I don’t like Christopher Hitchens even when we agree on a subject. The man’s vile, but hey it works for him and I’ve said stuff a lot worse (just not on CNN*).

Occasionally people say to me, Mike, you of all people should get a kick out of the guy which is like telling Cartman he should love ‘Family Guy’. If I found out that Hitchens was programmed by a group of manatees it’d make a lot of sense.

That said I couldn’t resist this interview simply because Tom over at the Amazon Blog gave him a ‘Jetsons’ related question to ponder:

Amazon.com: It’s rare to think of visions of the future that include religion. They don’t go to church in The Jetsons. But yet it remains with us.

Hitchens: We still have a need for the transcendent. I dare say even the Jetsons, if you talked to them earnestly enough about it, would say, look, you’re standing in Cascadia at sunset, and you’re hearing the strains of a Mozart symphony. Are you going to tell me that all life is is a chemical reaction? Surely there’s a bit more to it than that. Of course everybody feels this.

What I like here is not the way that Hitchens takes the curveball in his stride, but that Tom threw it at him in the first place. It’s appallingly easy to ask the obvious questions when interviewing anyone, but finding a hook to keep the interviewee and the audience from tuning out (especially mid-junket) is a good talent to cultivate.**

*I was quoted on CNN’s Inside Politics. They pulled out something I wrote about “norm meat” in reference to US Senator Norm Coleman vs. UK firebrand George Galloway.

** And this is a nice introduction to a new category here on Sizemore – RSS this – simply excerpts from the stuff that flows into my Google Reader that I feel the need to share and comment on. I have no idea if the Amazon Blog is already on a lot of your radars, but I like it a lot as it’s a way into a lot of subjects that I would never, ever go near in a million years. And it feels nothing like a corporate blog1

1Another good talent to cultivate (oh and before we drown in footnotes of footnotes I don’t really like ‘The Jetsons’ either).