On the Lighter Side....

"An author is a fool who, not content with boring those he lives with, insists on boring future generations." - Charles de Montesquieu

Found this little peach of a quote, kind of on a whim.  I was searching for quotes, which I do by typing "____ quotes" into the magic oracle box on Google.com, and I got bored.  Being in that state, I typed "boring quotes" and the one above came right up.  It's not that it's particularly boring, but rather that it contains the....  Well, you get it, right?

So usually when I find a quote that strikes me as odd, I probe the ancient oracle further to learn more about it--when it was said, where, and in what context.  Granted, context means very little to many people these days, and even less in an election season, but I often find the discoveries interesting. 

Yeah, I'm a nerd.  But I like it.

This quote, unfortunately, was obscure to the oracle's sight.  I tried everything I could, adding key words on citation and source, but after probing for--heck, six or seven minutes--I found nothing and had to conclude that M. de Montesquieu, an Enlightenment-era French philosopher who's been quoted often on matters of civil liberty and separation of governmental powers, didn't write much for the general Internet. 

I probably should be offended by the quote, I suppose, since I'm one of the fools to whom he's referring.  I don't know about insisting, but I sure hope to bore--er, entertain--future generations.  The alternative--and there are far more examples of this than there are of the baron's suggestion--is that my creations remain on a computer hard disk and eventually give in to the laws of physics, which say that artificially-magnetized spots can't stay magnetized forever.  Well, that, and they also say some things about dropping cats from heights or putting them into boxes, but I'll leave those alone for the time being. 

I wonder if M. de Montesquieu had a cat?

But--yeah, back to the topic--offense--nah, I don't have the energy.  Everything's so offensive these days, it seems.  People I agree with get offended over things I don't.  People I don't agree with get offended over things I do.  Some day, sometime, we're gonna have to take a day off from offense and explicitly recall that we're all residents of ____, and outside of that we're all Americans (except my friends that aren't, and they're all something else), and outside of that we're all members of the only species on the planet who can wiggle our thumbs opposite of our fingers while doing calculus.  Well, dolphins probably could do calculus, but not with the thumb thing going on.  And most of my friends can't do calculus, but their thumbs work.  And--well, you get the idea, right?

Oh, and M. de Montesquieu had another entertaining quote about the importance of mustaches, too.  You should look that one up.  But he spelled the word "moustaches" like the British do.  Those people--you'd think they invented the English language or something. 

- TOSK

Oh, and PS and all that stuff too--Cataclysm is Number 2, right now, on Amazon's list of Epic Fantasy!  Woo hoo!  Thanks for all the help and support you've given me as I push the book out into more peoples' hands in the hopes that they'll also enjoy Ascension, and in just a few short weeks, also enjoy Atlantis.

For other updates: www.TheOtherStephenKing.com