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Belated Book-tacular Questions

2008-04-21 · John · watch on YouTube · Books & writing · conversation qa

John admits he missed his Question Tuesday deadline and must be punished, argues Hank must be too (lost Peeps contest, over-four-minute video), asks viewers for punishment ideas, then belatedly answers a rapid round of book questions.

What is said

00:00:00 — 'I vote count' sticker joke; John will be punished for the missed Question Tuesday, Hank for the Peeps contest and a long video; asks for punishment suggestions

  • ★★ John voted early in Indiana and got an 'I vote count' sticker, which he notes isn't a sentence. (playful) — 00:00:00 · Indiana
  • ★★★ John admits he didn't do his Question Tuesday video last week, which means he will be punished. (playful) — 00:00:00 · Question Tuesday, Punishment
  • ★★★ John says Hank will be punished too: he lost the Peeps contest without participating and made a video over four minutes without a photo montage, which breaks the rule. (playful) — 00:00:00 · Peeps, Four-minute rule, Vlogbrothers
  • ★★★ John asks Nerdfighters to suggest in comments how the brothers should be punished, wondering about a shared or simultaneous punishment. (hedged) — 00:00:00 · Nerdfighteria

00:00:53 — Belated Question Tuesday: rapid answers to book questions (Paper Towns, favorite books, authors, poets, last words, Looking for Alaska ban, Catcher, Hamlet)

  • ★★ Paper Towns is not dedicated to the Nerdfighters, but they are in the acknowledgements. — 00:00:53 · Paper Towns, Nerdfighteria
  • ★★ John's favorite reference book about Islam is No God But God by Reza Aslan. — 00:00:53
  • ★★ John probably won't write a sequel to one of his books, though he might write a sequel to a non-existent book. (playful) (hedged) — 00:00:53
  • ★★ John's favorite German writer is Goethe, whose individual sentences, he says, outclass his entire body of work. (playful) — 00:01:22
  • ★ For the 'in your pants' game, John's favorite book title at the moment is Amy Krouse Rosenthal's Little Pea. (playful) — 00:01:22 · Amy Krouse Rosenthal, in your pants
  • ★★ John, who owns many books on conjoined twins, recommends One of Us by Alice Dreger (nonfiction) and God's Fool by Mark Slouka (fiction). — 00:01:22
  • ★★ The most interesting author John has met is Judy Blume. — 00:01:52
  • ★★ Paper Towns is 308 pages long if the acknowledgements are counted. — 00:01:52 · Paper Towns
  • ★★★ On the effort to ban Looking for Alaska: the school board of Depew, New York, which John calls made of awesome, voted unanimously to keep it in the curriculum. — 00:01:52 · Looking for Alaska, made of awesome
  • ★ John says he and Hank would not survive as characters in Into Thin Air; he would die on the walk to Everest. (playful) — 00:01:52
  • ★★ John's website name sparksflyup.com comes from a line in the Book of Job: man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward. — 00:01:52
  • ★★ John's favorite personification of death in literature is in Andrew Marvell's poem To His Coy Mistress. — 00:02:30
  • ★★ Asked for favorite poets besides Walt Whitman, John recites unattributed lines from several poems, then can't find his Langston Hughes book in his cataloged home library. (playful) — 00:03:00 · Walt Whitman
  • ★★ John recounts Emily Dickinson's last words ('I must go in, the fog is rising') and that Edna St. Vincent Millay died falling downstairs, her head on a poem ending 'Beautiful this day, no matter who has died'. — 00:03:00
  • ★★ John says Shakespeare would vlog about the poor quality of insults on YouTube. (playful) — 00:03:00 · William Shakespeare, YouTube
  • ★★ John thinks The Catcher in the Rye is excellent and that anyone who disagrees is, respectfully, wrong. — 00:03:45
  • ★★ John's favorite line in Hamlet is 'The rest is silence.' — 00:03:45

Humor (significant)

  • John's early-voting sticker reads 'I vote count', which isn't a sentence; maybe something was cut off. — 00:00:00 > «maybe what they meant to say was I vote count chocula.»
  • Asked who would win a fight between E. Lockhart and Libba Bray, John names a third author. — 00:00:53 > «Surprisingly, Maureen Johnson.»
  • After saying Goethe's sentences pwn his whole body of work, John adds one more difference. — 00:01:22 > «Plus, Goethe would have never said pwned.»
  • Asked whether he'd want the vampire Yeti to bite him, John claims he may already be a vampire. — 00:02:30 > «I mean, I'd be pretty fat for a vampire, but it's totally possible.»
  • After saying Shakespeare would vlog about bad YouTube insults, John insults Nerdfighters Shakespeare-style for punishing him. — 00:03:45 > «you're a bunch of fat-kidneyed gudgeons.»

Threads in this video

Replies to

  • ITCHY MUSIC! — «last week you made a video that was more than four minutes long»

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