The Lord of the Rings: The Novelization
My readers may not know that I occasionally visit bookstores. At one such establishment this week, I heard a customer say, “I’ll wait a year and a half to read LotR if I have to, because I’m not going to buy it with the movie cover!”
Later: more Novelization
At age 18 or so I wrote a scene (opening an otherwise unconceived story) set in the distant future, in which one of the characters was a tiger-striped human. Now . . . Look halfway down this page: Human genetics: Dual identities (Nature, 29 Apr 2002).
2008: The article has vanished. Oh well. It was about mosaicism, and included a picture of a human, apparently the product of two fused embryos, with striped skin.
“screeners now failing to catch anything”
In a troubling sign that investigators may be getting bored with their success smuggling guns and knives onto airplanes, the U.S. Department of Transportation today disclosed that its agents have recently cleared airport security checkpoints with an M1 tank, a beluga whale, and a fully active South American volcano.
Thanks to JWB for the link.
Two years ago today Sasha Chislenko, perhaps my brightest friend, bailed out of life.
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Learned Hand, 1942
This much I think I do know – that a society so riven that the spirit of moderation is gone, no court can save; that a society where that spirit flourishes, no court need save; that in a society which evades its responsiblity by thrusting upon the courts the nurture of that spirit, that spirit in the end will perish.
Francis Fukuyama, stasist twit
Francis Fukuyama doesn’t think much of libertarians.
The hostility of libertarians to big government extended to U.S. involvement in the world. The Cato Institute propounded isolationism in the ’90s, on the ground that global leadership was too expensive. At the time of the Gulf War, Cato produced an analysis that argued it would be cheaper to let Saddam keep Kuwait than to pay for a military intervention to expel him – a fine cost-benefit analysis, if you only abstracted from the problem of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a megalomaniac.
Kuwait had weapons of mass destruction?
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