Written by Aviary

One of the most fantastic things about building a suite of tools around a community, instead of the other way around, is that users are always willing to pitch in and help out others with tutorials and forum assistance. It’s our plan to build our applications with a very deep set of community tools, built around forums, wiki-documentation, chat, user-made tutorials and sharable workspaces.

Aviary super star Meowza has already begun paving the way with more than a dozen “photo-phixing” tutorials for other users of Phoenix. Got a specific question on how to make a technique in Phoenix? Ask and ye shall receive.

Unzipping a Kitty

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Chocolatizing a Statue

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Cyborg Frog

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Smoking Woman

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Alien Overlords

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Correct Shadow Perspective

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Aging a Photograph

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Making a Snow Storm

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Popping Elements with Dodge and Burn

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Aging a Boy (or How we Faked Dodo)

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Genetic Cross-Breeding

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How to Precision Select Custom Shapes

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Another tutorial on the same topic

Masking fur by Ziaphra

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Using Blend Modes; Having Fun with Liquify and Mating Celebrities

Read the full 3-in-one tutorial!

This article was written by Maggie Koerth-Baker and originally appeared in mental_floss magazine.

Songwriters have found inspiration in all sorts of places, from transvestites to team tennis titans. Maggie Koerth-Baker has read between the liner notes to find out for whom 8 famous songs were written.

1. “Philadelphia Freedom”

Written by: Elton John & Bernie Taupin

Written for: Billie Jean King, as a thank-you for a tracksuit she gave Elton. And what a tracksuit it must have been! The 1975 song remains one of the most popular disco hits ever, leaving thousands of Hustle enthusiasts wondering just what Billie Jean King had to do with Philadelphia, anyway.

Turns out, the song was a reference to King’s pro tennis team, The Philadelphia Freedoms. Prior to 1968, tennis players were all considered “amateurs” and weren’t eligible to receive prize money. So, if you didn’t have the wealth to support yourself, you couldn’t play. Billie Jean King fought against those constraints, ultimately founding Professional World Team Tennis in 1974 and turning tennis into a paid league sport. [Photo courtesy of EltonJohn.com.]

2. “Lola”

Written by: The Kinks’ Ray Davies

Written for: A transvestite. But the question is, which one? According to Rolling Stone, “Lola” was inspired by Candy Darling, a member of Andy Warhol’s entourage, whom Ray Davies briefly (and cluelessly) dated. If that’s the case, then “Lola” is just another notch on Darling’s song belt—she’s also referred to in Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side.” (”Candy came from out on the Island/ In the backroom she was everybody’s darlin’.”)

But, in the Kinks’ official biography, Davies tells a different story. He says “Lola” was written after the band’s manager spent a very drunken night dancing with a woman whose five o’clock shadow was apparently obvious to everyone but him.

3. “867-5309/Jenny”

Written by: Jim Keller (of Tommy Tutone) and Alex Call

Written for: Unknown, as the songwriters apparently make up a different story about its inspiration every time they’re asked. While the woman continues to remain a mystery, however, the phone number is all too real. In fact, it’s been wreaking havoc ever since 1982the passage of time hasn’t quelled of the number of crank calls. In 1999, Brown University freshman roommates Nina Clemente and Jahanaz Mirza found that out the hard way, when the school adopted an 867 exchange number for its on-campus phone system. Immediately, the girls’ innocuous Room No. 5309 became a magnet for every drunk college kid with a 1980s fetish.

Other unfortunate phone customers have fought back with creative and profitable solutions, like the holder of 212-867-5309, who put his phone number up for auction on eBay in 2004. Bids approached $100,000 before eBay pulled the item at the request of Verizon, the number’s actual owner.

4. “Für Elise”

Written by: Ludwig van Beethoven

Written for: Some girl probably not named Elise. In fact, as far as most historians can tell, Beethoven didn’t even know an Elise. Instead, the song was originally titled “Bagatelle in A minor” based on some handwritten notation a Beethoven researcher claimed to have seen on a now-lost copy of the sheet music.

Further complicating things, Beethoven had hideous handwriting—to the point that some scholars speculate the song was actually written “for Therese,” as in Therese Malfatti, one of several women who turned down a marriage proposal from the notoriously lovesick maestro.

5. “Oh, Carol”

Written by: Neil Sedaka

Written for: Carole King, naturally. Sedaka and King actually dated briefly in high school — a romance Sedaka was able to successfully milk with “Oh, Carol,” a then top-10 (if now somewhat forgettable) 1959 pop song.

However, the real success of “Oh, Carol” came a few months later, when it inspired King to write a rebuttal entitled “Oh, Neil.” At the time, King and her husband, Gerry Goffin, were fledgling songwriters in need of a hit tune. “Oh, Neil” wasn’t that, but it did pay off. After Sedaka gave a tape of the song to his boss, King and Goffin landed jobs at the legendary Brill Building pop music factory, where the duo went on to write chart-toppers like “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow” and “The Loco-Motion.”

6. “It Ain’t Me, Babe”

Written by: Bob Dylan

Written for: Joan Baez, though it clearly wasn’t the nicest gift Dylan could have given her. The two met in 1961, when Baez was an up-and-coming folk singer and Dylan was a nobody from Minnesota. Desperate to make his break in the music biz, Dylan worked like crazy to get Baez’s attention. He eventually ended up going on tour with her, which is how he first became famous, and also how the two began dating. For a while, they seemed like the golden couple, but things soon went downhill.

During a European concert tour together in early 1965, they had a huge fight and parted ways. That May, Dylan was holed up in a hotel after being hospitalized with a virus, and Baez, hoping to remain friends, decided to bring him flowers. Sadly, that’s how she found out that her ex was already dating someone else. That someone else was Sara Lownds, whom Dylan married a mere six months later.

7. “Our House”

Written by: Graham Nash (of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)

Written for: Joni Mitchell. In December 1968, Nash and Mitchell moved into a cozy little house in the Laurel Canyon section of Los Angeles. Though commonly left out of the hippy pantheon, Laurel Canyon was sort of a commune-home away from commune-home for San Francisco society — not just CSN&Y, but also Jim Morrison, the Eagles, Frank Zappa, and more.

“Our House” was directly inspired by a lazy Sunday in the Nash/Mitchell household. The couple went out to brunch, hit an antiques store, and then returned to find the house just a bit chilly, at which point Nash literally “lit a fire,” while Mitchell “placed the flowers in the vase that she bought that day.” No, really. The whole tableau seemed so ridiculously domestic to Nash that he immediately sat down and spent the rest of the day writing about it.

8. “Dear Mama”

Written by: Tupac Shakur

Written for: Afeni Shakur, who is, obviously, Tupac’s mama. A fascinating character in her own right, Afeni Shakur was born Alice Fay Williams, but changed her name while working with the Black Panthers in the 1960s. In fact, Tupac (named after the Peruvian revolutionary leader Tupac Amaru II) was born in 1971—just a month after Afeni was acquitted of bombing conspiracy charges. (She had spent most of her pregnancy behind bars.) As the song implies, she and Tupac didn’t always get along, particularly during his adolescence, when Afeni was addicted to crack. But, by the time of Tupac’s death in 1996, she was clean and the two had patched things up long enough for Tupac to write that she “was appreciated.” Today, Afeni runs a charity in her son’s name and is (somewhat controversially) responsible for Tupac’s multiple posthumous CD releases.

Written by Charlie Jane Anders

Our economic future could be even bleaker than you expect — and last year was the moment to unleash your inner survivalist. If the financial system suffers any more crises of confidence, credit gets even tighter, and the fed falls into a liquidity trap, we could be in for several hardscrabbling dystopian years. Forget maintaining your current shiny standard of living — how will you feed and clothe yourself, in the worst case scenario? We’ve compiled a few suggestions for things you can do now to brace yourself.

Avoid debt at all costs. If anything, you’ll want to save up as much money as you can, in case you have to live off your savings. Thanks to recent changes in bankruptcy law, it’s much harder than before for an individual to declare bankruptcy. So if you’re stuck in debt with little or no income, you’ll still be working for the banks. And as this guy points out, the banks will be hurting, so the moment you miss a payment, they’ll be quick to try and liquidate your collateral for whatever they can get.

Get out of your mortgage before the housing market collapses any further. As this site says, if you paid $300,000 for your house and it sells for $200,000, you could end up not owning your house and owing the bank $100,000.

Buy some cheap land in a rural area. Build a house, or just get a used RV. Either way, make sure you own your home free and clear, so you can live rent-free and mortgage-free for as long as you need to.

Go off the grid. Get your own power generator — or, better yet, some of those solar helium balloons. Or some wind turbines. Don’t be dependent on the power company to keep all your necessities running.

Cultivate some skills that will always be in demand. Become a decent electrician, handy-person, carpenter or cook. There may not be much need for someone who understands content management systems during a total economic shutdown, but someone who can build a house will always have a place to crash.

Offshore yourself. As the dollar gets weaker and weaker, U.S. white-collar service workers will be the cheap overseas employees for Europeans and Asians, predicts Robert Scoble in his roundup of how to recession-proof yourself. So as long as someone, somewhere, is still making use of those white-collar service skills (like programming, or customer support) you may be able to offer yourself to overseas companies as a cheaper alternative.

Invest in the ultimate counter-cyclicals. Some industries will always be in growth mode — like any business that caters to the rapidly growing senior population. Also, “sin and comfort” industries, like cigarettes, gambling and booze, do well during downturns and will probably make bank this time around as well. (Too bad booze and cigs are generally part of huge diversified conglomerates these days.) Also, movie companies are quietly bragging that the movie industry had one of its biggest growth spurts ever in the 1930s, as people craved escapism.

Invest in some Euros, or some other currency that’s not the dollar. Chances are the U.S. dollar will keep getting weaker, so you’ll be better off holding a more stable currency. You could also try investing in gold or silver, but those commodities are already skyrocketing in value.

Have some liquid funds on hand. MSN Money suggests reducing your contributions to your retirement plan or 401(k) (if you have one) so you can put more money into your savings instead. And remember, the banks are still FDIC insured, so your savings are probably safe — but other investments have no such guarantee.

or take part in a community garden in your neighborhood. Try to position yourself so you can get as much of your diet as possible from food you’ve grown yourself, instead of being hooked on sushi.

Learn to hunt. These fine people claim that hungry people are already hunting small animals in the parks of San Francisco, and during the 1930s deer and squirrels were hunted almost to extinction. Learn how to trap, kill, prepare and eat a squirrel now, so you’ll be ahead of the curve.

Stockpile medications. Your biggest problem, in an economic meltdown, could be getting health care. If you’re dependent on prescription meds, try to get some extra pills now so you’ll have some on hand later. Just make sure you’re always taking the oldest meds you have, to minimize the risk of taking expired pills, these folks advise.

And hey, here’s a meeting coming up in New York on how to “prepare and profit” from the next Depression. If any of our readers are in NYC, please please go to the meeting and tell us what they said, so we can learn how to turn abject economic misery into pure lovely gravy.

Written by environmentalgraffiti

Ah, Summer is almost upon us, and that means most American families are plotting madly to get out of town for a week.

Image from Kaydee did on Flickr

Never mind that the economy is in the tank, or that you’ll use just under half of your vacation days at once– it’s time to go to the beach! But wait… before you slam the kids in that minivan and speed off: there’s a greener way.

5. Don’t Travel As Far

In one of those special instances where environmentalism saves you a ton of money, the simplest piece of advice is one that most Americans aren’t likely to follow, even in this hour of $4.00 gasoline: stay close to home. Heck, even stay home: if you live in a major city, there are probably loads of museums, parks, baseball games, and restaurants that you haven’t been to. But if you MUST travel– try to stay within 100-150 miles of home. Your wallet, and the planet, will thank you.

Image from Stuckincustoms on Flickr

4. Find A Green Hotel

This may seem like a monstrous task, but it’s not– check this registry of environmentally friendly hotels. They’re standing ready to assist in your eco-escape, conserving waste, and committed to reducing their toll on the planet.

Image from Flickr

3. Take the Train

Rail travel isn’t quite dead in the U.S., which is good, because it features some of the lowest carbon emissions per-traveler of any form of transport. In order of most polluting, it goes: airplanes, cars, trains, and coach buses–but I don’t know many people who think of Greyhound as a good way to get around anymore. “Boost that failing government-subsidized rail system, America!”

Image from Flickr

2. Buy Local Souveneirs

This is hard, seeing as how we’re nationally addicted to airbrushed t-shirts and plastic toys, but buy local goods when you travel. Supporting a local artist doesn’t just do more for the economy of the place that you’re visiting, it cuts the cost of transporting all of those mass-produced tourist trap souvenirs. And besides, taking home art, or cooking ingredients from a place you can’t get at home, is far more interesting.

Image from Flickr

1. Minimize Waste

I know, that seems like a gimme– but it’s not. Turn off your thermostat when you’re not home. Take the pets to a sitter, or board them, rather than leaving them in the house with some neighbor stopping in to check on them. Pack a couple of water bottles so you don’t have to buy bottles of water everywhere you go. Common sense still applies on vacation, as odd as that seems.

Image from Flickr

Written by kezins.com

We all have heard of them, swore to have done them or know someone whose cousin has. That’s right, I’m talking about Video Game Urban Legends (VGUL). No, I’m not going to talk about the munchkin in the back of “Wizard of Oz” who supposedly hangs himself from the tree. Not also talking about how their is a ghost in the window in “3 Men and a Baby” who died in that house. Not Bigfoot or Loch Ness. I’m talking Video Games…. I’m talking Urban Legends in Video Games.

I have searched high and low to bring to you, our latest installment of these Urban Legends, and finish up with a wide known but not seen VGUL.

Tomb Raider

The Urban Legend – Lara Croft appearing Nude in Tomb Raider

The System – PSone

This story goes as far back as the game was first launched. It was almost like every video gamer wished this one to be true. I’ve heard it all from, “if you go in the water, you’ll see her nude”. Sorry to tell you folks, this one is a big fat lie.

Street Fighter II

The Urban Legend – Beat every character without losing a round or match let’s you play as the four bosses Balrog, Vega, Sagat, and M. Bison

The System – SNES

Well, this is an urban Legend that I believe all Street Fighter 2 players have tried. Now, while it isn’t that impossible, is was very hard. The rumor of playing as one of the bosses, went cross country. It always seemed that the more you went unbeaten the tougher the opponent got. I recall playing one whole day trying this one out, and after going unbeaten straight through Balrog, Vega became impossible. He would hang off the fence and “huaaahhh” with his blades onto my head. Of course, I used Ken and the timing of a shyruken was hard.

No doubt, once I completed the game unbeaten I realized it was a hoax. With people then saying “You have to perfect every round” back I went to the SNES and 15 years later…

Playstation 2

The Urban Legend – Iraq had purchased 4,000 PS2’s to launch missiles.

The System – PS2

World Net Daily claims that both the FBI and the US Customs Service are investigating the transfer of thousands of consoles to Iraq. According to a secret Defence Intelligence Agency report, 4,000 PS2s had been bought in the US and shipped to Iraq in 2000.

Some US military experts believe that several PS2s could be linked together to form a “supercomputer”, which could control a missile or an unmanned aircraft. They fear that the console, which contains a 128-bit CPU, could provide the power for Iraq to launch chemical weapons at its enemies.

It’s also very unlikely that bundling any number of PS2s together would actually work, as it would be extremely complicated to have a number of processors accessing shared memory and splitting up the computation. The complex software required would take years to develop. Sony refused to say whether it was possible to link PS2s together to form a supercomputer, explaining that it did not comment on speculative stories.

Super Mario Bros.

The Urban Legend – Jumping over the flag pole at the end of the level

The System – NES

In 5th grade, Kevin Diley once told me how he jumped over the flagpole in Super Mario Bros. I’ve called him on the telephone while I tried, he came over to try, I even asked him to video tape it on his VHS camcorder. He was never able to reproduce it. Till this day, I do not know a single person who was able to jump over the flagpole. I’ve heard of mods, and hacks that allow this. But until I see this:

1. Cartridge being blown into the bottom
2. Popped into an original NES
3. Original NES controller used to jump over flagpole

This will not hold true to me and Kevin Diley will continue to be a liar!

Legend of Zelda

The Urban Legend – There is a dungeon level in the Legend of Zelda that is a swastika.

The System – NES

Now although this is not completly an urban legend, it is more of a terrible version of the game telephone. It starts off with one person saying what they say, and it gets turned and twisted into an Urban Legend. So, let me explain. The third dungeon has the shape of what appears to Western audiences as a left-facing swastika. This shape is actually a “manji”, which is a Buddhist symbol of good fortune. In Japan, where this game was initially released, swastikas and similar shapes are relatively benign, which explains why a symbol so offensive to many Western audiences could be included. In the United States, there were surprisingly few complaints about the manji, but years later, when Pokémon became popular in the United States, Nintendo was forced to alter one of the cards due to complaints regarding a manji.

So take a chill pill, it’s just some Manji – Word of the Day.

Mortal Kombat

The Urban Legend – A code that enabled the “Blood Code” instead of a grey smokey splat

The System – SNES

This one is fairly easy to explain because it never existed nor was it an Easter Egg. Nintendo was/is very censored so they never allowed blood in their Mortal Kombat game. It was said that the Genesis version of MK sold better because of the fatalities and blood. Nintendo then tried using Genesis’ decision of incorporating blood as a negative, but that never flew. So now you had those Genesis freaks soaked up to their ankles in Hawaiian Punch and it was cool.

Polybius

The Urban Legend – A government run arcade cabinet was used to collect data. Once played this game would cause seizures, memory loss and people were brainwashed.

The System – Arcade

This game was out for a very short trial run of one month in small arcades in Portland Oregon in 1981. Produced by the company Sinnesloschen ( A German term meaning “sense-deleting,” or “Loss of senses.”), the game gave many players nightmares and many who played it completely swore off all video games afterwards. Others complained of having blackouts and memory loss. Employees of the manufacturer, in black coats came and collected data from the machines as part of a lease agreement. After only one month, all of the machines were removed. ROM’s of this game are rumored to be in the hands of some collectors but at this time they are not generally available. Check out more info here at Polybius Theory.

Game-play: There are two explainations for game-play.

1: Action/Puzzle game. Rumored to have a rotating 3D Puzzle, along with logic puzzles, and mazes resembling the playing style of Pac-Man.

2: You were flying through a tunnel and had to dodge things in your path. Lights flashing at rapid rates to heighten the effect. Said to resemble a pro-type for Atari’s “Tempest.” (Which was a shooter game. In an article about Tempest, it was said that the prototype caused motion sickness after a period of time.) The basis of the game was to get through a maze without being caught in a trap or a mine. Apparently, the further the levels went, to make the game more difficult, the background would start flashing much like a strobe light, and the spinning of the mazes.

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.

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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.