The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Tony Zbaraschuk:

I had grown up with the divide between the worlds: one free and building and full of hope (this was the 1980s, you understand, not the 1970s or the 1960s -- Reagan not Carter or Nixon or Johnson), and the other gray and dim and shadowed (not quite the deep terror of the 1950s or the false exuberance of the early 1960s, Brezhnev rather than Khrushchev or Stalin), but it still seemed an eternal thing, an iron wall dividing humanity far across the ages.

And then I was sitting in the lounge at my dorm at grad school in Notre Dame, staring with unbelieving joy at the live images of thousands of East Berliners dancing on the Wall.

Dancing.

On.

The.

Wall.

And just like that, the shadow fell away. And I am still joyful just remembering.

I called one of my college professors (a German immigrant who had been head of the history department I majored in) and talked for a while about it. I don't remember now what we said, and I don't think the words mattered much; it was the joy that needed to be shared.

Cow-orker is the Scott Adams description of the sort co-worker who tends to show up as the point of the joke in the latest Dilbert strip. If you're the sort of person that triggers Alice's Fist of Death or makes Dilbert's head explode from your stupidity, you're a cow-orker. (Like "filk", I think it started as a typo and got adopted.)

This discussion has got me thinking about the worship group I'm involved with at my university, and our regular use of the same Biblical passages for repetition over and over. One of the points of a properly structured ritual system [1] is that, from an internalist point of view, it forces you to confront stuff that is true but might not be in accord with the mood of the moment. Having a virus-checker running on your internal meme-structure is a valuable thing.


[1] Ignoring for the moment the debate about exactly how you determine "properly structured", and just assuming that well-done structures exist and can to some extent be distinguished from badly-done.

I tend to think that inappropriate cultural appropriation, for all its problems, is still at root a healthier attitude than xenophobic know-nothingness. At least you're thinking about learning from someone else and some other culture.

Though it is much easier to pick out one or two useful characteristics and admire/imitate/mangle them, than it is to adopt the whole network in which they exist and make sense, and which (sometimes) makes them possible.

(In the reverse direction, there are a lot of, um, interesting misfires on ways to adopt the Enlightenment and the Scientific Method and other fun Western traditions.)

The first gray drizzles
Refresh the fainting souls of
California


(Does haiku really work with five-syllable words?)

Some of us are potential Obama-voters who did not vote for him.

I'm thinking one of two things: either this is like a year in which nothing good got written and so the Hugo goes to a very weak candidate because there's nothing better, or else a shrieking WTF. If Obama accepts this when Wilson got the League of Nations going, and Roosevelt negotiated an end to an actual war, then he demeans himself and the Prize by accepting it for not being George Bush.

(Then again, we all know how the League of Nations ended up, and Roosevelt basically got rooked by the Japanese strategy for the war, which was "attack Russia, seize Manchuria, and then get the US to broker a deal before the Russians could reinforce the Far East.)

I dunno. The goals are noble, the idea is nice, but the more you give out the Nobel Peace Prize to try and push things in the direction you want, rather than recognizing actual accomplishments, the less effective it becomes.

O beautiful for spacious Arch
For silver-flowered hills
For purple edge-wall majesty
Above the Ringworld's ills.

Fire on the mountain shall find the harp of gold
Played to wake the Sleepers, oldest of the old

Yeah, that would be fun. But there are ways in which this is better... Reality interconnects in so many ways that fiction often can't be more than a pale shadow.

In general, people get released from prison, have relatives and so forth on the outside, and these people can be a constituency for prison reform. Perhaps slow and indirect. There are other avenues as well (appeals to the public conscience, lawsuits, etc.) I don't claim that they are perfect ones, but they do exist.

I think (temporary) deprival of voting rights as part of the punishment for (some) crimes is legitimate. One could probably make a case for differentiation on the basis of the crime.

Abi @0: I think I like Augustus better than Hadrian, though I don't know that it's a strong preference and it may be a bias from the amount of stuff still lingering in popular culture. (One does wonder why there are lots of books, films, etc., about the Julio-Claudians and not so many about the Five Good Emperors. Are they just boring? Or was it that they were mostly running a machine that Augustus had set up...)

Bruce @31: I dont' remember the last time we invaded a country because Polanski was there...

Juli @59: And Wolfe's ability to force people to conform to his schedule is amazing, isn't it? (Particularly when you get to fairly powerful people who are used to making others conform to their schedules...)

Alas, Charlie Brown.

You'll be missed. But thanks for giving me a decade of reviews, fun, interviews, pointers to good books, and news.

(Makes note to renew subscription.)

The Tao that can be programmed is not the eternal Tao.

I tend to agree. People are not as rational as we like to think we are; sometimes they do incredibly stupid things, and there's no particular Deep Reason behind it all.

"When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras." (We really need to update that particular proverb for the post-horse age... suggestions?)

If I had to suspect a plot, it would probably have something to do with the Evil Medical Doctors doing testosterone injections to take the spotlight off something else that they're up to.

I was thinking primarily of ALF, but also of older episodes. I admit the older episodes are perhaps less relevant to current affairs ;)

(Not entirely unrelated, mind you. One's own group is not immune from the temptation to do things which are evil, and it is useful to remember this from time to time.)

Fear rather than hatred, I think. Not that hatred is entirely off the map, but I suspect it may be a symptom rather than a cause.

There are right-wing terrorists, granted. There are also left-wing ones.

Lots of Thai food here in Riverside on the west coast. Lots of nice sushi places. But just try to find a good Greek restaurant... there must be one somewhere short of downtown LA, but I haven't been able to find it. Sob. Sob.

Nevil Shute's autobiography is well worth reading, particularly for the story of the R100 and the R101.

Ice tea: lemon or no lemon?

I just buy glasses in bulk and then if one breaks I have a bunch of others that look just like it. But possibly I read Cheaper by the Dozen at too young and impressionable an age.

When we make the movie of this, should it be Night of the Living Hamster or The Eve of St. Agnes?

>What's Latin for "thus always with pirates"?

Sic semper latrunculis

While we're on Holland...

I've been investigating the shelves of the library where I work, to see if what we have is adequate to support what our students and faculty are doing, and this month it was History. It turns out that we have very little on Holland. We don't teach any classes on Dutch history, but we need to have something -- anyone want to recommend the top five must-have books for Dutch history?

Comment statistics for Tony Zbaraschuk on the Making Light blog

Total: 92 comments. View all these comments on a single page.