Sentential Links #10

Yup, after a layoff of a couple of weeks, it's time to get back into the swing of finding nifty sentences throughout the blog world. As always, click through the get the context.

:: Or put it this way: Let’s make tell our prospective audience that we’re arrogant and smug, that we don’t understand the people we’re trying to reach, and that in fact we don’t know much about the world we’re living in. Now there's a recipe for success... (I couldn't agree more.)

:: Yes, I love back-to-school supplies as much as the next autodidact, but their reduced prices at Target do not herald the end of summer, only the end of the "summer fun" aisle. (This is a new entry to the blogroll, by the way, and one of the blogs I had bookmarked when I had to reinstall Firefox and thus lost all of my bookmarks. I rediscovered it quite by accident the other day.)

:: What reason could possibly justify the expense of venturing off-Earth to found offshoot societies, absent direct threat or a compelling need? Ideology of some sort would seem to be required, that or obvious and immediate economic benefit. (Note to self: read the remainder of this series. Via Jay Manifold.)

:: In the meantime, I notice outbreaks of testiness between several of the NRO regulars. I fear it is only a matter of time before they turn on each other like the dusty gang in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. (I dunno; I don't read NRO. I just like Wolcott's brand of snark.)

:: Only in New York can people talk about being in an ethnic food "rut" that contains not just Mexican, Chinese, and Italian, but also Ethiopian, Thai, Vietnamese, and Brazilian. (Actually, that's the entire post. I just thought it was a funny observation.)

:: Many things piss me off. One of those things happens to be a football coach making several million dollars a year condescending to fans that loading up the schedule with patsies is something to be proud of. (This is precisely why I pay extremely little attention to college football. The first half of the season consists of watching Florida State beat the South Carolina Typewriter Repair Maintenance College team -- their mascot, the "Shift Key" -- by a score of 81-0, and then dropping in the polls because Oklahoma beat the North Texas Animal Husbandry School Fighting Grillies by a score of 84-0. My interest level would probably be different if I'd attended a Division I-A school with a real solid program, as opposed to my Division III alma mater, but I was in Iowa anyway and the Earth revolves around the Hawkeyes in those parts, unless you're one of the small percentile for whom it's the ISU Cyclones who command your allegiance. Anyway, I no longer care much about college football.)

:: Here in the non-internet world, we have a technical term for people who, without the permission of the authors, take copies of their books and give them away for free to lots of readers: we call them "librarians". (Actually, I'd quibble with this: Librarians don't give free copies of books out, they loan them out, with the expectation that they will get them back. That's an important distinction, albeit not entirely critical to Mr. Stross's larger argument.)

:: Yes, I know. I could always move to Florida or Texas, but are hurricanes really preferable to six feet of snow? (This is something I've always maintained about Buffalo, and the post linked here isn't even talking about Buffalo. I'll take snow over people not dying in heat waves; the temperature hitting triple digits, well, ever; the wind chill not being below zero for months at a time; the possibility of large storms from the Gulf of Mexico wiping us out; the possibility of large swathes of our water-facing properties falling into the lake as a result of either earthquakes or erosion; or entire communities having to evacuate because of wildfires?)

:: But oh, what a country we would be if we could revive a sense of shame in a man if he leaves the house in the morning without a sack suit, brogues, waistcoat with watch chain, shirtfront, string tie and skimmer! (You know, we can elect a Republican President every time out between now and Doomsday, and that won't be enough to get me to move to Canada. But if we start getting men to dress like this again, it's "Peace Bridge or Bust" for me. Ye Gods! via Lance Mannion.)

OK, that's it for this week. Peace out, y'all!