I don’t get it. If Laura Schlessinger says “I’m Laura Schlessinger,” she gets no flak for it; everyone takes it in stride. But if I say the very same thing, people act like I’ve uttered some huge falsehood. Why the double standard?
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Moffat Copies Moffat
“Funny little human brains … How do you get around in those things?”
– Doctor Who, “The Doctor Dances”
“Dear God, what is it like in your funny little brains? It must be so boring!”
– Sherlock, “A Study in Pink”
Looking for Justice in All the Wrong Places
Inadvertently funny line from a press release for the new Americanised Torchwood:
His choice of career is significant. Someone like Rex could make a fortune in Wall Street, or Hollywood. But choosing the C.I.A. says a lot about him: that for all his swagger, he does believe in justice.
Uoltajre!
Michael Johnson’s article “The Delightful Voltaire” (linked from LRC today) tells me something I never knew before about Voltaire – namely that he chose the name “Voltaire” as an anagram of “Arouet l.j.” (the “l.j.” standing for “le jeune”). Johnson calls it a “loose” anagram, but it’s actually quite exact, given the once-prevalent convention that I and J are interchangeable, as are U and V (a convention that made sense in a culture steeped in Latin).
Incidentally, in another article recently linked from LRC, Tim Black claims that “the attacks launched against religion by thinkers like John Locke or Voltaire were not targeted at its content – they were targeted at its form as part of the state.” This sentence is a bit ambiguous, since Locke and Voltaire were attacking particular religious institutions and doctrines, not “religion” as such – but they clearly thought that various widely held religious views were false and dangerous, and were definitely attacking these views and not solely their forcible imposition by government (though of course they attacked that too).
Austro-Athenian Ethics
I recently had reason to link to my 2006 Mises philosophy seminar files, and saw that the relevant page on the Mises site looks somewhat confusing these days, so I made my own page of links.
The Comeback Kid
In 1972, when I was eight, I wrote a series of stories (or four “books” – 186 pages’ worth, though typed up and without the original drawings they come to a mere 25 pages total) collectively titled Oscar of Oscarville, about an eight-year-old boy who flew around on the back of an enormous hummingbird while whacking off the heads of monsters with his enchanted sword, in a magical land whose chief characteristic seemed to be the elicitation of various sorts of gigantism in everything from bats and butterflies to houses and hair tonic. (I then had no idea that there were actual places named Oscarville – in Alaska and Georgia, for example.) This was my magnum opus up to that point.
I hadn’t seen the Oscarville stories since 1981 and had feared they were lost, until I rediscovered them going through old boxes last week. As a break from more pressing but less enjoyable work, I’ve transcribed Oscar’s adventures and self-indulgently put them online. Lo, he is risen!