So the President has gone to fetch the Olympics for Chicago. In this endeavor I hope he fails. Should it prove otherwise, we hereby offer refuge to Ed when the menagerie rolls in.
Tangentially, did they really move the Pro Bowl to Florida? Yet another weekend I’ll have to spend shut indoors with the curtains drawn.
I’m not sure how to feel about Hitchens’ column on the slaughter of the Cairo pigs; his reaction was exactly mine, if one includes the things I left unsaid about sectarianism.
Even before we read A Time of War, we knew that the folks in charge of BattleTech were long ago were replaced by evil cyborgs. But were said evil cyborgs brilliant enough to get us to pay for the right to proof-read it? Yes. Yes, they were.
And do you have enough money to pay off your portion???
Everybody likes St. Augustine, but not always for the same reasons. I don’t much care for Confessions, although I appreciate that Augustine enjoyed far more the subsequent guilt than the fruit he stole from his neighbor’s yard as a boy. And although he’s not a conventional thinker, he’s given to the kind of pronouncements that one could imagine appearing in school yard philosophy. (Is it more virtuous for the virgin to yield to rapacious marauders or to save her chastity by throwing herself in the lake? Answer: she should yield, but by no means should she enjoy herself.) And he clearly enjoys demolishing his opponents’ weak arguments while setting up not a few of his own.
But none of these is what draws me to the man. What I love about Augustine is that he’s a scholar who hates to study. He refuses to educate himself in Hebrew letters and gets by on poor Greek, barely apologizing as he issues grand pronouncements of exegesis (which are really fun to read, and should put today’s radio preachers and science fiction authors to shame for their relative poverty of ingenuity). He refuses to formalize his arguments, or even to remain consistent with his own pronouncements. He knows that his brain is simply bigger and better than everyone else’s and he swings it like a cudgel, taking all comers. And why not? The Almighty doesn’t dole out first-rate minds to second-rate men, does He?
It’s hard not to long for the days when the most excellent churchmen were also total bastards. Whence came the foolish belief that saints should make pleasant company?
So you don’t like the Feds showing up at your door. Fine, I understand. And sometimes a man’s got to defend his castle from the oppressors. OK, sure. But we’re not talking BATF, or DEA, or even the truant officer; you kilt you a Census worker. Do they even count as Federal employees, or are they hired temps? Fie. Just for that, I’m throwing out my Confederate dollars.
Of late the Ivy League seems little more than a matchmaking service for pairing East Asian women with Jewish men. Why isn’t anything being done about this? What will become of the rest of us after the emergence of a new super-race that’s funny and good at math?
So many things one could say about this story.
When the government killed all the pigs in Egypt this spring — in what public health experts said was a misguided attempt to combat swine flu — it was warned the city would be overwhelmed with trash.
The pigs used to eat tons of organic waste. Now the pigs are gone and the rotting food piles up on the streets of middle-class neighborhoods like Heliopolis and in the poor streets of communities like Imbaba.
But the last line of the story sums up nicely:
“The Egyptians are really in a mess,” Mr. Amin said.
For a country without competent administration since the rule of the Ptolemys, they haven’t done too badly for themselves yet. At least they didn’t kill off all the cats.
At the moment I’m hacking my way through Castlevania 2 (NES). It’s a bit embarrassing to discover how slow my reflexes are; my younger self would laugh. I wonder why they stopped making console games that balanced puzzle-solving with fighting. Perhaps the programmers realized that they were mainly making games for the other half of the Bell Curve and lost interest in all but the technical aspects of design.
One of many disappointing things about Zelda: Twilight Princess was the ease of combat; killing a room full of slavering monsters was more chore than challenge. I wonder if games like Castlevania 2 and Zelda 2 hadn’t been so poorly received whether design might have gone into more fruitful directions; rather than embracing open-ended exploration and new modes of combat, buyers demanded re-treads of the originals (and got them). Sure it sells well, but it means I have to content myself with WiiFit.
Dr. Borlaug’s passing made me wonder how many of us have contributed positively to the human condition. Consider: glazed pottery, the polio vaccine, powered flight–each of these advances was introduced by an individual. A time-traveling malevolence with good information could snuff perhaps as few as ten thousand infants in the cradle and prevent man from distinguishing himself above Australopithecus. The other seven-odd billion of us contribute nothing at all; humanity would be no worse had we never existed.
Our current problems will be solved, if they have solutions, by individuals such as Dr. Borlaug, or Salk, or Theodorus of Samos, and not by a concerted effort of the many. “People coming together” has the same practical effect as the gathering of locusts.
