Tuesday Tally: The Muppets and Other Celebrities

Monday Tally is a weekly link round-up of some of my favorite posts discovered over the week. If you have suggestions for Monday Tally, please e-mail sophisticated [dot] dorkiness [at] gmail [dot] com. Enjoy!

My Writings on the Interwebs

I recently finished a story for work about the redesign of the Perkins Brailler, a product that hadn’t been redesigned since 1951. I think this article turned out well.

I also did a freelance piece of Readers’ Advisor News about Book Blog Basics for Librarians. A big thanks to Sarah at Citizen Reader for helping me set up this story, and Jenn at Jenn’s Bookshelves for being interviewed.

Quote and Photo of the Week

“I think perfect objectivity is an unrealistic goal; fairness, however, is not.” – Michael Pollan.

(Thanks, @OnlinePublicist, for sharing.)

This picture of Jason Segel and the Muppets from the upcoming Muppet movie never fails to make me smile. My favorite part is the look of pure joy on Segel’s face – it’s infectious. (via HitFlix).

Celebrity Profiles I Actually Think You Should Read

Tina Fey is a great female comedian, but I didn’t know much about her career until I read this profile from The Washington Post about her winning the Twain Prize. I especially love this anecdote:

A story: After graduating from the University of Virginia in 1992, Fey knew that she wanted to be in show business, but not in Los Angeles. “Maybe on some level I knew I’d get eaten alive in L.A., because it’s a place for very good-looking people,” she says. “You have to be to get in the door, to get an agent, to get a commercial. . . . ”

Wait, is Tina Fey — glamour queen of the smart set, icon of legions of young women in nerdy-cool “Tina Fey” eyeglasses everywhere — saying she isn’t attractive?

She brightens: “There’s photographic evidence that it was not going that well! I never thought I was terrible-looking, but I always knew that there was a certain type of person who could book a McDonald’s commercial,” suggesting it wasn’t her.

Another celebrity profile, but of someone I don’t care much about – Courtney Love. I’m only linking to it because the first six paragraphs are basically priceless. A reporter could not make up a better opening anecdote to tell this story.

And a third profile, of a comic I generally enjoy: Jimmy Fallon. This one talks about how Fallon is bringing back a more earnest and feel-god kind of comedy:

If other late-night shows echo the snarkier outposts of the Internet, Fallon’s smartly plugged into the Internet’s more earnest side: the part where fans flock to gab about last night’s Glee or watch videos of adorable puppies.

Literature in the Real World

Which literary character would have been a Facebook addict? Laura Miller (writing for Salon) looks at what literary characters would embrace new forms of social networking.

Another photo and story that I can’t help but smile at: recreational Quiddich – that game they play in Harry Potter – might become an NCAA sport. Priceless. (Thanks to my sister, Jenny, for sharing this article!)

Joan Didion is coming out with another memoir, Blue Nights, which will focus on aging. It’s being published on Knopf in 2011, and I can’t wait. Also, Didion says blogging makes her uncomfortable.

Finding Book Lovers Online

The Christian Science Monitor shared a list of Twitter hashtags for writers and readers. There’s a bunch of good ones in there, maybe that I didn’t know about.

The Huffington Post did a click-bait article (an article with a lot of pages that you have to click through, which makes their website stats look artificially better) about social networking sites for book lovers. I thought it was interesting.

Randoms

Vanity Fair does a surprisingly big number of great narrative journalism. This recent piece by Mark Bowden – The Case of the Vanishing Blonde – is a real-life detective story with some amazing characters.

Here are 20 Awesomely Untranslatable Words from Around the World. My favorites include:

2. Mamihlapinatapei

Yagan (indigenous language of Tierra del Fuego) – “the wordless, yet meaningful look shared by two people who both desire to initiate something but are both reluctant to start” (Altalang.com)

3. Jayus

Indonesian – “A joke so poorly told and so unfunny that one cannot help but laugh” (Altalang.com)

Books for My TBR

• Big Girls Don’t Cry by Rebecca Traister
• Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff because of an interesting NPR Books story.
• Soul Pancake by Rainn Wilson because I actually really love this book trailer:

And that’s it for the Tally this week. As always, any favorite or most interesting links?