My Top 100 of 2007 – sort of

Obviously, 2007 is still just getting started and, more obviously, iTunes doesn’t have every song I’m listening to, but here, for your 30-seconds-at-a-time previewing pleasure, are the top 100 92 of 2007 so far.

The Onion looks back at four years in Iraq

This week, lots of media outlets will be talking about the Iraq War, four years later. The Onion, straight from the heart of America’s Dairyland, has published a special issue looking back on their Iraq coverage to date.

Lost interviews

I’m apparently one of the last people still enjoying Lost. I view it as a big thick novel, of the stupidly long novel format that’s more and more common nowadays, and enjoy it for what it is.

Anyway, there’s two good new Lost-related interviews out there:

• KCRW’s The Treatment: Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse
• Wired: Inside the Mind of JJ Abrams

The No Asshole Rule

Here’s a book I think every CEO and HR person should likely read: The No Asshole Rule.

It’s just what you think it is: A breakdown of how assholes in the workplace, far from being the big rainmakers or motivators they’re sometimes perceived as being, actually hurt the bottom line.

Author Bob Sutton — a smartypants Harvard Business Review columnist, so maybe his ideas will gain some traction — is an online kind of guy, whose son plays World of Warcraft, so his blog is full of discussions of how online businesses — guilds — exemplify a lot of the stuff he’s talking about.

Everyone who’s played an MMORPG, either in a hardcore raiding guild, or simply knowing people who are in one, knows all about the yelling, demeaning, nasty raid leader. Not surprisingly, most of these outfits fall apart the moment the members feel like there’s another viable alternative out there. But so many members are so indoctrinated that they think that sort of thing is necessary to success in the raiding game that they just find another dysfunctional outfit and repeat the process until they finally quit the game in exhaustion.

(In my EverQuest guild, and to a lesser extent in my WoW guild, I myself was known for barking orders a bit, but I tried to make sure to keep it targeted on issues, not personalities, and to be generous — and specific — with praise when it was appropriate.)

If anyone in the newspaper industry who ever has or feels like they’re likely to hire me at some point would like a free copy of this book, just e-mail me. It’ll be money well spent.

You can listen to the interview or read the full transcript of the Marketplace interview with Bob Sutton here.

The android’s conundrum

I really enjoy the new song by The Shins, “Australia,” but the lyrics make me feel a little dumb:

Time to put the earphones on…
No!

La la la la
La la la la
Laaaaaaa
La la la la

(Born to multiply) Born to multiply
Born to gaze into night skies
All you want’s one more Saturday
Well look here until then
They’re gonna buy your nice time
So keep your wick in the air and your feet in the fetters
‘Till the day you come in doing cartwheels
We all pull out by ourselves
And your shape on the dance floor
Will have me thinking such filth and gouge my eyes

You’d be damned to be one of us girl
Faced with a dodo’s conundrum
I felt like I could just fly
But nothing happend every time I tried

Wooo, ooooh!

A dual-tone under wall
Selfish fool and hoped he’d save us all
Never dreamt of such sterile hands

You keep ’em folded in your lap
And raise them up to beg for scraps
You know he’s holding you down
With the tips of his fingers just the same

But you’ll be pulled from the ocean
But just a minute too late
Or changed by a potion
You’ll find a handsome young mate for you to love

You’ll be damned to pining through the windowpanes you know
You’ll trade your life for any ordinary Joe
Will do and I will grow old
Your nightmares only need a year or two to unfold

Been alone since you were twenty-one
You haven’t laughed since January
You try and think of this as so much fun
But we know it to be quite contrary

La la la la la la la

Dare to be one of us girl
Faced with the android’s conundrum
I felt like I should just cry
But nothing happens every time I take one on the chin
Your humor in your coat you don’t know how long I’ve been
Watching the lantern dim starved of oxygen
So give me your hand and let’s jump out the window

“Faced with the android’s conundrum?” Say what? Someone help me out here, please.