I still found Rand interesting enough to read. I couldn’t hack her nonfiction for more than about a page (after which I would typically realize that though my eyes were moving through the text, it wasn’t reaching my brain), but I read her fiction. I re-read Atlas two or three times (skipping the monologue one time, forcing myself to read the stupid thing at least once), and The Fountainhead twice, and the others once.

In my opinion, the real goldmine of stupidity, wrapped in nonsense and deep-fried in liquid pretension, is Anthem. It’s the shortest thing she wrote, and the only one I am quite certain I will never ever attempt to read again. It’s the DUCK AMUCK of Objectimalism.

Incidentally, I heard her speak on the radio once — the Fishwife, I mean — and she had an accent you could scoop with a shovel. I understand some people can learn how to speak English without an accent, but Superwoman couldn’t be bothered.

an article worth reading would be idiocracy: from fiction to fact in almost no time at all

Mr. Wonderful and Snorghagen: You two don’t think the movie might turn out to be one of those so bad it’s amusing things? Maybe I’m just being optimistic.

Move over, Battlefield Earth.

You know, the very same thing happened to me. Or something very similar, anyway. What with this and that, I had gone and spent my last dime on crack and hookers – hey now, don’t hassle me, all that’s in the past, and we should look to the future instead! – so I went to the local savings-n-loan with my palm outstretched to get financially bailed-out. Well, after a certain amount of begging and pleading I got them to the point where they were willing to make me a loan, but do you know what those evil jackbooted thugs had the nerve to demand of me? That I pay them back!

Tyranny! Oppression! Never, never, never! To Hell with society, I’m gonna go live in the woods, and let’s see just how well those arrogant bastards do in my absence!

I picked up a paperback of The Fountainhead in the library at about age thirteen. From the cover, I thought it might be science fiction. Read through the first dozen pages quickly, and realized:
first, this book is going to be all about Howard Roark.
second. Howard Roark is a screaming a@@hole.
Conclusion: I do not want to read this book.

Being a brainy, highly opinionated and socially awkward teenager, I could have become a screaming a@@hole MYSELF, had I read it. Narrow escape, for which I’m grateful. Years later, as a reasonably well-adjusted adult (early 40s) I read Atlas Shrugged cover to cover, including the hundred page ‘your stupid, stupid minds!’ speech. It did things to my mind, strange, terrible things that it took weeks to recover from. It’s the Necronomicon of insane politico-economic thought.

I shrug and say, “Hey, nothing personal, just figured that there had to be some sort of story there.”

He relaxes a little, introduces himself as Stephen “Senior Economics Writer of the Wall Street Journal” Moore, and tells me his story. “I was stranded on this desert island, and I’m there for a month, trying to live on coconuts and whatever fish I can catch, and then one day a bottle washes up on the shore, and when I open it, a gorgeous female genie–think Barbara Eden in her prime–comes out.

“So, immediately, I ask her if she can get me off this fucking island, and she tells me that a rescue chopper is on its way. Then I tell her that my life’s ambition is to become Senior Economics Writer of the Wall Street Journal, and she tells me that the job’s mine. I’m thinking of what else I want, and you know, she’s not wearing a lot and I’ve been pretty damn lonely, so I ask her if we can do it while I’m waiting for the helicopter. ‘Sorry’, she chirps, ‘but genies have to be celibate.’”

“I think it over. ‘Okay’, I say, ‘how about a little head?’”

Thankew, thankew, I’ll be here all week.

I can usually get through that part with a straight face. I lose it when I try to explain that the way to make the tide rise is to dredge the dirt from the sea floor and dump it on the mountaintops.

Was Rand aware that titainum alloys have been commerically available since 1946?

But Atlas Shrugged just grinds you down and makes you want to be illiterate.

Green indestructible metal?

I think they might asphyxiate in Cheeto fart gas even before that.

I honestly don’t even care to make the thing a revenge-laden death trap. Let the city be completely self-sustaining so they can do whatever it is they think they’ll do down there without a genuine proletariat to exploit. They just can’t come back up after they go.

Well, okay, putting that many assholes in a cramped, claustrophobic undersea complex might be a little revenge-laden, but only because I fully expect them to turn on each other the minute the bathysphere heads back to the surface and one of them declares himself “king”.

At a pinch, Rand fembots will do.