Here's a good indication that we're now in the 'slow season' ... the only thing I've accumulated in my mailbox for inclusion this a.m. is the incipit of a review of 'Sin City' from the Washington Post:

"If you would like to know what men really are," Lucretius once observed, "the time to learn comes when they stand in danger or in doubt. For then at last words of truth are drawn from the depths of the heart, and the mask is torn off, reality remains."

Lucretius was an early Roman poet-philosopher who plied his trade during a time when earnest folks looked to men like him for insightful observations on the nature of the universe. Nowadays, it seems, we look to filmmakers.

And, apparently, comic book artists too. Frank Miller is both, and like Lucretius, he is quite interested in the revelations that may arise when men -- and women -- are in danger or doubt. They are constantly up to their eyebrows in such distressing stuff in "Sin City," an often intriguing, occasionally perplexing film that opened earlier this month.

And since it's such a slow news day, here's the Latin ... from book three of De rerum natura:

quo magis in dubiis hominem spectare periclis
convenit adversisque in rebus noscere qui sit;
nam verae voces tum demum pectore ab imo
eliciuntur [et] eripitur persona amanare.