our television heritage
My Favorite Martian is available on DVD, but not The Addams Family or The Wild Wild West or Get Smart. Does that seem right to you?
We recently watched the first two episodes of The Protectors (1972), which wanted to be The Avengers — even quoting from the latter’s title narration at one point, contrasting the “professional” with the “talented amateur”. The plots were tolerably interesting, but the sparkle of the model was missing; as if Gerry Anderson took some leftover Avengers scripts and said, “Okay, now let’s cut out all the humour.”
Today I watched the first two episodes of The Saint (1962), and was surprised at how trite they are: a failed theatre producer plans to kill his third wife for the insurance; a gangster kidnaps an American governor’s daughter to get his brother out of the electric chair, and guess what, the Saint fails to spot the obvious corrupt policeman. Unlike the Saint of the books, this one is not in the habit of working alone; there’s nothing to distinguish him from any number of other teevee detectives, except that early in each episode someone says “hey, that’s the famous Simon Templar!” and a halo briefly appears over his head.
The Saint was, I gather, a very popular series. I shudder to imagine its competition. It would have been better as a half-hour show — and even then it might drag in comparison to its rough contemporary Danger Man.
let many Chinas bloom
As I understand it, both Beijing and Taipei maintain the fiction (or perhaps some in both capitals even believe it) that China is a single state, with one or more province(s) temporarily out of communion with the capitol. A large faction in Taipei would prefer to drop the fiction and “declare independence”, a notion that makes Beijing see red.
What if the Taipei regime were instead to dissolve itself, as the USSR did, letting sovereignty revert to the provinces? Beijing could hardly take that as the same kind of insult.
would you believe more links?
Tim Worstall: Bad, Bad Minimum Wage. Guess what: a price floor reduces demand! In real life, even!
Sean Corrigan: We Shoulda Seen it Coming! Since the effects of loose money are well known to economists, why can’t business adjust for them?
Check Point Nullification Project; Road Block Registry
cultured bone wedding rings; reported in New Scientist
yellow pages of patron saints
Patrick J. Buchanan: The Anti-Conservatives
electrodes against depression — me next!
The Smaller Picture: you help design a bitmap font
rule of law, you may have heard of it?
What I’ve read about the case of José Padilla tends to come filtered by dangerous subversives like Hornberger; so I’m wondering who, other than employees of the Executive Branch, takes the opposite view. Anyone?
the future of Latin
In the last chapter of A Canticle for Leibowitz, a priest makes a pun:
“Onerem accipisne?” [Do you accept the burden?]
“Honorem accipio.” [I accept the honor.]
In classical Latin, onus ‘burden’ is neuter, so the accusative is onus not onerem. Even a dead language, it seems, changes at least a little bit during the future dark ages.
April 20: Oops, I misremembered. The first priest’s line is tibine imponemus oneri? [Shall we impose the burden on thee?] — where ‘burden’ is instrumental, not accusative.
thank heaven for macros
Google finds 36 thousand uses of the phrase searing indictment.
bon mot
Selwyn Duke, a suspiciously white male, comments on the diversity police:
It’s a bit like insisting that every can of paint contain equal amounts of every color, so as to ensure that every color has a place in every can. This certainly would increase the constituent elements in every can, but the end result is that you would be left with only one color of paint in the world. Trying to make the constitution of every unit of society uniformly diverse does not yield true diversity, for it serves to make every unit the same.
Other links du jour — the jour in question being February 16-17, up to which I have caught in reading Rational Review News Digest:
Dave Kopel: The Klan’s Favorite Law
Glenn Harlan Reynolds: Real Social Security Reform
Tim Worstall: The Money Is In the Long Tail
Those who are committed to these leftish values of both a statist economy and a redistributive tax system need to make a choice, which of those do you actually want?