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I’ve always loved to read. Before I married, my whole front closet in the apartment was a library. (After, not so much. We needed the space for other stuff.) Recently. Newsweek had an article in the latest issue on the 50 books you should read now that will cast the greatest light on our now. They are all types and they’re there for al sorts of reasons. Just in case you need something to read: (Note I’ve got all 50 but the More tag doesn’t show here. Click the post title to see the rest.)

1. The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope - this satire of financial and moral crisis in Victorian England even has a Madoff-type swindler. Those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.
2. The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright - Perhaps no two questions are as important in the early 21st century as the ones Wright answers: how 9/11 happened, and why.
3. Prisoner of the State by Zhao Ziyang - Chinese officials are confiscating copies of this memoir by the party chief who was ousted for opposing military force in Tiananmen Square. They have reason to be nervous.
4. The Big Switch by Nicholas Carr - You’ve heard of “cloud computing,” but let’s be honest, you really don’t know what it means. Or why it’s going to change everything.
5. The Bear by William Faulkner - A boy comes of age in the 1880s by learning the ways of the fast-disappearing Mississippi forests.
6. Winchell by Neal Gabler - Before there was Rush Limbaugh-or Us Weekly-there was Walter Winchell: gossip columnist, commentator, McCarthyite, radio celebrity, has-been.
7. Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc - It took LeBlanc 10 years immersed in the lives of one Bronx family to produce this gripping, cinematic account of urban poverty and its causes. It will take you two days to read it.

Headlines from the Entertainment page on MSNBC. Something tells me they aren’t paying attention to themselves. With 8 of the 9 headlines being about Michael Jackson, check out the last one:

Jermaine Jackson: ‘I wish it was me’
DEA joins Jackson death investigation
Geller, ex-bodyguard tell of Jackson drug abuse
Scoop: Inside Neverland, few hints of fantasy
Aliens, ballet and quick step on ‘SYTYCD’
Scoop: OK! hits a new low with Jackson cover
Who’ll fill Jackson’s O2 dates? No one knows
Will Neverland be the next Graceland
Too much Jackson coverage, poll says

Lots of people do but there are still those who don’t and it’s stupid. There are online places that help you fill out a simple will and software that will tailor your will to your state’s requirements. They can even handle moderately complex things. But doing one requires thinking about what we don’t want to admit - we’re going to be history at some point - and the complexities that can go with that. If you’re married or in a relationship, it’s easy to focus on the simple - it all goes to my spouse - but then you have to stop and consider what if the two of you get hit by a semi on the way to dinner.

Fortunately, the law lets you wiggle out of that problem if you’re married. You can say in each of your wills if we both get whacked together, assume she lived longer. That means only her will needs to be detailed and have thought applied to it. But if you have no will, then the courts get to decide who to give it all to and if it’s not clear, they guess. If your parents are still living and you have siblings, the odds are fair to middlin’ that the one you hate the most - or the one who needs it the least - will win.

And life itself can complicate things. If your family seems to live for having stuff that “once belonged to great-grandma Ethel,” rest comfortably in the assurance that your relatives will be scheduling duels during the funeral if you don’t will that relish dish to them instead of some other part of the family. (And the person who comes to your funeral last - or leaves first - successfully sprung the lock on the back door to your house and has all the family treasures (and other stuff) in a U-haul sitting in the corner of the funeral home parking lot.)

If you are married into a family like this, keep a different set of locks for your doors handy so you can swap them out before you head to the funeral - unless it’s your funeral, of course. What these types of families don’t care about or realize is that people are starting to take that sort of behavior to heart, and specifically making bequests of selected family pieces to this and that person in an attempt at moderating the discord.

But that’s just the real stuff. What about the digital bits and pieces of your life? One thing that lots of people do not take into consideration is just what’s right in front of you now - the stuff you have on the Internet and squirreled away in this place and that on the web. If nobody knows your passwords, nobody can read your email (except the government, who is probably doing it already), shut down your blog, etc. Of course, most of us don’t care about all that anyway. Nobody’s life is at stake if my email doesn’t get read or die if this blog suddenly evaporated but there are people who take their computer privacy and secrets seriously.

If your computer has a password, nobody will be able to get to anything on it. It’s even worse if you decide to encrypt your hard drive and you don’t want your loved one to have the password. There are people like that, you know. Cory Doctorow, a British author who also posts on Boing-Boing, wrote an article on this issue in the Guardian. He uses significant 128-bit encryption on his computer and external hard drives and split his password into two pieces. One is held by a UK attorney and the other by a Canadian one. That way, Canadian courts will have a hard time forcing the UK lawyer to give up his half, and vice versa. More than I want to do.

There are a lot of artists who made the 60’s a great time for growing up and this is one. Gladys Knight and the Pips with I Heard It Through the Grapevine. She is so young here.

Known more as a song writer and lyricist than as a singer, Laura Nyro was also a formidable vocal talent in her own right. Her songs were recorded by Peter, Paul, and Mary, Barbra Streisand, Blood, Sweat and Tears, Three Dog Night, Carole King and many others. In some of her songs, you’d swear she sounds like an angel and in others she’s living and feeling the depths of the blues. She died of ovarian cancer in 1997. This is one of my many Nyro favorites, made popular by BS&T Three Dog Night, Eli’s Coming.

Edit: I always thought she was as good as, if not better than, Bob Dylan at lyrics and music. If I’ d had a son, I’d probably have named him Eli because of this song. (Well, that and if I’d called him Rainy Day Women it would have been worse than “Sue.”)

Well, according to the latest scientific research (OK, they got a couple of people plastered and timed them), driving while intoxicated is less dangerous than driving while texting. Yes, the car guys at Car & Driver magazine did the testing. They wired a brake light simulator to test reaction time and compared how long it took to react to the brake light when someone was texting vs. when the same people were inebriated. The two testees sucked down almost an entire bottle of vodka. Their reaction time when they were legally drunk was significantly better than when they were texting.

Now if they’d just added testing people while talking on the phone, maybe we’d be able to drive in relative safety. Right.

First, we tested both drivers’ reaction times at 35 mph and 70 mph to get baseline readings. Then we repeated the driving procedure while they read a text message aloud (a series of Caddyshack quotes). This was followed by a trial with the drivers typing the same message they had just received. Both of our lab rats were instructed to use their phones exactly as they would on a public road, which, if Jordan’s mom or Eddie’s wife are reading this, they never do.

Our test subjects then got out of the vehicle and concentrated on getting slightly intoxicated. They wanted something that would work quickly: screwdrivers (vodka and orange juice). Between the two of them, they knocked back all but three ounces of a fifth of Smirnoff. Soon they were laughing at all our jokes, asking for cigarettes, and telling us about some previous time they got drunk that was totally awesome. We had them blow into a Lifeloc FC10 breath-alcohol analyzer until they reached the legal driving limit of 0.08 percent blood-alcohol content. We then put them behind the wheel and ran the light-and-brake test without any texting distraction.

In our test, neither subject had any idea that using his phone would slow down his reaction time so much. Like most folks, they think they’re pretty good drivers. Our results prove otherwise, at both city and highway speeds. The key element to driving safely is keeping your eyes and your mind on the road. Text messaging distracts any driver from that primary task. So the next time you’re tempted to text, tweet, e-mail, or otherwise type while driving, either ignore the urge or pull over. We don’t want you rear-ending us.

Driving while drunk kills. Driving while texting does too. It just hasn’t been going on quite as long so the bodycount is still low. Don’t add a body to the pile.

New research has shown that you make it harder on your users if you mask out passwords in a web-based application. Most of the time, when you enter a password, all you see is a row of bullets or asterisks. The idea is so all those hundreds of evil people peering over your shoulder won’t be able to steal your password. The truth is that there really aren’t a hundred people back there; in fact, there’s hardly ever anyone back there.

The actual effect is that when you type your password in, you might as well just close your eyes anyway since you really have no clue what you typed in the box. The feedback the system gives you is useless. If you screw it up, you have no idea which letter you hit wrong so you keep trying over and over. I’m one of those people security types hate - I only have a few passwords that I prefer to use, period. If my work didn’t require me to use three of the big four (numbers, lower case letters, upper case letters, and special characters), and change the damn thing every 90 days, I’d probably have the same one forever. Jacob Nielsen says the following:

Users make more errors when they can’t see what they’re typing while filling in a form. They therefore feel less confident. This double degradation of the user experience means that people are more likely to give up and never log in to your site at all, leading to lost business. (Or, in the case of intranets, increased support calls.)

The more uncertain users feel about typing passwords, the more likely they are to (a) employ overly simple passwords and/or (b) copy-paste passwords from a file on their computer. Both behaviors lead to a true loss of security.

Yes, if you’re in an Internet Cafe or some other public setting, masking might be useful from a security standpoint, but instead of compelling everyone to use the masking, why not just add a simple check box to let users make that decision? User Experience - it’s about those people you want to suck money from. Keep ‘em happy and they’ll come back.

Oh, and remember that old three click rule? You know, if it’s more than three clicks away from the home page, nobody will ever bother. Well, that’s a load of crap, too. If a site makes it easy for me to find exactly what I’m looking for, it’s OK if it takes four or five or six clicks, just as long as I know I’m making progress. After all, when I get to your site, I’m on a mission. I want to simply find what I want. If I click on men’s, then shoes, then sneakers, then 12.5, then white, I’m smack dab right where I want to be and I’ve got no doubts about it. At all. Yep, that was another plug for zappos.com  or at least their navigation & usability.

it seems my right ear is as well and so is yours. According to Italian researchers, if you ask someone something, and ask it in their right ear, you’re more likely to get what you want. I can see those little wheels turning now. You’re thinking that it would look very strange if you went up to someone and asked them something by getting up close and saying it only in one ear, right? Well, if you do your research in a night club (second-best research idea ever!) where music is playing, it will seem normal. (Those clever Italian researchers!)

Because the left hemisphere of the brain is the one that processes words, it seems it gives precedence to stuff coming in from the right side. The study demonstrates (I added the bold)

the natural expression of hemispheric asymmetries, showing their effect in everyday human behavior.

Marzoli and Tommasi write that some work has shown that the left and right hemispheres of the brain appear to be tuned for positive and negative emotions, respectively. Talk into the right ear and you send your words into a slightly more amenable part of the brain.

I know, this is where everyone comes to get play reviews, right? We’ve subscribed to the Broadway Series at TPAC for decades quite literally. Almost every year there are plays we really look forward to, plays we are more so-so about and, on occasion, some that hold no interest whatever. Legally Blonde was in that category. I mean, a play that started out a movie first? That’s just backwards and the translation’s got to be less than wow, right? Besides, it’s a running blonde joke in pink.

Wrong! It was a good adaptation with a great cast and songs. Worth seeing, with a couple of local connections actually. Laura Bell Bundy, who now lives here,  returns to play Elle Woods (the Reese Witherspoon role in the movie). She starred in the role on the Broadway stage, receiving a Tony nomination fot the role. It’s not just a blonde, fluff play, it’s entertainment.

(Disclaimer: Reese’s dad is my ear, nose & throat doctor and is completlely responsible for how good my septum now looks.)

Tim Chavez, a former Tennessean columnist and a local blogger, has died from his battle with leukemia. Tim had made it through a two-year battle against the disease and returned to the Tennessean after an extended leave to find out his position had been eliminated. Recently, he was told the two words no cancer survivor ever wants to hear, “it’s back.”

I’d never met Tim, but I read his work on his blog, Political Salsa, regularly. He was one of lots of people out there in the Internet that I’d sorta gotten to know through what they wrote. Tim was the one who broke the news about Juana Villegas. I will miss him. ACK has more.

Ultimately, Life is just life. It’s having God with you in the good and bad times and always being appreciative for every good day you have and everyone you can tell you love and always being grateful when God has gotten you through a bad day and all its fears.

Cancer is a foul, vicious disease that tears at the families as well as those who suffer.