A product I was planning to order has disappeared from the LEGO website. No, I won’t tell which; I’m waiting to hear whether any wares are left, and I won’t have you sniping it out from under me. [Why is it OK to use three prepositions in a row in informal English? Can you use four in a natural-sounding sentence? Five?]
Update: Phooey.
The number of TV channels I can receive reliably at home has dwindled to zero. Also, I don’t have time to watch TV. Furthermore, there’s nothing good on. I contain multitudes.
Vampires and werewolves are bigger than ever, it seems, going so far as to make it into a Shakira pop song. Even Sendack’s furry trolls are now saddled with psychology. Why haven’t leprechauns and mermaids gotten the same serious treatment in film and fiction? Too inherently hilarious, I guess.
I can’t decide whether this [perhaps not safe for work] is bait for Gabe or for myself.
The Book of Genesis illustrated by R. Crumb has been criticised by leading religious groups such as the Christian Institute.
“It is turning the Bible into titillation,” said Mike Judge, of the Christian Institute, a religious think-tank. “It seems wholly inappropriate for what is essentially God’s rescue plan for mankind.
I don’t often think of the Bible as a titilating book, but a stroll through the Rennaisance wing of your local art museum will demonstrate that it certainly will serve [or Google "Potiphar's Wife"]. I’m not sure I “get” Crumb, and I’m also not sure whether or not this is a failing.
I only made it halfway through Kagan’s history of the Peloponnesian War, so I’m not quite sure how it turns out–the Athenians come back in an exciting climax, right? Kagan has a new book, a take-down of Thucydides as an interested party (gasp) who wrote his history primarily to slander the Athenian democracy. Slate is attempting to turn the circle with its review, taking a view so contrary that returns to musty convention.
Almost two and a half millennia before Orwell, Thucydides diagnosed the diseases of language caused by war and faction. He admitted that men could live by lofty sentiments in peacetime. But “war takes away the easy supply of daily wants, and so proves a rough master, that brings most men’s characters to a level with their fortunes.” Hence the corruption of character and language, which “have occurred and always will occur, as long as the nature of mankind remains the same.”
Through the whole fever dream that is human history, no one has ever written more cogently of the disasters of war than this retired general, who saw war as the natural condition of states. No one has ever dissected more meticulously the character of a great democratic state, or revealed more vividly the moral corruption that war brings with it. Of that Thucydides—who was every bit as real as Kagan’s consummately political historian, and who speaks to us every bit as powerfully—the reader will find few traces in this book.
Welcome to the party, Slate.
Despite my ascerbic prior post, I’m in a good mood today. It’s cool here at long last, and I spent last night at a friend’s restaurant stuffing myself silly. And I have my Mac back from repair, so I can finally finish that game of Shingen the Ruler I started long ago.
In an episode of Mork & Mindy, Mork is visited by his Orkan superior, who has the body of a 10-year-old boy (for reasons I don’t remember). They divert themselves with a game of Orkan Checkers, which is played on a board of two rectangles, black and red, with a single white piece the size of a saucer. After thinking a long while, Mork opens by moving the piece from the red field to the black. “Check,” he says. Mork’s visitor makes (apparently) the only move available to him: he moves the piece from black back to red and declares victory. [youtube]
Replace the single white disk with a gross of metal figures and you have miniatures gaming in essence. In such a game, strategy, tactics, even luck are irrelevant. The outcome is determined entirely by the initial placement of pieces on the field. Miniatures gamers are animated by the same neural gangleon that motivates bug collectors, not armchair generals. I gather that there are some who would “improve” our favorite passtime by prettying-up the figures; I can’t cotton to such a womanish point of view.
Things that go bump in the night: Weird critters of the Bible, from our own RDGStout.
You didn’t believe me when I announced the immanent return of scientific racism, but here’s news of its kissing-cousin, phrenology. Next: dowsing? Cold Fusion? Hollow Earth?
