The Globe and Mail and the Victoria Times-Colonist carry stories about a driver who forced another (drunk) driver off the road to protect road construction workers. It appears that police won't be charging him, in contrast to two store owners in Montreal (see the Globe's story) who're being charged with aggravated assault after beating a burglar breaking into their store.

What range of force should citizens have access to in order to prevent crimes?

Clearly, an excessive use of force is not okay, but where does reasonable force end? In the Victoria case, the road was fairly busy. It would seem to me that using a few thousand pounds of metal, at fairly high speed to try to stop another car raises some serious risks for others in the area. Did the risks of letting the drunk driver continue outweigh the risks of trying to stop the driver?

Organisms:

Here's Julian Sanchez with a pretty fresh piece on organ donation.

Makeup:

And Eliana Johnson links to this before-and-after as evidence that girls look better in make-up. I actually think that the pictures prove just the opposite point-- that too much make-up really doesn't help. Differences in taste, I suppose.

July 4th:

Happy Independence Day to all. I celebrated today by seeing Legally Blonde 2, and let me say, it was a pretty darn fun movie. Contrary to the New York Times's pan, I thought it was almost as good as the first movie. Of course, I'm a well-known sucker for Hollywood sequels. What the movie did particularly well, I thought, was poke fun at itself, since it recognized that it was rapidly beginning to push an envelope that could go no further. The best line? Elle Woods has locked herself into her bathroom after a terrible day, as her fiance is trying to coax her out.

Emmett :Elle, do you know what I thought when I first saw you?
Elle: God, that girl wears a lot of pink?

Tom Stoppard, revisited:

It's great how Blogging lets me find people who share my literary pecadilloes. Not only is Jeremy Reff an Ada-ite but it turns out that Timothy Sandefur is a Stoppard fan. Those interested in assorted Stoppard lines can find them here.

It's difficult to explain to Stoppard-skeptics why he's so great. To some people he's never out-done Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, the "Prufrock and Shakespeare" reply to Waiting for Godot. I've seen R&G are dead several times now, and it's never failed to move me, but when I saw Beckett's Waiting for Godot I was profoundly indifferent and a little wearied of it. This is partially because Stoppard is just a better writer. R&G comes alive with lines like "...Six rhetorical and two repetition, leaving nineteen, of which we answered fifteen. And what did we get in return? He's depressed! Denmark's a prison and he'd rather live in a nutshell; some shadow-play about the nature of ambition, which never got down to cases, and led in fact to his illuminating claim to tell a hawk from a handsaw!" Deeper fans of Stoppard also find the powerful philosophy of Arcadia, The Real Thing, and The Invention of Love, and the most obsessed even relish Night and Day, Indian Ink, Jumpers, and Artist Descending a Staircase.

The standard indictment of Stoppard (pretty much the only indictment, but repeated a lot) is that he's "all style and no substance." Critics never make quite clear what they mean by this. From what I understand, they mean A: that Stoppard's plays spend so much time arguing a point back and forth that they don't always carry an ultimate message, B: that they contain a whole lot of witty prose that masks any real emotion, and C: that they don't always have much of a plot.

Point A is properly dispatched with a wave of the hand. Yes, it's true, The Real Thing argues "love" so far back and forth that one can't be sure what Stoppard thinks. But anybody who tells you they can write a play to describe the true meaning of love clearly is lying. Stoppard explores ideas by firing at them from either side, flushing out some idea of the borders, but never throwing a message whole-bodied down the audience's throat.

What of B? Well, yes, it's true, Stoppard's characters talk in ways that only the most pompous or clever people in the real world do. Indeed, Stoppard pokes fun at his own tendency to write impossible wit in The Real Thing:

Charlotte: What an ego trip! Having all the worlds to come back with just as you need them. That's the difference between plays and real life-- thinking time. You don't really think that if Henry caught me out with a lover, he'd sit around being witty about Rembrandt place-mats? Like hell he would. He'd come apart like pick-a-sticks. His sentence structure would go to pot, closely followed by his sphincter. You know that, don't you, Henry? Henry? No answer. Are you there, Henry? Say something witty.