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230. While working on the latest Faction Paradox audio, I've found myself having to write poetry that sounds as if it might have been devised in the late eighteenth century. I can just about pull this off, although I've spent much of the last hour trying to find the right monosyllabic word to suggest "sharp-edged and lacking apparent humanity". The problem is that the word I really want to use is "cool", but most listeners would find this distracting, thanks to its rather more modern sense. This wouldn't have been an issue even in the nineteenth century; when H. G. Wells described the alien intelligences in The War of the Worlds as 'intellects vast, cool and unsympathetic', he wasn't picturing the Martians as a race of enormous Fonzies hanging out on Olympus Mons. Vast, cool and unsympathetic… I think I'd quite like that on my gravestone. It's the overweight obsessive's version of "young, gifted and black".