Douse your Pizza with Pepper Spray
Fox’s Megyn Kelly classifies pepper spray as a food product. So how long before we start putting it in school lunches?
Deep within a Madding Marriage
“A good wife is good, but the best wife is not so good as no wife at all.” That statement, from Pennyways in Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd…
Album Art Mash-up
Nate Bliss, whom I met at the STAPLE! table during Wizard World Austin last weekend, did a really cool album art mash-up by taking The Beatles album “Revolver” and populating…
A few passages from The Quiet American
I finally delved into Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, and as expected, it is an awesome book. Beyond the insightful and prescient portrait of Pyle, the personal honesty of Fowler,…
The Living Structure Meme
If you want to prepare for a new and illustrious career for future, I would recommend bioengineering, since future ships and buildings will be living things. Paolo Bacigalupi’s “A Pocketful for…
In the Financial Apocalypse…
It is good to know we can shift to an Egret Economy and trade in feathers should Congress (i.e., the Republicans) decide they are tired of success and drive the…
Bovary and the Beatles
Near the end of Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert, in the translation by Geoffrey Wall, there is a line, describing Charles’s inability to cope with the loss of his wife:…
Rage against…Something
Wisconsin’s Supreme Court cleared the way for Scott Walker’s anti-union law to go into effect. At the same time, legislation against unions – namely teachers and firefighters – is spreading…
Two Paragraphs Abandoned in “The Blue Caves of Austin”
There is a dangerous appeal to being the last. Maybe we do violence to the future so that the present won’t outlive us. Then perhaps the lack of visitors from…
A Worthy Quote from Borges
From “The Immortal,” by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Andrew Hurley: “I have noticed that in spite of religion, the conviction as to one’s own immortality is extraordinarily rare. Jews,…