“The Whole Earth As The Village?”

Leela called up the stairs. “It is here, Doctor. I did it. The beast is finished!”

She looked down at the shattered body of her foe.

“Your triumph will be short-lived, Earthling,” whispered the Rutan. “Soon our Mother Ship will blast this island to molten rock.”

“Empty threats, Rutan. Enjoy your death, as I enjoyed killing you!”

The Rutan quivered and pulsed weakly. “We die for the glory of our race. Long live the Rutan Empire.”

The glow faded and died, and the Rutan died with it.

With a savage grin of triumph, Leela turned and went back to the lamp room.

The Doctor had rigged together one of his amazing contraptions, taking apart the reflector lamp and the giant telescope and re-assembling them in an entirely different order. As far as Leela could make out, the power of the carbon-arc lamp would be reflected through the telescope and finally focused through Palmerdale’s diamond, which the Doctor was now fitting somewhere inside the telescope. He made a careful, final adjustment and looked up.

“They are hard to kill, these Rutans,” said Leela.

“Been celebrating, have you?”

“Of course. It is fitting to celebrate the death of an enemy.”

“Not in my opinion, but we haven’t time to discuss morality.”

from Terrance Dicks’ novelization
of his Doctor Who script
“Doctor Who and the Horror of Fang Rock”

So Leela had time to spend a moment chatting with the monster she just had mortally wounded and the dying Rutan had time for a bit of philosophy before passing away. But the Doctor, however, couldn’t take any time to discuss morality.

That’s the British for you. They’re always too busy with this, that or the other thing to talk about philosophy.

At least they say they’re too busy. Maybe, of course, they simply don’t have any philosophical foundation for their busy actions and they are hoping nobody will notice if they just act real busy.

Brits.


I used to think the whole world was turning into Los Angeles, but maybe the whole world is turning into London, and Los Angeles is just the first city to completely change.


A philosopher named Josef Pieper wrote a book called, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, but Pieper was a German philosopher.

The British are famously busy, and the Germans are famously slackers, aren’t they?


I notice that Pieper’s book isn’t available on Kindle.

I wonder if there’s a deeper meaning there, to the lack of a Kindle edition of a famous book about leisure as the basis of culture?

I’d speculate about it here, but I’ve got to go do some work . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .



The Five Student Colors Of L. S. Lowry


Music At The Garden’s Edge

“The whole Earth as the Village?”


“Hold Me Forever: A Doll Philosophy”




Orbis Non Sufficit And The Status Cow


Distance From Paris To Berlin



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An Impossible Kisses production note:


Josef Pieper is the second so-called
“German Catholic philosopher” I’ve
singled out here at the blog. Way back
when I talked about our local library
purging books in

Paris Hilton And The Butterflies From
Atlantis #3: Fons Et Origo

I mentioned
Dietrich von Hildebrand
and his extraordinary book
“The New Tower of Babel.”

These philosophers were not
popular with the Nazis and
they’re not popular in our
current culture. Hmmm.