An old market had stood there until I'd been about six years old, when the authorities had renamed it the Olde Market, destroyed it, and built a new market devoted to selling T-shirts and other objects with pictures of the old market. Meanwhile, the people who had operated the little stalls in the old market had gone elsewhere and set up a thing on the edge of town that was now called the New Market even though it was actually the old market.

Southern California doesn't know whether to bustle or just strangle itself on the spot.

That's funny because if anyone actually did prove the existence of God we'd just tell him 'nice proof, Fraa Bly' and start believing in God.

And it happened all the time that the compromise between two perfectly rational alternatives was something that made no sense at all.

Crappy old OSes have value in the basically negative sense that changing to new ones makes us wish we'd never been born.

The science fiction approach doesn't mean it's always about the future; it's an awareness that this is different.

Even the best of us have certain psychological mechanisms that can suddenly kick in and turn us into monsters.