"We need more harlequins, fewer ticktockmen."

Said Icepick in last night's thread about Boston banning drinking games in bars. He began:

I recently read "The Scouring of the Shire" chapter from Return of the King. It was disturbing how much the Shire under (ultimately) Saruman's direction sounded like modern America. The country is being run by over-officious jerks, and the American people are putting up with it. Land of the free no more....

And then:

We need more harlequins, fewer ticktockmen.

A link goes to the Harlan Ellison story "Repent Harlequin!' Said The Ticktockman." 

Icepick advises:

Professor, I believe you need some more tags. One for over-officiousness, and perhaps tags for harlequins (see Swartz, for example) and for ticktockmen (anything with Bloomberg).

Ellison begins his story with a quote from Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience":

The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailors, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purposes as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens. Others as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the Devil, without intending it, as God. A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it.

Ellison introduces that quote with: "There are always those who ask, what is it all about? For those who need to ask, for those who need points sharply made, who need to know 'where it's at,' this...."

That story was published in 1965, when the phrase "where it's at" was quite the thing. 

ADDED: I just bought "Masterpieces: The Best Science Fiction of the 20th Century," which contains "Repent Harlequin!"

"Boston’s becoming a town devoid of nightspot fun as some bars in the city eliminate board games and water pong..."

"... fearful that city regulators will come crashing in and accuse the pubs of sponsoring drinking games."

“If two friends at a bar say, ‘I’ll buy your next beer if you make this shot on the dartboard,’ the bar may have to go before a board. It’s silly how arbitrary it can be,” said Chris Mitchell, general manager of the Better Off Bowling league, who has seen the bar crackdown firsthand.

Hypnotist...

... thieves.

"They are promoting drug use... This is the wrong message for Nike to send."

The Mayor of Boston — Thomas Menino — doesn't like the T-shirts in the window at Niketown.

A Nike spokeswoman told the newspaper that the company doesn’t condone the use of banned or illegal substances.

“These T-shirts are part of an action sports campaign, featuring marquee athletes using commonly used and accepted expressions for performance at the highest level of their sport, be it surfing, skateboarding or BMX"...

The mayor is insufficiently hip, apparently. Doesn't cotton to ambiguity.

The death of the Boston Globe.

"From the moment the Times Co. purchased The Globe in 1993, it has treated New England's largest newspaper like a cheap whore. It pimped her out for profit during the booming 1990s and then pillaged her when times got tough. It closed her foreign bureaus and cheapened her coverage of everything from the fine arts to the hard sciences."

Squid ink bubbles?

I was with you up to the squid ink bubbles. Then I was kind of grossed out. Nice to see Boston again though, via photographs. I'm here in Madison, Wisconsin, eating Milk & Honey Granola. It's quite delicious. Chez Althouse, where we love Milk & Honey Granola, "It's quite delicious" is an oft-invoked allusion to a favorite movie...

Hunh. Well, uh. What is the, uh, "vromborova polevka"?

It's a potato soup. It's quite delicious.

Oh, well, that's great! I'll have that.

Vromborova polevka... that looks like something my linkee could easily translate without asking the waiter.

Anyway, as I often say, I'm here in Madison, Wisconsin. But spring break looms, and I will break out of Madison before long. Where am I going? You'll have to wait for the photographs, and I will let you guess. But it won't be Boston, and it won't be the Sahara Desert, and it won't be a forest in Poland, and it won't be India or Scotland or Montauk, Long Island. And there won't be any squid ink bubbles, I don't think.

John Updike has died.

Link.

What have you read and what have thought about, reading John Updike?

ADDED: "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu":

Fenway Park, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg. It was built in 1912 and rebuilt in 1934, and offers, as do most Boston artifacts, a compromise between Man's Euclidean determinations and Nature's beguiling irregularities. Its right field is one of the deepest in the American League, while its left field is the shortest; the high left-field wall, three hundred and fifteen feet from home plate along the foul line, virtually thrusts its surface at right-handed hitters. On the afternoon of Wednesday, September 28th, as I took a seat behind third base, a uniformed groundkeeper was treading the top of this wall, picking batting-practice home runs out of the screen, like a mushroom gatherer seen in Wordsworthian perspective on the verge of a cliff....

(K*thy in the comments says: "A gem and one of the best and most famous pieces of baseball writing ever.")

Jubilation.

I enjoyed waking up listening to "Morning Edition" covering Bostonians in a bar watching the Red Sox win the final playoff game. I'll link to the segment when it becomes available. I loved all the great curse-is-lifted lines that flowed out of the fans, like "God changed his jersey."

UPDATE: Here's the link.