Friedrich --

* Hate to admit it, but the NYTimes has run some good pieces recently. David Brooks asks conservative professors here whether they’d advise promising conservative students to pursue academic careers. Answer: probably not -- there’s just too much leftie crapola to face. A good Brooks line about the consequences of leftie thought control on campus: "Students often have no contact with adult conservatives, and many develop cartoonish impressions of how 40 percent of the country thinks."

* Corey Kilgannon writes about the sad old age of Mike Quashie, here. Celebrated in the ‘60s and ‘70s as the Limbo King, Quashie was a Village celebrity. He may well have invented much of the elaborate stage iconography of glam rock, and he was even buddies with Jimi. Now Quashie is poor, alone, and suffering from bad knees and a bad spine -- doing the limbo is hard on a body. A terrific slice-of-showbiz-life story.

* Ah, those golden years 'way back when, when Islam was a tolerant, civilized thing ... We’ve all been told this, right? But how true is it? Edward Rothstein’s verdict (here): not very. The golden years featured mass executions, plunder, murder, religious tribalism, special taxes on non-Muslims, massacres, and forced exiles. The piece is well worth reading all the way through. Rothstein gets off a couple of terrific paragraphs near the end on the charm and power of Islamic art: "The viewer is absorbed in a formal world that overwhelms, inspiring awe with intricacies that seem beyond comprehension" -- that’s darned good.

* According to John Tierney (here) as many as half of all Iraqi marriages are between first or second cousins -- a fact that has important (and discouraging) implications for attempts to do a little nation-building. Good to see Tierney acknowledging Steve Sailer, especially given that his piece is essentially a colorful re-write of one of Sailer's own American Conservative pieces (here).

* Dept. of Get Over Your Fear of Conservatism: Steve Sailer has posted an interesting John O’Sullivan National Review piece here that’s a taxonomy of conservatives -- learn how to distinguish among 'em. Roger Scruton writes movingly about the nature of conservatism here. Someone has typed Michael Oakeshott's great esssay "On Being Conservative" into the web here. And Hernando de Soto explains the importance -- for the poor -- of property rights, here.

* In The Oldie (here), Stanley Price remembers visiting the set of "The Quiet American" and meeting Graham Greene.

* The brainy, arty and articulate Kelly Jane Torrance is a blogger once again (here). This time she's threatening to keep at the blogging for more than a week.

* Pleased to learn that Colby Cosh (whose blog is here) will be writing a regular column for Canada’s National Post on Mondays and Fridays -- congrats to him. Here's a recent Colby column.

* This Calvin Trillin profile (here) of the crime reporter/novelist Edna Buchanan is a classic New Yorker profile: droll, insightful, beautifully turned.

* Catherine Blackledge's new "The Story of V" is a profile of a different kind -- a thoughtful, scholarly account of the vagina. Jerome Burne reviews the book here for the Financial Times.

* Polly Frost refuses to give up carbs (here), and continues thinking about horror movies (here). Film buffs should enjoy a long q&a Polly once did with the film critic Pauline Kael (here).

* Aaron Haspel comes close to talking me out of reading the morning newspaper, and then -- in a display of virtuoso, devil-may-care foolhardiness -- risks the wrath of women everywhere (here).

* David Sucher confronts the scary topic of local real estate laws, here.

* In this posting here, I wrote about my dislike of Microsoft Word and recommended a couple of low-cost writing tools I much prefer. I've taken to using a few more well-designed, cheap programs too: Jarte (here) and Rough Draft (here). Both are cut-to-the-chase word processors free of Microsoft bloat. Both make it easy to work on numerous files simultaneously (a terrific feature, at least for nonlinear scatterbrains like me), and both enable you to type notes into a small window to the side of the main writing window -- very handy. Jarte's perhaps the quirkier of the two, but I've found both to be fast, stable and very helpful. Super-cheap, too. Both are for the PC; I haven't found anything similar for the Mac, darn it. (UPDATE: I just noticed that Boswell over at American Digest, here, has gone OSX, also hates Word, and feels hopeful aboutOpenOffice. Hey, Boswell: try Z-Write! Mac writing bliss can be found here.)

* For Newsweek, Rana Faroohar and Michael Hastings profile the Nobel-winning Vernon Smith, the father of "experimental economics" (here). Be sure to read this informative piece all the way through; the most interesting stuff is in its final few paragraphs.

Best,

Michael

I use Nisus Writer which also has an OSX version, Nisus Writer Express. (I'm still stuck on OS9, on ancient machinery.) Been using it for 5 or 6 years.

Posted by: Ian on October 1, 2003 2:24 PM

Hey Ian -- I've never been able to tell: does Nisus Writer enforce "page view" -- ie., you're wrestling with layout even as you type? Kind of like with AppleWorks? The price is certainly right, I gather.

Posted by: Michael Blowhard on October 1, 2003 3:04 PM

Sheesh - just read the Middle Eastern cousin-marriage pieces by Sailer and Tierney. I think Tierney ought to be paying copyright fees to Sailer! My professors would flunk me for cribbing ideas and entire phrases without acknowledging their originators.

Posted by: Courtney on October 1, 2003 10:53 PM

many develop cartoonish impressions of how 40 percent of the country thinks

Personally I develop my cartoonish impressions of conservatives from the cartoonish behaviour many of them display on their blogs...

Posted by: James Russell on October 2, 2003 2:14 AM

James -- I get my cartoonish ideas about political people generally from their blog behavior. Political people, huh? Who knew? Last thing I want to do is step into the midst of that. Hey, do you suppose we arty people look like cartoons to them?

Posted by: Michael Blowhard on October 2, 2003 11:10 AM

Hey, do you suppose we arty people look like cartoons to them?

More like aliens, I'd say.

Posted by: Tim Hulsey on October 3, 2003 12:18 AM

Michael: indeed. Political People in general, even the ones whose side I'm nominally on, have a tendency to all act the same eventually. Small wonder I'm trying to extricate myself from that nightmare...

Posted by: James Russell on October 3, 2003 1:48 AM






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