When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops? by George Carlin

George Carlin skewers a wide range of targets in this compilation of humor.  As usual some of the material is for adults only and not for those easily offended.  His mastery of the increasingly euphemistic world we live in make it worth reading.  I've included a section of his speech to the National Press Club below on the phases of a political scandal.  It it a helpful primer for predicting the inevitable path of future events. 

Anatomy of a Political Scandal - Approx 4 minutes

Heroes and Legends: The Most Influential Characters of Literature by Thomas A. Shippey

The audio course  by Thomas Shippey, Heroes and Legends: The Most Influential Characters of Literature, is also available through Amazon Prime Great Courses Signature Collection.  

I enjoyed going from Odysseus and Beowulf to James Bond and Harry Potter.  Each of the 24 episodes covers a different style of hero.  Frodo Baggins from The Lord of the Rings is not a typical hero.  He comes ill prepared to the task and grows into his role as an unlikely hero.

The Icelandic poems of Thor reveal the human and often humorous side of a hero with tremendous strength.  Lesser know characters such as the colorful Wife of Bath by Chaucer are discussed alongside Jane Austen's Elizabeth Bennett.

Each of the stories is put in historical context to give a better understanding of the character and the author.  The series is a useful overview of the types of heroes available to authors creating their own memorable characters.



Writing to the gaps in literature from Tolkien by Thomas Shippey 5 min 30 seconds

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! by Richard P. Feynman

The book, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Adventures of a Curious Character), covers the life of this physicist from his early days devising more efficient ways to answer the telephone at a hotel front desk, his encounters with Einstein and Bohr, to his consternation at receiving a Nobel Prize.

Professor Feynman is up for adventure.  He spends a year in Brazil, at first working to convert the Spanish he just learned into Portuguese and eventually moonlighting as a pandeiro player for a local samba band. He offers up a critique of the Brazilian educational system that is applicable to flaws in the US system. We learn by memorization but don't know how it applies to the real world.  


Leading up to World War II, he works for the military and then is pulled into the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos.  He is sent off to Oak Ridge Laboratories and discovers a storage problem with the nuclear material.  It is being stored too close together and could result in an explosion. He helps them redesign he plant even though he's never seen a blueprint before. 

When he returns to Los Alamos, Mr. Feynman learns how to become a safe cracker combining physics with psychology and illustrating lapses in the security system. 

The book celebrates the joy of saying yes to an adventure and yes to continually learning new skills to live life to its fullest. 

Richard Feynman - The Great Explainer -Sci Show - 10 min. 

Richard Feynman talks about light - 6 min.

Feynman''s Learning Technique - 2 min.