Dave, Bell, #200: I've even seen it suggested that, with the easy availability of man-packed anit-aircraft missiles, mules might still have a place in warfare, replacing the helicopters and aircraft which had supplanted them in the 1960s.
The difficult part is teaching the mules to hover.
Syd's link at #42 is interesting, incidentally. Palin appears to be building her career around the idea that she's been dumped on and disrespected, becoming an identification figure for people who've been really dumped on. If she in turn cluelessly dumps on those fans, it might backfire on her.
miriam beetle, #44: i don't think jones ever took on the dracula mythos
On the contrary.
Jon Meltzer, #937: Alan Moore isn't writing for Who, but Grant Morrison wrote some DW comics during the Colin Baker years.
On the subject of missing letters... I cannot recall seeing a restroom hand dryer that didn't have the last two letters of "Push Button" scratched off. Perhaps that's why many newer models seem to have gone to pictograph instructions.
Criggo is a good place to go for more of this.
Bill Higgins, #137: That's right, even in 1823, producers were emphasizing the special effects!
Even earlier than that. David Garrick at one point played Hamlet in a hydraulic wig that would, on the appearance of the ghost, stand its hairs on end like a fretful porpentine.
It was probably impressive in the 18th century, but I can only imagine it accompanied by the sound of a slide whistle.
I hope no one minds if I plug something I've accomplished on the open thread...
For the next couple of months I'm going to have three drawings on display in an Iowa City gallery, as a small part of a larger exhibition. It's the first time I've accomplished anything like this, and the first hint I've had that I actually might be doing really worthwhile work.
heresiarch, #63:When people read Dickens, or Faulkner, or whomever, and say they hated it and don't know why anyone likes it, I think what they mean is this piece didn't speak to me or my experiences as a human being living right now.
albatross, #69:As an aside, I came to reading Jane Austens' novels in my mid-30s, as an SF fan. And I perceive myself to use the same basic world-building, suspension-of-disbelief, acceptance-of-weird-assumptions processes reading her books as I do reading SF.
Now I'm wondering if all that time I've spent reading science fiction, with its utterly alternate cultures, is the reason I can get into Dickens, and other nineteenth-century novelists, so easily.
cherish, #51: I liked the Company books and didn't mind the future they presented, mostly because it was too silly to believe.
I also managed to like Brian Francis Slattery's Liberation, because he writes beautifully--he's probably the best new author to hit the SF genre in the last couple of decades--and because, despite everything, the book felt hopeful and compassionate.
Stefan Jones, #35: Another hazard is the Depressing Near Future story, in which every negative trend at the time of writing has plunged straight down to the bottom of the graph and created a world where most people are miserable. I can't read these at all. If I have to read about the near future, I'll take a near future in which I have no reason to be suicidally depressed, thanks.
What I really want to read are stories that connect to the present, but connect to it through a cool space opera future with spaceships and aliens and people sauntering across the galaxy in a way that is probably impossible in real life, and in which the specific problems peculiar to our current society have been dealt with. I'd rather read about somebody else's problems.
I also agree with Zander's interpretation of Frankenstein at #4. The novel makes it pretty clear that the monster had the potential to be, for lack of a better term, human. He's an abused child who becomes an abuser.
The "playing God" interpretation comes mostly from later plays and movies. I suspect it comes from a worldview that sees scary new ideas and new technologies springing up and disrupting things and changing the world, and just wants it all to stop. (See Dresden Codak's "Caveman Science Fiction," recently linked on another thread.)
Barry, #33: Maybe it's time to pull out that Sondheim line again: "Nice is different from good."
albatross, #45: I don't have context for the quote, but the safety net quote makes perfect sense, and it's exactly how we do all safety net programs: the goal is that people who need the help get it, but not people who could provide it for themselves.
The thing is, the people who are providing things for themselves are by definition not even in a position to be caught. They haven't fallen. The guy in the New York Times article was talking about letting people fall.
Teresa, #71: Grayson apologized for that particular statement, and I think he was right to do so. Some insults come with unwanted baggage. The word "whore" can be used as strong metaphorical invective on men, but it gains a particularly unpleasant subtext when applied to women. It's like the way "articulate" can be either complimentary or racist depending on who it's applied to.
That said, in reply to SeanH, #38: make it as strong as you like, but don't attack anyone who doesn't deserve it.
The issue isn't whether she deserved to be insulted--given that she's a former Enron lobbyist, I'm willing to give Grayson the benefit of the doubt--but whether Grayson did it well.
I nominate this viral marketing campaign from Toyota.
I'm also pretty sure that Grayson does not wildly misrepresent the motivations of his opponents. These are the words of one ordinary town hall attendee, who was approvingly profiled by the New York Times as "calmer" and "more reasoned:"
“We’ve got to do something about those people who can’t get insurance,†he said. “There has to be a safety net there. But I don’t want that safety net to catch too many people.â€
I can't think of any kind or generous way to spin this utterance.
High-mindedness is great, but sometimes you're faced with something truly awful, and at times like that you sometimes need invective just to drive home the fact that things are not normal.
In the United States of America, thousands of people die every year because they have little or no access to health care. Thousands more people are bankrupted trying to stay alive. This is barbaric, and the people who profit off this system and who want to preserve this system are barbarians. Pretending that this is a civilized policy disagreement--that we're merely haggling over the numbers in paragraph three of page 12 of a budget bill, or the wording of the proclamation of National Beet Week, and can laugh about it over coffee together when the session is over--will get us nowhere.
Just today in the House a Republican representative from North Carolina came out with this stunner:
And I believe the greatest fear that we all should have to our freedom comes from this room, this very room. And what may happen later this week, in terms of a tax increase bill masquerading as a health care bill. I believe we have more to fear from the potential of that bill passing than we do from any terrorist right now in any country.
What's going on in this country is not normal. It's surreal as hell. Refusing to identify imbecility by its true name will just encourage this country to float further and further away into whatever alien dimension it has entered.
Linkmeister, #335: It's nice to see that R. H. Malden's stories are available somewhere--I read his "Between Sunset and Moonrise" in an excellent but obscure anthology called Lost Souls edited by Jack Sullivan, and I've wanted to read more ever since.
You mention elsewhere on your blog that you had once owned and lost Edward Gorey's The Haunted Looking Glass. It's currently in print from New York Review Books Classics.
One good companion to the Halloween-esque links in the Particles might be a selection of ghost stories.
M. R. James is pretty much the single best ghost story writer of all time. His first three volumes of ghost stories are available on Project Gutenberg. Penguin Classics has published a two volume collection of his work which also includes A Warning to the Curious.
Ghosts and Scholars is a journal about James's writing which may or may not still be active. There's a webpage which includes quite a few articles and James-style stories by other authors, and a never-published story by James himself (which is also included in the second Penguin collection).
William Hope Hodgson's Carnacki the Ghost Finder is a steampunk ghostbuster who fights--or debunks--supernatural menaces from an electric pentacle. The link is to the Project Gutenberg edition, which includes six of the nine Carnacki stories. Of the other three, "The Hog" and "The Haunted Jarvee" are worth tracking down, but "The Find" is just a minor detective story about a forged manuscript.
Carnacki was played by Donald Pleasance--who unfortunately made only one appearance in the role--in the British anthology series The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes.
Another literary reference is "The Vanishing American" by Charles Beaumont, which really gets across how it feels to the protagonist to be unseeable. (He gets his visibility back by doing something noticeably odd: climbing on the back of the lions outside the New York City library.) It's reprinted in the Penguin Classics anthology American Supernatural Tales, edited by S. T. Joshi.
The invisibility discussion has been reminding me of China Mieville's most recent novel, The City and the City. For anyone who hasn't already heard, it's about two cities sharing the same physical space. They maintain their separate identities by rigorously training their citizens to "unsee" the other city.
There are certain situations in real life when unseeing (or the less drastic real-life version, anyway) is a tool to maintain sanity. When you're packed onto a crowded bus with thirty other people it's polite to pretend you can't hear the private conversations around you, and leave your neighbors alone to read or play with their iPods or just stare out the window. And if we paid constant full attention to every detail of our surroundings the most relevant information would probably get lost in the sensory overload.
Retail is a pretty good example of an environment--and there are many--where "unseeing" is never, ever helpful. A lot of The City and the City is about how unseeing can so easily turn dysfunctional.
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