Tom Fury is a fictional character in the Ray Bradbury story “Something Wicked This Way Comes.” This mysterious character sold lightning rods of a special sort. Even though his handiwork wasn’t enough to protect people from the danger of their own desires and weaknesses, he tried his best to tell them what was coming.
This blog is named in honor of Tom Fury’s efforts to help people turn away from dangerous and unpleasant things. This blog offers a collection of images, links, reviews, poems that show the way toward appreciating beauty and wonder.
In this sense, Tom Fury is about what it feels like to be human. It is about beholding the universe through our senses, our imagination, and our intellect. It is about art and science and the wonder that powers both. It’s about everything beautiful and powerful that “through the green fuse drives the flower.”
Tom Fury promotes the celebration of truth and beauty in all their manifestations, freedom of mind and body, self-exploration and the consensual exploration of others, and the sustainable happiness of all people.
Tom Fury wants everyone to get along, work together, and play together, and has an inkling that celebrating beauty, wonder, joy, science, art, music, poetry, and the delights of living might make all that a little easier.
Tom Fury believes there is much to recommend this passage from Kurt Vonnegut’s God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, which is sort of baptismal address for some new-born babies:
“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”
Tom Fury loves you, and wants the best of everything for you.
Tom Fury is an online course in the humanities, constantly rewriting itself, curious about artwork and poetry and memorable places. Tom Fury celebrates the human form in all its mystery and sublety. Tom Fury enjoys a somber memento mori, a joke, a silly cartoon, or even a little snippet of agitprop to keep those brain cells humming.
These posts are in some ways similar to the original Tom Fury’s peculiar lighting rods: they are totems to protect us from danger, charms to remind us to be happy, connections that ground us to the real world.
All of this is, in a sense, a metaphorical battle against those who spawn evil, corruption, and sin. Tom Fury fights against Mr. Dark, Darth Vader, Blue Meanies, Nurse Ratched, Dolores Umbridge, the Sheriff of Nottingham, the Harkonnens, Simon Legree, Big Brother, Sauron, and Rupert Murdoch.
Tom Fury would like humanity to heal itself of all traces of superstition, bigotry, rudeness, censorship, greed, and arrogance.
Tom Fury is an old fart, watching the wheels go round and round.
All things considered, Tom Fury would sometimes would just as soon be a dolphin or a bonobo, but most of the time is overjoyed to be human. There is, after all, “grandeur in this view of life.”
Who tells you? Tom Fury tells you.