Late Night Jokes: Obama Saves Bieber's Monkey

The Tonight Show with Jay Leno

• President Obama's approval rating has dropped eight points over the past month, down to 45 percent, his lowest rating in over a year. Obama's vowing to find out whose approval he's lost, track them down using their email and phone records, and personally win them back.
• The latest search for Jimmy Hoffa has been called off. The FBI now says they called off the search because the NSA said it would be too difficult to find Jimmy Hoffa because he hasn't made a phone call since 1975.
• In Xalapa, Mexico, a cat named Morris is running for mayor. Do you know the difference between a cat and a politician? Cats don't pretend to care about you.
• Iran has elected a new president named Hassan Rohani. Rohani has promised to improve Iran's economy and fix the unemployment problem. If that doesn't work, he's going to blame the whole thing on President Bush.

Late Show with David Letterman

• President Obama was in Germany today and made a historic speech. The reason Obama is in Germany is to promote democracy and to rescue Justin Bieber's monkey.
• Germany is mad at the United States for the NSA eavesdropping. This, ladies and gentlemen, from the country that gave us the Gestapo.
• It's a beautiful day in New York City. It's 77 and sunny, like Martha Stewart.
• Have you seen the new Superman movie? The final battle scene between Superman and the evil General Zod is like nothing I've ever seen before except for every other super-hero movie.

John Oliver

• Sarah Palin has been hired back by Fox News, and she only left five months ago. She has now effectively quit quitting. She can't even commit to being uncommitted.

The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson

• A new restaurant here in Southern California requires women to wear high heels. I'm outraged! This is sexist! Why just the women?
• President Obama is in Berlin, Germany. It was 97 degrees in Berlin today. I haven't seen Obama sweat like that since, well, yesterday. And the day before that. All this week, in fact.
• During the cold war, West Berlin was an "exclave" — a tiny outpost of liberalism surrounded by people who want to crush it. It was like Austin, Texas.
• President Obama is trying to get Vladimir Putin to scale back Russia's nuclear arsenal. But it's not a good time. Putin just got a divorce. He just lost half his stuff. And his wife gets to use the Kremlin on weekends.

Late Night with Jimmy Fallon

• This spying scandal at the White House isn’t going away. In fact, it was just announced that President Obama will meet a group of regular Americans to hear their concerns about the White House surveillance program. Or more accurately, to RE-HEAR them.
• Men’s Wearhouse founder and spokesman George Zimmer has been fired after 40 years with the company. I don't know about you, but I do NOT like the way this looks.
• A new survey found that 70 percent of Americans admit to “going through the motions” at their jobs. And the other 30 percent blah, blah, blah, punch line.
• NASA is challenging Americans to help them figure out a better way to find threatening asteroids. Americans said, “What do we get if you pick our idea?” And NASA said, “To live.”

Comedian Argus Hamilton

• Oakland A's fans demanded a new stadium Sunday after a major sewage spill chased the team out of their locker room. The rancid fumes seeped into the stands. The fans all agree it was a big mistake to sell the stadium naming rights to Royal Caribbean Cruises.
• President Obama told PBS Tuesday he is satisfied that the NSA spying programs protect the privacy of U.S. citizens. The president insisted that the spy program is transparent because it's overseen by a top-secret court. Dick Cheney was so proud he passed out cigars.
• President Obama was ripped Monday for sending small arms to the Syrian rebels, too late to help. What can we do? It'd be nice if the U.S. had a reliable Arab leader installed by the CIA in the region to impose order on the situation but we invaded Iraq and hanged him.
• President Obama flew to Germany to address the German people in Berlin. It might cheer him up. He's been ripped by both U.S. parties lately for being an an authoritarian and a compulsive speech-maker so he might as well go where it's traditionally appreciated.

Book Review: Graveland

By Alan Glynn

400 Pages

$9 Kindle Edition
$12 (approx.) Paperback

Brought to you by Barnes and Noble

Alan Glynn is quickly becoming one of my favorite authors. I first encountered his writing in Bloodland, still one of my favorite books of all time. 

After some research I learned that Bloodland was actually a sort of sequel to another book, Winterland, which was also pretty amazing. 

(Alan Glynn also wrote the book which was the basis for the movie Limitless, by the way.)

I had incredibly high expectations for Graveland, which I'm assuming will be the final book in the -land series.

(Minor Winterland and Bloodland spoilers follow)
Winterland and Bloodland follow the same basic story structure. There is a murder in the opening pages. Then you are quickly introduced to the rest of the characters, all loosely connected in some way. It becomes apparent very quickly who is behind the murder, but not why. The fun of both books is watching the "good guys" slowly find out who is behind the murder and why, while also seeing what the bad guys due next.

It's a great structure, but like Dan Brown did with his third Langdon book, Glynn changed things up a bit for the third book.

(Minor Graveland spoilers follow)
This time there is more than one murder, and the reader is in the dark about both the murderer and the motive. Plus the characters are much less connected, at least at first.

The first half of the book is incredible. The tension is high and there are several oh crap moments. Glynn's writing style in the first half is on par with Bloodland and Winterland. That is, incredible. His style is probably the best I've ever read, though that may just be because it's so similar to my style.

Halfway through, the story reaches its climax. The separate characters come crashing together and it's amazing, exciting, and wonderful. Then the second half kind of drags out and becomes amazingly, stupidly predictable (except for a nice, final twist at the end).

Throughout all three -land books, there has been a constant "bad guy" vaguely behind everything. This is supposed to be the book where he finally gets whats coming for him. But, if you had never read Bloodland or Winterland, you wouldn't even understand that he is a bad guy. He does absolutely nothing remotely evil in this book. He's just an old guy about to retire.
The second half also made me realize that the new characters introduced in this book (basically all of them) are much flatter than the characters in his previous novels, which were dynamic, round, and plenty of other adjectives as well. Even the big bad guy from the previous two books is made into more of a monochrome character with only one real goal.

The second half of the story, while pretty predictable, is still somewhat compelling and interesting, especially towards the very end, but it's dragged out way too long. At the absolute most it should have been a quarter of the book, but preferably much less than that. 

Overall, Graveland is still an excellent book. The first half of the book easily gets 4.5 stars (out of 5, obviously), but the second half really drags it down. If you've read Winterland and Bloodland (and even Limitless, aka The Dark Fields, which gets a nice, sort of awkward, reference towards the end) then you absolutely need to read this novel.
If you haven't read the previous two, you'd likely be confused about who the bad guy is, since he's just a sort of rude old man in this book. I highly suggest you go back and read Winter and Blood first.

3.7/5

Also brought to you by Audible, basically the best place ever to get amazing audiobooks. I highly suggest both The Great Gatsby and A Game of Thrones. 

Now There's a Picture of Mars with Over a Billion Pixels

Because science can't be stopped, NASA has compiled a picture of the surface of mars with over a billion pixels, 1.3 billion to be exact. The photo you see on the right is a much smaller crop of said photo.

This is the first photo from the surface with over one billion pixels, and its made from about 850 exposures from Curiosity stitched together.
The first NASA-produced view from the surface of Mars larger than one billion pixels stitches together nearly 900 exposures taken by cameras onboard Curiosity and shows details of the landscape along the rover's route.

The 1.3-billion-pixel image is available for perusal with pan and zoom tools here, and a scaled down, but still huge version (~159MB) is available for direct download here.

Watch Russell Brand Make Three Professional News People Incredibly Uncomfortable

A Humorous Case of Spam Comments

Comments on the Internet are notoriously sucky, and spam comments are even worse. I've seen all sorts of bad spam here on Clickege, usually with long paragraphs full of bad english and no punctuation followed by a "my blog:: {Insert crappy title here}" link. 

Today I witnessed a particularly funny spam comment. It simply said "hmm you write good word your blog thanks." followed by a link to some crappy spam site. Thanks spambot, I do write good word my blog, dog. 

I don't know why, but I just love this comment. It's just... so short and so bad and... it's great. It made me sad to crush it with my mighty spam smashing administrative powers. 

Anyways, story time is over. Go back to pondering the future of US/Iran/Taliban relations under new President Hamid Karzai.