Hand me an angioplasty. I went to the movies three times in the past seven nights: I took our out-of-town teenage company to see Bourne Ultimatum last Wednesday, my son Alex to see The Simpsons on Sunday, and my wife to see Live Free or Die Hard last night. I couldn't decline heavily-buttered popcorn on any of the trips, of course, so I'm feeling pretty clogged right now. I need to go on a rabbit diet.
I liked Die Hard IV, incidentally. I'd never heard of a movie being based on an article, but this one is. A 1997 article in Wired. I found it, but haven't read it (nine pages is a bit much to read on the screen, but I'm printing it out as I type this).
Later addendum: I read about half of it last night. It's about the United States' exposure to I-War (attacks on our computer infrastructure, which is what Die Hard IV is about). Summary: Technology is moving much faster than security. It's scary and worrisome stuff. I would have had to drink more breakfast than normal today, except the article was written ten years ago, so I'm blithely assuming security is moving a little faster these days.
__________
I forgot to link to this piece yesterday: Is this the end of English literature? Excerpt:
What do the following have in common: Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, T S Eliot, W B Yeats, Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Evelyn Waugh, Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis?
The answer is, of course, that if they were to come back to life in Gordon Brown's Britain and wanted to go out to their club, or a restaurant or café, they would not be allowed to indulge in a habit which sustained them during the most creative phases of their lives.
The moment they popped their favoured cigar, cigarette or pipe between their lips and lit up, they would have been fined on the spot.
__________
The Atlantic Monthly recently ran an excerpt from a 1914 Mencken article. I liked this:
One of the principal marks of an educated man ”¦ is the fact that he does not take his opinions from newspapers–not, at any rate, from the militant, crusading newspapers. On the contrary, his attitude toward them is almost always one of frank cynicism, with indifference as its mildest form and contempt as its commonest. He knows that they are constantly falling into false reasoning about the things within his personal knowledge . . . and so he assumes that they make the same, or even worse errors about other things, whether intellectual or moral. This assumption, it may be said at once, is quite justified by the facts.
Any serious Catholic that has gotten frustrated at media coverage about Church matters knows exactly what Mencken was saying.
__________
