Reading Matter

What do I do when I’m between books and/or not sucked into the one I’ve got? Glad you asked.

I read the news but that disgusts me fairly quickly. I succumb to the internal battle between being well informed and remaining sane. Sanity generally wins. 

What else do I read? Lists, like:

• 50 Most Annoying Songs of All Time
• The Most Memorable and Iconic Moments in Late-Night Talk Show History
• Funny ‘Do You Know Who I Am’ Moments
• Cat Behaviors That Are Paw-sitively Perplexing & Curiously Odd
• 38 Accidental Texts Sent By Total Strangers And The Funny Responses Received
• 18+ Meet-Cute Stories to Bright the Day
• The Secret Life Of Cats: 40 Comics That Put The Cat In Catastrophe
• Snap Puppies: 50+Dogs That Made Us Giggle
• Brutal And Awkward Rejections Gone Wrong

There’s an infinite number of these posts. They promise to be entertaining BUT the copy is invariably unnecessary and execrably written. Plus, the pet posts have a lot of overlap—if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.

The other bit is that the “writers” are clearly wholly unfamiliar with their subjects. I was reading one column plus pics about Johnny Carson (who was apparently kind of a dick) which talked about his dislike and nasty-ass words about Wayne “Newtown.” Yup, the scribbler obvs had no idea as to who Wayne Newton is. This wasn’t just a typo—the so-called journo consistently referred to Mr. Las Vegas as Wayne “Newtown” throughout.

Embarrassing. I take it that no one proofreads before hitting publish.

The other reason I’ll be avoiding these posts from now on? Pop-up ads. They’re ubiquitous.  So numerous that, when wasting time on my tiny phone, I can’t see the article for all the advertisements.

Yeah, I need to find new shit to distract and even inform my bean.

Reading the NASA site would work. There are tons of cool pics, thoroughly fascinating articles and endless sparks for my imagination.

Fer instance:

A team led by researchers at the University of Montreal has found evidence that two exoplanets orbiting a red dwarf star are "water worlds," where water makes up a large fraction of the entire planet. These worlds, located in a planetary system 218 light-years away in the constellation Lyra, are unlike any planet found in our solar system. (source)

Star-forming cluster

Also:

Using data from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, scientists have identified an Earth-size world, called TOI 700 e, orbiting within the habitable zone of its star – the range of distances where liquid water could occur on a planet’s surface. The world is 95% Earth’s size and likely rocky. (source)

Awesome—way more interesting than reading abysmal, ad infested posts about late night teevee hosts, annoying pop songs and “meet-cute” stories.

Also, annoying is in the eye of the beholder. Just FYI and shit.