One of my professors in grad school had a bit of a rivalry going on with another professor in his field. But I don't think it was quite so epic as the escalating Honderich/McGinn deathmatch. Rule #1: never let it get personal....

How many times--thousands, tens of thousands surely--were we subjected to these used-car-lot ads? Each ad was introduced with a frenzied cry of "It's Cal Worthington and his dog Spot!", followed by low-budget footage of somebody (presumbly Cal himself) awkwardly cavorting with a zoo animal that was never actually a dog. And the music that accompanied it... decades later, every word is still seared into my brain.

Oddly, these commercials always seemed to air at really inappropriate timeslots, such as during Thundercats and Duck Tales. I don't know about most kids, but I certainly did not have any used-car purchasing power at that age. Cal Worthington at least provided me with my first lesson in marketing strategy: I quite clearly recall asking my dad once why somebody would create advertisements that seemed designed only to annoy and repel potential customers. Dad's answer was "Well, you remember his name, don't you?"

Oh, how I remember.

The health-care debate is something I know very, very little about, so I generally refrain from commenting. (And don't worry, that's not what the article is really about, although one can't get through the article without getting the strong impression that there's a lot that's horribly screwed up about our medical system.) But the doctors' comments towards the very end of the article about the prospect of universal health care caught my interest, because they echo what a doctor friend of ours has mentioned once or twice: that a very great deal of money and interest in the current American system is focused on helping people with extremely serious health problems of the sort that other health-care systems might (reasonably?) write off as terminal. That's great if you've got such a problem and have access to good insurance; I know of more than one person in my circle of family and friends whose life has been literally saved by this system, no doubt at hugely disproportionate cost to the health-care/insurance system as a whole. But is that the best way to do things from the perspective of broader society? Probably not, but who knows? I sure don't, so I'll just stop talking for now.

But how on earth does someone who can compose the wonderful simile of the ruins "protruding uncannily above the sands as parts of a corpse may protrude from an ill-made grave" manage to let themselves write, not a page later, that the "brooding ruins ... swelled beneath the sand like an ogre under a coverlet"? --Kenneth Hite on Lovecraft

The BBC recently broadcast a radio show examining the life and continuing influence of H.P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft is the early 20th-century writer of weird fiction who invented the Cthulhu Mythos and penned many stories of "cosmic horror."

I am extraordinarily fond of Lovecraft's writing. In fact, I'd certainly place him amid the crowd of writers whose work has inspired or influenced me throughout my reading life. One thing that intrigues me about Lovecraft is that he's not a terribly good writer in any traditional sense of the word: his recognizable-from-a-mile-away writing style is often clumsy and obsessed with clunky words like "cyclopean" and "squamous" (for a challenge, fit those into your next everyday conversation); his characters are often poorly developed (and there's pretty much one female mentioned--once--in the entire body of his work, and she's a centuries-old undead witch); and he consistently sidles too close to Goofiness when he's trying to evoke Creepiness.

But he's got one thing that more than compensates for any technical failing of his writing: sheer, unadulterated vision. You can see it lurking behind every awkward, adjective-laden phrase, in every earnest description of a monster that's supposed to be horrifying but instead comes across sounding like a hippopotamus-headed tentacled frog. And every great now and then, his vision breaks out of the cheesiness of his writing style and knocks you over with its pure brilliance. Occasionally, amidst all the mad scientists and squid-faced flying ooze monsters, you catch a sanity-shattering glimpse of what Lovecraft is really scared of: a universe that doesn't care, in which mankind and all he's accomplished is just an unnoticed aberration of evolution. Lovecraft throws all that overwrought prose at you to keep you distracted, and then when your attention is diverted, he punches you in the gut with the existential awfulness of his vision.

At the risk of turning him into a cheesy inspirational figure, I like Lovecraft because he's an example of somebody whose ideas were so compelling that his writing deficiencies simply didn't matter. In fact, the strength of his vision and the earnestness with which he pursued it actually took that sometimes-awful prose and made it a work of art in its own right. In religious terms, his ideas redeemed the clumsy way in which he communicated them.

My own introduction to Lovecraft came in the form of a computer game, actually--Infocom's The Lurking Horror. In college I found a collection of Lovecraft stories and, one spring, I spent many a sunny Michigan afternoon reading almost everything he'd written. "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" and "At the Mountains of Madness" were my instant favorites, along with some of his lesser-read, dreamlike short stories. Then followed the superb Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game (a must read for Lovecraft fans, even if you've no intention of playing it) and the realization that some of my other favorite horror stories (Stephen King's It, for instance) were essentially Lovecraft fan fiction.

All this to say: if you've not had the joy of reading Lovecraft, you really ought to head down to your local library and check out a collection of his stories. And a few links if you want to delve a bit deeper:

• Ken Hite, writer of excellent roleplaying books, has been reflecting on each of Lovecraft's stories (the good ones, the bad ones, and the mind-shatteringly awful ones) at his Livejournal. (See his commentary on "Mountains of Madness," for instance.)
• Neil Gaiman wrote a spectacular Lovecraft/Sherlock Holmes crossover story called "A Study in Emerald", which impresses me anew each time I re-read it. (It's the third story down on the page.)
• Lots of information about Lovecraft's life and works.
• "A Colder War" by Charles Stross, adding the Cthulhu Mythos to the Cold War.