Eccentric Flower talk:201010/Placeholder

Jette:

"Sociopathic idealized nerds collapse society because they don't get enough hugs."

I saw this recently. It was called "The Social Network." But it only showed the first half, before the actual collapsing. Perhaps Fincher and Sorkin are planning a sequel.

-- 16:32, 4 October 2010 (BST)

Rhonda:

Regarding your digestive woes: I wish I could say "tra la, TMI, I have no idea what you're talking about" but that would be lying. Periodically my body decides that there is something I ate too much of and so it will never digest that again--dairy products, perhaps, or onions and garlic. Or maybe I had to get up too early too many days in a row, or I'm under so much stress that the stomach says "that's it, I'm on vacation!" But of course in those stressful times, I usually have to spend more time around people, so I can't vacation along with my stomach.

Anyway, find that as soon as this starts happening, it helps to take digestive supplements (because sometimes stress causes the body to not make enough, now that one is getting to be a bit of an old fogey). It seems that a few days of taking extra enzymes gets things back on track.

You can get HCl capsules, but you can also get capsules with a whole bunch of different enzymes thrown in, just in case the problem lies elsewhere. Take them with your meals and see if it helps.

-- 16:54, 4 October 2010 (BST)

Spc476:

Heh. I found the yogurt humorous.

I too, have read _Atlas Shrugged_ and wrote a synopsis of it for some friends: http://boston.conman.org/2001/10/23.1 I'll leave it up to you to decide if I liked it or not.

-- 23:20, 4 October 2010 (BST)

Harmony:

I first read Atlas Shrugged years ago, after being seduced by The Fountainhead in high school. I am a fast and smart reader, and I have never felt so proud of reading anything as when I finally slogged to the end of the goddamn argh-ty page-long speech. It is a cracking good story, though, if you abridge it as you go!

-- 02:27, 5 October 2010 (BST)

Columbina:

I am proud to say I never once have read Galt's three-hour radio speech. When I first read the book (as a college freshman) and I realized that he wasn't going to stop talking anytime soon, I just started thumbing pages forward until he stopped talking (which was, as I recall, about seventy pages later).

Rand wrote many things more compellingly than some people are willing to give her credit for. Dagny Taggart gets most of Rand's most interesting scenes, and I confess I probably would not like the book as much as I do if I didn't like Dagny so much. The problem is that I think she works better with Hank than with Galt - but with Rand, all concerns of plausibility or good story must ultimately be plowed under to serve the philosophy - her fatal weakness - and so of COURSE Dagny, the true heroine of the book, must eventually fall for Galt, Rand's ideological strawman figurehead.

There are some things Rand did laughably badly - writing sex (or near-sex) scenes, for example. It is documented that Rand had a sex life (punch "Nathaniel Branden" into your search engine) and might even have been a little kinky about it, given her infamous tendency for taken-by-force sex scenes. This is also the woman who said in an interview:

So clearly her lovemaking scenes aren't bad because she was some sort of Puritanical robot in that department; they're bad because she couldn't write them well.

Anyway, no matter. Even the most genius writer in the world couldn't have made Galt's speech compelling. The most unbelievable occurrence in the book is that we are expected to believe that speech held the nation in rapt attention for three hours.

Incidentally, if you want the substance of the speech but not the verbosity, it is quite possible to condense it down without losing any key points. Here's a version that comes in under a thousand words. But if you actually were paying the least bit of attention in the rest of the book, you have already been fed plenty of what Galt is saying; the speech is redundant.

-- 22:38, 5 October 2010 (BST)

ProfRobert:

I've never read any Rand (ein Volk, ein Reich, Ayn Rand), and nothing I've seen here suggests I'm missing anything. So I write only to nitpick: I think you mean "alter ego," not "strawman." A "strawman" is someone you speciously create as an opponent so that you can knock him down to reinforce your position.

-- 03:03, 6 October 2010 (BST)

Columbina:

I didn't mean "straw man," you're right, but I didn't exactly mean "alter ego" either - that'd be a stand-in for the author, and Galt's not.

Um, is there a word for a character you have constructed only to embody your ideal/philosophy, who doesn't have any sort of real existence as a character except as a mouthpiece for your views?

-- 03:17, 6 October 2010 (BST)

Columbina:

Robert: Harlan Ellison has a joke somewhere (which means it's going to be mildly sexist but oh well). I don't think I care to go looking through five books to find it right now, so I paraphrase:

"Female authors write in all kinds of ways. You can read Marion Zimmer Bradley, for example, and think, 'Jesus, she writes just like a woman.'

"Or you can read, say, Octavia Butler and think, 'Jesus, she writes just like a man.'

"Or you can read Ayn Rand and think, 'Jesus!'"

-- 03:20, 6 October 2010 (BST)

Harmony:

"Um, is there a word for a character you have constructed only to embody your ideal/philosophy, who doesn't have any sort of real existence as a character except as a mouthpiece for your views?"

I'm sure there is in German.

-- 05:51, 6 October 2010 (BST)

Jweader:

Sock puppet.

-- 20:35, 6 October 2010 (BST)

Bwinton:

Harmony: Well sure, but the German word would be the same number of characters as the English phrase.

-- 20:20, 7 October 2010 (BST)