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Sunday, December 30, 2007

A Very Serious Post

Posted by John Holbo on 12/30/07 at 12:44 PM

Harrumph. I’d better feed the blog before it dies. (I’ve been trying to cut back, y’see. Get some silly personal projects done.)

My daughter, Zoë, has invented the world’s most awesome superhero: Mademoiselle Moneypipe. She’s a French, beret-wearing young lady who has the power to transform into a waterpipe that shoots ... money. Coins, bearing the profile of Mlle herself. And after you’ve firehosed the villains into submission, you can spend it. It seemed a good time to introduce some basic monetary concepts. Zoë thought about it and declared: “Mademoiselle Moneypipe has the power to make coins whose value is resistant to inflation.”

I’ll be back in a day or so with still more serious literary blogging.

Comments

"Literature is currency that STAYS current.” - Ezra Pence

By Ray Davis on 12/30/07 at 06:18 PM | Permanent link to this comment

So MM’s role is to encourage crime, eh? Or attempts at it, at least.

By The Constructivist on 12/30/07 at 06:50 PM | Permanent link to this comment

Your daughter’s superhero sounds a lot more practical than the impression of Iron Man that four year-old son is doing with our new set of aluminum pots and pans. Mlle. Moneypipe could also fill in for St. Nick, but would Alan Greenspan, who seems to be backpedaling from some of the prescriptions that were attributed to his enigmatic statements from the 90s, still look to her to save the US from the mortgage meltdown?

As for comics, I recommend Salvation Run by Bill Willingham - the premise is that the DC villains are all shipped via boom tube to a godforsaken dangerous planet where they are forced to cooperate to survive. The first one who proposes a utopian plan for building a new society gets his brains bashed by the Joker. But then Lex Luthor arrives with a solution—constructing the social order around the idea of getting back the bums who shipped them there. As Chesterton once said, hatred is collective.

By on 12/31/07 at 02:42 PM | Permanent link to this comment

Hi Peter, I haven’t read “Salvation Run” but it sounds good. Stories about cooperation and organization between villains is a good vein to work. Obviously one must begin by quoting Kant, from “Perpetual Peace”:

“The problem of organizing a state, however hard it may seem, can be solved even for a race of devils, if only they are intelligent. The problem is: “Given a multitude of rational beings requiring universal laws for their preservation, but each of whom is secretly inclined to exempt himself from them, to establish a constitution in such a way that, although their private intentions conflict, they check each other, with the result that their public conduct is the same as if they had no such intentions."”

Of course if they are SUPER-intelligent, then the swiftest Boomtube route from id to Superego runs via a knot of hatred for Superheroes. Yes, that seems self-evident.

By John Holbo on 12/31/07 at 10:15 PM | Permanent link to this comment

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Sunday, December 30, 2007

A Very Serious Post

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