At least, I think that’s him. The face isn’t visible, but still, that is definitely how Nemo walks.

Seems a hunter up in Bemidji set up a game trail camera and Nemo just ambled along in front of it during the dead of night.

The wee small hours are, of course, Nemo’s favorite time to go out for a stroll. It isn't clear why he’s chosen the Bemidji area for his nocturnal walkabouts.

Not sure what’s up with the gorilla suit either, but I assume there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for that too.

I got bogged down about halfway through and put the book aside. I'm a fairly tenacious reader but Wallace's writing has lots of long, arid stretches of exposition and in the end I got pushed out of the book.

A couple of weeks ago I picked it up again, and yesterday slogged on to the finish.

The Man, written in 1964, rests on a premise so improbable it almost reads like science fiction. As the book opens, both the President of the United States and the Speaker of the House are killed in a building collapse in West Germany. We learn that the country happens to be without a Vice President when this crisis occurs, the elected V.P. having recently died of a stroke (this was, of course, a few years before the 25th Amendment spelled out the rules for filling that particular vacancy).

Under this scenario, the Presidency falls not to the Secretary of State, as we might expect, but to the President Pro Tempore of the Senate -- Douglass Dilman, an undistinguished senator from New Hampshire. Dilman, we are told, was given the ceremonial Pro Tem post in order to appease northern liberals, although this is never really explained; traditionally the honor goes to the oldest, crustiest guy in the building.

Well, anyway. The kicker here is that Dilman is black, and because this is 1964, the country goes bonkers.

As soon as Dilman is ensconced in the White House the southern bigots and northern cynics begin laying plans to destroy him. Secretary of State Arthur Eaton feels the Presidency should have been his, and mint julepy Sen. Zeke Miller offers to help him to get Dillman out of the White House. Dilman, who'd spent his Senate career as a mealy-mouthed back-bencher, is expected to fold quickly, but rises to the occasion and shows his enemies that he's got the right stuff to be President.

Sprawled out over 800+ pages, Wallace's brand of lackluster melodrama wears thin. But The Man did spawn a decent little TV movie in 1972, with James Earl Jones portraying Dilman as a smart but somewhat melancholy guy who's been thrust into a world of trouble. Burgess Meredith played the Zeke Miller character with oily gusto, and he got one of the best lines in the Rod Serling-penned screenplay: The White House ain't near white enough for me tonight.

Wallace tried valiantly to imagine a black man leading the country, but his imagination failed him at times. The truth is that anyone placed in the Oval Office by such bizarre circumstances would be politically hamstrung right out of the gate. Make that person a black man in 1964 and the problems would be magnified a hundredfold.

The impeachment subplot tried to project the Senate trial of Andrew Johnson into the 20th century, and the result was essentially a courtroom drama, with teary-eyed witnesses trying to sway a jury of 100 Senators. As the Nixon impeachment hearings (and the Clinton impeachment trial) showed, dramatic emotional appeals were few and far between.

Rather, the task of the impeachment managers was not only to convince members of the House and Senate that their charges reached the threshold of "high crimes and misdemeanors" as specified in the Constitution, but that failing to remove the President left the Republic itself in grave danger.

Today the western is all but dead, and science fiction films seem to be bubbling up from the multiplex all the time.

There's hardly a Philip K. Dick novel that hasn't been adapted for the movies. But Isaac Asimov, arguably the most respected writer of that benighted genre, has never successfully made that jump.

I guess this was because Asimov wrote lots of scenes where two Very Smart People stood in the same room, quietly outwitting each other. Not the most cinematic writer, to be sure.

There have been exceptions to the No-Asimov-at-the-movies rule, of course. Back in the 80's, someone did an adaptation of his short story Nightfall that kept the title but little else. A few years ago, Will Smith starred in I, Robot, purportedly based on an Asimov short story. But aside from the presence of robots, there wasn't much Asimov in that one either; it was essentially a Will Smith actioner set in the future.

Interestingly, the only adaptation of Asimov's work that came close to being faithful was from a game -- a rather primitive "interactive" VCR game produced by Kodak in 1988. Isaac Asimov's Robots was based on The Caves of Steel, the first novel to feature New York homicide detective Elijah Bailey and his android partner R. Daneel Olivaw.

Asimov imagined a future in which the inhabitants of an overcrowded Earth built vast underground cities. Over time people become so used to their underground existence that they developed agoraphobia; they could no longer bear the idea of being "outside". Meanwhile, human colonists who had traveled to other solar systems built a prosperous and technologically advanced civilization, largely on robot labor. These "spacers" look down on the Earth people, but they have developed a neurosis of their own. They are incurable germaphobes who are fearful of direct contact with the Earthers,whom they see as dirty.

Nemo's dad used to have a copy of the VCR game, and for its time -- and for what must have been a miniscule budget -- it worked pretty well.

But it seems unlikely that The Caves of Steel will get a big-budget Hollywood treatment anytime soon. In Hollywood's view, the future is old-fashioned; most science fiction movies produced today take place in the present or, if they really want to go out on a limb, the near future.

I tend to agree with that, but in our Manichean culture, all literature must be weighed for its political content. And John J Miller, whom you may remember from the National Review's attempt to identify politically pure rock songs, has opened the floor for nominations for the Best Conservative Novels Ever Written.

Miller is on firmer ground here than he was on the rock song project. You can find a novel to support any worldview imaginable. But of course, the goal here isn't simply to identify conservative novels; rather, the intent is to demonstrate that the center of intellectual gravity in western culture is in conservative territory.

Not so easy, that. Readers threw in all sorts of suggestions -- some quite sensible, others a bit off, and some truly wacky. A few of the highlights:

Not So Strange

State of Fear, Michael Crichton

Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand

Anthem, Ayn Rand

The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Robert A Heinlein

The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkein

Rainbow Six, Tom Clancy

Winter’s Tale, Mark Helprin

Out of the Silent Planet, C.S. Lewis

The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis

Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

Animal Farm, George Orwell

Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh

Advise and Consent, Alan Drury

Okay, A Little Strange

Sometimes A Great Notion, Ken Kesey

A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole

Watership Down, Richard Adams

Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson

A Canticle For Liebowitz, Walter M Miller, Jr.

Dracula, Bram Stoker

Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov

Never Let Me Go, Kauzo Ishiguro

USA Trilogy, John Dos Passos

The Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson

The World Accordiong To Garp, John Irving

Like Miller’s previous effort to list “conservative” rock songs, this project becomes something of a Rorschach test. If a conservative likes a book, does that make the book conservative?

Many readers seemed to think so. One suggested that Nabokov’s Lolita is a conservative novel “if you can get past the allegorical child molestation”. Another recommended a John Derbyshire essay extolling the virtues of Lolita, saying that was proof the book’s conservative bona fides since “John knows what he likes” (It’s well-documented, of course, that what Derb likes is young ladies whom our decadent, liberal society has labeled “underage” )

Watership Down got several nominations. There is a “freedom vs. tyranny” theme that will cause people of all political stripes to embrace it; but it’s interesting to note that Watership Down could have been written as an allegory to the post-9/11 world. Adams portrayed the Efrafa warren as a state that had made a deliberate choice to pursue security at the cost of freedom. The result was a highly regimented, highly paranoid culture.

John Kennedy Toole's brilliant A Confederacy of Dunces appears several times on the list of suggested books, though it's difficult for me to see why; that comic novel's protagonist, Ignatius J. Reilly is an avowed Medievalist who professes his hatred for our Enlightenment-tainted world -- a conservative enough attitude, I suppose. But he is also a lurid train wreck of a man: bumbling, complaining, solipsistic and lazy -- not exactly a poster child for rock-ribbed conservative values.

Some books seem to have been nominated because the reader was simply immune to irony. The Great Gatsby was suggested, on the grounds that Jay Gatsby was a self-made man, the kind of fellow who pulled himself up by his bootstraps. One reader recommended Stephenson's The Diamond Age because it posited a future in which Victorian culture and values makes a resurgence (true enough, but the "neo-Vics" in Stephenson's novel are depicted as retrograde and faintly ridiculous).

What to make of the nomination of Uncle Tom's Cabin, I don't know. That melodrama about the injustices of slavery so enraged southern conservatives that it is commonly cited as one of the causes of the Civil War, a conflict that some conservatives still haven't gotten over. It's a baffling suggestion, really -- one that makes me wonder if the person nominating it had even read it.

I didn't suggest that Bill Ayers is the author of one of Barack Obama's biographies — I reported that someone else had made the suggestion and had made an interesting case, and that Obama was not helping matters by refusing to disclose any of his prior writings which might put any doubt to rest by demontrating his writing skills.

I've never been sure why this is. Maybe liberals feel a need to stake out each of their bumper sticker convictions separately, as they tend to be a coalition with different specific pet issues, while conservatives can use a single sticker (Bush/Cheney 04, for example) as a shorthand for their Gods Guns n' Gays agenda.

Interestingly, when I ask liberals about this, they claim it isn't true. They seem to believe that conservatives tart up the backs of their cars just as much.

When I ask conservatives, they claim it's true but only because they fear their cars will be vandalized by the mouth-breathing liberal hordes.

I don't think conservatives seriously believe this -- but you gotta feed that persecution complex somehow.

On Thursday he attended a D.C. fund-raiser, where he shared his vision of the Republican party's future:

He touted his ability to win in a state with a grand liberal tradition, briefly promoted his record in St. Paul and said the GOP ought not be in the business of ideological purification.

“We don’t have a big enough party to be throwing people overboard,” he said.

Later that night, he was asked to weigh in on the curious race in New York's 23rd Congressional district, where GOP nominee Dede Scozzafava is being challenged from the right by Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman. The New York 23rd is a very conservative district, but the rift threatens to split the conservative vote and throw the election to Democrat Bill Owens.

Pawlenty was asked whether he stood by Skozzafava, the GOP nominee, or Hoffman

"I haven't been following that. I haven't studied the race at all. It's not that I would or wouldn't [endorse Scozzafava], I just don't know anything about it."

Within 24 hours -- and in spite of admitting that he didn't know anything about the race -- he was making it clear that he'd soon be part of the mob throwing Scozzafava overboard:

As a conservative I'm concerned about some of the alleged issue positions that she holds," said Pawlenty, R-Minn. "I want to be fair to both candidates and look at their records. But there are some things that [I] have been told that you know, she holds dear, that may not be consistent with conservative principles."

Pawlenty's "concern" seems to have more to do with the fact that conservative darling Sarah Palin has already endorsed Hoffman. Pawlenty, who needs to establish his right-wing street cred in order to hae a shot at the 2012 nomination, has got to get with the program.

This isn't the first time the Republican base has helped Tim see the light.

As governor of a state with a "grand liberal tradition", he used to express concern about global warming. But now that the Iowa caucuses loom, it's all a bunch of hippie alarmism. Last winter Pawlenty urged Congress to get the stimulus bill passed quick because the people of Minnesota needed it fast. Now, he's preaching the gospel of the 10th Amendment and telling the dadburned gummint to get off of his lawn.

Tim's flip-flop on Scoozzafava may not be his biggest, but it's certainly his quickest.

I've known a lot of good dogs. But you were one of the best.

Miss you already, Tori.