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Eric Scheske

Bastiat

Kontent from the Kindle A few gems from Bastiat's The Law: > The law is the organization of the natural right of lawful defense. It is the substitution of a common force for individual forces. And this common force is to do only what the individual forces have

Funny Fallon

A lot of couples are planning on getting married tomorrow because the date will be 11/12/13. Couples say they like 11/12/13 because it's a unique date that will never happen again. In a related story, that's literally how EVERY date works. Of

Charity and Skepticism

Kontent from the Kindle "True freedom comes only to a lucid mind unbound by conventional wisdom and suspicious of received opinions." That's Joseph Epstein, writing about Santayana in Essays in Biography. It's a great aphorism. It reminds of GKC's observation that only

I literally cross the Tiber

I'm on a trip to Rome right now. Details to follow in a few days.

Humorous

H.I.F. A few "[Crappy] Today I Learned from Reddit: When people say "break a leg" they're not actually telling you to break a leg. If you smoke enough weed, dynamiting a beached whale seems like a good idea. "Baby carrots" are

De Lubac and Nietzsche

"God is dead." Anyone who graduated eighth grade has heard that famous Nietzsche pronouncement. It makes Christians cringe, but Nietzsche meant nothing by it. He was merely pronouncing what the rest of Western civilization had impliedly concluded. He needed to slam shut the book on Christianity so he

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Never Knew That Writing about Mencken's column, "The Free Lance" in The Baltimore Sun (1911), Terry Teachout says "Mencken appears to have been one of the first modern American newspapermen to write a signed editorial-page column in which he commented regularly on major issues

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An Ass Theodore Dreiser's The Genius (1915) was "a self-serving obviously autobiographical novel about an artist whose wife failed to understand his need to copulate at will with other women." Terry Teachout, The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken (Harper Collins, 2002), p. 128.

Interesting, BYCU Version

H.I.F. For all you beer nerds out there: "Beer Studies: BJCP Classic Example Scoresheets with Audio [http://www.bjcp.org/course/ClassicStyles.php]." Pretty extensive effort.

Friday

Kingsley Amis: "Charles Jackson's marvellous and horrifying The Lost Weekend, still the best fictional account of alcoholism I have read." I'm going to have to get that book. First, it deals with booze. Second, it's endorsed by a man of literary quality