Bad books and bad magazines

In my usual morning online tour, one thing lead to the other and I came across this site http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/People/spok/most-banned.html listing the 50 most frequently banned books in the 1990s in the US according to a book by Herbert N. Foerstel (1994) Banned in the U.S.A.: A Reference Guide to Book Censorship in Schools and Public Libraries. In this list there were 3 unexpected entries:

1. two of Mark Twain's most famous books The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Hucklberry Finn.
2. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, which personally I haven't read but heard a lot about and was under the impression that it is considered by many to be a very good read.
3. Lord of the Flies by William Golding, which I studied as an undergrad and think is a very interesting novel.

Now to magazines, I don't know when the Newsweek appalling charade will end. First, they have sources telling them about the Qur'an being flushed down the toilet in Guantánamo Bay by American interrogators, then they say that no actually this was not entirely accurate, then now they go back to 'we have a source' part. Why would they care to stop this storyline anyway? Just because 17 people died on the way? So what?

And, according to the NYT (http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/17/politics/17koran.html?th&emc=th), the editor of Newsweek says "In order for people to understand we had made an error, we had to say 'retraction' because that's the word they were looking for." Correction: the words we are looking for are: "we seriously screwed up, we are ashamed of ourselves and we are closing down the magazine because we don't deserve to even exist".

Now, miscellaneous:

Do you think that writing that firey blog yesterday had anything to do with the fire alarm going off at 3 am forcing us all to leave our warm beds and go out in the cold to wait for the brave firemen? I wasn't sleeping anyway but I think now I have a cold. I know it doesn't sound right, but maybe if once it was a real fire not a false alarm I would feel better? Just a small contained fire where no one gets hurt, maybe?

And a new word I learned today, conveniently very linguistic, "haplology" = the accidental omission of one or more repeated syllables or sounds when speaking. Interestingly, this word comes very close to an Arabic word meaning "nonsense" or even "idiocy".

Mai