Vitanuova for 2002 March 11

You are probably wondering why he is carrying a hose

If you were told that you had a fire extinguisher and didn't know what to say, you could tell people that it's important to have a fire extinguisher at home and that you should have a fire extinguisher at home too and even that you can buy a fire extinguisher at Target or at many fine hardware stores near you.

One time Lindsay was in a city and a man walked by carrying a hose. "You are probably wondering why he is carrying a hose", said the man. She was. The man was right.

Avernus

I wrote a lot to my mom about Avernus, where Aeneas enters the underworld in Aeneid VI.

Eldred

Here's a pro-Eldred editorial in the Washington Post.

Hoffer

H. G. Wells remarks that at the time of the Reformation people "objected not to the church's power, but to its weaknesses. . . . Their movements against the church, within it and without, were movements not for release from a religious control, but for a fuller and more abundant religious control."
(The True Believer, 35)

Slightly later:

The people of London acted heroically under a hail of bombs because Churchill cast them in the role of heroes. They played their heroic role before a vast audience -- ancestors, contemporaries and posterity -- and on a stage lighted by a burning world city and to the music of barking guns and screaming bombs. It is doubtful whether in our contemporary world, with its widespread individual differentiation, any measure of general self-sacrifice can be realized without theatrical hocus-pocus and fireworks.
(ibid., 47)

A fortune-teller in a turban came up to me as I was eating my lunch and started to tell me things about myself, and then he did an uninspired equivoque followed by another uninspired equivoque, and then he asked me for money, and I didn't give him any. Maybe if I hadn't been so wary of the equivoque, I would have.

I thought good to discover it, together with the rest of the other deceiptfull arts; being sorie that it falleth out to my lot, to laie open the secrets of this mysterie, to the hinderance of such poore men as live thereby [...]
(Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft, p. 182 (emphasis added))

Reading list

I finished Magic & Showmanship by Henning Nelms and Death Be Not Proud by John Gunther, the second and third books on my reading list. (I've extended the reading list a bit past its original eighteen books.)