The Long Walk.

We had a record in of “Poems and Songs of Middle Earth”--some of which is apparently in Elvish!

In the middle of a student’s rather ordinary paper occurred the mysterious phrase “cow orders”. It took me a bit to realize he had intended “cohorts” (i wonder how he came up with this uncommon word?), guessed at the spelling, then accepted Spelchecker’s suggested emendation without a thought.

Alternate History: the Vietnam War never happened, & by this time we would have had a man on Mars & a base on the Moon...

“It is not, I protest (to myself at any rate), a mere weak-knee’d sort of escapism. I attend, rather, to my own business, which is the completing of a book. A book, I remind myself, may evoke pleasure; it may, at least possibly, turn out to be permanent; and either outcome is more than ever even the most ardent statesmen have asserted as to the special war they fomented.

Cheered by these inspiring reflections, I continue with my writing; and the war, that inconceivable huge horror, becomes only a slight, disegarded annoyance now that writing drugs me. I have lived through too many years to expect human beings to behave rationally; and the war, as yet, stays endurably remote, in its more violent aspects, from tiny Poynton Lodge and my adjacent sedate seven acres in the Northern Neck of Virginia.”
--James Branch Cabell, from the introduction to Let Me Lie (1947)