My 7-year old daughter asked me the other day whether I was born before email. “Yes,” I confessed. Then she quickly followed up: “Where you born before plastic?” “No,” I said, “I was born after plastic but before email.” Satisfied that she had placed me within the structure of the history of the world, she went back to her weekend play.

Last year, Salon.com announced that it was very fashionable to fry your Thanksgiving turkey, a tip which the truly fashionable regarded as at least 12 months out of date. For those out of the loop — not that it matters now — frying involves injecting the turkey with hot sauce and submerging it in 6 gallons of lard heated to 450 degrees.

Hit-in-the-head movies are usually pathetic. Some guy takes a fall and learns to see the world a new way, which invariably involves becoming more politically correct and marrying a feminist or some such. “Memento” is not to be confused with one of these. It is surely one of the most brilliant and innovative films to come along in years.

This post is one in a series entitled Posthumous Refutations. Previously in this series: The Starvation Brink, Victorian England, and the Santa Claus Principle.

On the latest This Week in Tech, guest panelist and sci-fi author Jerry Pournelle has an interesting anecdote about his involvement with a copyright squabble between Fox and Universal in the 1970s concerning Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica. As noted on Wikipedia:

In America today, for every problem, a national “solution” is proposed, regardless of how individual or local the issues are. Whether we consider housing, education, energy, transportation, finance, labor markets, the automobile industry or the current attempted takeover of the health care and insurance industries, we are overwhelmed with ever more “federal government knows best” policies and programs centralized in Washington. And what it does not mandate, the federal government manipulates with its ability to massively redistribute income.

[This article is excerpted from Economic Thought Before Adam Smith.]

The views of the great philosopher Aristotle are particularly important because the entire structure of his thought had an enormous and even dominant influence on the economic and social thought of the high and late Middle Ages, which considered itself Aristotelian.