Daily Show, Jared Diamond, and bash

The New Yorker has a short read about Stephen Colbert and the moving of sets...also included is a short piece about his interview with Al Sharpton:

Colbert: In street lingo, are you running to stick it to the Man?
Sharpton: I don’t know on what street you got that language.
Colbert: The urban street. The mean streets.
Sharpton: I’m sticking up for a lot of people that have felt that no one has stuck up for them. But I’m not trying to stick it to anyone.
Colbert: Not even . . . the Man?
Sharpton: Who’s the Man?
Colbert: Let’s pretend for a moment that I’m the Man. Now stick it to me.
Sharpton: I’m not sticking it to anyone.
Colbert: Not even the Man? He’s very stickable.

And on the opposite end of the literary spectrum, we have bash.org, a collection of somewhat-humorous quotes taken from IRC (internet relay chat)...if you're under 18, you really shouldn't click it, and yes, I know saying that is akin to giving a child a firecracker and telling him not to light it...here are a couple of my personal favorites:

#69868

Kitsa: heh, you want to see something funny, closed-caption the news.
Kitsa: "twenty people were taken to the emergency room after touching debris"
Kitsa: translates to
Kitsa: "twently people were taken to emerge in see room after touching the brie."
Kitsa: the deaf must think we're insane.

#99835

Guo_Si: Hey, you know what sucks?
TheXPhial: vaccuums
Guo_Si: Hey, you know what sucks in a metaphorical sense?
TheXPhial: black holes
Guo_Si: Hey, you know what just isn't cool?
TheXPhial: lava?

And some blogger goes to see Jared Diamond speak at her college...interesting info, as usual:

The talk was fantastic - he discussed how societies collapsed in the past, using a set of case studies to analyze different factors. The emphasis of the talk was on how societies who use up all of their resources fail. He spoke of Easter Island (which deforested itself to cannibalism and eventually extinction) and the natural experiment of Haiti vs. Dominican Republic. Amidst all of the stories of failed societies, he discussed how Japan saved itself from deforestation and extinction.

Throughout it, he kept making jabs at our current political state and how we are (globally) headed to a very very bad place. At one point, he rattled off a set of possible statements that the Easter Islanders might have said when they cut down the last tree. I can't recap them perfectly, but they were hysterical... something like "well, there might be tree elsewhere that we don't know about yet" and "science will find an alternate to trees shortly" and "God gave us these trees for our own use" and "this is my property, i have the right to do what i want with my own trees." We all giggled nervously.