So today I feel like mocking some Objectivists. Whee!

Okay, this book reminds me of nothing so much as Fushigi Yuugi. If you're not familiar with FY, it's an anime series which involves a Mary Sue (author insertion) character and a hero-group of young men who all, including the transvestite gay guy and the other gay guy, happen to be in love with the heroine. None of them ever seriously fight over her; they are all willing to step out of the way of the One Most Worthy for the sake of love for her. That's this book, and it's pretty damn silly. Francisco, Rearden, and Galt actually get bodice-ripper funny sex scenes with the heroine. Eddie whats-his-name just gets to serve her like a feudal serf then tragically confess his love and be abandoned to die. Aww! How sweet! I think in Rand's twisted universe, Eddie deserves to die because he devoted his life to someone else. Or because he's not an architect. Or something.

In the world of Atlas Shrugged, all cars, airplanes, and tractors will collapse into a steaming heap of bolts within one year if major replacement parts cease to be available.

In Atlas Shrugged, a man can run a pig farm singlehandedly, from breeding to cured ham and bacon on the table, and run an airplane/tractor factory in his spare time; no previous experience with pigs required. A single man with no experience can run an orchard and grow enough fruit to have plenty to spare for a city, and have plenty of time left over to give concerts and write symphonies. And by the way, it only takes a year for fruit trees to mature in the Colorado mountains and start producing fruit. There are no weevils or caterpillars or blight of any sort, because Ayn Rand characters don't believe man is destined to be miserable, which makes them immune to natural disaster.

In Ayn Rand's universe, anyone who can pinch an inch also happens to be evil. Especially women. Our heroine seriously considers abandoning a trainful of people to die because one middle-aged woman who has been awakened in the middle of the night wearing only a nightgown fails to hold her stomach in. Of course, it's easy for Ayn Rand heroines to hold their stomachs in... none of them have children, and they all work 26 hours a day behind a desk, which as we all know is really great for those abs. They can also fly airplanes through the mountains without ever learning how.

I think the scene that most tempted me to throw the book across the room was when a train with a coal-burning engine plunges into a tunnel with a ventilation system meant for a diesel. I'm not going to argue about the various merits of diesel fumes versus coal, because I'm not that familiar with them, but I can do basic math. The train is traveling at 100 miles per hour through an 8 mile long tunnel. That's a mile and 2/3 per minute. In slightly less than five minutes, the train will emerge from the tunnel. Want us to believe that in five minutes, the train will consume all the air in an 8 mile long tunnel and suffocate all the passengers? For five minutes, the passengers could roll the friggen windows up and just breathe the air trapped in the train! It would take longer than five minutes to INTENTIONALLY kill yourself by gassing up your garage! Of course, maybe Rand realized she was being a dimwit, because while the train full of smothering people is backing up 3 miles trying to return to the entrance (instead of plowing forward the remaining 5 miles) it's hit by another, completely uncalled-for train, collapsing the entire train tunnel. This is necessary because although the reader might care about the fate of the people on the train, Rand has established that her heroine doesn't give a shit about any living creature, so she can't reasonably be expected to care about 300 dead passengers; on the other hand, she gets hysterical at the collapse of the tunnel granddaddy built. I understand why Rand did it this way, but she undercuts what was building to be a very cool scene with the "death train" emerging from the tunnel with its ghastly cargo.

In fact, Rand undercuts pretty much every scene in the book. The climax of the book is a 90-page-long manifesto delivered over the radio. Supposedly it makes people in the city very upset. It made me skip ahead, skip ahead some more, skip ahead some more, think "Oh Jesus how LONG is this stupid thing? Self-interest yadda yadda, how many ways can she say the same thing over and over?" and finally put the book down and go play Left for Dead on versus mode because zombies are more mentally stimulating than Ayn Rand.

After reading this book, I have to say I consider the dating site an essential service. Ayn Rand fans should not interbreed with innocent strangers.

"Tall, rugged, orphaned industrialist seeks slender, waiflike heiress with rape fantasies for twelve years of tortured longing culminating in the rest of the world finally admitting they were wrong not to appreciate us as we deserve. Reply to H.R. at the top of the phallic skyscraper - if you're the girl for me, you know the one."