It's been very illuminating reading all the discussion about the lack of enjoyment to be had from humiliation humour. I thought for years there was something wrong with me because that kind of thing just leaves me cold, even shuddering a bit. Like Bruce Cohen, above, I suffered terrible bullying as a kid, and I find now, in my mid-40s, I'm very sensitive to anything that reminds me of it, even a little. The "Funniest Video" type shows just make me wince and feel terrible for the poor bastards shown having some awful thing happen to them. Even with all the added sound-effects and "wacky" music cues, it's still not funny, not even a bit.
Re Seinfeld and Friends: I have watched lots of both these shows, and found I preferred Seinfeld, even though that show is about these awful people. It came as quite a shock to me when I first realised that not only were they unlikable, but that they were *meant* to be unlikable. (Unlike Friends, where clearly the viewer was supposed to love all of them.) That struck me as shocking at the time.
Or maybe I just need to get out more. :)
Open threadiness:
Folks have been asking where they might find their jetpacks? Maybe right here.
The thing that puzzles me is how does copyright even enter into the discussion in the first place? It seems like a red herring. I would have thought that the right to disemvowel a blog comment comes from the fact that the moderator is either the owner of the blog, or is acting for the owner. And, it seems to me, the owner of the space gets to make all the rules. (The discussion of these issues at John Scalzi's blog struck me as very apposite on this point.)
(Okay, resuming lurking now.)
I was amazed and delighted to hear that Phoenix landed safely; I'm *gobsmacked* to see that image of it parachuting in! Such things are a welcome tonic when you feel as if you're drowning in your own cynicism about humanity.
Tim May said:
Incidentally, does anyone know if it has ever, anwhere, been a common practice to bind books with the spine horizontal rather than vertical in the field of view of the reader? I.e., such that one turns the pages from bottom to top rather than from right to left (or vice versa)? And does that orientation have obvious disadvantages, or did things just happen to work out this way?
I took "Vocational Typewriting" classes in high school, during the 70s, double-spaces after full-stops, etc, and all. All of the workbooks we had to use (with titles like "Practical Secretarial Typewriting"), from the good people at McGraw-Hill, were bound across the top. I've never come across that kind of binding in books anywhere since.
The curious thing about these books was that you read down the first page, flipped it upwards, and the next page was printed on its back, upside-down, so that you could read a two-page spread from top to bottom. It was a useful way to arrange pages when you had to copy, say, a long legal document, etc.
re growing up during the Cold War:
Living here in Perth, Western Australia, a town sometimes referred to as the most isolated capital city in the world, I grew up in the 70s and 80s deeply worried indeed about nuclear war. I don't recall the Cuban Missile Crisis as live news, but I do recall watching the annual May Day parades from Moscow each year, all those enormous rockets on trucks, endless phalanxes of troops all marching very strangely (but very determinedly), etc. While nobody at any school I was at ever had to do any duck and cover drills, etc, nuclear war was an issue at least very strongly in the background, like a strong smell you can't quite identify or locate. I was pretty sure there would be a nuclear war before the year 2000 (a date given apocalyptic significance by loads of cheesy genre TV). The question was: what would happen to us here in Western Australia? Was Perth enough of an international presence that the Soviets would send a MIRV or two our way?
When I got older and read up (encyclopedias, arms-reduction discussions in the likes of Time magazine, etc), and learned that there were many tens of thousands of warheads out there, and that we did have a US communications base way up north in Exmouth (to say nothing of the other, even more secret one at Pine Gap in the Northern Territory), it then seemed more a question of *how many* warheads they might send our way, since clearly they would have plenty to go round in an all-out strike.
By the 80s I was Very Worried Indeed about all this, something like a character in Douglas Coupland's Generation X, imagining where I'd be when the bombs fell. In 1985 I was a university student, doing theatre. One night I had to go up to the uni theatre to work the box office. It was a cold, dark and rainy night. Out of nowhere came the single most terrifying lightning/thunder strike I've ever encountered; it must have been just about directly overhead. As the sky lit up with the flash, and the boom of the thunder blasted down at me, I thought, oh God, here it is!
When, in November 89, one afternoon while I worked at the Australian Tax Office, listening to news radio on a walkman, and heard live coverage of the Berlin Wall coming down, I damn near wept with joy and excitement. I told everybody in the office within earshot. Nobody else was as crazy/pleased as I was. At last all that madness was over!
It was good for a few years, anyway. :(
I was six in 1969, here in Australia, when I saw, on live TV, the whole Apollo 11 saga, from launch through the agonising three-day wait (various local experts sitting at a panel talking and talking us through the slow patches, explaining what all the bits of hardware were about) to the landing, the first steps, the first words. It was spellbinding.
The odd thing was that at that age I had not fully grasped the concept of *other countries*. So while I was fully prepared to believe there were men walking around on the moon, I also believed that the Apollo launches, at Cape Kennedy, were so close by that I wondered why we couldn't just hop in the car and go and see the next one. I vividly remember drawing a picture in (must have been grade 1 or 2) of my family and me doing just that, driving off to see the big rocket launch. When, later, I learned that there was a humongous great ocean in the way, I was very disappointed.
Around that time I also remember seeing the Vietnam war on TV most nights; having some awareness of Australian national politics; hearing stories about "hippies"; antiwar marches; etc.
Dave Luckett @373 said:
It's exactly the same here. This regression to the centre is all very well, nicely stable, no radicals around here, nope, uh-huh, yeah. Only there's no choice. Rudd reminds me of a cabbage patch doll both for looks and substance, and his main care seems to be not to say anything that someone might take offence to.
Howard was out to screw the workers with the largest bore helical scourer available, and everyone knew it. I'd like a Labor crew with some counterfire in their bellies. And a little honest outrage wouldn't go too far wrong either.
I quite agree, and while I'm pleased that we finally have a Labor government again, I can't say I'm that excited by Rudd or any of the Ruddtones. I'm vividly reminded of the South Park episode where the kids had to vote for a new school mascot, and the choice was between a "Giant Douche", and a "Turd Sandwich". The upshot was that in elections it's *always* a choice between a Giant Douche and a Turd Sandwich. I came away from our recent election night coverage thinking, well, the Giant Douche won. Yay.
(I would dearly love to be wrong about Rudd, et al, and that a Golden Age of progressive and enlightened government is waiting to unfold around us, but I'm not holding my breath.)
I found out I was red-green colour-blind at age 10, and it was at once a huge blow (because it meant I couldn't be a pilot or an astronaut), and a revelation, because it explained why I saw things differently from how other people saw things. Like the vividly red grass over there, for example. Or people with green hair. See a lot of green, actually, often in places where people swear there's actually a kind of light brown. And don't get me started about blue and purple. My wife and I run into this a lot. "Ooh, check out the fabulous purple on that car!" "Sweetie, that's blue." "I think you'll find it's purple." "Blue." etc.
Once I tried a German language class. Thought it might be interesting. It was the kind of language class where the teacher only speaks in the language concerned. And one of the early lessons was identifying coloured pencils, quickly, within a time limit, in German. Guess whose brain exploded?
The other problem I've had with colour perception all my life is when people find out I see things differently (usually after I ask someone to pass me that green thing, and they go, "What green thing? Oh, you mean this brown thing?") there immediately follows all the questions, "What colour is X?" where X is every mundane object under the sun, including the sky!
The "how do you know this is red?" question is a curly one I've often had to deal with. I see a lot of red. Sometimes correctly. When asked the question, I have to refer back to situations where someone has indicated that a given object is red (regardless of what it might look like), and this new phenomenon matches the way that previous example looked.
My wife and I play a lot of videogames, too. Frequently these feature a lot of tricky details using red or green as toggled options of some kind. At such moments I have to hand it all over to Michelle to sort out because I have no idea which is which. Doesn't help when the "green" thing often looks like a shade of grey (the green of traffic lights, for example, looks grey).
I also need various assistance playing games like snooker, as well, to distinguish all the differently coloured balls, many of which look either identical, or at least so similar as to be a problem.
I just wanted to express my continuing thanks to Teresa, Patrick, Jim, and all the other wonderful folks who post and hang out here on Making Light. I've been reading, mostly lurking, for (thinks hard, counts) years now. Making Light is easily my favourite haunt on the web; even if I hardly ever have anything to say, I always wind up with a lot to think about, in a good way. So thank you, all!
(And mashed potatoes? Done right? With butter? Oh my oh my... :)
About the "wanker" thing:
I remember, back in what I think would have been the early 80s, an episode of (forgive me) Mork and Mindy.
All was proceeding along in its own way, when a character was introduced, named "Mr Wanker". Nobody in the studio audience laughed, giggled or tittered.
Me? I nearly ruptured something.
I loved the UFO series, too, when I was a sprog in the 70s. I think I was too young for it, though: I'd watch a given episode, which would abruptly end, and I'd be left going, "What?" Not really understanding the story, basically.
I remember, around the same time, falling hard for the von Daniken nonsense--oh, it was totally plausible! It was!--and spending altogether too much time looking up at the sky, and kinda wishing a lot. This was before I also learned that one should always be careful what one wishes for.
When I first got onto the Internet in the early 90s, when you had to have so many different utilities to do different jobs, I discovered vast troves of fascinating UFO/alien-related documents in an archive at Rutgers University, and spent a lot of time downloading and reading them. They were all of the form of badly written and formatted text files about everything from secret aliens at Groom Lake, to CIA Mind Control (MK-Ultra, and everything), to you name it. I found that I was more interested in how passionately the people concerned believed in all this stuff than I was in the stuff itself. What was it about the material that stirred up such extraordinary passions, that made the believers (and the equally passionate disbelievers, for that matter) so intense? The material itself was thin and not that convincing, but you had people investing their whole selves in it, like a religious ecstasy, only involving "Space Brothers".
Nowadays, of course, even if it did turn out that the US government had a bunch of dead alien guys on ice at Groom Lake or somewhere similar, I'm inclined to think nobody much would give a damn, since everything else the government is doing is so much more terrifying, worrying, etc.
That all said, Jim, that was a damn fine post (I've now read the whole thing). Good on ya for going out there and looking into it all in such detail.
vian@375
Many thanks for the info re A Wrinkle in Time.
About Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time:
When my wife and I were in Boston for the 2004 Worldcon, we visited a bookstore where I found, among other things, a table of "Banned Books", which included the L'Engle (and The Diary of Anne Frank, too, for that matter). I've never read A Wrinkle in Time (would dearly love to, I have to say), so I have no idea what it is about that book that could lead it to be banned--but I figured if anybody would know why, it would be Fluorospherians. So, any ideas?
I'm a day late, but I wanted to wish Xopher a Happy Belated Birthday. I've been (mainly) lurking here for some years now, and I've always enjoyed both the variety and the depth of your comments.
ok, who else has some (good news, not doll heads, necessarily)?
After five months of hard work, I've just finished the first draft of my new book. Since, back around Christmastime, I'd felt so discouraged and unhappy about the whole "professional writer" caper that I was thinking about giving it up, this is huge news for me, something I didn't think I had in me. Faith restored!
Wow! Congratulations, Patrick! For what book did you win?
Lila--aw, geez. Please accept my apologies. :(
Lila--
The resignation appears to be true
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