New Pournelle interview

Glenn Reynolds interviews Jerry Pournelle, at PJTV.

Compare and contrast: Tom Snyder interviewed Jerry Pournelle and Durk Pearson, back in 1979.

Jack Vance has written a memoir

Steven Hart writes about Vance, and about this book, This Is Me, Jack Vance (Or, More Properly, This Is "I").

Too many favorite Jack Vance stories to name them all.

There is some more discussion here. The Vance Integral Edition has already become a rare item.

Sweet bird of youth, you must be laughing

The song. (First version is the one from the album, second from a live performance, sort of eerie.)

The play, which the song is referring to.

The bird.

The bird.

Up at the mountains, we watched the old Studio One production of "The Trial of John Peter Zenger," from this set of movies. We had a pretty good conversation about the importance of the Zenger verdict to American jurisprudence. I think I said, "This was the case that established freedom of the press in America, even before America existed." I thought there should have been a few more minutes to it, to give some attention to the jury's deliberations. The way it was presented made it look like Andrew Hamilton simply won Zenger's case, but the way the jury reached their verdict was just about as important as the verdict itself. The film skipped over that entirely.

But much more conversation resulted from the fact that this old TV show included three Westinghouse commercials, with Betty Furness selling a refrigerator, of course, and a TV, and something else, an air conditioner, it might have been.

So the daughter said, of Betty Furness, "When was it that people stopped wanting to look like that?" Like adults, she went on to explain. Which I thought was a good question, and we went down a winding conversational path having to do with neotenic behavior among baby-boomers.

Now I'm back in the world which includes an Internet, and I see that Morgan Freeberg has done some redecorating at The House of Eratosthenes, and that he has a post there with a clip from the late night Scot, dealing with this very issue. So check it out.

Misattributed quotations plague us ever

"They Never Said That" by Carl M. Cannon, in the Readers' Digest, attempts to straighten out some of the popular favorites, starting with a candidate who still does not care about the facts:

The misstep was probably inevitable, given the many compari­sons made between Barack Obama and Abraham Lincoln. With seven weeks to go in Obama's presidential campaign, the young candidate from Illinois inadvertently committed one of the most common sins in American politics—he used a phony Lincoln quote.

"Abraham Lincoln once said to one of his opponents," then-senator Obama asserted, "'If you stop telling lies about me, I'll start telling truth about you.'"

William Randolph Hearst, who ran for governor of New York in 1906, also liked that line. But it was Republican senator Chauncey Depew, another prominent New Yorker, who is actually the first person known to employ a version of the phrase to bash his opponents back in the 19th century.

I was surprised to learn that the Ben Franklin line, "Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy," was originally about wine, and in French at that.

More on this: Quote ... Misquote by Fred R. Shapiro at the NY Times.

The clock-work heart

See it here.

Jessica Palmer says, "What does it signify? Does it represent the gradual replacement of the natural world around us with technology, to the point where our own bodies become artificial? Is it critiquing the reductionist tendencies of neurobiologists who believe our deepest emotions are complex but purely chemical reactions? Is it a steampunk Valentine?"

An enigmatic image. Meaning? You, you human beings, you make the meaning. You create the meaning. So be careful, be mindful, of what you are creating.

***

Abrupt shift in tone:

19th-century pacemaker, that's my guess. Maybe the thing under the floor that so upset [the character written by] Edgar Allan Poe.