When I visited Anchorage for the first time, I was terrified when it looked like a man by the side of the road was readying to hurl a long sharp piece of scrap steel at me. Turns out he was just showing me that he had baleen for sale.

You are correct! You must have been taught the controversy:

"There is evidence that the atmosphere enveloping the early earth was very different than it is today. At one time the entire earth enjoyed a warm tropical environment and there was enhanced oxygen in the atmosphere. Organisms grew larger and lived longer as a…

This is a perfect time to share one of my favorite lexilogical terms: "minced oaths."

I experience this feeling quite often, perhaps one out of every thing times that I'm driving. I've never given in to the urge, but I have spent a lot of time worrying over why I'd be experiencing such a self-destructive impulse.

But surely we are permitted to hazard a guess, informed as we are by his behavior? (I certainly agree that the hypothesis that he himself is gay shouldn't be linked to his homophobia.)

Let us not forget about Rob Cockerham's Light Sharpener: http://www.cockeyed.com/incredible/solardish/dish01.shtml.

I've got to agree with you, B4B9. The book's moral artillery is aimed against the dangers of superficial media culture, and the way these displace harder things (reading) and better things (interpersonal relationships). (Note that this is not an "anti-technology" argument.) The book-burning was a device to advance…

Ugh.

Taurine scat, tauRINE scat.

I'm a poet, and not inclined to argue against the usefulness of art. That said, your reasoning here is faulty. The gun example fails: the work done by Industrial design and mechanical engineering is neither equivalent to nor replaceable by the kind of conceptual/graphic design shown in the Pantone series. The design…

Or worse, Mule rule.

Well, it will. IN 10,000 YEARS!

Reading between the lines, I wonder if his predictive powers were amplified by the unauthorized use of... psychohistory!

Hard to tell on such a local scale.

It escaped me! Cheers.

What about psychohistory, phylopoetics, and quantitative blumerology?

^ This.

The "this girl needs a sandwich" trope (an ugly cliche, I know) reminds me of the old Ray Bradbury story, "Skeleton", from "October Country." Eugene Levy plays it straight in the TV adaptation. Here's Part 1.

And of James Morrow's "Towing Jehovah": http://books.google.com/books/about/Towing_Jehovah.html?id=eQoOHOI_fQIC

I'd understood that the core samples which ostensibly provided support to the turtle hypothesis were actually misinterpreted, to the end that what was thought to be tortoiseshell turned out to be elephant toenail scrapings.