triticale - the wheat / rye guy

Why I Did It

I recently presumed to criticize Lileks over one phrase in a throwaway line in the Bleat. The reason I would presume to do this is admiration. I expect perfection from him. Especially in these throwaway lines.

Take today's Bleat for example. He gnatters about lack of sleep and shooting down satellites so they crash into DirecTV's customer service office. Then he gets down to the business at hand. There is no worse job a U.S. president could face, and no worse threat he could make, than to "open the tubes and order Slim Pickens to the cockpit."

He stops to explain why today's enemy is different than the old one. Being a smoker and a connoisseur of ephemera, he describes the cigarettes smoked by the old Soviet elites. About like Nat Shermans. I've seen the cigarettes smoked by the common folk. Not only were they stuffed with prison tobacco, but instead of a filter, two thirds of the llength was an empty cardboard tube. The basic wrongness of Communism, in a throwaway line with nothing to do with his topic. This is what he is read for, and when he falls short, it hurts.