I mostly read the Time 100 Most Influential People in the World for the oddball pairings.

Ted Nugent on Sarah Palin.

Palin on Glenn Beck.

Bono on Bill Clinton.

“Rock stars can’t be President (lucky for you) but we’ve all got reasons to be thankful that Presidents can be rock stars,” the U2 lead singer says of “Haiti’s best friend.”

Cyndi Lauper on Lady Gaga.

Stevie Nicks on Taylor Swift.

“Saturday Night Live” hostess Betty White on Sandra Bullock.

Midwesterner Elizabeth Warren, overseer of the $700 billion bailout of the U.S. financial industry, occasionally appears on “The Daily Show.”

Usher on Prince, who’s “timeless. He hasn’t aged a bit. He had an attitude, a rawness that Michael didn’t have.”

My admiration for Lauper has only grown seeing her belittled and dismissed by lesser talents week in and week out on “Celebrity Apprentice.”

I tuned in once to see former Dowagiac resident Sinbad, then got hooked in spite of myself.

And no, Rod Blagojevich didn’t make this cut, either.

Lauper said Gaga makes her feel “like the dust was shaken off of me. I find it very comforting to sit next to somebody and not have to worry that I look like the freak. She isn’t a pop act, she is a performance artist. She herself is the art. She is the sculpture.”
I consider myself well-read, so this issue always confuses me, since I can only identify 30.

Closest to home is Goshen, Ind.’s, Dr. Douglas Schwartzentruber for cancer vaccine research.

Thank goodness for entertainers, although I was surprised to see Elton John, 63 whom I enjoyed in concert in high school in 1974, makes the 2010 list.

How influential can you be if I’ve never heard of you?

Time says in that stuffy way it has, its provocative list is “not about the influence of power but the power of influence.”

I say Managing Editor Rick Stengel had it right in the headline over his column, “Under the influence.” There had to be some drinking involved.

How else do you explain Han Han, 27, novelist, race car driver and “enfant terrible of China’s literary world” and, since mid-2009, its most popular blogger.

Clearly, Time shows off with this issue because it can.

And in my defense, I might have recognized the name of Recep Tayyip Erdogan if Time did more cover stories on Turkey’s prime minister instead of relegating a week’s worth of world snippets to a page of briefs in the front of the book, near 10 questions with Karl Rove.

Rove, who lacks a college degree, finds the Tea Party movement “interesting” because “the vast majority of these people have not been involved in American politics, and that’s a healthy thing.”

He deals with people like me, who blame him and President Bush for all the world’s evils, by trying to “make them be specific. People can hyperventilate all they want, but I want them to be specific in their charge. So I ask, What is it that you think we did wrong? And then confront those aspects.”

Rove, whom I saw speak on Sept. 22, 2008, doesn’t see the GOP as the party of no.

Republicans will see great gains in the 2010 elections which will “be bigger if Republicans are not content simply to surf the wave of discontent with what Democrats are doing but instead offer an optimistic and positive agenda.”

Rove doesn’t care how he’s remembered.

President Bush’s “greatest achievement was to put America on the right footing to win and prevail in the global war on terror.”

As for the Republicans’ 2012 nominee, “I think there’s going to be somebody we haven’t seen yet,” just as no one would have bet on Barack Obama in 2006.

By the way, W’s memoir, “Decision Points,” which goes on sale Nov. 9, will set you back $350 if you want one of the 1,000 signed copies.

Then I flip a page to the Postcard from Halden, Norway, and almost give up on the 100 Most Influential.

It’s about the world’s most humane prison, with a sound studio, jogging trails, flat-screen TVs and mini-fridges to rival college dorm rooms, orange sorbet and $1 million spent commissioning artwork.

It opened April 8 at a cost of $252 million to house 252 inmates, or $1 million each.

Laugh if you want at their pudding-headed, crime-coddling approach, but within two years of release, 20 percent of Norwegian prisoners end up back in jail, while the United States and United Kingdom enjoy recidivism rates of 50 to 60 percent.

If you wonder if there’s anything in which America is still No. 1, there is – the world’s highest incarceration rate, 2.3 million people, or 753 per 100,000 (69 for Norway).

Guards don’t carry guns, though they eat meals and play sports with inmates.

Half the guards are women to reduce aggression.

Prisoners receive questionnaires asking how the experience can be improved.

This, an item that Sony will stop making floppy disks in Japan in March 2011, a lawyer-killing Utah death row prisoner choosing to die by firing squad and Kevin Keller, an openly gay character coming to Riverdale High with the September issue (they still have Archie comics!?) are way more interesting than a list of foreign names I can’t pronounce, but I muddle my way back mid-magazine.

Michael Moore writes President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva “wants for Brazil what we used to call the American Dream. We in the U.S., by contrast, where the richest 1 percent now own more financial wealth than the bottom 95 percent combined, are living in a society that is fast becoming more like Brazil.”

I really admire Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but I didn’t know much more than his February remark, “Allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly would be the right thing to do.”

I never stopped to consider the irony of a “sailor leading our military in two land wars.”
Diplomat Richard Holbrooke credits him with the “widest-ranging intellectual curiosity of any chairman I’ve known.”

John Eby is Daily News managing editor. E-mail him at john.eby@leaderpub.com.