Reference

I haven’t linked to a Lileks column recently. That’s become sort of passe in the blogosphere — it’s simply assumed that everyone pulls up Lileks’ Bleat column on a daily basis, and chuckles at the same jokes and marvels at the same turns of phrase.

Another reason is because he writes about multiple subjects in each column. So he might write something uproariously amusing about his two-year-old, Gnat, but it will be sandwiched between a bit about terrorism and a passage about life in Minneapolis, and those are only mostly wonderful, so I don’t want to dilute things so I don’t cite it.

On the other hand, today has two gems out of three, even on those three topics, so I will.

First, on terrorism, in particular the suicide bombings that hit Israel again, yesterday:

Twenty dead I can imagine. I tote up 20 of my friends and relatives, and imagine them gone. Reaction? […] My wife was incandescent when they [got home] – a driver on France Ave. had merged with oblivious velocity, and had my wife not wrenched the car two lanes over the other vehicle would have smacked her car right where Gnat was sitting. The other driver was a young woman yammering on a phone, and I swear if I had the power I’d find out who she was and reprogram her phone so it delivered an electrical shock sufficient to set her hair on fire and blow off her shoes if she used it while driving more than 6 MPH. That’s how I feel about someone whose casual rote stupidity almost cost the life of my daughter.
Towards those who would do that intentionally I can imagine a wide variety of rejoinders. If I turned on the TV and I saw people celebrating the car wreck that killed my daughter, I think I would go mad. I think I would claw my eyes until everything was red. I would want to call down hell on their heads.

On Gnat (who bears an uncanny resemblance to Kitten):

Yes, Little Miss Sweetness and Light. Also Little Miss Capricious Tyrant. Such are the twos; the word NO is her answer to everything, and she’s caught on to the Bugs Bunny Mind Control Trick, too: when I say “No” to her “No,” she doesn’t say “Yes” anymore. She says NO, LOUDER. And we’re dealing with the appearance of new rules, drafted daily, none of which are announced in advance and each of which requires strict adherence. Two-year olds have the soul of a 19th century European bureaucrat. Ritual, routine, capricious application of power, devotion to process. Also naps. Today, for example, I learned that I had to stand on the right side when we walked up the stairs, not the left, because standing on the left would RUIN EVERYTHING in some inscrutable way, and provoke tears and lamentations not heard since the plagues of Egypt.

There’s a bit on life in Minneapolis, too, at the end, but that was only good enough to make me want to go back and reread all his previous comments on the subject, so I won’t quote it here.

So, take up and read, already.