Unchecked ego…I hadn't thought of that. It makes sense. Muldrow knows what he wants, and he'll do anything to get it.

"Wide Ranger is right again"

For all Muldrow's observantness and practicality, I was really interested by the fact that he did so much magical thinking. And there was really nothing about religion in his thinking. He didn't bargain with a god in order to get things done.

Stephen King once said that he didn't know why, but readers were fascinated by descriptions of people's jobs.

Thanks! I knew literacy would pay off one day :)

Good question. Muldrow might be making a distinction between killing and torture. As many people as he kills, none of their deaths are protracted. It's the death he's after, not the victim's reaction. He doesn't think of killing as a violation.

You've got questions, we've got answers
Great, great choice of book. The author described nonverbal thought in a way I hadn't seen before. The language sometimes tripped me up, but I think it made Muldrow's experiences more immediate, harder to shake off.

I was once offered a free $100,000 Bar. The catch was — if I ate it, I would be told that I was eating chocolate produced by child slaves in Cote d'Ivoire. The dilemma was wrenching, but in the end I decided I didn't want the guilt. So I tossed the candy bar to the kids on my cocoa plantation. You should have seen…

@Dutch Baby: I didn't know about Session 9. Thanks, I'll check it out!

Yes, "Threads". Even the spider in the opening credits looks apocalyptic.

Big elephants, skinny Christians
* Am I nuts, or is Gus van Sant's "Elephant" chilling? That's the movie about a Columbine-type high school shooting. I saw it in a theater close to the front row, so there was nothing to distract me from the giant images. Watching the movie, you know what's coming — high school and…

Not coffee beans. Crushed nuts.

Point taken. Maybe I've watched too many movies where the main character gets pulled into a new world to do something like save it from robots.

For you guys who have read the book more recently than I have, and are still checking this thread: it's pretty clear to me why Art latched on to Arthur, Cleveland and the gang. But I'm not really sure why they took him in. It's kind of like an admission that their group wasn't self-sufficiently awesome anymore. Did…

Well, this is depressing
I've read "Mysteries of Pittsburgh" a couple of times, but not for this installment of Wrapped Up In Books. So I can't pull up many details of the book to explain what I liked about it. (And yes, it's not a perfect book, blah blah)

A deleted scene from "The Number 23"
[Flashback to Carrey's twenty-third birthday]

So
Are there any songs about death panels?

"Any bad guy people talk about but you don't see until the end who is referred to as "Mr. somebody" is a woman."

@Awesome Welles: I know there's no comparison, but this made me think of film noirs (or films noir, take your pick) where protagonists named Sam or Hammer go watch cars being fished out of rivers, use made-up cool slang to hide what they know from the cops, then go to cool dives/nightclubs to question girls in gowns…

We've got a dangler!
No more dangling off the edge of things. It was good in "Safety Last!" (funny) and "Bladerunner" (uncomfortable), but everywhere else it's just an excuse for the camera to sit in one place for a while so the director can go get coffee and the viewers can return their Pepsis to the water supply.