atlas shrugged quickly

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A blast from the past. In an article I wrote for Plokta, I included (along with many others) the very rare and collectible "Atlas Shrugged" View-Master reel (which Ayn Rand herself reportedly enjoyed):

1. “I built a railroad by myself.”
2. “Give us your new metal, Rearden!”
3. Grabby second-raters take everything in sight.
4. Where have all the smart guys gone?
5. “Hank! Come with us to a new life.”
6. Eddie can’t make the engine work.
7. “It’s like heaven—with cigarettes!”

I just saved you all $7.25, not to mention what you'd have spent on popcorn and going to see parts 2 and 3 — where you would, presumably, also eat popcorn! So send money, or you're all just parasites and second-raters. You know it's the right thing to do.

(note: You might also enjoy Ellis Weiner's sequel to "Atlas Slugged," over at Smashwords. The fellow — a veteran of the funny days of National Lampoon, I believe — has a good grasp on the way paragons of society talk to one another:)

In a single silent act he shifted his gaze from them to Dragnie until their eyeballs silently beheld one another’s. “You who claim to serve no one,” he said. “You for whom the very idea of granting a favor is a metaphysical chimera, an imaginary creature possessing no reality; you whose sole allegiance is, not to some comforting but fictional construct called ‘society’ but, simply and utterly, to existence; you for whom life itself is rational and self-interested or it is nothing; you who, without shame or boasting, call ‘self-reliance’ what the mass of men call ‘selfishness;’ you who ask nothing of any man for which you will not, at once and without cavil, give some other thing of equal value; you, who know in the deepest recesses of your consciousness that to perform the slightest kindness to others, without the promise of reciprocity in a manner that is meaningful to you on your own terms, is to collude in the enslavement of both them and yourself; you, who ask nothing of the world apart from its consent to leave you to freely pursue your desires in a manner consistent with your own values and morality—will you, not so much in violation of these principles as from an unthreatened position of strength afforded by them, pass the brisket?”

(excerpt from the first fifth of the book, which is posted at the link as an enticement to purchase, and because 20% of information wants to be free)

edited to add the word "View-Master"
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phenomena (doot doo, d'doo doo)

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On my walk yesterday, I looked down and saw ants. Black ants. Lots of black ants, busily going to and from a pile of dirt, such as ants often make on curbs and gutters (which is where it was). Only the dirt was moving as well. It was seething, a mass of ants; not dirt at all.

I stopped. I stooped. I scrutinized it. It lay across a gap in the cement, and echoed the gap in itself. I was on my cell phone, talking to my sister. I don't think I can take pictures while I'm on the phone, and anyway it wouldn't have caught anything but a dark blur. If I took a movie, there might be some fuzzy movement showing and nothing else. I walked on.

Today I remembered it and walked back to it with my good camera and some batteries, hoping but not believing it would still be there, and it wasn't.

I may be imagining it, but there seems to be a bit of dirt connecting the two sides of the small cement chasm that had been covered with ants yesterday. It had a hole in it, and an ant was coming in or going out.
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