Off-topic topics

If you'll check the description line above, you'll see that our official statement includes the important disclaimer phrase, "and whatever else we want." Now, everyone knows that I love a good Renaissance joke as much as the next Renaissance professor wiener; if you had heard me laugh aloud at Truewit's Blurt Master Constable reference, you'd be part of that rhetorical everyone. But this disclaimer performs several important functions: 1) preventing us from getting too bored with Renaissance discussion (always a risk); 2) preventing us from boring our (incredibly small number of) readers, who may not care in the least about plays like Blurt Master Constable, Renaissance profs like Dick Burt (hard as that may be to believe), and books like Dangerous Familiars, nor want to hear allusions to them; 3) allowing us to post about non-Renaissance funny things that occur to us; 3.1) viz: The strangest thing about that headline is that the question relies on the bizarre assumption that someone might actually imagine that all-out civil war in Iraq could be a bad thing, when it's so obviously the best thing possible for the success of our war against Eurasia, with whom we have always been at war. Oh, and Fox News, Erasmus called; he wants his paradoxical encomium back. (Couldn't really go an entire post without a little Renaissance humor.)