Entry 20:

Ginger,

You don't follow women's lacrosse? Why didn't I know that? Learn something new about your partner every day.

I agree about energy policy, but if we're planning (as we are) to move to Northern California next year, I think we'll be reminded every few days when we have to turn on our generator, if we have one. On the other hand, it won't be so different from Connecticut, where the power goes out regularly from all the falling trees. When we first moved here we got hit by a hurricane and were blacked out for four days. Then we bought our generator. Now all we have to worry about is whether or not Amerigas gets the propane delivered. Maybe we should take our generator with us to California.

Bad books make much better films than good books because good books are fully orchestrated, and the orchestration isn't transferable between media. On the other hand, what we've seen so far in the way of Lord of the Rings trailers look pretty good. Never know: Maybe they pulled it off.

Short and sweet today; I haven't gotten anything else done all week, have you? I still have a lecture to write for that supercomputing conference and a profile of Hitler for my forthcoming book, Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust. And yes, Hitler was brutalized, but he never completed violent socialization. I've found no evidence in the historical record that he ever personally seriously injured or killed anybody. He was a desk murderer: He ordered other people to kill. So was Himmler, who also wasn't personally violent but ran the Holocaust, including the Einsatzgruppen, killer task forces that followed the Wehrmacht into the Soviet Union after June 1941 and who murdered at least 1.5 million people by hand, by shooting them into killing pits, before the development of the death camps. So there's more ways to the woods than one and more kinds of violence than personal violence. Bite that one, Fraysters.

white xox,
Rhodeman

(P.S.: A reference for the Fraysters who wondered where I got my statistics about medieval homicide: Eric A. Johnson and Eric H. Monkkonen, eds., 1996, The Civilization of Crime: Violence in Town and Country Since the Middle Ages, University of Illnois Press.)