook and cranny of the narrator’s fascinating mind, is worth all the effort.

Ulysses
James Joyce

Banned in Britain and America for its depiction of female masturbation, Joyce’s Ulysses takes its scatological stand at the pinnacle of modernist literature. Lyrical and witty, its stream-of-consciousness narration deters many, but makes enraptured enthusiasts of others.

For Whom the Bell Tolls
Ernest Hemingway

A sparse, masculine, world-weary meditation on death, ideology and the savagery of war in general, and the Spanish civil war in particular.

Sword of Honour trilogy
Evelyn Waugh

A poignant, ironic study of the disintegration of aristocratic values in the face of blank bureaucracy and Second World War butchery, Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen and Unconditional Surrender are Waugh’s crowning achievements.

The Ballad of Peckham Rye
Muriel Spark

Comic, satirical and ineffably odd, Spark’s fifth novel introduces Dougal Douglas, ghost-writer, researcher, mysterious figure of Satanic magnetism and mayhem, to the upper working-class/ lower middle-class milieu of Peckham.

Rabbit series
John Updike

We first meet Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom in Rabbit, Run, as a boorish, unhappy former basketball jock who runs from (and to) his pregnant wife. The novels that follow cover 30 years and make up the great study of American manhood.

One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel García Márquez

The greatest moment in magical realist fiction, García Márquez’s passionate, humorous history of Macondo and its founding family, the Buendías, has the seductive power of myth.

Beloved
Toni Morrison

Morrison brought to life a version of the slave narrative that has become a classic. Her tour de force of guilt, abandonment and revenge plays out against the background of pre-emancipation American life.

The Human Stain
Philip Roth

Roth’s brilliant, angry dissection of race, disgrace and hypocrisy in Clinton-Lewinsky era America brings to a close his grand and meticulous American trilogy (American Pastoral, I Married a Communist).

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ROMANTIC FICTION

Rebecca: the narrator is haunted by the housekeeper’s worship of her predecessor

Rebecca
Daphne du Maurier

Cornish estate owner Maximilian de Winter’s second wife – also the nameless narrator – is haunted by the housekeeper’s oppressive worship of her predecessor, Rebecca. A masterful tale of suspense.

Le Morte D’Arthur
Thomas Malory

Malory’s yarn explores the possibility that chivalry is best revealed by a knight’s loyalty to his fellow knights, and not simply his devotion to a woman.

Les Liaisons Dangereuses
Choderlos de Laclos

Paris in the 18th century: the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont concoct a scheme of seduction to entrap members of the aristocracy. Their roguish machinations lead to their climactic undoing.

I, Claudius
Robert Graves

An invented autobiographical account of Claudius, the fourth emperor of ancient Rome. Graves draws upon the historical texts of Tacitus and Suetonius to write Claudius’s story after claiming a visitation from the ancient ruler in his dreams.

Alexander Trilogy
Mary Renault

Renault transports readers to Ancient Greece in a historical trilogy that presents the life and legacy of Alexander the Great in a humanising fictional portrait.

Master and Commander
Patrick O’Brian

Set during the Napoleonic Wars, O’Brian’s books journey the seas with Commander Aubrey and his crew aboard HMS Sophie. The novel follows Aubrey’s convincing and complex friendship with Maturin, the ship’s surgeon, as they fight enemies and storms.

Gone with the Wind
Margaret Mitchell

Scarlett O’Hara manipulates her way through the American civil war. This selfish, but gutsy heroine idealises the unattainable Ashley before realising her love for her third husband, Rhett, who dismisses her with, ‘My dear, I don’t give a damn.’

Dr Zhivago
Boris Pasternak

Yuri Zhivago loves two women, his wife, Tonya, and the captivating Lara. Pasternak juxtaposes romance with the stark brutality of the Russian civil war in this extraordinary historical epic.

Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Thomas Hardy

Disgraced by an illegitimate child, Tess is tainted with shame and guilt, which destroys her marriage to Angel Clare. She emerges as a tragic heroine, incapable of escaping the hypocrisy of Victorian society.

The Plantagenet Saga
Jean Plaidy

A collection of novels inspired by the Plantagenet dynasty. Jean Plaidy is one of the many noms de plume of Eleanor Alice Burford Hibbert, the celebrated historical fiction writer, who died in 1993.

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CHILDREN’S BOOKS

Swallows and Amazons
Arthur Ransome

Four children sail to Wildcat Island, where they encounter a rival camping party then join forces to hunt treasure. Robinson Crusoe meets The Famous Five in a tale of sailing and ginger beer.

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
C.S. Lewis

Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy discover the land of Narnia and the malevolent White Witch. The novel uses Christian iconography in Aslan’s dramatic sacrifice and resurrection. Edmund’s transition from self-interested schoolboy to heroic young man is also resonantly spiritual.

The Lord of the Rings
J.R. R. Tolkien

Frodo and friends journey to Mordor to destroy the ring, making the young Hobbit one of the greatest fictional heroes of all time. More than 100million copies have been sold of the trilogy that brought fantasy to a mainstream literary audience.

His Dark Materials
Philip Pullman

Will is a boy from Oxford. Lyra is a girl from Oxford in a parallel world. Together they have an epic adventure spanning parallel universes. The trilogy has inspired criticism for being heretical – Pullman himself declared the books were about ‘killing God’.

Babar
Jean de Brunhoff

Babar brings clothes and cars (and Madame) from Paris to his African kingdom. With his family and the wise Cornelius by his side, Babar protects his land from the Rhino King Rataxes. The big, beautiful books are enriched by Brunhoff’s wonderful illustrations.

	The Railway Children: the children adapt to a poverty-stricken life helped by waving to trains

The Railway Children
E. Nesbit

Nesbit’s classic, made famous by the 1970 film, tells of how Bobby, Phyllis and Pete, missing their beloved father, adapt to a poverty-stricken life in the country, helped by Mr Perks, the Old Gentleman, and by waving to the train.

Winnie-the-Pooh
A.A. Milne

The Silly Old Bear, with his friends in Hundred Acre Wood, is more than a British institution. A.A. Milne created a life philosophy with the trials, triumphs and tiddley-poms of the honey-loving, always kind-hearted Pooh.

Harry Potter
J.K. Rowling

The boy wizard’s dealings with the forces of adolescence and evil have sold more than 350million books in 65 languages. The Harry Potter phenomenon has its detractors, but the success of special ‘grown-up’ covers, allowing commuters to read Rowling without shame, tells its own tale.

The Wind in the Willows
Kenneth Grahame

Lonely and miserable trying to clean his hole, Mole ventures outside. He meets Ratty, Toad and Badger, and embarks on a new life defending Toad Hall from the weasels, protecting Toad from himself and messing about in boats.

Treasure Island
Robert Louis Stevenson

The piratical coming of age of Jim Hawkins, who discovers a map of Treasure Island among an old sea captain’s possessions – and then follows it. Parrots, ‘pieces of eight’ and the lovable, but morally ambiguous Long John Silver.

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SCI-FI

Frankenstein
Mary Shelley

The great genius of Shelley’s novel has often been overwhelmed by images of schlocky bolt-necked ‘Frankensteins’. Brought to life by Dr Victor Frankenstein, Shelley’s creature is part gothic monster, part Romantic hero.

Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
Jules Verne

Among the deep-sea volcanoes, shoals of swirling fish, giant squid and sharks, Captain Nemo steers the Nautilus. Nemo is the renegade scientist par excellence, a man madly inventive in his quest for revenge.

The Time Machine
H.G. Wells

A seminal work of dystopian fiction, Wells’s tale of the voyages of the Time Traveller in the distant future (AD802,701) is also a cracking adventure story.

Brave New World
Aldous Huxley

Ignorance is far from bliss in Huxley’s terrible vision of a future of rampant consumerism, worthless free love, routine drug use and cultural passivity.

1984: chilling, wry and romantic, Orwell’s novel is a passionate cry for freedom

1984
George Orwell

So persuasive and chilling was the world summoned up here that ‘Orwellian’ has entered the language as shorthand for government control. Chilling, wry and romantic, it is above all a passionate cry for freedom.

The Day of the Triffids
John Wyndham

Shifty Soviets and the clipped vernacular make this a Fifties horror story. But as humans cope with disasters (mass blinding by meteor shower; ruthless walking, flesh-eating plants) the tale becomes taut, terrifying, and far from ridiculous.

Foundation
Isaac Asimov

‘Great Galaxy!’ It is not for literary brilliance that one approaches the first in the Foundation series, but rather for the sweeping grandeur of Asimov’s epic universe-wide tale of the decline and fall of empires. Once you’ve finished this, 14 novels and countless more short stories await.

2001: A Space Odyssey
Arthur C. Clarke

The first in Clarke’s quartet was written as a novel and, in collaboration with Stanley Kubrick, as a film script. As the Discovery One mission drifts towards Saturn, Clarke creates the embodiment of the perils of computer technology, HAL9000.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Philip K. Dick

Dick’s masterpiece questions what it is that distinguishes us as human, as we follow Rick Deckard on his mission to ‘retire’ recalcitrant androids. Spawned Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner.

Neuromancer
William Gibson

A violent slab of cyberpunk sci-fi, in which techie activities (artificial intelligence, hacking, virtual reality) are married with a grimy, anarchic, slangy sensibility, and a cast of hustlers, hackers and junkies trying to make sense of a world ruled by corporations.

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CRIME

The Talented Mr Ripley
Patricia Highsmith

Tom Ripley is one of 20th-century literature’s most disturbingly fascinating characters: a suave, charming serial killer, who’s utterly amoral in his pursuit of la dolce vita.

	The Maltese Falcon: a tale of greed and deceit, complete with flawed hero and femme fatale

The Maltese Falcon
Dashiell Hammett

A tale of greed and deceit that’s also the archetypal work of 20th-century detective fiction: complete with flawed hero (Sam Spade), femme fatale and a convoluted plot that unravels grippingly.

The Complete Sherlock Holmes
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

It’s one of literature’s most wonderful ironies that Conan Doyle himself became a spiritualist so soon after creating the most famously rational character in all literature.

The Big Sleep
Raymond Chandler

His oeuvre may be small, but with the help of long-time protagonist PI Philip Marlowe – who appears here for the first time – Chandler helped define the genres of detective fiction and, later, film noir.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
John le Carré

Le Carré, master of the Cold War novel, follows British spymaster George Smiley as he tries to uncover a Moscow mole, and faces his KGB nemesis, Karla.

Red Dragon
Thomas Harris

Hannibal Lecter’s second literary appearance sees him called upon by old FBI chum (and near-victim) Will Graham, to help solve the case of the serially morbid ‘Tooth Fairy’.

Murder on the Orient Express
Agatha Christie

From Istanbul to London, Hercule Poirot’s little grey cells rattle away to improbable effect as he untangles the mystery of the life and violent death of a sinister passenger.

The Murders in the Rue Morgue
Edgar Allan Poe

Poe’s blackly ingenious tale of brutal murder in 19th-century Paris establishes C. Auguste Dupin, a man of ‘peculiar analytic ability’, as the model for pretty much every intellectual detective to come.

The Woman in White
Wilkie Collins

A sensational 19th-century epistolary tale of women in peril adds one of the most charismatic, refined and straightforwardly fat villains to the pantheon.

Killshot
Elmore Leonard

Leonard is known for his pithy dialogue and freaky characters. Here he manages to create a sweatily suspenseful thriller, with a married couple as the unexpected heroes.

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BOOKS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD

Das Kapital
Karl Marx

His thinking may not be as popular as it was in the Sixties and Seventies, but it’s as relevant. The cardinal critique of the capitalist system.

The Rights of Man
Tom Paine

Written during the heady days of the French Revolution, Paine’s pamphlet – by introducing the concept of human rights – remains one of modern democracy’s fundamental texts.

The Social Contract
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

‘Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.’ How are we to reconcile our individual rights and freedoms with living in a society?

Democracy in America
Alexis de Tocqueville

This treatise looked to the new country’s flourishing democracy in the early 19th century and the progressive model it offered ‘old’ Europe.

On War
Carl von Clausewitz

The first, and probably still foremost, treatise on the art of modern warfare. The Prussian general looked beyond the battlefield to war’s place in the broader political context.

The Prince: the ultimate mandate for politicians who value power above justice

The Prince
Niccolo Machiavelli

Written during his exile from the Florentine Republic, Machiavelli’s bible of realpolitik offers the ultimate mandate for those (still-too-many) politicians who value keeping power above dispensing justice.

Leviathan
Thomas Hobbes

Hobbes’s call for rule by an absolute sovereign may not sound too progressive, but it was based on the then-groundbreaking belief that all men are naturally equal.

On the Interpretation of Dreams
Sigmund Freud

Drawing on his own dreams, plus those of his patients, Freud asserted that dreams – by tapping into our unconscious – held the key to understanding what makes us tick.

On the Origin of Species
Charles Darwin

No other book has so transformed how we look at the natural world and mankind’s origins.

L’Encyclopédie
Diderot, et al

Subtitled ‘A Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Crafts’, with contributions by Voltaire, Montesquieu, Diderot and others, the 35-volume encyclopedia was the ultimate document of Enlightenment thought.

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BOOKS THAT CHANGED YOUR WORLD

	Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: a feel-good memoir that became the biggest-selling philosophy book of all time

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Robert M. Pirsig

Pirsig’s feel-good memoir about a father-son motorcycle trip across America became the biggest-selling philosophy book of all time.

Jonathan Livingston Seagull
Richard Bach

Bach’s fable about a dreamy seagull called Jonathan, who seeks to soar above the ideology of his flock, became a New Age classic, and is dedicated to the ‘real seagull in all of us’.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Douglas Adams

Originally broadcast on Radio 4, this quotable comedy about a hapless Englishman and his alien friend proved that sci-fi could be clever and funny.

The Tipping Point
Malcolm Gladwell

Gladwell uses everything from teenage smoking to Sesame Street to show how one person’s small idea, or way of thinking, can spark a social epidemic.

The Beauty Myth
Naomi Wolf

Wolf, the controversial American feminist (and teenage victim of anorexia), argues that women’s insecurities stem from society’s demands on them either to be beautiful or face judgment.

How to Cook
Delia Smith

The cookery queen’s series is credited with teaching culinary delinquents how to prepare good wholesome food from scratch. Her latest book, How to Cheat at Cooking, does the opposite.

A Year in Provence
Peter Mayle

For those who’ve dreamt of leaving it all to live in the South of France, expat Peter Mayle’s diary offers a dose of reality, from unexpected snowfalls to an algae-coated swimming pool.

A Child Called ‘It’
Dave Pelzer

Pelzer’s graphic account of his abusive childhood topped the bestseller lists worldwide. Since then, he’s had to fight off accusations of embellishment and fantasy from family members.

Eats, Shoots and Leaves
Lynne Truss

In an attempt to stamp out poor punctuation, Truss compiled a lively and useful account for all those in doubt about how to use an apostrophe.

Schott’s Original Miscellany
Ben Schott

Dip into Schott’s compendium of trivia and impress your friends with such questions as, ‘Do you know who makes the Queen’s pork sausages?’ The answer: Musks of Newmarket.

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HISTORY

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Edward Gibbon

Compressing 13 turbulent centuries into one epic narrative, this is often labelled the first ‘modern’ history book. Gibbon fell back on sociology, rather than superstition, to explain Rome’s demise.

A History of the English-Speaking Peoples
Winston Churchill

Taking us from Caesar’s 55BC invasion to the Boer War’s end in 1902, Churchill’s four-volume saga makes the proud, but now-unfashionable, connection between speaking English and bearing ‘the torch of Freedom’.

A History of the Crusades
Steven Runciman

Still the landmark account of the Crusades, Byzantine scholar Runciman’s work broke with centuries of Western tradition, claiming the crusading invaders were guilty of a ‘long act of intolerance in the name of God’.

The Histories
Herodotus

Ostensibly about Greece’s defeat of the invading Persians in the 5th century BC, it blends fact, hearsay, legend and myth to tell tales of life in and around Ancient Greece.

The History of the Peloponnesian War
Thucydides

Famously fastidious over the reliability of his data and sources, Thucydides – with this detailed study of the 25-year struggle between Athens and Sparta – set the template for every historian after him.

Seven Pillars of Wisdom
T. E. Lawrence

Lawrence of Arabia’s fascinating, self-mythologising account of how he united a string of Arab tribes and successfully led them to rebellion against their Ottoman overlords.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

Compiled at King Alfred’s behest in the AD890s, this is the earliest-known history of England written in old English. It’s also the oldest history of any European country in a vernacular language.

A People’s Tragedy
Orlando Figes

Figes charts the Russian Revolution in stark detail, telling the tale of ‘ordinary people’ and boldly concluding that they ‘weren’t the victims of the Revolution but protagonists in its tragedy’.

Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution
Simon Schama

Before he was on television, Prof Schama offered 948 pages of proof that there was more to the French Revolution than fraternity, equality and eating cake.

The Origins of the Second World War
A.J.P. Taylor

Was Hitler all that bad? Wasn’t he just an opportunist who took advantage of Anglo-French dithering and appeasement? The label ‘iconoclastic’ applies to few historians so well as it does to Taylor.

---

LIVES

Confessions
St Augustine

In probably the first autobiography in Western literature, the Church Father recounts his life-journey from sinner to saint, from the boy who stole pears from a neighbour’s tree to the articulator of key Christian doctrines.

Lives of the Caesars
Suetonius

Charting the lives of Julius Caesar, Augustus and the 10 subsequent Roman emperors, with scandalous tales of imperial decadence, vice and lunacy.

Lives of the Artists
Vasari

The history of Italian Renaissance art, as told through the biographies of its heavyweight practitioners.

If This is a Man
Primo Levi

His background as an industrial chemist from Turin may not sound remarkable, but Levi’s poised account of his hell-on-earth experiences as a prisoner at Auschwitz undoubtedly is.

Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man
Siegfried Sassoon

He’s best known for his anti-war poems, but Sassoon was also once popular for his semi-autobiographical trilogy of novels, of which this was the first.

Eminent Victorians
Lytton Strachey

Strachey didn’t do hagiography. His unflattering biographical essays on major Victorian figures debunked the myth of Victorian pre-eminence.

A Life of Charlotte Brontë
Elizabeth Gaskell

A biography of the intriguing Jane Eyre author, by her friend and fellow-novelist, Gaskell. One of the definitive ‘tortured genius’ biographies.

Goodbye to All That
Robert Graves

A friend of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, Graves was another Englishman to write unsparingly about the horrors of trench warfare.

The Life of Dr Johnson
Boswell

He’s one of English literature’s all-time heavyweights, but most of what we know about Samuel Johnson, the man, comes from his friend Boswell’s hearty anecdotal biog.

Diaries
Alan Clark

The late Tory MP was not one to get bogged down in matters of policy. His indiscreet memoirs detailed countless extra-marital affairs and character assassinations of colleagues.

Written by Alistair Croll This article is from gigaom

We oft en think of the Internet as a platform for unfettered global communication, where information flows freely, innovators can launch new applications at will, and everyone can have a voice. But it’s unlikely that our children’s Internet will look anything like what we have now.

How might the Internet as we know it die? Here are 10 possibilities.

1. Someone subverts the Domain Name Service. The Internet relies on DNS. But if someone broke – or worse, subverted – the fundamental way in which we find web sites, we wouldn’t trust URLs any more. Phishing would be easy. Own the DNS and you own the Internet.
2. Zombie networks attack! Untold numbers of enslaved PCs are waiting to do the bidding of shadowy hackers. Matt Sergeant of MessageLabs puts the size of the Storm botnet at between five and 10 million machines (though others peg the size of the network at much less.) Today, bots fill our inboxes with spam. But in the past, they’ve been used to take out companies and countries and to blackmail sites. In the end, it’s an arms race in which only one side has to play by the rules.
3. Massive physical infrastructure failure. If an accident involving a couple of cables in the Mediterranean can make the Internet unusable for hundreds of millions, imagine what an intentional attack could do.
4. Death by a thousand fragments: Ever since Usenet, people have been grouping together with those who think like them. In his book “The Big Switch,” Nicholas Carr cites one study that claimed more than 90 percent of the links originating within either the conservative or liberal community stay within that community. Some link referral tools can even be configured to keep visitors on sites with the same world view. The end result? Islands of like-minded people, increasingly sure there is only one right answer and that they’re in sole possession of it. And an end to the dreams of a global community envisioned by the Internet’s creators.
5. A really good virus breaks the routers. The Internet’s self-healing mechanisms rely on the Border Gateway Protocol, or BGP. But what if someone gets inside the routers? In a 2006 NANOG presentation, Cisco looked at claims of vulnerability and concluded that “the most damaging attacks are caused by the deliberate misconfiguration of a trusted router.” Corrupt BGP, and you not only stop the Internet from forwarding traffic, you interfere with our ability to get to the routers and fix them.
6. Updates break how updates work. Most software these days is designed to patch itself and remain current. But sometimes the process of automated upgrades triggers its own problems. On Aug. 16, 2007, Skype went down in what the company claimed was a side effect of a massive automatic update to Windows. It’s only a matter of time before an update makes a fundamental piece of software, like a networking stack, unable to update itself, cutting off millions and requiring manual intervention.
7. The Net stops being neutral. If the carriers start to charge us for access to sites the way cable companies charge for premium television, pretty soon you’ll have a “Google fee” on your monthly bill. This already happens with many mobile phones that feature the services of Facebook and YouTube. It’s perhaps the most insidious death, because it would signal the end of innovation – no one would be able to launch the next Skype, Twitter or YouTube without the tacit approval of carriers.
8. The lawyers get involved. The Internet has been an experiment in free speech. That may be coming to an end. Unable to go after the sites themselves, lawyers go after the hosters and registrars. That’s how Swiss banking group Julius Baer took whistleblower Wikileaks off the air. And once there’s precedent, others are sure to follow. The recording industry is already wondering if it can go after carriers for enabling copyright infringement. This is the irony of Net Neutrality: When telcos start treating different bytes differently, they aren’t “common carriers” and may be liable for what they transmit, including illegal content. So they’ll comply.
9. Walled gardens: Many countries already restrict how the Internet is used. China’s firewall – which includes 30,000 people tasked with finding improper users – is a good example. But the Internet is a tool for social change and revolution that could threaten any government. Imagine, for example, a U.S. Congress that outlaws online pornography and blocks known adult sites (which accounted for 18.8 percent of all web visits in 2004, according to Hitwise, although the U.S. government says that figure is actually a mere 1 percent.) Instead of a global Internet, we’d have a return to localized standards of decency imposed by legislators. It’d be like “Dirty Dancing” all over again.
10. Humans take themselves out: As Discover Magazine pointed out years ago, we’ve got plenty of ways to do ourselves in, from nukes to plagues to sucking ourselves into a black hole of our own making. And what’s an Internet without users?

The Internet has already morphed from its initial aspirations of open academia to a commercial platform controlled by corporations and carriers. In many ways, the time between the start of ARPAnet in 1969 and the end of Netscape this past February is just a brief period in history that the Facebook generation won’t miss.

Written by Jeff & Patrick This article is from collegehumor

Some jokes are funny because they’re true. Here are seven jokes that were funny because they weren’t true, yet.

Joke: The Chris Rock Show (1997)

Reality: OJ Simpson’s “If I Did It, Here’s How It Happened” (2006)

In their first ever sketch, the writers of HBO’s “The Chris Rock Show” really did predict that OJ would one day come clean and tell us with a wink how everything happened. Chris Rock’s comedy was always fearless – his guest for that premiere episode was Johnnie Cochran. There was a little bit of luck in how close Chris came to foretelling the future, but it wasn’t magic. He just extrapolated OJ’s smug attitude and thought, “Where is this heading, and how can we take it one step further?” Unfortunately, like so many writers on this list, they underestimated how far their subject would go.

Unfortunately, Pootie Tang has yet to come true.

Joke: Mr. Show’s “Blowing Up The Moon” (1997)

Reality: Toby Keith’s Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American” (2001)

When “Mr. Show”s Bob Odenkirk and David Cross wanted to lampoon the aggressive American pride of country music in 1996, they wrote “Blew Moon,” a patriotic music video by “C.S. Lewis, Jr.” Lewis celebrates an absurd NASA plan to blow up our lunar neighbor by standing in front of the Stars and Stripes with a guitar and warning the celestial object, “You don’t mess around with God’s America.” It was therefore surprising when, five years later, real-life country musician Toby Keith, in an equally pompous though far less ironic move, decided the best way to respond to our crucial post-9/11 international relations was by throwing on a Stetson hat and informing the Middle East, “We’ll put a boot in your ass.” Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue” expresses a nationalistic desire to do to every country east of Turkey what “Blew Moon” wanted to do to a heavenly body. And while the Moon may seem the more foolish target, unlike the Middle East, it doesn’t have Kalishnikovs and angry Muslims.

Joke: The Onion’s “Fuck Everything We’re Doing Five Blades” by the CEO of Gillette (February 2004)

Reality: The five-bladed Gillette Fusion (January 2006)

The Onion’s classic “Fuck Everything, We’re Doing Five Blades” wasn’t the first time someone predicted razors growing out of control. MAD Magazine did an article about a seventy-six bladed razor in 1979, and twenty years later MADtv produced a fake commercial for the relatively tame Mach 20. The Onion’s article still feels the most prescient. They predicted not only the number of blades in Gilette’s Fusion line of razors, but also the Lubrastrip (“Put another aloe strip on that fucker”) and even the trimmer blade that rests on the back of the cartridge (“Make the blades so thin they’re invisible. Put some on the handle. I don’t care if they have to cram the fifth blade in perpendicular to the other four, just do it!”). Most importantly the humor doesn’t come from an absurd number of blades, but from the nationwide pissing contest between Gillette and their competitors.

Joke: Donald Kaufman’s script in Adaptation (2002)

Reality: The script for Identity (2003)

(SPOILER WARNING: Major plot points of Identity revealed below)

Of all movies in the “film within a film” sub-genre, 2002’s “Adaptation” lives up to its self-referential premise best. Rather than poking fun at tired Hollywood stereotypes (“Actors are vain! Movie producers are greedy! Take that, showbiz!”), Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman’s story of a neurotic screenwriter finds humor in the un-originality of movies today. Specifically with The 3, an achingly predictable script about a schizophrenic serial killer. But where audiences saw a clever critique of boring movies, Columbia Pictures saw its next paycheck: Identity, released a year later, is essentially The 3 with John Cusack thrown in. In the thriller’s third act we learn the cops, the victims, and the killer all exist in a one person’s mind. In addition to renforcing Adaptation‘s commentary on the lack of creativity in manstream films, Identity proposes the theory that the interior of the human mind looks like a motel, and our sub-concious is Ray Liotta.

Joke: The Simpsons “Last Exit to Springfield” (1993)

Reality: Batman & Robin (1997)

In that wondrous pre-political era when Arnold Schwarzenegger was content blowing shit up in front of a camera, you didn’t have to be Nostradamus to predict the Conan the Barbarian star would continue making his signature awful puns. But, as always, The Simpsons took the Blue Ribbon for Schwarzenegger-based humor when the cartoon’s Arnold doppleganger, Rainer Wolfcastle, punches his way through an ice-sculpture at an evil millionaire’s soirée and cries, “Ice to see you.” But if the Simpsons‘s writing staff thought the ill-fitting pun would deter future future filmmakers from having Schwarzenegger recite “ice” jokes, they grossly underestimated Batman and Robin director Joel Schumaker. Not only did Schumaker have Arnold as Mr. Freeze bring back the “ice” pun, he subjected viewers to 90 minutes of low-temperature-related quibbles in a film that explains why Christopher Nolan saw the need to hit the RESET button on the Batman franchise.

(Special thanks to Scott Gairdner for his remarkable “Mr. Freeze” montage.)

Joke: Airplane II: The Sequel (1982)

Reality: Rocky Balboa (2006)

Long Before the God-awful Scary Movie franchise ruined the goofball genre with six years of Britney Spears jokes, the Zucker brothers (Airplane! , The Naked Gun) turned zaniness into an art form and provided Leslie Nielsen with work for fifteen years. But even the Zuckers weren’t immune from the pop-culture humor that soured the Wayans Bros.’ Scary series into what are now the shitteist reels of celluloid currently festering in American theaters. That said, the 1982 sequel to their Airport spoof, Airplane!, was at least prophetic in its requisite pop-culture jokes. A brief gag in Airplane II: The Sequel shows a theatrical poster for Rocky XXXVIII and a feeble, geriatric Stallone in gloves and boxing trunks. Who would have guessed that, 24 years later, a 60-year-old Stallion would return to the ring in earnest for Rocky Balboa? And, being released in the early ’80s, not only does the joke predict Balboa, it also predicts Rocky IV and V.

Joke: The Critic’s “Hunch! The Musical” (1994)

Reality: Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996)

Short-lived but well-remembered, The Critic‘s bread and butter was pop culture parodies. Every week the writers challenged themselves to come up with more terrible-yet-plausible movies for their critic, Jay Sherman, to endure. One memorable sequence lampooned Disney’s tradition of turning macabre fairy tales into sugar by making Jay endure a Broadway musical based on the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Just two years later, Disney was selling plush dolls of Quasimodo with an adorable and soft wart over his eye. Both the Critic and Disney’s musical Hunchbacks turn the book’s villains into heroes, take out the sex, and let everyone live at the end. The only thing Jay Sherman didn’t see coming was the direct-to-video sequel, The Hunchback of Notre Dame 2.

Written by lets get tight

Being a performer can be a demanding job. When you are playing a dynamite live show, all eyes are on you, watching your EVERY move. Sometimes gravity can get the best of you and in one second you could go from swaying to “Sweet Child O’ Mine” to getting a nice sample of the tasty floor.

Take a look at these performers taking some embarrassing spills.

1.) Beyonce’ is focusing a little too much on head banging and not enough on the giant staircase she’s standing on.

2.) Jason Newsted of Metallica goes the untraditional route of falling up the stairs.

3.) Some dude strutting his stuff.

4.) Kelsey Grammer is doing a little too much deep thinking.

5.) This one I am going to hell for. This is an actress who plays Helen Keller, eating shit at a play. Such dedication to the role. What? I already said I’m going to hell; might as well get my money’s worth.

Written by lifehacker

On Tuesday we asked for your favorite instant messaging applications, and over 550 comments later, we’ve culled it down to the most popular five. From web-based chat to desktop clients to tools that combine IM, email, and social networking, your nominations spanned a wide range of instant messaging applications. Let’s take a closer look at the five most voted-for apps, and face them off against each other in a final showdown to crown the ultimate favorite.

Digsby (Windows)

The youngest application by far to make the Hive Five, Digsby has taken the world by storm since we first mentioned it in February. Boasting integration with all of your IM networks as well as your email and social networking (Facebook and MySpace included), Digsby is converting new users left and right with their simple but appealing formula: IM + Email + Social Networking = Digsby. Currently a Windows only app, Digsby’s developers promise that Mac and Linux versions are in the oven-and that they’re constantly squashing bugs from the still-young Windows version.

Pidgin (Windows/Linux)

Formerly known as Gaim, this cross-platform, open source IM client has a huge following on both Windows and Linux platforms, estimating over 3 million users in 2007. Much like Firefox, Pidgin is open and extensible, meaning you can add your own improved functionality and tools to Pidgin by simply installing a plug-in (like one of these 10 must-have Pidgin plug-ins.)

Meebo (Web)

By far the most popular web-based chat application, Meebo boasts support for all popular chat networks, video and voice chat, and even an iPhone interface. Meebo’s main appeal is that it works wherever you are, no matter what operating system you’re using, as long as you’ve got a web browser and an internet connection. Can’t go wrong with that.

Adium (Mac OS X)

The overwhelming favorite chat app for OS X, Adium puts Apple’s default IM application, iChat, to shame. Like Pidgin, Adium is highly customizable, extensible with plug-ins, and works across all your favorite IM networks. In fact, Adium is kind of like a brother from a different mother to Pidgin; it got its brain from Pidgin’s daddy, libpurple, but its looks straight from the dangerous maiden that is OS X.

Trillian (Windows)

Once an overwhelming favorite for cross-network instant messaging, Trillian has lost a lot of users to newer apps like Digsby or fresher ones like Pidgin. That said, the long-awaited update to Trillian, Trillian Astra, is still in alpha, and those who have tried it continue to place all of their IM trust to Trillian. In the future, Trillian is also promising a Mac release along with an iPhone version, so it may have plenty of life in it yet.

Now let’s see if we can’t crown a favorite.

Gawker Media polls require Javascript; if you’re viewing this in an RSS reader, click through to view in your Javascript-enabled web browser.

Honorable mention goes to Miranda IM and Google Talk/Google Chat, both of which barely missed the cut.

Whether or not your chat app of choice made the top five, let’s hear what you love about it in the comments.

Written by S Peter Davis This article is come from Cracked.com

High school was hard enough, what with all the video games and boobies to distract us from our homework. What makes it even harder is having to unlearn all of the stuff they taught us in elementary school that turned out to be utter bullshit.

To this day you can even hear some adults repeating these “amazing” historical tales that, years ago, somebody just pulled out of their ass:

#5.

Columbus Discovered the Earth is Round

The story we heard:
In 1492, a Spanish ponce by the name of Christopher Columbus won his long-standing feud with the monarchy and the Catholic church to get funding for a voyage to East Asia. They were afraid that he would fail spectacularly, because everybody knew that the Earth was a flat disc, and the direction Columbus was sailing in would cause him to fall off the edge and into the mouth of the giant turtle that supported it.

Columbus, as we were told, did fail to reach his destination, but not because the world was flat–it was because he crashed into the future greatest nation on Earth, baby! Thus, Columbus proved the world was round, discovered America, and a national holiday was born.

The truth:
In the 1400s, the flat-earth theory was taken about as seriously as the Time Cube theory is today, if not less so. The shape of the world has been pretty much settled since the orb theory was first proposed by the ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras, around 2,000 years before the existence of Spain.

In fact, the navigational techniques of Columbus’ time were actually based on the fact that the Earth was a sphere. Trying to navigate the globe as if it was a flat plane would have fucked up the trip even more than it was.

Artists’ representation

The Spanish government’s reluctance to pay for Columbus’ expeditions didn’t have anything to do with their misconceptions about the shape of the world. Ironically, it was because Columbus himself severely underestimated the size of the Earth and everybody knew it. The distance he planned to travel wouldn’t have taken him anywhere near Asia. Nevertheless, he eventually scraped together enough funds to embark on his ridiculous adventure, and the clusterfuck that was the Columbus voyage has been celebrated annually in the Americas and in Spain ever since.

So where did the myth come from? It began with author and historical charlatan Washington Irving, who wrote a novel about Columbus in 1838. The novel was fiction, but some elements managed to creep into our history textbooks anyway, probably by some editors who wanted to spice it up a bit. Who’s going to read a history book that’s just filled with a bunch of boring shit anyway?

#4.

Einstein Flunked Math

The story we heard:
Motivational speakers love to tell this tale, inspiring underachievers with the story of this German kid who was just like you! Despite his sincerest efforts he could never manage to do well in his math exams, and struggled desperately with physics while working as a lowly patent clerk.

That muddled kid grew up to be Albert Fucking Einstein! And if he can do it, then so can you!

The truth:
Well, no you can’t. As it turns out, Einstein was a mathematical prodigy, and before he was 12, he was already better at arithmetic and calculus than you are now. Einstein was in fact so fucking smart that he believed school was holding him back, and his parents purchased advanced textbooks for him to study from. Not only did he pass math with flying colors, it’s entirely possible that he was actually teaching the class by the end of semester.

The idea that Einstein did badly at school is thought to have originated with a a 1935 Ripley’s Believe it or Not! trivia column.

Not the actual column

There’s actually a good reason why it’s a bad idea to include Robert Ripley among the references in your advanced university thesis. The famous bizarre trivia “expert” never cited his sources, and the various “facts” he presented throughout his career were an amalgamation of things he thought he read somewhere, heard from somebody, or pulled out of his ass. The feature’s title probably should have been: Believe it or Not! I Get Paid Either Way, Assholes.

When he was first shown this supposed expose of his early life, Einstein allegedly just laughed, and probably went on to solve another 12 mysteries of quantum physics before dinner. By the time he finally kicked the bucket in 1955, it’s entirely possible that “failure” was the one concept that Albert Einstein had never managed to master.

Of course, this just reaffirms what we have always suspected, deep down: success really is decided at birth, and your life will never be better than it is right now. Sorry about that.

#3.

Newton and the Apple

The story we heard:
You’ve probably heard of Isaac Newton. He’s pretty much the Jesus of physics. In the late 17th century, Newton practically fucking invented science. The discoveries we can thank him for include the laws of motion, the visible spectrum, the speed of sound, the law of cooling, and calculus. Yes, all of goddamn calculus. One wonders if anybody in history ever had a thought before Newton.

Probably his most famous discovery, however, is the law of gravity. The story goes that Newton, a modest mathematician and professor of physics, was sitting under the shade of an apple tree one sunny day, when an apple dropped from a branch and bopped him right on the head.

While most people would merely think “Ouch! Son of a bitch!” and stare warily upward for 10 minutes, Newton’s first instinct was to formulate the entire set of universal laws governing the motion of gravitating bodies, a theory so sound that it went unchallenged and unmodified for over 200 years.

The truth:
Newton never mentioned the thing with the apple, and in fact it was another guy named John Conduitt who first told the story some 60 years after it supposedly happened. Even then, he was decisively vague about whether Newton actually saw an apple, or whether the apple is a metaphor that he used to illustrate the idea of gravity for people less intelligent than he was (read: everybody):

“Whilst he was musing in a garden it came into his thought that the power of gravity (which brought an apple from the tree to the ground) was not limited to a certain distance from the earth but that this power must extend much further.”

You’ll notice that even then we don’t get the thing with the apple actually hitting Newton in the head, it got added somewhere along the line to add the element of cartoonish slapstick to his genius life.

Future versions will say that Newton then vomited in agony.

We like to think complex discoveries happen this way, with a sudden light bulb popping on over our head. Kind of makes it seem like it could happen to us one day, the next great idea will just occur to us while we’re wasting the afternoon on a park bench. In reality, Newton spent the best part of his life formulating and perfecting his theories.

When we have kids, we’re going to tell them the truth, dammit. Just Newton, hunched over his piles of papers covered with clouds of tiny numbers. Just months and years of tedious, grinding, silent, lonely work, until he had a nervous breakdown and finally died years later, insane from Mercury poisoning. Welcome to the real world, Timmy.

#2.

Washington and the Cherry Tree

The story:
It’s a parable that resonates through every primary school student’s retelling of the life and times of the man who was both America’s first president, and the only president to also have been a superhero.

As a child, we were told, George Washington came into possession of a hatchet, and went about his days chopping the shit out of everything he saw. One day he came upon his father’s prize cherry tree, and without so much as a second thought he chopped that sucker down, presumably because it was a Monarchist. Upon being quizzed by his father about the event, Washington proudly admitted that he had been the culprit, due to his inability to lie. The story was later loosely adapted to film with Jim Carrey in the leading role.

The truth:
In a fairly cynical culture, George Washington has still been elevated to the status of some kind of deity, thanks in part to a man named Mason Locke Weems. He was the author of the unfortunately titled biography “The Life of George Washington, with Curious Anecdotes Laudable to Himself and Exemplary to his Countrymen.” This was the shortest title his editors could persuade him to agree to.

Weems recalled many fantastic stories about Washington, with particular emphasis on his overwhelming moral fortitude and infallibility. The cherry tree story is of particular importance, because it demonstrates that Washington can easily destroy things, and just chooses not to.

According to Weems, “at the sight of him, even those blessed spirits seem[ed] to feel new raptures.” That’s right, when the angels learned of the existence of George Washington, they began to second-think their allegiance to their much less powerful leader, God. Curiously, Weems waited until Washington was dead before publishing his anecdotes.

As it turns out, if Washington was indeed incapable of lying, then Mason Weems was surely his exact nemesis, seeing as his recounting of Washington’s exploits were about as historically accurate as the 1999 Civil War documentary Wild Wild West.

Nevertheless, Weems’ pack of lies were taught as fact in American school textbooks for over a century, probably because they are much more enthralling than the true story of a man who, by more reliable accounts, was actually a bland, boring and uncharismatic everyman who just happened to be taller than average, and pretty good at warring. The story still resonates today, delivered to your children’s impressionable minds through such reliable media as Sesame Street.

Why does this bullshit story survive? Perhaps because the central message still resonates: “It’s much easier to tell the truth when you’re the one holding the ax.”

#1.

Benjamin Franklin, the Kite and the Thunderstorm

The story:
Another great American hero to whom many seem to attribute mutant superpowers is Ben Franklin, the scientist and statesman whose inventions included bifocal spectacles, the urinary catheter and freedom. He was particularly interested in electricity, and faced with intense skepticism from his colleagues about his theory that lightning is electricity, legend has it that he conducted an experiment to prove them wrong.

Franklin, with a knowing wink, went out into a raging thunderstorm and released a kite with a lightning rod affixed to the top and a metal key attached to the string. When the kite had annoyed the face of God to the point that he threw a bolt of lightning at it, the charge passed down the string and into the key, and when Franklin touched the key, it let off a spark of static, which somehow allowed him to discover electricity.

The truth:
It’s certainly true that Franklin at least proposed a kite experiment. Less certain, however, is whether or not he ever actually got around to performing it, and some sources suggest he did not. What is certain is that the experiment had nothing to do with lightning. If someone flew a kite into a storm, and it was struck by lightning, there’s a good chance that person would be utterly destroyed. In fact, everyone in the vicinity would at the least suffer from hairless-scalp syndrome.

Many people today who believe the amended story of Franklin’s kite experiment grew up immersed in the revisionist history of Walt Disney, whose classic cartoon Ben and Me portrayed Franklin not only as having flown the kite in a thunderstorm, but also having been a complete fucking jerk.

While few people still believe that all of Franklin’s innovations are actually attributable to his pet mouse, the kite story is still widely accepted despite the unfortunate testimonies of anyone who’s ever been stupid enough to replicate it.

The reality of Franklin’s experiment is that it simply involved flying a kite into some clouds to collect a few harmless ions, in order to prove that the atmosphere carries a charge. It is through Franklin’s discoveries that science was able to infer, later on, that lightning probably has something to do with electricity.

The idea that his kite was actually directly struck by a bolt of lightning is a rather dramatic exaggeration perpetuated by some school textbooks, which also helpfully serves to convince generations of children that getting hit by lightning is not only totally harmless, but scientific fun!

It also, like the Newton apple thing, takes one of history’s great geniuses and portrays them experiencing childlike wonder at some now-common idea, as if everyone who lived before the 20th century was a childlike simpleton.

Why can’t there be some other legend about him, one closer to his real personality? Like the time he pleasured six women at once. Sure, we made that up. But if you go out and repeat it enough, it’ll be in the textbooks by 2050. Let’s try it.

S Peter Davis runs the exceedingly adequate SPeterDavis.com. The illustrations in the article were by Nedroid of Nedroid.com fame.

Written by Neil Miller

This morning I sent a note out to the FSR Editorial team, letting them know that today was going to be an intentionally slow news day – not because there wasn’t any stories out there in the movie blogosphere, as there are plenty of headlines, but because you just can’t trust what you read on the internet today – it’s all a bunch of bologna.

So instead of pulling our own gag (and I did have a pretty solid one in my head, I just couldn’t pull it off), we have decided to put together a list of our favorite movie-related April Fool’s Jokes being thrown around the halls of the interwebs today. So thanks to all of our friends and neighbors, as you are making my job quite easy this afternoon.

10. Cloverfield Monster in Transformers 2 [Giant Freaking Robot]

This is one of those things that you glance at, start to move along, then glance back at again. Then, on your second glance, you realize that it is as obvious as the existence of the Sun that this one is fake. It is creative though, I will give them that.

9. Tyler Perry Movies on to Horror [Bloody-Disgusting]

Tyler Perry’s They Live… I would actually go an see that one.

8. Colin Farrell to star in a Once Remake [Moviehole]

One drunk Irishmen taints the work of a seemingly sober Irishmen by remaking his movie and singing his songs. The best part about this one is the alleged Colin Farrell quote: “In our version I’ll of course f&* the girl”.

7. Wolverine to Make an Appearance in The Incredible Hulk [ComicBookMovie]

I will admit, this one almost got me. If you take the fact that Marvel is crossing over between Hulk and Iron Man combined with the fact that Wolvie is currently in production, this one almost seems like it could work. On top of that, the guys at Comic Book Movie started this one yesterday, sliding it under the April Fool’s radar.

6. Art House Movie: There Will Be Farts [RopeOfSilicon]

Brad and his team at Rope of Silicon really went all out on this one. If you click the link to the official site for this film, one exists (although it is hosted on RoS). On the official site, you will find a pull-quote from Pete Hammond (whose outlet is His Desktop Computer) that says “I can’t wait… Milkshake jokes and pregnant teens are sure to make a hilarious spoof film!” Somewhere, a Weinstein Company Exec is scrambling to secure the rights to this one…

5. X-Files: Full Moon Rising [IESB]

Like something from a Creedence Clearwater Revival song, the title of the X-Files sequel came springing from the pages of IESB. Full Moon Rising? Really? They really should have stuck with “Curse of the Werepeople”.

4. Superman vs. Spider-Man Movie Announced [Slashfilm]

From our good friend Peter at Slashfilm comes a rumor about a Jake Gyllenhaal Spider-Man facing of with a CGI Christopher Reeve. Oh dear Pete, you had me going until the part about the CGI Christopher Reeve… That is good stuff.

3. Jake Gyllenhaal is Spider-Man [Joblo]

Joblo goes after a rumor that is plausible, to say the least. Rumors of a Jake Gyllenhaal takeover in the Spider-Man series have been circulating for some time now, but have never been confirmed. On any other day, the rest of us would be reporting this as well, but today is not any other day. The story really falls apart when they quote Gyllenhaal as saying that he would love to make out with his sister Maggie on-screen. Missed that part? You might want to take another look.

2. Christian Bale and Brandon Routh Sign on for Justice League [Cinematical]

To me, this one seemed like the most obvious April Fool’s joke possible – both Bale and Routh have publicly denied having anything to do with the “Justice League” movie, but fans are secretly holding out hope. But while it was obvious to me (and maybe you as well), this one did get one of my staff writers, hook line and sinker. I received an email from a writer on my staff (who will remain nameless) asking if I had seen this yet and whether or not I would like a write-up. Even more hilarious is that this is one of our best writers here at FSR… It gave me a good chuckle.

1. The Existence of a Justice League Movie [Warner Brothers Pictures]

You didn’t hear this from me – but the entire existence of George Miller’s Justice League Mortal is a sham. It has been a long running gag on all of the internet writers. You may not believe me right now, but bookmark this moment – did you really believe that someone named Armie Hammer was going to play Batman? Ha…

Honorable Mention goes to IGN for the Legend of Zelda Movie Trailer. Cheeky bastards!

So there you have it, a list of my favorite April Fool’s Day gags procured by our friends around the movie webosphere. There are more, in fact Alex at FirstShowing has created a pretty in-depth list, as has Peter at Slashfilm. Have you seen any other good ones out there? Feel free to drop them in the Sound Off section below.

Written by lifehacker

Since the dawn of time, geeks have been playing harmless pranks on their beloved (but unsuspecting) associates, and it’s up to all of us to carry the torch forward. On the eve of April Fools’ Day, when you’ve got local network access to your coworkers’ and family systems, cubicles just crying out to be filled with packing peanuts, and webapps that can do all sorts of things automatically, there’s no better time to baffle, confuse, perplex, and just plain mess with your loved ones and associates. Hit the jump for our top 10 favorite harmless geek pranks, just in time to get your prankster pistons firing for tomorrow.

10. Install the Blue Screen of Death Screensaver

Make your co-worker think their PC crashed when they get back from lunch. The BSOD (“Blue Screen of Death”) screensaver is a free download from Microsoft (ironically.) For other operating system “support,” check out the Linux BSOD ‘saver with support for Apple, Windows, and Linux crash screens.

9. Fake a Desktop with Screenshot Wallpaper

Freak out your co-worker or family member by faking out their Windows desktop with an unclickable facade: Take a screenshot of their current desktop, then set it as the desktop wallpaper. Hide the actual taskbar and disable desktop icons (right-click the desktop and choose “Arrange Icons By” and uncheck “Show Desktop Icons.”) When your victim returns to the computer, watch the futile clicking begin.

8. Schedule a Phone Call with a Text-to-Speech Message from Wakerupper.com

Wake up calls aren’t just for the a.m., you know. Pop your victim’s phone number, a time, and a custom message into Wakerupper.com, a free wakeup call service, and they’ll get a call with the message read Silicon Sally text-to-speech style back to them. (original post)

7. Fill an Office with Packing Peanuts (Or Make It Look That Way)

Actually filling your co-worker’s cubicle with packing peanuts can be a pain in the ass, but if there’s a glass wall involved, it’s easy to make it look like you did. Check out Hack N Mod’s nifty gallery of what looks like a glass room filled with packing material.

April Fools: Cubical Chaos Fakeout [Hack N Mod]

6. Remote Control Your Co-Workers’ Computer with VNC

How would it feel to have your mouse taken over by a ghost and do things on your computer you never intended while you watched? You can inflict this feeling of utter confusion on your victim using VNC, a computer remote control protocol. You’ll need to install the VNC server on your victim’s computer first, and have their IP address, so this one will work best in the office when you’re on the same network. Here’s how to remote control a computer with VNC. Mac users, here’s how to remote control Leopard with TightVNC.

5. Message Co-Workers with NET SEND

Hidden in the depths of the Windows command line is a nifty little utility called Net Send, which pops up very official-looking alert messages on any computer you send them to. If you know your co-workers’ IP address, you can net send them goofy messages, like this person on the Geeknewz boards:

A good prank that I have played on some friends involves the net send command. What I did was I used the net send command to send a message that said “Microsoft has detected that you have a small penis. Please consider upgrading for better performance” to other people on my local network. When you use the net send command in the command prompt, you specify the computer you want it sent to by typing the computer name, it also says on the message which computer it came from, so I changed my computer name to Microsoft, so it appeared, to the technically challenged, that the message actually came from Microsoft. In case you were interested, the syntax for the net send is:

net send computername message

Here’s more on how to use net send.

4. “Break” Your Victim’s LCD Screen with Wallpaper

Want to put a crack into that shiny new widescreen monitor? Download the broken LCD desktop wallpaper, set it as your victim’s desktop wallpaper and hide the taskbar and icons.

3. Hijack Firefox with the Total Confusion Pack Extension (Enabled on April 1st Only)

Your victim use Firefox? Install the “Total Confusion Pack” Firefox extension, which enables the following “features” on April 1st only:

• Two Steps Back: Make the back button go back twice-not every time, but only on random instances.
• Rick Rollr: Switch out 2% of the video clips your victim watches with the infamous Rick Astley video.
• The Devil’s Inbox: Make the number of unread email in your victim’s Gmail inbox exactly 666.
• Highs and Lows/Sarcarsm Enhancer/For real: Add LOL, *sigh*, “for real,” “Whatever” and various other commentary to web page text.
• Watch it: Make it look as if the page was loading forever. (Now this is just plain mean.)

Download the Firefox Total Confusion Pack here.

2. Customize the Office HP Printer’s Console Message

Baffle your coworkers with an “Insert Coin” message on the office printer using the HP Printer Job Language (HPPJL) command set. Here’s how to customize the printer’s Ready prompt to read whatever you want. (original post)

1. Turn Web Pages Upside Down

If your office or housemates all use the same Wi-Fi network and you’ve got some network admin skills, run the web traffic to their computers through custom scripts that turn images upside down, blur them, or redirect all web page requests to kittenwar.com. This is the most difficult trick in the list to implement, but it’s pretty clever. Here’s more on how to set up Upside-Down-Ternet. (original post)

For more good pranks, check out Wired’s Top 10 April Fools’ Pranks for Nerds, and Ask MetaFilter’s thread on the topic.

What’s your pick of favorite April Fool’s Day prank? Share the love in the comments.