Back from Origins today, and between my aching feet, piled-up work, and general sleep-dep, tonight was all about lying around with mollpeartree and watching Wanted. Oh, Angelina Jolie -- how you taunt me.

But even better than Angelina Jolie in tight leather on the top of a speeding El car in Chicago shooting around corners was winning the Best Non-Fiction Work of 2008 Origins Award for Tour de Lovecraft: The Tales. This was especially gratifying, as it's my first Origins Award for a project that was substantially my work -- although I have no delusions about righteousfist's crucial role in the book. And, indeed, I also owe many thanks to you kind folks, for reading the Tour in its initial form in these pixels, commenting, improving those posts with suggestions, and (speaking of suggestions) suggesting I collect the blog Tour into a book in the first place. So thank you all very much.

You can see a short film by wordwill on the Award here. It's a delicate little tone poem of a piece, and speaks volumes of the quality of his friendship (and his narrative skill, even in such glancing, almost calligraphic form). Given that wordwill and jtidball were also nominated for their superb ludoparemiography Things We Think About Games, I can't tell you how much it means to me that he put this together.

I was also deeply touched by my warm reception at the "What's New With Pinnacle" seminar, which Shane Hensley generously invited me to attend. I am not used to being applauded for thanking potential customers and making a potential product announcement. (Not even for anything specific, just: "Day After Ragnarok won't be my last Savage Worlds setting.") Savage Worlds is a great game, and if the audience at that seminar was any indication, it breeds great fans. And there was a song. Two songs.

Let's see, what else? You saw righteousfist and the game playwrights at the fantastic Burgundy Room, where I think the highlight this year was probably the Roasted Lamb Lollipop with Lemon-Fontina Enriched Risotto, Black Walnut Pesto and Red Pepper Relish. Unless it was the Asparagus, Pattypan Squash, Baby Zucchini, Raddichio and Smoked Mozzarella Ravioli with a Madeira Reduction.

I got some more half-price Osprey Books, did a podcast and a bit, helped out at the Hero Games booth (and as always, many thanks to dtwatts for his hospitality at booth and hotel), and chatted with a host of good friends. I love this convention, and after four successive lunches at North Market (with Jenni's Ice Cream for dessert each time), and a pint mojito or two with rockin' yukon_jack, I love this city.

Can't wait to go back next year.

Some of you may have already known about the "old-school" RPG movement, which I discovered about a year and a half ago while I was looking for additional formats in which to publish Adventures Into Darkness. The thing that just tickles me to death is the number of "emulator" games out there -- games that use some combination of the Open Gaming License and the fact that you apparently can't copyright game mechanics, merely their specific description, to create "retro-clones" of the games we all couldn't wait to stop playing twenty years ago. In a way, it's the same sort of thing that Alex Ross and I -- how's that for a misleading name drop -- are doing with our various public-domain supers projects. (The two trends combine, as it happens, with Daniel Proctor's Night of the Living Dead: Revisited, an adventure for the Basic Role-Playing emulator GORE based on Romero's film, which is now in the public domain.)

I'm especially fond of the "alternate history" emulators:

Oliver Legrand's Mazes & Minotaurs comes to us from an alternate 1972 in which Gygax & Arneson were Greek mythology and Ray Harryhausen animation fans rather than Tolkein-Howard-Anderson fans, so the whole hobby takes a big thematic turn toward the legendary Mediterranean rather than the fantastic Northlands variously understood.

S. John Ross' amazing Encounter Critical is more of a "secret history" emulator -- it's a brilliant evocation of the "basement game" circa 1979, complete with IBM Selectric font and awesome art by the GM's best friend. And it's really a remarkable piece of game design in its own right, but then you'd expect that from Sjohn.

And they're both free in PDF! How great is that?

Anyway, all this is by way of preface to the fact that I've got an interview with maliszew (whose Grognardia blog is well worth reading in its own right) up on Out of the Box in honor of the one-year anniversary of Gary Gygax' passing.

* Which is by way of saying that Adventures Into Darkness, my alternate-historical RPG supplement mashup of H.P. Lovecraft and Nedor Comics Golden Age superheroes, is now available in the world-beating Hero System version, from Atomic Overmind and Hero Games! Many thanks to dwatts for his heroic Hero assists, and for his nearly as heroic patience while the stars came right on the project.

* There's also a lovely review by kestrell of Tour de Lovecraft: The Tales up on Green Man Reviews: "So where So where should the Lovecraft beginner begin? The answer is, with Kenneth Hite's Tour de Lovecraft: The Tales." I couldn't have said it better myself.

* Tour de Lovecraft got a little more exposure over the holidays, when "cptmachine" featured it as one of his Lovecraftian Christmas gifts -- watch and delight in "Merry Yithmas, Part 2." Thanks, Captain, and belated Merry Yithmas to you!

* And surely every true fan of the Fighting Yank has already seen the wonderfully, weirdly addictive Nedor-A-Day Page.

* Weird Tales is giving away a free issue of their magazine, to wit the July/August issue, which includes among other good things (such as a fine Mike Mignola interview) my "Lost in Lovecraft" column on the Dreamlands.

* As a public service announcement for those not aware of it, The Groovy Age of Horror is my kind of blog. As befits Grooviness, not all images are SFW.

* Everyone has, of course, already seen Luke Burns' McSweeney's piece, "Selections From H.P. Lovecraft's Brief Tenure As A Whitman's Sampler Copywriter," but someone is apparently taking it more seriously than most: I present to you, the Choconomicon.

* And finally, behind the cut you can see Savage Worlds statistics for Stalin's army of man-ape hybrids, plucked still-warm from the pages of my current project, The Day After Ragnarok! Verrrry scaaaaarry, eh kids?

( A World Where Apes Evolved From Inevitable Historical Dialectic? )

For the interested (and who wouldn't be?) scalzi has posted my "Big Idea" anent the Tour de Lovecraft: The Tales on his wildly successful and entertaining blog "Whatever."

And because no Big Idea is possible without a Small Screwup, I should note that yes, I know Sprague de Camp's biography was published in 1975, not 1976. Slip of the cursor. I assure you that I get it right in the book, which (did I mention?) is available now from the publisher, has been available at The Source in Minneapolis since August, and will be available later this fall in fine bookstores everywhere.

* I'm back from Omaha, where I drove for my niece's wedding. Hence the dissociation, no doubt; a man doesn't just come out of an Omaha wedding the same kind of man he was going into it. Sure, we've all heard the words, seen the movies, read the comics, until "Omaha wedding" has become just another cliched genre trope, like "alien invasion" or "giant robot." Well, the real thing puts all that in the shade.

* So what cheer? (The name of a town in Iowa. No kidding.) Well, first off, my Tour de Lovecraft: The Tales is now available for purchase direct from Atomic Overmind in either PDF or printed copy form! Far be it from me to urge anyone to go the spendier route, but seriously, righteousfist has produced a fricking gorgeous book.

* And as if an occult hand had orchestrated it, rdansky graciously interviews me on the topic of Lovecraft and the book in the latest Five For Writing segment on his blog.

* While you read me plugging my work, you can also listen to me plug my work, on the latest episode of Brian Isikoff's 2d6 Feet in a Random Direction podcast. This one blasts straight outta ConQuest (aka Pacificon), with special guest star Sean Nittner, who just kills with his description of "My Life With Joker," a My Life With Master event he ran at said con. Plus, I was drinking just a wee bit of absinthe.

* I've recently read two sequels to books I've reviewed in this space: Red Seas Under Red Skies, the sequel to The Lies of Locke Lamora by scott_lynch, and Ha'penny, the sequel to Farthing, by papersky. Rapidly, then:

* Scott Lynch's book is even Ocean's 11-ier than his first "Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, only confidence men" novel, since Red Sails Under Red Skies involves a casino heist. And oceans, come to think of it. The voice I loved last time is still there; as is the sense of place and the salutary willingness to push the "plot" handle firmly. That said, the novel is a little more concerned with the relationship between Locke and Jean than it needs to be -- dialing things down to the Leiber level may never happen, but for example, Patrick O'Brian (speaking of oceans) managed to crank out a nice long series featuring two realistic characters without banging them off each other's psyches every five chapters -- and the prologue is just a big cheaty cheaterson. But I'm liking Lynch's world better and better, and speaking of that plot handle, there are some really nice touches in this caper flick considered as a pirate story or vice versa.

* Jo Walton's Ha'penny changes out the roman a clef Cliveden Set of her first book for an even more transparent fictionalization of the infamous Mitford sisters. The novel, a capable Frederick Forsyth-style thriller about an attempt to bomb Hitler at a performance of Hamlet in increasingly-fascist London, moves along at a steady clip, and Walton manages to vary her narrator's voice believably and interestingly: Viola Larkin is not Lucy Kahn from Farthing. (She's not Nancy Mitford, either, which is kind of a relief, actually.) Sadly, this is the installment in which poor, long-suffering Inspector Carmichael (who returns from the first novel) gets his solid gold Idiot Plot with Oak Leaf Cluster moment. It doesn't particularly help that he realizes that he was an idiot; the end result is a rather catastrophic loss of sympathy for Carmichael and of belief in Walton's world. The first is no great wound, but Walton's excellent AH worldbuilding chops deserve better.

Many thanks to jnutley, who from the infinite goodness of his heart sent me a copy of A True and Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Years Between Dr. John Dee and Some Spirits, compiled by Meric Casaubon in 1659 from Dee's manuscript diaries, and as (slightly more recently) displayed on my Amazon wish list, from whence jnutley plucked it to wend its way to me. (For those interested in such things, it is also available online here, nestled within what seems like a very nice interface. Searchable, too. (EDIT: Or, rather, it is if your Internet access, like mine, is via a University that provides access to the EEBO site. Failing that, there's a (non-searchable) PDF version of the book downloadable here.)

Just reading along in it is so much more informative and evocative of the process of skrying angels than mere description; Edward Kelly must have been a master actor to keep all the various voices and speech patterns in his head. I think my personal favorite angel-aethyr-whatever is "Il," who shows up on page 41 in front of a curtain, in ragged apparel but wearing a "white satten" jerkin, and says: "Room for a player. Jesus, who would have thought I should have met you here?" In an earlier seance, Il was even described as looking like "a Vice in a play"; and sure enough on page 42, Il claims "I have business in Denmark." I could troll through the rest of Il's appearances and pull out plenty more like that -- in short, I think I've found the smoking goetic gun for Dee's dramaturgies.

There's also a lot of untapped prophecies in the various angelic and aethyric utterances; the notion of Dee and Kelly as Nostradamian figures has a lot of pernicious potential.

But my favorite bit so far is one that Phil Masters and I stumbled over in Cambridge when we were looking at the microfilm collection there; it's from a seance on May 23, 1584, and from page 156 of Casaubon's edition:

Now appear many Crocodiles, long necked, scaled on the body, with long tales. A great place appeareth, covered about with fire. Many great Serpents appear here of 200 foot. It appeareth very Eastward. No people appear here."

The narrating angel (Nalvage) calls the place Coxlant, and in the tour of the world Nalvage is conducting, it immediately precedes the Garden of Eden. Did Kelly skry up dinosaurs? After all, if he were making things up, wouldn't dragons have made more sense to him?

Fun on every page. Untranslated Latin on many pages, but such is the price one pays for being a dabbler instead of a real scholar.

That said, my Dee dabbling is now well and truly enabled. I've already got the nice Peterson edition of the Mysteriorum, published by Weiser as John Dee's Five Books of Mystery: Original Sourcebook of Enochian Magic, and a copy of The Private Diary of Dr. John Dee and the Catalogue of His Library of Alchemical Manuscripts, so I'm pretty well fixed for primary Dee activities, and I've already discovered that I can't make heads or tails out of his formal magical-Hermetic texts, so I'm just as happy to depend on Robert Turner's Elizabethan Magic: The Art and the Magus where need be. (That book, by the way, is just impossible to find; I stumbled over a copy for thirty bucks at Fields in San Francisco a few years back and counted myself lucky. I'm not sure what I'd recommend that's actually available. There's probably something out there, though.)

So big thanks again to jnutley for helping a brother out. Over the years, every so often someone has (to my dumfounded amazement) been so nice as to out of the blue send me books they suspect (or know) I want; I've embarrassingly less often been so nice as to thank them publicly. Well, my Leap Weekend Resolution is to thank such people going forward, in a format very like this one.

My erstwhile home state, Oklahoma, is 100 years old today. It's kind of a weird place in a lot of ways, perhaps because it sits atop the subterranean realm of N'Kai.

The western half is just the West -- cowboys and desert and military bases. The northeastern half is the Midwest -- agribusiness and occasional hills and Babbitt-Gantry sanctimony. The southeastern half is well-described as "Little Dixie" -- pickemup trucks and Confederate flags and jug beer. (Yup, that's three halves.) Oklahoma City is spang in the middle of all of them, which gives it more character than the average white-bread Plains city, and it had the great good fortune to have money during the 1920s, so there's still some decent architecture around if you look. Of course, with the oil boom in the 1970s, there's a lot more terrible architecture around, too.

The whole state has kind of a cowboy-Saudi glitter to it when the oil is expensive, and kind of a sepia-Joad craquelure to it when the oil is cheap.

There is nothing like an Oklahoma dust storm, although I say that having never seen a South Dakota dust storm.

The last Confederate general to surrender was from Oklahoma. He was Stand Watie, of the Cherokee Nation.

Three Oklahoma governors have been impeached -- one for putting whole counties under martial law to break the KKK.

Governor Walton may have also been the governor who tried to declare war on Texas, though I don't recall precisely. On a similar note, being from Oklahoma has given me great practice for moving to the Second City, as well as considerable sympathy for my Canadian friends.

In that spirit, I can say the Tex-Mex food in Oklahoma is better than it is in Texas. (Except Austin, where it's better than it is anywhere.)

In a similar spirit, I am reliably informed that head shops in New York City once sold T-shirts emblazoned with "Thank God For Adair County, Oklahoma."

Oklahoma has arguably the fourth-best state song, after Georgia, Florida, and Wisconsin.

It's all about the football. I used to crack that I followed two professional football teams, the Dallas Cowboys and the OU Sooners.

The original "Sooners," of course, were the people who cheated during the Oklahoma Land Run of 1889, sneaking into the Territory -- the last "free land" taken from the Indians in the whole U.S. of A. -- sooner than they were supposed to. My birth state, therefore, takes its nickname proudly from people who had to cheat in order to beat people who were too incompetent to make a living in any other state or territory of the Union. Compared to "Sooners," "Okies" is almost a badge of honor, one would think.

So, as an Okie who went the right way on Route 66, happy birthday to the state of my birth!

EDIT: The lovely and talented anaka has it right -- it was Governor William "Alfalfa Bill" Murray who fought Oklahoma's brief, glorious, and victorious war with Texas in 1931. I had him confused with Walton because he put the whole state under martial law during the Depression and called out the National Guard something like forty times.

Here is Truth, and Much of Wisdom, the Word from On High, and the Incontrovertible Way of Things.

(Pay attention; this will be on the test.)

THERE.

ARE.

NO.

BORING.

TOPICS.

There are only boring writers.

Malcolm Gladwell may be a flighty monomaniac with a sheerly romantic attachment to statistical rigor (and who does that description remind you of, hmmm?) but he is by God not a boring writer.

And I don't even like ketchup.

* On stopping into Borders, I noticed that Walter McDougall, whose work I have enjoyed since The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age has the first volume (Freedom Just Around The Corner: A New American History 1585-1828) of his new history of the United States out in paperback. I may pick it up when the grim hand of Austerity lifts a trifle.

* Speaking of books I mayhap intend to get and then get around to, what with Popes and suchlike I have renewed my curiosity about Robert Fogel's The Fourth Great Awakening. Has anyone read it? I admire Fogel's work, but this seems a skoosh outside his remit.

* My new Out of the Box column is up, expressing some portion of my glee with the new Werewolf. I was also glad, as I read further, that I liked Blue Rose as much as I eventually did; John and Steve are friends, and when I got the book I was crushingly disappointed that they had punted the "romance" aspect of the game so hard. But the rest of it sold me again.

* On Saturday, Kung Fu Hustle realigned my chi, removing the taint that Matrix Revolutions had left there. It needed more dancing, though -- afterward, I regaled voxel, kaynorr, and gnosticpi with my vision of a Bollywood-Hong Kong martial arts musical, perhaps directed by Baz Luhrman. Unmoved were they.

* We've played Fantasy Flight's War of the Ring twice now; once more, and I'll post a postmortem review sort of thing here. This is why I don't review board games in Out of the Box -- you have to play them twice or three times to get a real sense of their worth, unless they're garbage.

* And finally, happy ANZAC Day to all you badass Antipodeans out there.

My new Out of the Box column is up, for those interested.

I'd like to reiterate, here, just how swell Dean Shomshak's Ultimate Mystic and Mystic World are. Those of you who know my charming arrogance know that there's no higher praise I can give an RPG book about the occult than to say that I couldn't have done it better. I could have done them differently, sure. But these two books are pretty much GURPS Cabal for the Hero System, if GURPS Cabal was four times as long. (But then I said "for the Hero System" already. Ba-dump-bump.) The presence of the Zoas of William Blake (who I teasingly called a "proto-Kirby" in my column, for what increasingly seems to be good reason) in Mystic World's cosmology is the kicker.

What with the press of Christmas whatnot, I only got one column done before time to take off for Omaha; it's my annual Christmas Shakespeare Suppressed Transmission (available in finer online gaming magazines everywhere); this one will be on Titus Andronicus, and should appear on Christmas Eve. I love doing these, although I wish I'd had another day or so to poke around for more, er, meat on this one. Still, it's pretty swell, if'n I do say so myself.

But that means that the reference to "before Christmas" in last week's Out of the Box is now retroactively and obviously a reference to Greek Orthodox Christmas. I'll hash out the promised Indie Roundup nee Stocking Stuffer Column when I get back, and pop it up before the 30th. So that's covered, then. Sorry, but if it's a choice between reading another Kinkoed RPG and watching Natalie Portman gyrate in Closer, well, there you go.

Be good in comments until I return, yo.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good flight.

Today is the birthday of the United States Marine Corps; founded on November 10, 1775 and blooded at Trenton the next year (as well as many battlefields far more horrible and a few only slightly less glorious).

My dad was in the Army, and I absorbed a lot of his good-natured military prejudices about the Corps, primarily their charmingly simple-minded devotion to killing bad guys. This is more than usually unfair, because the Marines actually, when you look at it, are the real-time laboratory for American combat theories both tactical and strategic -- many of which they developed themselves without a lot of fancy-pants help from other services. The USMC-authored Small Wars (originally put together in 1940) remains strikingly useful and enlightening in a hardheaded (one almost writes "jarheaded") way, kind of a "Yankee know-how" version of Sun Tzu for counterinsurgency.

I never served in the military -- my dad wanted me to, but I'm one of life's natural civilians; slow, gangly, lazy, and soft. (This may, of course, have been why my dad wanted me to serve, and I'm not prepared to say he's wrong for all that I don't really regret choosing otherwise.) Even if I had served, it would have been the Reagan-era Stateside Army, with maybe a tour in Germany if the brass was interested in my language skills. Except for Basic, and waking up early, and the green clothes, it would have probably been pretty civilian.

It surely wouldn't have been a combat tour in some godforsaken, pestilential slum on the Euphrates River, carrying 100 pounds of gear and armor into an alleyway full of murderous fascists, with nothing but a few fellow Marines between superheated death and my own fragile skin.

I haven't heard a lot of good-natured ribbing of the Marines from my Army friends, lately.

My brother-in-law is a Marine, the real deal; he was in Iraq a while ago doing intel work with the Seabees building roads and bridges and highways and stuff. He's back here, now, but lots of his brother Marines aren't.

Good luck, guys, and try extra hard not to get killed on your birthday.

Today is the tenth anniversary of my wedding to the brilliant and gorgeous mollpeartree, and (not coincidentally) the fourteenth anniversary of our first date.

"She speaks poniards, and every word stabs."

Right in the heart, baby, and I die blissful, and doubtless without a scintilla of evidence incriminating her. Let's all hope she keeps me alive for another ten, shall we?

Welcome robin_d_laws, who is nice enough to say nice things about me amid blaming me for his entry to these dark waters.

(I must say, anent one of Robin's later posts, that it's odd to be compared to a Yankees fan; kaynorr will know how odd.)

But enough about me, let's talk about Robin and me: When I was but a wee snip of a lad in the game biz, I read Weather the Cuckoo Likes, Robin's "Cut-Up Project" tribute for Jonathan Tweet's immortal RPG Over the Edge. It's quite, quite good. It contains Robin's adventure "Last Chance Brains," which at the time I read it, I considered to be the greatest single RPG adventure ever. I have yet to authoritatively change my mind.

At a GenCon some years later (it seems now, but it can't really have been that long afterward), I met Robin for the first time -- at an "industry insider" party which I had no business attending -- and spent our brief meeting babbling incoherently about that adventure, that sourcebook, and his general unstoppable awesomeness as writer, thinker, and human being.

Whether Robin has charitably consigned that memory to the cobwebbed back of his mental liquor cabinet, or whether, grinning, he takes it out and dusts it like a Hummel figurine every time he hears me pronounce authoritatively on some topic from a position of professional decorum and lofty grandeur, I can only guess.

George Washington would be 270 today.

You will look a long, long time through the history books for someone who had dictatorial power conferred on him by a country, including absolute personal sway over the military, and gave it back into elected civilian hands. Twice. And took no salary or public money during that time.

His personal eloquence and example prevented two military coups against Congress, in 1782 and 1783. The first aimed to place him on the throne of America; his response: "I am at a loss to conceive what part of my conduct could have given encouragement to an address which to me seems big with the greatest mischiefs that can befall my country. If I am not deceived in the knowledge of myself, you could not have found a person to whom your schemes are more disagreeable ... Let me conjure you, then, if you have any regard for your country, concern for yourself or posterity, or respect for me, to banish these thoughts from your mind, and never communicate, from yourself or any one else, a sentiment of the like nature."

Frederick the Great (who knew a little something about the subject) declared Washington's maneuvers at Trenton and Princeton, which saved the independence of the United States, "the most brilliant achievements recorded in military annals." And the lengthy period of strategic victories and tactical defeats that followed didn't fool Frederick: he later sent Washington a portrait, inscribed "From the oldest general in Europe to the greatest general in the world."

Lafayette sent Washington the key to the Bastille: Washington sent Lafayette a pair of shoe buckles in return. Washington's Revolution had no Reign of Terror, no Thermidorean reaction, no military coup d'etat, no dictatorship, and did not result in the return of the corrupt monarchy it overthrew, 20 years and millions of lives later. This is all due to George Washington.

Without Washington, there would be no U.S. Constitution.

He could "swear the leaves off the trees."

When, in January of 1800, news reached Britain that George Washington had died, Lord Bridport, commanding the British fleet at Torbay, ordered all ships under his command to fly the British ensign at half mast. The entire Royal Navy eventually followed suit.

This great man provided museums with many fascinating artifacts, which he often blasted out of Egyptian tombs with black powder. He also provided me with a user icon. Circus strongman, thespian, monk, barber, hydraulic engineer, stage magician, and Egyptologist -- the career of Giovanni Battista Belzoni should be an inspiration to us all.

How many of us carry a metaphorical ton of circus dwarves around on our backs for a metaphorical British theatrical impresario, when what we should really be doing is stealing giant stone statues from corrupt Egyptian khedives by means of scientifically-placed explosive charges?

Er, metaphorically, I mean.

Every so often, I meet fans of my work, who are nice enough to say nice things about it. Once or twice, they'll say something like, "It's an honor to meet you." I have a stock response to that, which goes something like, "No, it's an honor to meet Neil Armstrong. It's kind of cool to meet me."

I have never met an astronaut, or a Medal of Honor winner, but I have met two heroes in my lifetime, both of them (as it turns out) on the University of Chicago campus. While I was a grad student, Milovan Djilas, the famous Yugoslavian dissident and author of THE NEW CLASS, came to speak to our class, and he looked just like he should -- shock of silver hair, Victor Laszlo erect posture, and so forth. Very central casting.

Today, thanks to mollpeartree's alertness, I met a second hero, the Egyptian expatriate professor of Islamic jurisprudence, Khaled Abou El-Fadl, who you can read more about here, if you're so inclined. He gave a talk on "Islam and Democracy" that was incredibly interesting and, among other things, used the Islamic heritage of individual moral responsibility to argue simultaneously that democracy was the only legitimate form of Islamic government, and that saying that was, itself, an un-Islamically reductionist act. And that was just one point, which he made off-handedly on his way to many other similarly electrifying points.

Dr. Abou El Fadl looked, by the way, nothing like the image evoked by "Egyptian dissident," being kind of hunched over, diffident, mumbly, and short. (Dr. Abou El Fadl reminded me of Christopher Hitchens' statement about Orwell, that he proved an ordinary man can be a hero. I wouldn't call Orwell ordinary, but Hitchens' point does apply to both men.) Not a central casting hero: no fiery temple-of-Karnak profile, no Ricardo Montalban (because Hollywood wouldn't cast a real Egyptian) swagger and precise diction -- just words that demonstrate by their sheer decency the criminnal nature of the Mubarak government, the Wahabist movement, the Iranian mullahs, and anyone else who would silence him. I certainly don't know enough about Islamic jurisprudence to say if his thought is brilliant in that field -- but I know enough about democracy to say it.

Thanks to a prudential bookstore stop (where Sheila couldn't find his books, but we'll keep trying), I managed to run into him after the speech, on the sidewalk. I shook his hand, and mentioned that he and Milovan Djilas were the two heroes I've met. He was very nice, and seemed flattered, and obviously completely at sea as to what some guy in a New York Rangers shirt was doing shaking his hand. Like Victor Laszlo, he smokes like a chimney.

And it was an honor to meet him.