Man, I’m wasted.

Let me rephrase that.

I’m very, very tired, and have been all day. I drank three cups of tea today, which is two more than my usual consumption.

You know how I said yesterday that events had all the earmarks of giving me one of those nights where I don’t get to bed at all?

Sometimes I scare myself. Turned out I was pretty close.

The flight arrival, originally scheduled for 7:30 p.m., got moved back to 8:30 p.m. A while later I checked the airline website again, and now the plane was expected around 11:00.

And then it was midnight.

Then 1:00.

I finally set out for the airport, at midnight. I figured I’d leave about the same time the plane took off from Chicago, since it takes me about as long to get to the airport on a dirty night as it takes to fly here from the city of big shoulders.

And the weather was dirty. Snow mixed with rain. Slushy highways. I drove around 35 or 40 mph all the way.

When I got there, I found that arrival had been moved back again, to 2:00 a.m.

At that point the regression mercifully ceased. I sat by the baggage claim and read a Dean Koontz (The Funhouse—early work, not his best) until Moloch and Mrs. Moloch showed up, and then I drove them back to my place. By that time they’d been thrown off their circadian rhythms so drastically that they figured they might as well just drive home. The weather had lifted, and the roads were supposed to get better the further south you went.

So I got to sleep at about 3:00 a.m.

For all I know, I have my fingers on the wrong keys and am typing pure gibberish.

Ann Althouse asks what movies you have walked out on. I rarely see movies in a theater, so I don’t have much opportunity to walk out, but my wife and I did eject a Doris Day DVD a while back. Caprice is a spy comedy, and I had read about its complicated plot, so I was open to subtleties and a bit of confusion. Still the light but constant sexual humor (mild compared to what’s available today) was not enjoyable.

In lue of Lars’ absence last night, here’s a link to a story about a stuntman who has built a viking-style ship out of ice cream sticks. Who ate the ice cream is not reported.

This is not a post. This is just a filler to substitute for a post.

The weather today turned out to be both rain and snow. Precipitation full of ambivalence. The radio advises me to take about twice the time I’d ordinarily plan for any travel tonight.

On the bright side, the flight is delayed. (No, it’s not on American. Bet the plane’s full of bumped American passengers, though.)

This has all the earmarks of a night in which I may not get to bed at all.

Elsewhere on Britannica’s blog some folks are criticizing Ben Stein’s movie, Expelled, in context of an essay Stein wrote for the Expelled website. Robert McHenry writes:

“Darwinism . . . is a perfect example of the age from which it came: the age of Imperialism” [Stein says.]

And therefore . . . Well, he doesn’t say. This is called an enthymeme, or a rhetorical syllogism. The idea is that the conclusion gains force from seeming to occur spontaneously to the reader. This is the sort of thing that gives rhetoric a bad name.

But why isn’t “Darwinism” offered as a perfect example of, say, the Victorian Age? Or of the Steam Age? Or the Age of the Clipper Ship? Is it possible that Stein is loading the argument just a tad?

A little bit later he tells us that “Imperialism had a short but hideous history – of repression and murder.” He seems to think that the British, and specifically the Victorians, invented imperialism. This idea would surprise the Incas and the Arabs and the Spanish and the Portuguese, among others around the world. He seems also to believe that the results of European imperialism were uniformly terrible. Some were, some were not.

Somehow, I think McHenry is missing the point. Between the first quote and the second, Stein explains the therefore McHenry asks for. Stein writes:

But it fell to a true Imperialist, from a wealthy British family on both sides, married to a wealthy British woman, writing at the height of Imperialism in the UK, when a huge hunk of Africa and Asia was “owned” (literally, owned, by Great Britain) to create a scientific theory that rationalized Imperialism. By explaining that Imperialism worked from the level of the most modest organic life up to man, and that in every organic situation, the strong dominated the weak and eventually wiped them out, Darwin offered the most compelling argument yet for Imperialism. It was neither good nor bad, neither Liberal nor Conservative, but simply a fact of nature. In dominating Africa and Asia, Britain was simply acting in accordance with the dictates of life itself.

There’s a long comment thread after both essays.