Oh, this is just the thing to brighten my day. The Boston Phoenix has created short MP3s of the crucial bits from Obama’s reading of his autobiography. Hear the President of the US say: “You know that guy ain’t shit. Sorry-ass motherfucker ain’t got nothing on me.” “There are white folks, and then there are ignorant motherfuckers like you.” “You ain’t my bitch, nigga! Buy your own damn fries!”

In his bestselling autobiography, Dreams From My Father, President Obama introduces us to his high school friend, “Ray,” who, like him, is bi-racial. Who, also like him, is casting about to find his place in the world. But, who, unlike him, has a potty mouth that would make a sailor blush.

Best of all? When reading the audiobook version of his bio, Obama does impressions of Ray’s manner of speech. Swear words and all. It’s fucking awesome.

{Via WFMU’s Beware of the Blog}

Oh, and here’s some YouTubeage of these bits:

The Dalia Lama’s biography as a manga graphic novel. I haven’t seen it, so I can’t say whether it covers his involvement with the CIA, but I doubt it.

The publisher, Emotional Content, is also putting out manga bios of Mother Teresa, Che Guevera, Malcolm X, MLK, Anne Frank, and Gandhi. More info at Publishers Weekly.

The Papers of Benjamin Franklin website contains digitized, searchable versions of all of Franklin’s 30,000 extant papers - books, pamphlets, scientific papers, Poor Richard’s Almanacks, correspondence, etc.  This collection will occupy 47 printed volumes when Yale’s book series is completed. (Via Boing Boing, where the website was briefly mentioned in this post by guest-blogger Steven Johnson, author of The Invention of Air.)