If a dataline is running and there’s no one there to watch it, has anything really happened? - Pat Cadigan

It gets tricky here, but it’s always seemed to be that sanity is, or can be, as relative as anything else. Sacrifice an animal to Zeus and predict the future from the formation of its entrails—do that as a general in ancient Greece hoping for victory in a coming battle and you’re prudent. Do it today and you’re a clinical paranoid and a mean one, too. Sanity, like customs and manners, seems to have a strong basis in the accepted standards of a particular time and place.

If fasting really had anything to do with enlightenment then millions of people throughout the ages had died of the secret of life. And the secret of life was, in its entirety, that starvation hurt like a bastard.

Old responses live long, die hard, and frequently leave a troublesome corpse.