Ghost in the Machine

According to Dr. Mac's Cultural calendar for July 22, on this day in 1376, so the legend goes, the Pied Piper of Hamelin led the rats out of town. When the town did not pay him, he came back and led the town's children off, never to return. This story has always bothered me, and I remember as a child seeing a TV version that really upset me. It wasn't just the mindlessness of the children, but the fact that the punishment was so out of proportion with the crime. It's the same sort of outlandishly cruel, if poetic, justice that makes Hitchcock's films so disturbing: think of how the flawed but not unsympathetic characters in Psycho or The Birds get their comeuppance in ways that are monstrously disproportionate to their "crimes."

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On a lighter note, today is one of those hot, lazy summer days--complete with rumbling thunderclaps off in the distance--when I can't seem to motivate myself much. Nothing seems quite real. I might be a ghost or a virtual construct in some computer program--a "sim" or a "bot." How do you know I'm not? How do you know I'm not a blog-male version of Alice, programmed to spew out random bits of pseudo-intelligent persiflage, hmmm?