>Yikes! Back in the 1980s thru 1990s I recall the frequent "religious war" when it comes to folks' "pet" computer languages -- discussions often decaying into "jihad" between various factions (i.e. Pascal folks deriding BASIC users for using a "toy" language; C users deriding Pascal users implying they need to be weaned and potty trained; C++ users deriding C folks for not ridding themselves of old, outdated notions; etc. -- each "faction" claiming their favorite programming language is *the* language and all others aren't worth anything).
>
>This is getting wierd.

Charles Hankey will appreciate this quotation from the late, great, and very weird Hunter S. Thompson: "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."

When I was a freshman in college Hunter Thompson came to speak at Northwestern. I was a journalism major and Hunter was one of my three greatest inspirations. The others were Red Smith and David Broder, which was a very weird trio. Right at the beginning, after he was introduced and seated at the table, an apprentice madman in the front row (not me) tossed something to him. He inspected it briefly and then said, "This is a f*****g amyl, man." He then downed it and the appearance continued in that spirit. It was the 70s, it was all a little crazy.

The partially self-created wild man persona that made him famous is unfortunate IMO. It obscures the fact that he was a really, really good journalist. Everywhere he wrote he left an indelible stamp. You won't see his face on a coin any time soon but he left footprints in the sand. I wish he had stayed with us long enough to write a looking-back memoir. It would have been a hoot.

HST quote:

The tragedy of all this is that George McGovern, for all his mistakes and all his imprecise talk about “new politics” and “honesty in government”, is one of the few men who’ve run for President of the United States in this century who really understands what a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race this country might have been, if we could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers like Richard Nixon.