If you weren’t paying attention, Kottke’s begun excavating the archival treats freed by the demise of TimesSelect.

• Mr. Clive Thompson pointed out the addictive Bloxorz the other day.
• Priscilla just looks gorgeous (via Infocult).
• Flow in Games is both beautiful and mesmerizing (also via Infocult).

All right, Snarketeers, the gauntlet is thrown: Help me come up with a theme and some nominations for readings for my book club.

Every month, one of my fellow book-clubbers is assigned to nominate three or four books. When we meet to discuss the past month’s reading, we choose one of the nominees for the next month. Being something of an oddball, I like to organize my nominations around themes. The last time, for example, my theme was “Masters of Humankind.” The books I proposed were No god but God (God), The Year of Magical Thinking (Death), The Time-Traveler’s Wife (Time), and Moneyball (Money). (The club picked The Time-Traveler’s Wife. The actual selection doesn’t make much of a difference to me, because I plan to read all the books I propose, and I did.)

The theme can be oblique, clever, or straightforward. (In the straightforward camp, for example, I’ve been considering the four elements — Cloud Atlas (Air), Snow (Water), American Prometheus or Dante (Fire), Coal: A Human History or Salt: A World History (Earth).) They can be either a prominent theme of the book or just a play on its title. We prefer books that have been out in paperback, and a nomination almost always goes unpicked if one of us has already read it. I aim for variety in the selection — memoir, biography, journalistic non-fiction, literary fiction, magical realism, social history.

So, whaddya say? Help me out?

Whenever I think about our reflexive distrust of emerging technology, I remember Plato’s Phaedrus, in which Socrates argues that writing is inferior to rhetoric. Socrates recounts a legend in which the Egyptian king Thamus refuses the gift of writing from the god Theuth, saying that writing will be deleterious to true wisdom. We will read, but never know, Thamus says. Writing may remind us, but it can’t educate us, the way a speaker can. The irony in this passage, of course, is that Phaedrus is itself a written work.

There’s a lot to be said about the curious intersection between technology and memory — how technology seems to allow us to both retain more and forget more — but Jenny Lyn Bader managed to leave out all the interesting parts in her NYT Week in Review essay (“Britney Spears? That’s All She Rote”) on how people can’t remember anything anymore. And along the way, she manages to fit Britney’s lip-synching, organ transplant recipients, and “The Vagina Monologues” into this tortured half-argument. it’s kind of a train wreck. I really have nothing especially profound to say about this essay, it just seemed a blogworthy exemplar of the awful our-culture’s-going-to-hell/wasn’t-it-better-when form. And she cites Phaedrus too, with no nod to the irony therein.

It doesn’t exactly look comfortable, and it’s not exactly pretty. But it’s a chair-barrow with a lamp attached to it. It’s even apparently got little shelves hidden beneath the armrests. I want one! Alas, all the text is in German, and I don’t see anything that resembles an “add-to-cart” button.

(Via my bookstore. See also: Bibliochaise.)

Firing an employee is a messy business. No small business likes to do it. There are the headaches

Stop reading this post right now and go read Mark Lilla’s stunning NYT Mag article adapted from his forthcoming book. The past year has seen a horde of devout atheists — Dennett, Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris — gathering arms against religion and its place in the civic sphere. But no matter how they title their books, Harris et al aren’t speaking to a Christian nation, but to a small subset of fellow thinkers. Lilla’s scholarship as summarized in this article feels like the scaffold for a bridge between the staunch secularists and the political theologists. Put him in a room with Reza Aslan, and you have the makings of a serious conversation, one that might begin to answer the question, “How do we live together?” Much better than this beautiful-but-doomed dialogue, at least.

Are you really still reading my rambling? GO READ LILLA. Then read No god but God. (Then read Rousseau’s “Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar,” which I’d never heard of until reading Lilla’s piece. It’s fantastic.) Then get into a conversation with an open-minded person on the opposite side of the secularist/theologist divide.

Edgar Allen Poe’s masked fanatic has allegedly unmasked himself. A 92-year-old Poe-head named Sam Porpora claims to be the originator of the annual tradition of celebrating Poe’s birthday with roses and cognac. But he says he’s not sure who’s continued the toast each year since 1976. The mystery remains …

This tie-tying tutorial works pretty darn well. I’ve always been a good tier of ties, but I just tried this, and it totally ups my game. (Via.)

When David Weinberger talks about how effective the Internet has been at evolving sophisticated filters for processing all the stuff that’s on the Internet, this is what he means. AideRSS is a Godsend. It analyzes the activity around each item in an RSS feed — Technorati hits, comments, Del.icio.us links, traffic reports, etc. — and calculates a score for the item. It then creates four feeds from the original feed, each set to a higher activity threshold.

Example: So far today, BoingBoing has posted a liver-curdling 18 entries. I could cut that down to two entries by subscribing to the feed of what AideRSS has deemed to be BoingBoing’s “best” posts. (Today, I’d be reading the obit of the fellow who could dial a phone by whistling, and a post on this “John Hughes meets George Romero” graphic novel. Among other things, I’d miss cheap plastic toys, fugly sweatshirts, a clay iPhone, and politically-themed crafting projects. Think I’d live.) If I really only want to hear from BoingBoing every couple of days, I could go for just the hits.

For those of you overloading on RSS feeds, but hoping not to miss anything big, this is totally key.