In retrospect, really brilliant things seem obvious. “But of course!” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJsepnsqqyM

is in Detroit.

A thing I saw just now tangentially reminds me of this, which has been one of the best things on the Internet since the last millennium. “The composition of vast books is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance. To go on for five hundred pages developing an idea whose perfect oral exposition is possible in a few minutes! A better course of procedure is to pretend that these books already exist, and then to offer a resume, a commentary . . . More reasonable, more inept, more indolent, I have preferred to write notes upon imaginary books.” — Jorge Luis Borges, FICCIONES http://www.themodernword.com/borges/borges_hexagon.html

So I started eating this chili pepper raw last night and the bottom of the pepper was like maybe a mild plus to a medium, but it got surprisingly biting somewhere around the middle. Now it is following like a power law of hotness as I get up to the stem. I keep eating because now this is like my Everest.

Two men enter, Kevin Carson leaves. #KevinCarsonFacts

The Gnu Gneeds You! My favorite used bookstore in the world is looking for supporters. A pledge of $125/yr (= about $10.50 / month) gets you a reward of a used book every month. “In coming to terms with the approach of 2014, I need to do something that is very difficult for me and that is to ask for help. In order to sustain The Gnu’s Room for another year, there must be an investment from those who appreciate our mission and want to see it continue. I am looking for people who are willing to make annual tax-deductible gifts to The Gnu’s Room. The gifts can be made weekly, monthly, quarterly or in one lump sum, but we need people to pledge to make a gift. In order to continue operations, we need to raise $15,000 in pledges. For each level of giving, there will be a reward to the donor. . . .”

Seriously, why (and how) in the world does anyone locate a business in downtown Metropolis anymore? Even setting aside questions of personal safety, do you have any idea what the insurance premiums must be like?

Disarm the police.

is trying to figure out the best color to use for visibility & legibility of the title, which will be the only non-monochrome element, on the cover of a new S.E. Parker booklet. Right now I think it’s looking like bright, Kermit-the-frog green? Which was not my first choice.

“Art is individualism, and individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. THEREIN LIES ITS IMMENSE VALUE. For what it seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man [sic] to the level of a machine. . . . Selfishness is not living as one wants to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live. And unselfishness is letting other people’s lives alone, not interfering with them. Selfishness always aims at creating around it an absolute uniformity of type. Unselfishness recognises infinite variety of type as a delightful thing, accepts it, acquiesces in it, enjoys it.” ~Oscar Wilde, “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” (1891). Emphasis mine.