Just So

1.  Right now I am in Holland, Michigan for a Liberty Fund conference on Adam Smith.  Last week, I was camping, or at least pretending to be camping.  Going on vacation the week before leaving for a week-long conference is not good planning.  Yet, come to think of it, it wasn’t actually planned that way; it was more the emergence of a spontaneous order—and undesirable spontaneous order, to be sure.  That last sentence is the result of spending the last three days talking about Smith and Hayek.  Let us all hope the rest of this post can avoid such jargon.

2.  The NFL has returned from the dead.  I cannot even begin to express my joy.  The strike weighed on my very soul, depressing my spirits.  I haven’t even played Madden for months because thinking about football was too depressing.  And now we are about to have one of the craziest weeks in the history of football.  I am glad that ESPN exists; the hotel here provides only a pathetic little local paper.  But they do have free internet access, so ESPN will fill that void.

3.  This hotel is nuts, by the way.  It is the City Flats hotel.  The rooms are crazy—every room in the place is different—and I mean different not just from one another but from every other hotel room on the planet.  Mine has this odd diagonal wall spitting the room into two trianglish (“trianglish: something not quite similar to a triangle”) shaped areas.  And the hotel is Green—not the color, the religion—seriously Green.  They pride themselves on their Greenness.  There are at least a half dozen locations in the room trumpeting their Greenness.  There is no Gideon’s Bible in the room; there is the National Geographic book, true green: 100 everyday ways you can contribute to a healthier planet in the room.  (Why the title has no capital letters in it is presumably one of those things Green people would know—perhaps upper case letters waste precious resources or something.)  I haven’t read the book—but I may flip through it this week so I can mock it.  The lights in this room fail to do their job of, you know, providing light.  So, it is a bit cavelike at times.  There is a window, so during the day, one of the two trianglish areas gets light.  Don’t get me wrong—it’s a nice hotel.  Really.  I’d stay here again.  It’s just a weird hotel.

4. I have read a lot of Adam Smith in the last month for this conference.  A lot of Adam Smith.  I’ll review the books soon, but for today, I’ll review a book that reading Adam Smith made me want to read.  Kipling’s Just-So Stories.  It is a little known fact (indeed, until now, I was the only person on the planet who knew it, and I just learned it a few weeks ago) that Kipling’s Just-So Stories are more entertaining versions of Adam Smith’s essays on the development of language.  Kipling changed the topic and argument—and he writes better than Smith—but in terms of persuasiveness of argument, “How the Camel got its Hump” and Smith’s work on the origin of language are identical.  It was fun to read Kipling again; I haven’t read those stories for years.  Kipling is a seriously underrated author.

5.  I was introduced to Kipling’s Just-So Stories at school when I was very young via Film Strip.  Do film strips still exist?  I'll bet my kids have never seen a film strip.