Thursday, December 05, 2013

Daily Links 12-5-13

In today's roundup of links: Ben Franklin's awesome feats, Bill Cosby on blue comedy, heroic acts, and more.

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He held off six enemy tanks and several waves of infantry all while firing from the top of a burning tank. The incredible heroic story of Audie Murphy.

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Ben Franklin was a man on many achievements. Here's a list of some his lesser known feats.

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Be afraid of everything! A warning to parents not to be overprotective.

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Bill Cosby recently appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and took Stewart to task for his use of profanity in his stand-up routine. But this also speaks to a larger point about our culture:

Cosby was alive when things like segregation and institutional racism still legally existed. The way most cultural influencers today would have you think about it, anything that comes from a time before Michael Jackson’s “Black or White” topped the charts is not worthy of remembering because everyone was super racist back then. The “snobbery of the present,” as C.S. Lewis called it, tends to dismiss or discount anything that came before one’s current day.
And so here is an elderly black man – one who is active and vocal in the black community – telling not only us, but some of the greatest comedic minds of our time, that there was something better and more respectable about the way people used to do comedy. He has walked the walk and talked the talk for nearly half a century with his unique brand of humor. His sitcom The Cosby Show spoke to a generation of Americans from across racial and socio-economic divides. He’s not perfect, and he’s suffered immense personal tragedy along the way, but Bill Cosby is someone who actually cares where his culture is headed. 

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A process for taking notes while reading. I don't normally take notes while reading a book but I think it may be worth a try.

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