Basic Instructions by Scott Meyer for November 16, 2012

hahahaahahaaa

Will I have patent problems if my solid steel gun fires viruses instead? How about parasites? I bet no one’s tried a solid steel parasite gun. It uses bedbugs. It’s not lethal or harmful in any way, but it’s itchy as hell and gives its targets bad reputations and significant extermination costs.

It makes people itch, damages their reputations, and costs them to hire exterminators, and you call it “not…harmful in any way”?

My gun shoots fungi. Depending on where I aim it, it gives people either ringworm, jock itch, or athlete’s foot.

I bought that book wellllll over a decade ago in order to follow along and perhaps participate in a call-in radio show discussion of it…I never got past chapter 3 and I don’t think I listened to the entire broadcast, either. The book, I believe, ended up in a used book store.

Circle of hilarity.

Hey, it helped me appreciate this comic strip to a greater degree than I would have otherwise. Nothing to pity there.

Most of what is sound in the book isn’t new; Zinsser, Van Loon, and McNeill had already covered that ground. If you’ve read them, Diamond doesn’t add much, and the geographic reductionism isn’t very persuasive.