My favorite part is "the Science of Electronics".

This is the 'Hitler' of The Iron Dream, impotent in reality creating the fantasy of his perfection and power. Only, of course, he went beyond this into crime.

I wonder what his fellow rightists have to say about this. Why do I expect that they will be eloquently silent?

Bets on how long it takes this guy to show up, and how much candy there is in him?

A world where anything is possible but not everything is possible. Anything can happen, but not all things can happen at once.

How, um, Serlingesque :-)

And I think you misunderstand his point. He's saying that Gibson, Doctorow, etc., etc., don't write proper science fiction because they write about "compassion, tolerance, and equality" rather than the correct theme of science fiction, which is "common sense and merit." Gor books are SF, see, but not Le Guin. The reason why you miss his point is that you are not a deranged loser.

Yes, I'm a hopeless and unredeemable optimist.

* * *

"and how much candy there is in him?"

Whoa. Saturday Morning Lazing on the Couch Flashback.

This made me choke. I guess he thinks that if you say it with enough force, logic doesn't matter. Gee, I've never seen that tactic used in political debate before ...

Yes, he uses the word "anthology", and quite a few other long ones, but it's a sort of book that's thin on the ground these days. It's an odd word to use, and could refer to The Twilight Zone as compared to Star Trek, rather than anything written.

But I'm probably reading too much into this guy's babbling.

Okay, I guess you can write them, but maybe warn us, so we can take appropriate safety measures.

Once again, we see that conservatism is the philosphy of self-hatred.

Thanks for bringing the snark, though. If we all disown him, does that count as kicking him out of fandom? He doesn't seem to have too far to fall, what with how he seems to loathe all things fandom to begin with.

OTOH, it also turns out that Olberman was one of the targets, so I'll forgive him this time.

I think of Fellers Like That as soreheads; perpetually, habitually, and neurotically angry and resentful.

www.timecube.com:
"Humans are educated stupid Word Animals,
creating a Word God and Word World, thus
inflicting singularity as mange upon Nature.
Singularity educators are unfit to even live.
Wisdom is a Cubic measure of Knowledge.
Via Cubic Wisdom, I am the wisest human.
Mind must see Cube eyes can't comprehend.
Time Cube impose 4 corners on Earth sphere.
Earth sphere is Cubic with rounded corners."

Seperated at birth?

Hi, Avram, that "Science of Electronics" caught my attention, too. Whatever ever happened to e.g. "Electronic Technology." Was it paper out of a mail order diploma mill or something, I wonder... Note there's attribution of where it's from or how much he might have paid for it....

Ann Coulter is a Goddess and I worship Laura Ingraham and Michele Malkin . English is the langauge of the United States of America- - our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution are written in the langauge that expresses our civilized freedoms .

Does he think that the Bible's written in English, too, I wonder?

Spanish is the language of Banana Republics, beyond that it belongs in a European country.

ROLFMAO! Apparently it fails to occur to him that the Spanish came over before any British colonies got established in North America.

Perhaps he should be sentenced to watching Zorro reruns and allowed only books written by Joanna Russ, Chip Delany, Melissa Scott, Ted Sturgeon, Stranger in Strange Land, and maybe some Barry Malzberg novels...

From what little I've heard, I must say I like my timeline much better than your timeline... even with the untimely loss of Neil Armstrong, Colonel Buzz Aldrin, and Colonel Jacqueline "Jackie" Cochran.

A timeline where the space programme paid off slightly later, it seems..

More seriously, I guess it was only a matter of time before one of the legion of the perpertually angry rightwing sf fans went and put one of their fantasies into action; I'm surprised it took so long. I'm also glad it's not a name I recognise.

As for the people who go trolling for psychopaths...I think that will be a crime eventually; it already is, sometimes. But crime or no it's an awesomely unethical thing, and deserves all the censure we can heap on it. And it occurs to me to wonder...how many of the al-Qaeda terrorists are more competent versions of Castagana? Isn't trolling for psychopaths what the mullahs do when they pound their pulpits, or for that matter what Haggard used to do?

Every now and again, I start feeling a sick sense of how horribly the world is fucked up. I'm feeling it now. It's not the cruel and competent ones who leave me feeling this way--they just get me angry--it's the poor ineffectual dangerous schmucks like Castanaga. The waste--!

...a phrase popularized by Rick Mercer on the show This Hour Has 22 Minutes, which was produced by Salter Street Films of Halifax, Nova Scotia.

That wasn't Salter Street's biggest moneymaker, though. Go on, guess what their big television success was. I dare you.

X-Files, Millennium, Highlander, Outer Limits, Welcome to Paradox, Stargate: SG-1, Stargate: Atlantis, Earth: Final Conflict, Andromeda, Smallville, Galactica and many others were all produced here in Kanuckistan. As was LEXX of course -- a German/British/Canadian co-production shot in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Do you think Mr. Castagna might feel a tiny bit threatened by this?

OK, now that's just damned freaky.

1. He probably does read Steve Stirling and thinks the Draka are the heroes. If you've never seen Steve's screeds on what he thinks of such readers, you have missed a real treat.

2. Of course someone like this guy would hate Roddenberry. Never mind what they did on original Trek: Next Generation abolished money and treated its absence as a good thing, and put an empath in a position of authority on the ship's bridge. Then Deep Space Nine deepened the wound by treating the one dedicated commercialist as comic relief. None of the newer series are kind to capitalism, nationalism, or anything else a Freeper is likely to hold as fundamental values. And they would know that in interviews around the launch of ST:TNG, Roddenberry and some of the cast spoke favorably of socialism in real life as well as fiction. The horror, the horror.

If you skip his initial sentences, I think he's just saying that he doesn't like the sort of time travel story in which time travellers are able to change the past, and thus the present. It might be the only thing he said which falls into what I'd call the ordinary range of tastes.

#25: Randolph--I don't think the mullahs (and "mullah" probably isn't a good word for that bunch--there are plenty of mullahs who don't do that sort of thing) troll for psychopaths, or at least all the research I've read about says that suicide bombers are sociologically indistinguishable from normal people, though the folks who talk them into being suicide bombers may not be.

As far as I can tell, being vulnerable to getting talked into killing and dying for your group (even if neither actually does any good) is solidly part of being normal. Maybe it shouldn't be, but that's the species we're stuck with.

At a guess, perhaps he's irate with the idea that history repeats itself. He's right to be, I suppose. I would be, if I were in his place -- fascists, even armchair fascists, usually go out in ignominious implosions of bad ideas.

But remember he calls it a fantasy world.

As for that bizarre quote "A world where anything is possible but not everything is possible,"... well, it certainly sounds a bit schizophrenic. Repressed, and repressive.

Sounds like it was Dark Angel that got his goat.

I looked down the comments to the Free Republic post, and here for your edification is the self-confessed extent of his acquaintance with written science fiction:
_________________________________
I have only read the works and short stories of:

H G Wells
EE Doc Smith
Larry Niven
Robert Heinlein
AE van Vogt
Issac Asimov(Second Foundation, History of the Greeks)
Edgar Allen Poe(Facts in the Case of Mr Valdemaar)
John W Cambell Jr(Who Goes There?)
Arthur C. Clarke(Exile of the Eons)
Dean R Koontz (Phantoms)
____________________________________

Presumably he re-reads them a lot...

Ivanova kicks ass. Too bad she's fictional, and therefore can't be convinced to kick this guy's ass.

How much has he really read by Wells? (And has he read ALL of Heinlein?)

Not that I have read everything by Wells, but all the scientific romances seem to be making "social allegories". Also, is he aware that Wells was a socialist?

I'm not even sure where to start with what he appears to have read (and misread) by Heinlein.

Maybe he's related to Carlos Castaneda. Then again maybe not.

I've got to send this to Elisabeth, and she can pass that on to Joel, Francine and Daniel. I'm sure they'll all be quite hurt that Castagnettes doesn't read their prose.

Karl Parakenings: Thank you. I was hoping someone would get that.

Mark (15), I went and read your letter, and in the process was illuminated: Castagna favors "...a cosmos not governed by compassion or tolerance or equality, but common sense and merit," because he imagines that he possesses common sense and merit. He is of course a fool. In the kind of world his chosen masters would build, those that have would get, and common sense and merit would be rewarded meagrely if at all.

Steve (20): Dilute! Dilute!

Anticorium (26), what Michael Roberts said. And by the way, Rick Mercer's Talking To Americans made me laugh until my sides were sore.

Bruce (30), Patrick has a longstanding theory that Star Trek takes place in an alternate timeline in which the Soviet Union prevailed.

Serge (42), I figured they weren't exactly pining him.

Bwahahahahah!!!

Sounds like a member of the Cult Of Ayn Rand to me. Care to take bets he masturbates to the rape scene in The Fountainhead?

"The future is not written" means, I think, I don't have time to read books, and anyway it's too hard.

And that list of authors! Just as expected, only he left off Jerry Pournelle, who I was sure would be there. It's a pity that the guy is now in jail, or else I'd email him to point out that Isaac Asimov was a Socialist. On the other hand, he said he as reading "Issac Asimov", so maybe it's someone else.

And maybe someone should mention to him that English is a European language too?

It's really bizarre that while what I have always loved about alternate history is the chance to get timelines like yours, yet when I wrote one it was an everything-worse one.

Ivanova also came "out" in the third season (IIRC) of the show.

But what, exactly, is an Associate Degree?

And, incidentally, the phrase "trolling for psychos" reminds me of Bruce Sterling's "Distraction" - the automated enemies list that had identified thousands of Net nutcases, and spammed them with encouragements to kill the people on the enemies list...

#43: Does that make Spock the political officer? Because I've always wondered exactly what his job was. It's supposedly something like "Science Officer", but he has way more authority than that suggests...

Oh lawzy. I bet he worships Ayn Rand, too.

What a loser.

No, but that sure makes a good story, doesn't it? :)

They're thrown into space, not projected? His synonym-finder needs to account for context.

O_o

If you've never seen Steve's screeds on what he thinks of such readers, you have missed a real treat.

Do you have a link? (I've tried googling but to no avail).

Well, I can think of one more current event, well actually person, I'd like to have thrown into outer space.

In space, no one can hear you explode, Steve. That reminds me I haven't watched the DVD of Outland in a long time.

(On the Internet, nobody knows that you're a twelve-year-old boy.)

Jo, you'll be happy to know that after reading your everything-worse one, I was sufficiently creeped out that I had to run off and read Tooth and Claw again to cleanse the palate. So if you're thinking of writing a some-things-better one, that sounds like a fabulous idea to me...

The sad thing is, if you took Castagna's opinions, gave them a shower and wiped the spittle off their face, Robinson would agree with a lot of them. Robinson is a peculiar historical anomaly, somehow managing to combine hippy-dippy big hug luv with Heinleinian authoritarianism disguised as libertarianism, and he certainly thinks sf is supposed to be positive and forward-looking and optimistic and all that. If you want to see Robinson descend to these depths (albeit with fifty more IQ points), read his reviews of Triton and We Who Are About To... .

It's also my alma mater, and I just found out I'm on the alumni board. WHOOT! (Does happy dance)

Also, if memory serves, Farscape started around the time of Lexx and did better timewise, critically, and fanbasewise. (Checking wiki shows I'm basically right, at least as far as US airings go.)

I don't see the point in piling on the man; he's no longer a threat and he's in all kinds of hot water. Unfortunately, he's likely to be out in a few years, and still a problem; there aren't legal or social devices for dealing with this kind of psychological disability. The people who trolled him, now, they're another matter. And as for his effects on the rep of sf...for some people he's just going to be proof that we're all delusional, and for them every attempt to distance ourselves is just going to connect us more. Oh, well. Personally, I like my castle in the air--how 'bout you?

I don't know that I'd call Heinlein authoritarian. He is at times, but he's anti-authoritarian at others. One of the things that makes his work interesting is the tension between Heinlein-the-elitist and Heinlein-the-populist.

Sadly, many of his fans just pick up on one of these. Robinson, in particular, has a strong anti-intellectual streak that he wraps up in faux-Heinleinian folksiness.

For some reason, I was positive it was Xena.*

*Yes, Xena got punched back plenty. I'm betting his selective vision blacked out those parts.
Also that he easily mentally converted a fantasy show to "liberals' idea of SF." He just seems the type.

To all the weasles out there, I appologize for comparing you, only in my mind, to Charles Conrad Castagna. I clearly only meant to compare him to a fly infested, worm infused, molded, mildewed, scrap of rotten banana! Or a network executive.

What? What did I say now?

Scraps (@66): do you have URLs for those Robinson reviews, or do I ask Velma to tuck them in her bag when she comes up here for apple cakelings?

Scraps makes me laugh out loud. But that's also a good point, which is not to say that I think Spider is any kind of whack-job.

Chryss, Antiochians rule. Congratulations.

It's been replaced by "I wanna be like you" from Disney's Jungle Book.

"Now I'm the king of the swingers, the jungle VIP."

Thanks, Steve. Now I have this image of Tarzan in a disco suit.

Steve (@76) - I discovered the other day that half my DNA is the same as that of a banana. So I'm only half insulted.

That, Neil, reminds me of a purposefully silly issue of Marvel's "What If" comic-book. It asked what if the Fantastic Four had been fruits instead of people. Instead of the Human Torch, they wound up with a Banana Flambe.

Serge (#86), if you wish to see John Travolta in "Saturday Night Fever" that's your own thing.

What? What did I say now? Oh bother.

I will, however, say that I look forward to the cessation of time Castagna posits happening up here. Perhaps he read "Muffin Explains Teleology to the World at Large"?

Ah, a banana split.

Hah! That would be Lexx.

Unless they count as having a hand in Trailer Park Boys, after having been swallowed up by Alliance Atlantis.

"One banana, two banana, three banana, four."

IF:

There's hard evidence of illegal activities.

Report it to the police.

There's no hard evidence, but there are firsthand accounts and/or physical indications that point to a possible problem.

Report it to social services.

There are stories circulating via word of mouth.

Ask your informant why they haven't reported the matter to social services or the police. Suggest that they do so, if they think the matter warrants attention.

Not surprisingly, this brought on the most catastrophic set of feuds to ever hit fandom. If you want to read more, go here. The "advice" that they quote from their "legal advisor" (they never said "lawyer," and I don't think he was one) is particularly unconvincing.

Years later, the most prominent and vocal member of that faction, who'd been gafiated for most of the intervening time, came out of the closet. It's a funny old world.

And then there're the actions of that oh-so-anti-American Roddenberry. How dare he fly B-17 bombing missions against the Japanese, and earn medals while doing so? What kind of patriot is that, I ask you?

I drew a pair of Haggards- Merle and H.Rider.

I'm going to lose at Celebrity Poker to three Whitmans (Christine, Walt, and Charles), aren't I?

(grinning, ducking, and running)

Scott

In space, no one can hear you explode, Steve.

What I think of when I see a name like "Charles Conrad Castagna" is that a bunch of British public school types, finding out all the "good places" to ski were already taken, decamped for Abruzzo for a long weekend of drinking and semi-successfully falling down hills, ol' Charlie meets up with one of the locals at one of the "don't we look like a American place? Really!" cheap wine and oddly interpreted burger bars. Nine months later, said local names the kid after the one-night stand, figuring he might be able to track down papa someday, if only that said papa hadn't given the real name of a US Astronaut he saw on an old Nat Geo cover pasted on the restaurant wall.

Okay, maybe it's just the Vicodin (minus an appendix since a couple back)......

"There once was a boy named Charles Conrad Castagna, and he almost deserved it."

The isolation thing is creepy. People evolved as social creatures, and we tend to evaluate our own beliefs and actions and plans based on those of our friends/communities. The potential for a very isolated real-world life, and the way the internet can bring wackos with shared beliefs and ideas together, makes it possible to really amplify a specific set of beliefs--to go from a mild, background anti-black prejudice to a more and more intense hatred of blacks as the root of all American social problems, or to go from a concern about the treatment of animals in labs and factory farms to a willingness to assault people and destroy property to stop it. There's a kind of feedback process that goes on sometimes, where you adjust your sense of "what's a reasonable way to think" based on those around you, and a whole group of you drifts toward more extreme points of view.

This is the flipside of the wonderful ways that the net lets you find communities of interest.

Yup, Nicole. And it's set on Eye-o. Or is it Ee-o?

After the fashion of most planetary scientists I've heard, I pronounce it "Eye-o." Brother Guy Consolmagno, a planetary scientist himself, pronounces it "Ee-o."

I resolved the inconsistency by explaining to him that "How you pronounce it depends on what part of Io you're from."

Patrick's theory about Trek history has much merit, but I most love Mark Jones' claim that US culture was rebuilt after WW3 around the nucleus of senior FEMA officials and their families, who of course survived in their special bunkers.

Albatross, that was really well said about isolation and communities of interest. I think there's a basic responsibility to sometimes ask questions like "What would I do if I'm wrong?" and "How would I tell?"

Oh, yeah? Well, I saw them live, man....

The series was all about frustration - the James Bond super-stud super-man who was both a eunuch and absolutely without ambition or motivation, the underachiever gifted with ultimate power who continues to underachieve, the turbocharged love slave who remains a virgin, the ultimate weapon... ultimately useless. It was the fantasy landscape of a twelve year old, seething with desires but no idea what to do with any of it.

I could almost accept it was one of those shows he hated, except that he doesn't. Or does. I can't imagine that he wouldn't realize the show was Canadian.

As for that stuff about a world based on achievement and merit, I can only report what Jeff Hirschfield, one of the key writers, told me once: "The impulse to heroism is the same impulse to bumbling off a cliff." Lexx in a nutshell.

Everything about the first three seasons seems profoundly antithetical to everything he seemed to believe.

Individuals aren't naturally paid-up members of the human race, except biologically. They need to be bounced around by the Brownian motion of society, which is a mechanism by which human beings constantly remind one other that they are . . . well . . . human beings.

It's easy to lose perspective if you're surrounded by people that always agree.

It's easy to lose perspective if you're surrounded by people that always agree.

Oh, absolutely.

(Someone had to do it....)

I liked Tony Daniel's short stories, such as "A Dry, Quiet War" and "Grist," but the novel series developed from "Grist," Metaplanetary and Superluminal, became more and more unreadable.

I still can't decide whether he meant his Napoleonic Wars / Second World War rip-off, with politics that echoed present memes of "appeasement" and "take the war to the enemy," to be ironic in Colbertian fashion avant Colbert, or actually right-wing (libertarian stream).

In any case, it all became less and less real. In RL, Daniel is / was a theatre person, and the artist characters of "Grist" were convincing. The novels are that kind of SF that showcases the technology (worked out in great detail) with cardboardy characters.

Bill Higgins (#114) "I resolved the inconsistency by explaining to him that 'How you pronounce it depends on what part of Io you're from.'"

Ahhh, dagnabit. There's another song!

"I thought you all preferred I-O-Wah."

"We do, but we like to say it I-O-Way."

"Oh, there's nothing halfway about the Io way to greet you, when we greet you, which we may not do at all... So what the heck, you're welcome, glad to have you with us, even though we may not ever mention it again."

A world where anything is possible but not everything is possible. Anything can happen, but not all things can happen at once.

He does, actually, prove the first sentence with the second here. You can't have anything but not everything possible. Words don't, in my (admittedly limited) experience, work that way. Anything allows for everything. Everything includes anything. Perhaps he meant, 'A multitude of possibilities, but each occuring in their order and place.' (It is more likely that he meant, 'I am verrry deep. Go me!')

That is what time is for, to keep all things from happening at the same moment.

Because without time, things would be happening, like me moving the stapler on my desk in the next five seconds... oh, wait.

That shall be the only rule of our new fantasy world. That an event happens only once.

He really prefers one-night-stands?

What has been done, cannot be undone.

He's afraid to take his shoes off, because he may not remember how to retie them. Thus he justifies the smell.

There is no turning back the sands of time.

Metaphores to mumble... mix 'em and cook 'em up in a pile like gumbo.

You can review the past but you cannot change the past.

Since what he's just written was written in the past, he can't go back and fix it in an attempt to make more sense. That's what time is for: to justify letting pseudo-stream-of-consciousness unintentional sophism.

This is actually what I find to be the most lucid and comprehensible paragraph of the rant.

Just watch Voyager for a while until you are ready to hurl the TV, or at least select episode writers, across the room for writing YET ANOTHER episode where at the end of the episode someone goes back in time or fails to go back in time or something so that the whole story never "really" happened.

Any long-running science fiction show gets to do that once; maybe, if the primary focus of the show is time travel they can get away with once every other season, but that's it. I can think of three such Voyager shows off the top of my head.

(You know, excessive Voyager exposure might also explain some of the rest of his rant)

I'll add to that: Parallel universes with evil versions of the protagonists, characters who become "out of phase" with their fellows and walk invisibly amoung them until the last scene, characters immured on escape-proof prison planets, Holodeck games gone awry . . . owwww, I'm getting myself depressed.

I'm glad that Trek Brand Comfort Food is out of production. It has nothing to do with political correctness, lady warriors, or the interstellar liberal conspiracy.

i registered it as soon as i saw the other anagram (cause the da vinci code thread makes me giggle every time the book or movie is mentioned, & really feels like all i need to know about either*).

i just figured everyone is even smarter than me & keeping their knowing silences.

*well, that and "possibly the first incidence in cinematic history of someone speaking latin into a cellphone."

gotta be Xena, Warrior Princess, doncha think?

> Steve (20): Dilute! Dilute!

Sorry - was I incoherent?

Just pointing out how Castagna's writing resembles canonical crackpot rantings - and www.timecube.com is the most inspiring crackpot site on the web for me - it's been going forever, it's frequently updated, and it *never* makes a scrap of sense.

The "separated at birth" bit was a reference to an old feature which used to run in Private Eye.

Oops - no, Wikipedia tells me the feature was called "Lookalikes", and that when the American magazine Spy copied it, *they* called it "Separated at Birth".

Who do I trust - wikipedia or my memory? I wouldn't put big money on either, frankly.

The trouble is when *every* episode has a Mandatory Plot(TM). Voyager does not do well, by this measure.

Dude, neither was I. I was talking about the Banana Splits. I saw them live at a race track in the 2nd grade--�Pimlico, I think.

Sorry, shoulda made it clearer what I was talkin' about.

Oh, and about our pal, Mr. Castagana, Radar has the FBI affadavit with all the gory details:

One of the Stewart letters featured a "picture of a recently deceased tsunami victim with a condition known as Priapism, an erect penis on a cadaver." Handwritten on the picture were the words, "Jon Stewart, Fuck Your Wife."

Stay Classy, Katherine Harris supporters!

I will never make that "L" sign on my forehead, ever, ever again!

There's a show premiering this week -- "Day Break" -- that I saw a preview of several months ago. (They ran it on an obscure home shopping channel . . . strange business that.) It's an entire show based on the repeating day. Episode after episode of a cop trying to figure out why he's been framed for a crime.

The pilot was pretty good, but I took pains to tell the person who called to get my opinions that I would resent to death a phony and contrieved central mystery, or one that wasn't definitively revealed at some point.

One of the myriad of things that's annoyed me about it is that it continually shows the pretty girl but only gives the star's name as a hook to draw you in. What, her name's not recognizable? Neither is his!

(Well, that and I see no particular reason why "Lost" should take 12 or 14 weeks off; I'm already losing my enthusiasm for the show, and I may not come back to it next year. I wonder how many other viewers feel like me.)

> Steve (139), I understood that you were talking about Castagna as a canonical crackpot, and agreed with your assessment of him. "Dilute! Dilute!" is a major repeating motif in the writings of ur-crackpot Dr. Bronner, a soap manufacturer whose product labels are always densely covered with rants set in crowded nine-point type.

Oops. I understand now. I have once been shown a Dr Bronner's label by a friend who brought one back from America, but I neglected to read it all!

I note that you replied to me in #143, EXACTLY 100 POSTS AFTER YOUR FIRST REPLY. I'm sure this has great crackpot significance.

There's a very fine crackpot generator at:

http://contraintes.inria.fr/bin/dada?crackpot.pb

but it's actually more fun to read the script that drives it, at least if you have geek-nature:

http://contraintes.inria.fr/bin/dada?crackpot.pb;m=SRC

The Unabomber demonstrated the same phenomenon at work in a left-wing subculture: if you find yourself drawn too strongly to constant rage and get stuck in an anhedonic feedback loop, sooner or later genuine violence is going to follow. And is no more an insult to say "part of your body is broken and needs treatment" to that than it would be to someone trying to run marathons with broken legs.

In his series that starts with Dies the Fire, he describes a world in which something or someone fracks with the laws of physics so that, long story short, things no longer go boom, zap, or critical in quite the same way on our planet after a certain moment in March of 1998. As the cover blurb for the paperback version puts it, "The lights go out--for good." The survivors take off in all kinds of weird directions.

For one thing, the Unabomber is the revered prophet of a large and powerful religious movement (offstage in the first three books).

It's thumping good storytelling, BTW, and I recommend it to anyone who likes to get lost in fictional worlds.

Oops - no, Wikipedia tells me the feature was called "Lookalikes", and that when the American magazine Spy copied it, *they* called it "Separated at Birth".

http://www.olivercromwell.org/quotes1.htm

Perhaps he'd like to enlighten us as to what sunlight is for, or gravity, or the colour blue, or anything else on the endless list of 'things' and 'concepts' that are 'for' nothing except their mere existence.

Of course, he could be talking intelligent design here, and giving us all the benefit of his long conversation with God. When I say 'conversation', I mean monologue. When I say 'monologue', I mean relentless diatribe. When I say 'relentless diatribe' I mean I wonder whether God is really that good a listener.

Isn't this just an awkward re-phrasing of the old joke "Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once"? (Usually attributed to Woody Allen, I think.)

Didn't DC once have a group formed by Subs rejects (like Eyeful Ethel, Polecat, and Arm-Fall-Off Boy)?

Teresa: I noticed the anagram, but since I only noticed it after something you said (somewhere before #90), I figured the gaff had been tipped already. And because I don't poke in here often enough, I'm a day late and a gaff short.

Why, oh why, oh why, oh? Why did we ever leave Io?

I'm sorry, I am short on time and have had no time to read the comments yet. If I duplicate earlier ideas, I most humbly apologize.

But I just HAD to respond to this now.

Let us create a future of infinite possibilities devoid of ..
Okay. To start right here, he obviously doesn't understand "infinite." Infinite is, by definition, unable to be limited.

A world where anything is possible but not everything is possible. Anything can happen, but not all things can happen at once.
All right, everything happening at once is a nifty concept, I can't guarantee that no one has written a story about that, but if they have, it's not one I've heard of ...

On the other hand, could it simply be (based on his other postings) that as he is unable to think and chew gum at the same time, that intelligent storylines with a plot baffle him, and make him think that everything is happening at once?

That is what time is for, to keep all things from happening at the same moment. That shall be the only rule of our new fantasy world. That an event happens only once. What has been done, cannot be undone. There is no turning back the sands of time. You can review the past but you cannot change the past.
(You tell me what that passage means. I dare you.)

Again, just guessing, but I'd say it might mean he wants simple, linear storytelling because he gets confused by flashbacks ...

That a vision of a possible future, to the present, must be taken in the context of the present. A cosmos not governed by compassion or tolerance or equality, but common sense and merit.

On the plus side, we now have confirmation (not that it was needed) that "compassionate conservatism" ain't.

But hey, since he is guilty of (admittedly incompetent) terrorism maybe we can send him to Gitmo and read Eye of Argon at him until he gives us the name of his Conservative co-conspirators ...

I think they learned it from Operation Rescue... who in turn got it from Henry II, I think. "Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?"

He obviously identifies himself with Stanley the useless cleaner whose only break in life was to fortuitously absorb the key to the most powerful spaceship in the universe...but still can't get girls to be nice to him.

And I will bet a steak dinner that he thinks the REAL reason he can't get a date is that he's "too nice, and women only want to date assholes". Never mind that a genuine nice guy wouldn't be sending fake anthrax bombs to anyone. (Or real ones either, for that matter!)

either I'm suffering the deja-vu from hell, or that guy was a lot more influential in fandom that it seems, because things like making a distinction between "anything" and "everything" being possible (as a shorthand for "Make up your world's rules and play by them"), or critizing the lack or imagination shown in just taking some "here and now" and having it take place in space[*] -- those seem very common in criticism of speculative fiction, and I have rarely seen them mocked before.

And the quib "Time exists to keep everything from happening at once." is likely no younger than the one about reality being a crutch for people who can't cope with science fiction.

On second thought, I take option c) The guy's writing is simply highly derivative.

[*] I believe this critique is so common as to have spawned its own ironic typographic conventions, which, unfortunately, I do not remember.

Inge (167), I myself have made the distinction beetween "anything is possible" and "everything is possible" in a critical essay (the intro to one of Patrick's anthologies), and I was hardly the first to do it. Taking something mundane and and transplanting it unchanged into space -- known as "false exoticism," a.k.a. "calling a rabbit a smeerp" -- is universally derided. What makes Castagna's version nonsensical is that all his sentences happen at once.

Or, if it's the introduction to the next paragraph, then it might be saying that we can't fix the mistakes of the past, so why worry about it?

Pedantic Peasant (#165) Infinite is, by definition, unable to be limited.

You're almost certainly right in the way that he uses it. I'm not going to get into set theory and transfinite maths here. But he may be riffing off the Larry Niven quote:

The ways of being human are bounded but infinite

*I'm being polite

I think "calling a rabbit a smeerp" is Blish/Atheling, but I also think Knight quotes it. They were buddies, of course.

No, he's recommending that you turn them forward, or perhaps sideways...it's the same control-freakishness as people who insist that there is only one permissible way to hang a roll of toilet paper.

(And @133 - I noticed it. I never commented because I noticed it embarassingly late, and no matter how you turn your hourglass, you can't go back and post a comment in the past. Drat you and your read-only past!)

Why, oh why, do these people always place themselves among the meritorious despite logic and evidence to the contrary?

Oh, that's right.

Yep. I, like all of us, am more-informed, more public-spirited, kinder, and smarter than average. Also better looking, wiser, better-dressed, and a much better driver. We're *all* above average. (Except some of the other people aren't so great at math, but don't tell them I said so. I pride myself on being more tactful than average.)

I just checked, and Making Light will anagram to Gingham Kilt.

Sincerely,
FORAGED INTEGRALS

A poor Indian, obviously.

Is there something wrong with me for reading 166 as "Will no one rid me of this meddlesome past"?

Eeew.

BAA HINDER LUST (sigh)

Naturally, there were many more anagrams, but that one seemed sufficiently silly.

HAIR AND SUBTLE

> I don't have any clever anagrams of my name because it breaks anagram generators.

My name (in full form, "Stephen Taylor") is an absurd playground of good anagrams, from
Tory Elephants to Horseplay Tent to Phony Starlet to Telephony Tsar...

I was surprised to find that my daughter, "Hannah Ben" is completely un-anagramable. Not even stupid ones. Perhaps this protects her against certain obscure wordplay based forms of magic...

Oh! I suppose you're right. About the hourglasses, I mean. Huh.

I honestly never thought of that. I always thought of the sands of time blowing through the desert, and covering over ancient civilizations, old ways, most of Ozymandias, you know.

Perhaps that's because of the song in Kismet: "...and over the sands, the silent Sands of Time, they go..."

Teresa has a Name of Power.

"See, ye sin, Neanderthal!" That's kind of what Teresa does when she points out how stupid certain people are being...like that guy who wrote all about how the problem is that men need to be meaner to women—while living in his mother's basement.

"These adrenaline yens" speaks for itself.

"Seer analysed the Nine" makes me think of Teresa gazing in a crystal ball with Nazgûl on the couch, talking about their unfortunate childhoods.

I didn't know that Teresa was such a harsh editor...

Makes me sound like a Fearless Leader, Faren. I like it. Not a true description of me at all. But, yes, I like it.

Mall Refiner (if I got into Real Estate)

Lean Firmer (insert comma, use in BowFlex ad)

Fallen Rimer (how tragic!)

Not sure if it would work on OS X anymore.

A Thrice Vile Slur, Or
A Chillier Rove Ruts.

[punctuation added]

I consider that, despite its somewhat Victorian flavour, the title alone should guarantee wild success, (who needs book proposals and outlines and suchlike?) and if traditional royalty-paying publishers should scorn my offering, I now know where to find publishers that will treat an author with proper respect. ;-)