Scalzi Gets Terribly Comfortable

Once again skipping the whole "comment thread" idea, Scalzi cuts straight to the chase. Why is he wearing a sock on his head? Was he burned by acid or something like that?

No, as the Man in Black says,

It's just that they're terribly comfortable. I think everyone will be wearing them in the future.

A Twofer

The highly literate commenters at Football Outsiders are usually good for a Princess Bride reference, but they managed to get two unrelated ones into a single thread. First, commenter Tundrapat plays off a previous commenter's handle to to bring up Inigo's initiation of the rhyming game:

That Vizzini, he can fuss.

Later, commenter Eddo tosses in an abridged version of Inigo's classic:

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Joe Posnanski Goes Back to the Beginning

Joe Posnanski took Goldman's Law to the next level, by shortcutting the whole "comment thread" thing and putting the Princess Bride quote right into the post title:

Vizzini, you told me to go back to the beginning.

The Origin of Goldman's Law

Well, I had to do a little bit of my own Google searching, but I tracked down the first time I used the term "Goldman's Law," back in another comment thread on the Whatever. Again, it was commenter Patrick M. who got the ball rolling with Vizzini's line that

Australia is entirely peopled with criminals

in comment #68 of this thread. Mr. Scalzi and I piled on in comments 74 and 75, leading me to coin the term in comment #95.

A kissing book?

On the Whatever, commenter Patrick M. cites in comment #9 (with a slight misquote, but we'll let it slide) the underrated line from The Grandson:

Is this a kissing book?

Goldman's Law

Most people are familiar with Godwin's Law, which states that "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1."

Over the past few months, though, I've seen the emergence of a much more pleasant phenomenon, which I've taken the liberty of naming Goldman's Law*, after William Goldman, the author and screenwriter of The Princess Bride:

As a blog discussion grows longer, the probability of someone quoting The Princess Bride approaches 1.

* I have no connection to William Goldman, aside from being a fan of his work, and this naming has not been endorsed by him.**

** Although John Scalzi's Law of Internet Invocation suggests that Mr. Goldman will show up and let me know whether he's OK with it.***

*** And now that I've referred to Scalzi, he'll probably show up too.

So, I've created this humble little blog to document instances of Goldman's Law. Because let's be honest: The Princess Bride is a heck of a lot more fun than Hitler.