Ykblog

 As well-known for leading a flamboyant, playboy lifestyle as being the mastermind responsiblefor funneling $5 billion dollars (about $12 billion today) to Afghan rebels (when theywere on our side) in their fight against the Soviet Union, Texas Congressman Charlie Wilsonwas a larger than life character who serves as a stark reminder of how different the politicallandscape was before social media and the 24 hour news cycle. So it should come as no surprise that hisfirst introduction into politics was just as notable as his later exploits. Charlie was born on June 1, 1933 and raisedin Trinity, Texas, a small town north of Houston.  As he explained in the book Charlie Wilson’sWar: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History, written by GeorgeCrile, when Charlie was 13, his dog strayed into his neighbor’s, Charles Hazard’s,yard one too many times. Hazard, living up to his name, fed the dogsomething that contained crushed glass, ultimately leading to the dog’...

 Hi, I'm Younus. This is Crash Course Literature and today we're gonna discuss Lord of the Flies. Mr Green! Mr Green!I hate that book. You know, Me From The Past, I've beenthinking a lot about selfhood lately. Like, how is it that I am still the same technical person I was when I was 16? Because, like, my tastes have changed, my passions have changed, almost all of my cells have even changed. What is it, aside from some tiny strand of memory, that makes the me I was when I was 16 the same me I am today at 38? And then I remember.We both dislike Lord of the Flies. Right, but personal taste aside, Lord of the Flies is taught in many literature classes, so here we are. We're gonna kill the pig.We're gonna cut her throat, spill her blood... I don't know what just came over me. Probably the capacity for evil that William Golding believes lurks in the heart of every man, and also presumably every other person. But more on that in a moment. Lord of the Flies is a 1954 ...

 I took a cell phone and accidentally made myself famous. (Laughter) I was just talkingabout the things that I cared about, but with the click of a button and an incendiary viral video I propelled myself into overnight stardom. When I say overnight, I mean I literally woke upthe next morning with so many notifications on my phone, I thought I sleptthrough a national tragedy. (Laughter) It was the craziest thing, guys, but when it came to my influenceand my exposure, I literally took a quantum leap.  So I made more videos and the subject matter of my videos was often the most divisive subjectin American life, but it was the way that I articulated race that made me somewhatof a digital lightning rod. See, being a survivor myselfof police brutality and having lost a childhood friend, Alonzo Ashley, at the hands of the police, I had a little somethingto say about the topic. You see, this was at the heightof the Black Lives Matter furor and people seemed to be turningto me to artic...

 They say you used to be able to ski through the canals. I wasn’t alive then, granted. So I’ve never actually seen it. But all the old people say so. Things were different before they starting dredging. In 1842, in a country just a few years awayfrom declaring itself Canada, colonist David McCall received a Crown Patent for a small island in the middle of the St. Clair river, just a stone’s throw from the Michigan border. After arriving on North America’s shoresa few hundred years before, his people had spread unwanted across the back of the continent, upending any native groups rooted in their way.  At times they spread deliberately, at timesby accident, but no matter how they got there, their influence soon spanned coast to coast. McCall happened to be one of the ones that was spread deliberately. What was once a fertile deer hunting groundfor the local indigenous tribes would now be a farmstead for an ambitious British implant. A European seed in American soil. Through him,...

 Welcome to our Hammer Frankenstein Top Ten. A few years ago we released a two-part special charting the Hammer Frankenstein franchise and the history of the studio that made it, from inception ‘Where did it all begin?’ to demise... 'There's nothing more to see. It's all over now' This is a sort of companion piece looking at the best characters ‘Bit of a barney getting it out it was. Tricky thing a brain’ Moments... and scenes from across the series. And there’s only one place to start. ‘I am Baron Frankenstein’ Immediately distinguishing it from the Universal franchise, Hammer made their films all about the Baron himself rather than the creature. ‘You are a very clever man then Baron’ ‘Yes I am’ And their Baron Frankenstein was a very different character.  'There is nothing - do you hear me - nothing more important to me than the success of this experiment' As written by Jimmy Sangster, directed by Terence Fisher, and performed by Peter Cushing, Hammer’s Victor...

 It’s safe to say that I won’t live touse a time machine. And not because I didn’t attend Stephen Hawking’s time traveler party, I have bigger fish to fry than that. No, the reason I know I’ll never use a timemachine is because when I was thirteen years old I sent a letter professing my undyinglove to a girl in my class, only to then blame a friend the moment that she rejected me. And If I ever encountered a time machine,that would not be a memory that I still have.  But today’s episode is not about my failed love life. It's about giant letters in a hill. It’s about time. You can’t erase the past. It’s a lesson that's surprisingly hard to learn. They say those that don’t know history are doomed to repeat it but I’d argue that we're doomed to repeat it regardless. Few people really want to look back on history,because that’s where the lessons are, and almost none of us really want to learn a lesson. We’re kind of like Calvin on that camping trip with his father dreading what...

 So, I'll start with this: a coupleyears ago, an event planner called me because I was goingto do a speaking event. And she called, and she said, "I'm really struggling with howto write about you on the little flyer." And I thought,"Well, what's the struggle?" And she said, "Well, I saw you speak, and I'm going to call youa researcher, I think, but I'm afraid if I call youa researcher, no one will come, because they'll thinkyou're boring and irrelevant." (Laughter) And I was like, "Okay." And she said, "But the thingI liked about your talk is you're a storyteller. So I think what I'll dois just call you a storyteller." And of course, the academic,insecure part of me was like, "You're goingto call me a what?" And she said, "I'm goingto call you a storyteller." And I was like, "Why not 'magic pixie'?" (Laughter) I was like, "Let me thinkabout this for a...