"The demands of the modern age require new concepts..."

This must be what jail is like!

"This relatively crime-free community saw its share of uncommon developments in 2004, beginning with the theft of a life-size statue of a woman during the Northern Virginia Fine Arts Festival [at the Reston Town Center] in May. The missing sculpture of a scantily clad young woman was found in June.

Then, in October, someone took Bob Simon's bronze statue from its bench seat at Lake Anne Village Center and set it to rest by a small canal just past Simon's real home at Heron House. The statue, a gift to Reston unveiled on Founder's Day last spring, was recently returned to its seat next to Lake Anne."

link

Aw yeah, C. S.!

"The trouble is that honest and wholesome poetry is utterly inadequate for the themes that Spenser is attempting. You cannot carry a reader beyond the flaming bounds of space and time simply by sincerity and conscientious workmanship. Poetry that deals with such towering conceptions as these must be either a continuous blaze of dazzling splendours or else fail completely. Great subjects do not make great poems; usually, indeed, the reverse".

Tell it like that, C.S.!

"It has, of course, been suggested that Henry VIII (that hard-worked whipping boy) was responsible for the Drab Age by cutting off the heads of scholars and poets. But who (save Surrey) were the promising poets that he killed? It is not clear that our poetry would be much the poorer if he had beheaded nearly every writer mentioned in this chapter."

Mission control!

I'd been hastily recruited for an impromptu space flight. Hours before launch, a tiny sore appeared above my right eye. It gradually widened to become a small mouth (about an inch-and-a-half wide) complete with tiny, miniature teeth. Nobody really seemed to care but me. Fortunately, it sealed up again in time for my preparatory visit to the Space Museum. As I awoke, you (Ryan), Jennifer, and I were on the verge of ditching the lame-ass tour.

Football Season Is Over

"No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun -- for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax -- This won't hurt." - Hunter S. Thompson

C. S. Lewis on Thomas More:

"He cannot denounce like a prophet; he can only scold and grumble like a father in an old-fashioned comedy."

... on Alexander Barclay:

"Barclay's Egloges are, like the rest of Barclay, bad."

From English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, by C. S. Lewis:

"But against what seems to us this fantastic artificiality in their [Tudor-era] education we must set the fact that every boy, out of school, without noticing it, then acquired a range of knowledge such as no boy has today; farriery, forestry, archery, hawking, sowing, ditching, thatching, brewing, baking, weaving, and practical astronomy. This concrete knowledge, mixed with their law, rhetoric, theology, and mythology, bred an outlook very different from our own. Highest abstractions and rarified artifices jostled the earthiest particulars. They would have found it very hard to understand the modern educated man who, though 'interested in astronomy', knows neither who the Pleiades were nor where to look for them in the sky. They talked more readily than we about large universals such as death, change, fortune, friendship, or salvation; but also about pigs, loaves, boots and boats. The mind darted more easily to and fro between heaven and earth: the cloud of middle generalizations, hanging between the two, was then much smaller. Hence, as it seems to us, both the naivety and energy of their writing ... They talk something like angels and something like sailors and stable-boys; never like civil servants or writers of leading articles."