Sunday 30 March 2003

I'm going out this evening, so it seemed pertinent to have a nap midday, though I don't like to make a habit of it. I was a bit bored, so I grabbed a Calvin and Hobbes anthology off Neil's shelf and read it prior to the aforementioned. It was very good, so I believe it may have to replace my Dilbert subscription. Dilbert's getting pretty stale. This leaves me open to the charge of wallowing in nostalgia, my other regular read being Peanuts, but this I deny. My childhood was not remotely like Calvin's, and good ol' Charlie Brown? Only vaguely. I found a lot of Calvin and Hobbes quotes on atheist/agnostic sites*, and though "Calvin" immediately brought to mind Mr. predestination, it took me a while to recognise Hobbes as the author of Leviathan which, it always slightly takes me aback to realise, is really a philosophical rather than a purely literary work. In my mind it has associations with Margaret Cavendish's The Blazing World, due to my Civil War module last year. The latter is laughable, so Hobbes has suffrered by the association. One particularly stupid part of Cavendish's opus is when the ostensible heroine, a duchess, basically fools the heathen into worshipping God through the medium of pyrotechnics, somewhat like Hank Morgan in A Connecticut Yankee. She fails to notice any moral contradiction. Bloody token women on literature courses.

All comics mentioned available in one's electronic mail, respectively, hyar, hyar and hyar.