the wishful thinking of historians
Bellesiles goes down. Lighten up Clayton, you’re entitled to gloat a bit.
Gene Healy, whom I had not read before:
Forty armed citizens out of 700 in the audience might have made it quite difficult for the [Chechen] terrorists to secure the [theatre] building. Sure, a lot of folks might have been killed in the firefight, but a lot more would have been able to escape in the chaos. Sixty-seven died anyway in a rescue attempt that might have gone a lot worse.
Al Gore attacked candidate Bush for signing a CCW bill in Texas that didn’t prohibit carrying guns into churches. But if Chechen methods are replicated by Al Qaeda cells here, that looks to me like a solid argument for guns in churches, bars, shopping malls, and schools.
I like to say, whenever someone brings up something like Columbine: “Gun control worked perfectly. Nobody shot back.”
Any French film buffs in the audience? I’m trying to remember the title of a movie in which one of the main characters brags of his « collection intégrale des Livres de Poche » (complete collection of Pocket Books). If memory serves, the plot concerns two friends (one of whom was played by Depardieu) trying to impress the same woman, but both too modern to be competitive about it.
2004 February: Possibly Préparez vos mouchoirs.
Down the street was Cheapo Records, located now in the old Best Buy store. Cheapo sells used CDs as well as new, and dumps every day’s purchases in big bins marked with the date they came in. Most of the CDs are lame, but there’s always a gem in the dross. People flip through the bins quite quickly: crap. crap. crap. crap. crap. zamfir. crap. crap. 182 blink. crap. hippie crap. crap. crap. Whoa! Woody Guthrie! The sound fills the front of the store, drowns out the music: clack clack clack clack. It’s like listening to a Difference Engine made of hard plastic, or ten people drumming their tongue studs against their front teeth.
Most of my disc collection was accumulated in the early Nineties when I used to go to Recycled Records on Haight Street every month or two. Rather than spend an hour going through the whole stock and then decide which four of my twenty selections to buy, I hit on a system: on each visit I searched one letter of the alphabet, and bought everything that struck my fancy. Saved loads of time, and exposed me to lots of stuff I’d never have tried otherwise. After about two cycles through the alphabet, there was little left to find, so I stopped going.
What if I could go back in the past, take myself aside and say: You know, in the future, you will be convinced that Russian computers are sending you messages about barnyard sex photos.
I would have gripped my future self by the shoulders: am I insane in the future? Tell me!
No, everyone gets them.
Miles Kington channels A.P.Herbert, sorta: introductory remarks; motive. (Thanks to Michael Travers.)
Toshiba says a notebook computer running on fuel cells is two years away. (From slashdot by way of Bill St Clair – whose blog, I now notice, is “created with Emacs”. You go.)
update 2004 Oct 22: I’m waiting . . .