Every time you use a 10 year figure to talk about next year’s budget, a fairy dies.

— Neil Stevens (@presjpolk) December 4, 2012

Old cowboy couple driving a broken down, rusted out limousine through the Valley; reminding me that anything can happen.

— kelly oxford (@kellyoxford) December 4, 2012

Told my Mom that she can rewind & fast forward live TV with her DVR & she called me a warlock & said there will be no Christmas this year.

— Brandon Guttermouth (@UNTRESOR) December 5, 2012

I was thinking of how rare it is to have a great ending in fiction. This is important to me as I’m trying to write fiction myself and know it’s hard to wrap things up, so I was trying to think of other good examples of great endings. But there are so few in either movies, books, or TV series. Like I just read Ender’s Game, and while the second to last chapter of it blew me away, the actual last chapter and concluding of the book was kind of “eh.” It’s like maybe it should have just ended sooner, but there were threads to wrap up. And I can’t even think of one TV series that had a finale that met expectations. As for movies, most of the great movies I can think of just had okay endings. The examples I hear for great endings are usually twist endings — which only have the impact on the first viewing if it wasn’t spoiled — and movies where it wasn’t really an ending. Like Empire Strikes Back had a great ending — but it wasn’t an ending as we knew that was all getting picked up in the next movie. Offhand, if I was to think of a great ending that just perfectly summed up the story while also wrapping things up well enough, the best example I can come up with is The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

Maybe great endings are rare, but I pretty much never see anyone not recommend a great film or book because the ending was only okay (though some endings are so bad they almost ruin the whole thing, like for the TV series Lost). It’s all the stuff leading up to the ending that’s important, and the ending is more obligatory because fiction has to end. But in real life, there are no endings.

So what are the best endings in fiction you can think of?

Buttercup prepares for the military of the future:

If you would like to learn more about the advantages of having dinosaurs in the military, please read my new book.

Bob Costas says that his anti-gun commentary in the middle of a game was a mistake, but then he goes on to say his view is that he’s okay with firearm ownership except for semi-automatic weapons. What do you think the chances are he actually knows what a semi-automatic weapons is or that most handguns these days are semi-auto?

It’s no wonder some people are so scared of guns when they’re absolutely so ignorant about them and spewing nonsense about “cop-killer hollow points” or whatnot. By far, most people are pro-gun and for individual gun ownership — and that’s something that’s only increased over the past fifty years. So the few left thinking that banning handguns is still an option or thinking the same tired gun-control talking points are something no one has heard before are necessarily extremely disconnected from normal people and quite ignorant. That will only increase. In the future, there will be even less pro-gun control people and they’ll be even dumber than they are now; they’ll probably believe guns just jump out of closets and shoot people by themselves or secrete some sort of chemical that makes anyone who touch them become murderous. It’s not an easy thing going into the ash heap of history; think of the people left who are blatant racists.

Liberty: People really like it, and you might want to try and understand why instead of ignorantly ranting against it.