Vanity of Vanities, all is Vanity

Al-Qaeda endorses John McCain.

Colbert endorses Obama.

Air quotes.

Long ago in our home, before a fool struck fire, we were so – roaming without whatever may be named save the sun, the night, and each other. Now we are so again, for are gods, and things made by hands do not concern us. –The Fifth Head of Cerberus, Gene Wolfe.

Wassup 2000 and Wassup 2008.

The vet who did not vet.

Interesting.

Since a friend asked for it (and no, he is not Simon), here is an example of pseudo-code in LaTeX (using my style, there are of course other packages that do the same thing): latex source. Style file: salgoithm.sty, and the resulting pdf.

Gradually, but not as gradually as it seemed to some parts of his brain, he began to infuse his tones with a sarcastic wounding bitterness. Nobody outside a madhouse, he tried to imply, could take seriously a single phrase of this conjectural, nugatory, deluded, tedious rubbish. Within quite a short time he was contriving to sound like an unusually fanatical Nazi trooper in charge of a book-burning reading out to the crowd excerpts from a pamphlet written by a pacifist, Jewish, literate Communist. A growing mutter, half-amused, half-indignant, arose about him, but he closed his ears to it and read on. Almost unconsciously he began to adopt an unnameable foreign accent and to read faster and faster, his head spinning. As if in a dream he heard Welch stirring, then whispering, then talking at his side. he began punctuating his discourse with smothered snorts of derision. He read on, spitting out the syllables like curses, leaving mispronunciations, omissions, spoonerisms uncorrected, turning over the pages of his script like a score-reader following a presto movement, raising his voice higher and higher. At last he found his final paragraph confronting him, stopped, and looked at his audience.

— Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis

I live in fear. But who doesn’t?

Paul Krugman just won the Nobel prize in economics. He bas a blog which I read regularly, and he has an Op-ed in the New York Times. He is disliked by the right, and I expect that it would turn out that he is palling around with terrorists, or something. In any case, he is worth reading…