The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Evan:

Andrew M @#17: I read the quote your way--that American SF tends to be soft, and also to be set in the near future, not that near-future SF is ipso facto soft. So I found Patrick's rant puzzling, but the John Ford bit was so damned entertaining I decided I didn't care.

I've met several journalists in my life. A couple of them were very intelligent, insightful people with a passionate drive for getting at the real truth of a story. The rest of them struck me as profoundly dull sorts, not really interested in much of anything, but with a facility with words they could turn into a paying job.

The smart ones both ran screaming from the profession within three years of entering it. The rest are still plugging away. This seems relevant somehow.

If I lived close enough to DC to be at the inauguration next month, I'd take along a sign that said "This is a goodbye kiss, you dog."

As it is, maybe I'll just print up a bumper sticker.

I was 16 years old, and an avid reader of newspapers, when the San Francisco Chronicle ran a huge spread memorializing the the 20th anniversary of Kennedy's assassination... reprints of their front page, reprints from the columns that all their columnists had written, various people describing their vivid memories of that day.

I sat in the living room of my family's house in San Francisco, on a gold-colored easy chair near a crackling fire, and read every one of those stories. I was born after Kennedy's assassination, but I got really caught up in it... the sense of this enormous historic event that so many people had witnessed, remembered so keenly, and shared the memories with each other.

It's now the 25th anniversary of the 20th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, and I can still vividly remember right where I was.

Harry Potter, he was there
The party to enjoy
And holding tightly in his hand
The wand of young Malfoy

And it's who'll slash ye this time

Who'll slash ye noo?

The lass who slashed ye last, lad,

She no will slash ye noo

I have long suspected that the warrantless wiretapping (which started well before 9/11, let us not forget, a time when terrorism was self-evidently the lowest of Bush administration priorities) was initially targeted not at terrorists or criminals but at Democrats.

And this leads to a faint, perhaps-paranoid suspicion that the FISA law--among others--passed due to fear of a blackmail apocalypse. (The only thing that keeps me sane and skeptical on this point is the conviction that if Bush's people really had dirt on Democrats, there's no way they'd keep it quiet just because the Democrats had capitulated. They'd blackmail and extort and then publish it anyway.)

Teresa said it best: “I deeply resent the way this Administration makes me feel like a nutbar conspiracy theorist.â€

Well, shoot, the links didn't work. Retry:

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cafepress link

Huh. Maybe it's time once again to pull out this bumper sticker I designed a few years ago:

image
cafepress link

"The future is here. It's just not evenly distributed yet." - William Gibson

On a recent business trip I overheard a TSA agent accosting a frail-looking elderly man at the security checkpoint. I mean, top of her lungs yelling at him: "It doesn't matter that this bag is less than a quart, it's NOT A ZIPLOCK BAG! IT HAS TO BE A ZIPLOCK!"

You're right: something's just broken in these people's brains.

On the flipside, I'm thinking the ziplock people could probably use this in a commercial. "Our patented Ziplock™ technology really seals in the terror!"

Definitely an interesting day.

Here in Santa Cruz, there was a impressively loud noise, remarkably similar to that of a big Rubbermaid garden shed getting blown to shit in a windstorm and scattering shovels, rakes, hoes and other sharp, heavy objects all the hell over a swampy, rain-soaked yard. Turned out it was caused by our big Rubbermaid garden shed doing just exactly that. The awful DYNNE would've loved it.

I'm sorry now it didn't occur to me to put the results on flickr.

There once was a man from the Coast
Who liked, of his poems, to boast
But though lovely at first
Every poem was cursed
Because he had an unfortunate tendency to lose track of the rhyme and scansion
And let the poems run on too long.
Eventually the whole thing would devolve into a fart joke
Or something equally inane.
It was pretty pathetic, really.
(Fart.)

My first specific news memory was Nixon's resignation and Ford's inauguration, and the only reason I noticed it was that the local paper ran a photograph in color, which I'd never seen before. I was, guess what, six.

I was aware of the war for a few years before that, and I'd heard of Watergate (but didn't really know what it was). But those weren't news stories to me; they were just background noise. The Nixon resignation was the first discrete event I noticed.

It's interesting to think about how I saw things then. The war was like the seasons of the year: winter, summer, winter; war, peace, war. Just a kind of interesting thing that happens in the world; not something anyone's responsible for.

I wonder if there are people who grow up and still feel that way.

If you're having trouble knowing the proper names of things, your best plan is to get yourself a 2-3 year old child. When my son Ben was that age, he took to picking up random objects and informing us of their names in very teacherly tones. For example, waiting in line at the grocery store, he presented me with one of those rubber divider sticks you put down on the conveyor belt to separate your groceries from your neighbor's, and announced: "This is a wong-wong. It's for when you're paying." Having no information to the contrary, I assume he was right, so I've used that word ever since.

Which brings me to Malthus #11: Doors in public buildings often have a small rubber thingy mounted on the wall next to them so the doorknob doesn't scuff up the wall. Does anyone know the name of that?

According to my son Ben, this device is called a wobber. Now, if you'll excuse me, there's no school today, so he's set up a first-grade classroom in our living room and given me an arithmetic assignment to do.

Lying about evolution is not evidence of faith. Lying about anything is not evidence of faith. Lying to one’s co-religionists is not evidence that you care about the state of their souls or your own. So why do it?

Because fundamentalism is a flavor of authoritarianism.

Authoritarianism is threatened by independently verifiable truth. If a proposition is objectively true, or objectively false, regardless of whatever the preacher or Party or Führer may say, then that means there's a higher authority than the preacher or Party or Führer... and that's Very, Very Bad. As Orwell famously put it, freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four; authoritarianism wants two plus two to be "whatever we say it is," and for everyone else to buy it.

Creationism is a tool for destroying the faculty of critical thought. That's why they teach it in their churches, that's why they want to teach it in public schools. It's entirely about power.

I propose that, for our own safety, we start referring to the two authors that were the purported subjects of the takedown notices as "He Who Must Not Be Named" and "You Know Who".

And SFWA as "The Ministry of Science Fiction".

I'm finding myself in sympathy with Josh, here.

I've been going into men's rooms for, oh, about 37 years now--I even went into one at the Minneapolis airport once--and I've never noticed men hitting on each other, or been hit on myself to the best of my knowledge.

I assume the reason for this is not that it never happened around me at all, but that I was oblivious to it. For all I know, I've walked right past a couple of guys surreptitiously jerking each other off in the can and never known a thing--in which case, how was I harmed? \/\/hatever, say I.

For that matter, I feel certain I've walked past stalls where men were jerking off solo. But again, since I never knew about it, I don't see how it harmed me. Here's the thing, though: Have cops ever mounted a sting operation to arrest public-restroom masturbators? If so, I've never heard of it. Why is it different? A duet's no more unsanitary than two arias, as far as I can see.

Now, if the police report is accurate, this guy Craig went into a bathroom, put out a few subtle, understated signals, progressed to slightly less subtle signals after the cop responded in kind, but remained quiet and unobtrusive throughout. Someone in a third stall, or at the urinals, or washing hands at the sink, would've been entirely unaware that any of this was going on.

Honestly, if this is how men who hook up for sex in bathrooms go about it... well hell, I applaud them for their discretion and restraint. And I can think of about a hundred things I'd rather see scarce police resources used for than to catch such people. (But, apparently, police resources have been used to catch dozens of them at that one airport alone).

And I can't help thinking that the reason the Minneapolis police department sets their priorities this way is that they find the concept of gay sex inherently ooky. And that is a double standard.

I think I need a ruling from the judges on how many syllables are in "R'lyeh".

(I apologize in advance if I guessed anyone's sex wrong.)

A Making Light poster named abi
Had a dactl that wasn't too shabby
Said she: "This is no trouble!
Why, I'll make it a double!"
Then posted it, quick as a tabby

Chris Y took a bit of a chance:
He composed in a form fancy-schmanced.
"Of this ball, I'll be belle,
With my fine villanelle!"
Said Chris Y, just before being pantsed.

Then ethan composed us a sonnet:
It was hard work, and he got right on it
Such extravaganzas
Of well-crafted stanzas!
We all wished that *we* could've done it.

Now Debcha felt slightly morose:
"I tried to be quick, not verbose,
For writing haikus
Takes a short-winded muse,
But still I'm in fourth! Well, 'twas close."

And finally there was Bruce Cohen
Whose limericks are widely-known
For hilarious rhyme
And for scansion sublime--
Shitloads better, I'd say, than my own.

I wrote this over at Ezra Klein's place yesterday, and I'll repeat it here:

Years ago, I met an elderly woman who bought the Weekly World News and other tabloids and actually believed in what she read there. When I questioned her, she angrily asserted that it had to all be true, because there was a law against publishing anything that wasn't. Once I was out of her hearing, I snickered derisively, but then it occurred to me that there were many other people like her.

Not long after that, I picked up a friend's copy of the WWN, and found a story about a medical study that "proved" condoms cause a particularly deadly and incurable form of cancer.

This was, I think, 1988--the peak of the AIDS crisis, and right around the first time I lost a friend to the disease. I found myself thinking of that poor stupid old woman, and wondered how many stupid people like her were going to die from reading that story.

After that, I just never found them funny anymore. Good riddance to the evil motherfuckers.

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