BobHarris.com - Dust never settles

Books! Actual books!

"A rollicking ride of intellectual discovery and emotional growth... his comic timing never fails"

-- The Wall Street Journal

"Pulls you in like a good sports story"

-- The New York Times Book Review

"Endearingly frank... jubilant... lighthearted and fast-paced"

-- New York Newsday

"A surprisingly touching memoir"

-- Entertainment Weekly

"Snappy and informative"

-- Associated Press

"Effortlessly funny and informative... tender, human, and very wise... A must for anyone who loves Jeopardy!, or has ever seen it, or is breathing."

-- Joss Whedon, creator, Buffy the Vampire Slayer

"I haven't seen Jeopardy! since I was a kid, and yet I was charmed and amused by Bob Harris's fascinating and surprisingly suspenseful book. Through sheer force of personality, he takes this brainy TV show and makes it funny and easy to relate to."

-- Ira Glass, creator and host, This American Life

"A surprisingly intimate, entertaining book."

-- Orson Scott Card, 4-time Hugo Award winner, author of Ender's Game

"Funny, enlightening -- and just might help you win a million bucks on Jeopardy!"

-- A. J. Jacobs, author of The Know-It-All

"A masterful job of describing the feel of Jeopardy! in the heat of battle... I knew Bob was a great guy and a fantastic Jeopardy! player. Now I've found that he's also a wonderful writer. I think I'm starting to hate him."

-- Brad Rutter, top money-winner in Jeopardy! history

Books I'm Getting

Who Hates Whom:
Well-Armed Fanatics, Intractable Conflicts,
and Various Things Blowing Up —
A Woefully Incomplete Guide™

“Revelatory... Harris's sly wit and infectious curiosity make understanding world chaos fascinating... witty, horrific, and necessary.”

— Boston Globe

"Brave... irreverent... charges into the thick of the globe's myriad simmering wars... hilariously relaxed."

— New York Observer

"Only Bob could make a user’s guide to our increasingly hostile world this absorbing, this breezy, and—ultimately—this hopeful.”

— Ken Jennings, author of Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs

“Fascinating, enlightening, and surprisingly: NOT TOTALLY DEPRESSING. A gimlet-eyed look at the world we endure that’s also suitable for enjoying with a gimlet.”

— John Hodgman, author of The Areas of My Expertise
and correspondent for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

"All three [presidential] candidates should read all three of these [recommended] books, but McCain gets first crack at Bob Harris's "Who Hates Whom“... a lighthearted overview of the insurrections and civil wars in the world today."

— Steven Pinker, author of The Stuff of Thought, in the New York Times Book Review

Main

CDI

Dust never settles

Tag it now -

Tuesday, 22 February 2005

Brief notes, minor changes:

The "Popular" section on the right-hand column turned out to be a bit silly, really. Since those pieces stayed on the front page all the time, they kept collecting hits. After the first few weeks, it gradually began to congeal, and soon would have hardened into stone. Should have seen that coming. So, poof.

As to comments, it turns out only eight or nine visitors ever used the feature much, and (at least with our current set-up) keeping the cache time long enough to enable comments beyond a sentence or two slowed response times for the other 2000 daily visitors, sometimes by a lot. Kobiashi Maru, and traffic is actually up since comments went down.

The new "Fresh Linkage" feature in upper right will highlight either an important link in an entry that might soon be down the page, a new blog you might enjoy, or whatever else seems worth putting near the top. I'll try to make it always worth clicking.

Updates will remain a bit infrequent.

Shorter me, if you're busy, too: Bush's people consider lying a basic political strategy, as can be proven on a near-daily basis; they (and too many Democrats) are only concerned about profits and their own power, damn the consequences; intolerance sucks, and it's constantly used as a means to manipulate people into working against their own long-term economic interests; ditto religious fundamentalism, which is the suicide of reason and likely to get the rest of us killed with it; the media are plainly a series of corporate enterprises filled with bottom-line executives and attractive incompetents more concerned with self-promotion than serving the Republic, which explains why the news is usually just celebrity trials, something Bush said, eight things on fire, and then the weather; we are in great danger; on Fridays, small deer are really cute.

The details just change around a little.