lightning: \some/ businesses don't work that way. Up The Organization has a quote from Napoleon about resigning rather than follow orders that will be disastrous, with brackets converting the military ranks to management; from everything I've read, Townsend practiced what he preached. But I have no idea how commonly the better way is practiced rather than preached; one of the few people I have heard use "Theory Y" in conversation is happy to resort to bullying if he doesn't get his way.
<smug>TB: You've just won the Jerry Pournelle award for posting before finishing reading.</smug>
And a question for those specializing in Catholic neepery. Today's Boston Globe discusses the funeral, including that the triple coffin will go in the niche where John XXIII's was at one time. True? If so, why? I don't think the conservatives would go so far as to grub up his bones....
Avram: !@#$%^&*! I'd forgotten the scene in which Harriman walks into to the Moka chief's office and pins on a suitably-sized "6+" button to demonstrate that just ]painting[ the moon would make a legible logo; fortunately nobody carries through. I last read that so long ago that I didn't even realize at the time what brands RAH was taking off on.
Chris: "That bugger Innocent. We'll give him Innocent! He was a Switzer, and you can't whack them for contrariness. [goes on to describe how Innocent was told contraception was necessary and immediately bulled against it.}"
Xopher: JvP is mostly correct. The logo was not spray-painted on the moon but sprayed upward from the moon -- the idea was to make a (sodium?) vapor cloud big enough to be easily seen, but some well-paid joker slipped a stencil into the nozzle. I recall a con involving diamonds in tMWStM but no advertising.
The bit about hazardous wind loads is alarming; I've \seen/ a scaffold much less tall than this one get blown down because a gust caught the covering. It was an impressive sight, but if it had happened when the area was more trafficked (instead of at 11:50am Sunday morning -- this was before Massachusetts dropped its blue laws) people would have been hurt and possibly killed.
TNH, Chris -- you want to let the rest of us in on the joke? I'm guessing Amis hinted at it in The Alteration, but Wikipedia doesn't bear me out.
Ok, I'm a sucker. Points to Alex. Maybe I need a scorecard to track the players....
OTOH, points off for trying changing "classical" to "Classical"; the capitalization does make a difference. (As in the remark commonly attributed to a Harvard functionary: "The President is in Washington to see Mr. Wilson.") And half marks to Jim Flannery; Bach wasn't heavily published, but Handel was.
The danger of not giving a large enough incentive can be easily seen by examining the creative arts and sciences throughout all history; almost nothing of value was created until after the Statute of Anne in 1705.
Alex -- do you think classical music began with Bach and Handel (b1685)? Or, for a technological hit, note that calculus was invented twice in the 1600s, movable type in the 1400s, etc.
mayakda: that sounds like Asimov & Conklin's Fifty Short Science Fiction Tales (except that on my copy the rocket is much less prominent than the tentacles coming from behind the 5). It's certainly not all roses, including "The Altar at Midnight" (Kornbluth) among others, although it may have fewer downers than more recent anthologies.
Pace Patrick, there have been arguments that SF as practiced then was more optimistic; in one of the Spectrum forwards, Amis argued that Brave New World would never have had such a down ending if it had been written by a real SF writer instead of an interloper. OTOH, a common response to people calling SF escapism was to talk about the "realities" of marathon dancing, game shows, etc. compared with post-holocaust stories.
Also to Xopher: which fantasies? I don't remember the early pieces well, but loved the "Fortress" set -- which I'd think about recommending to some YAs because of Jane's "getting of wisdom" factor.
I've sometimes wondered if the publisher of Asimov's knew what he was getting with Dozois; I remember talking to Scithers when he was still editor (early 80's) and getting the idea what the magazine is doing now is not what the publisher was looking for then.
Alex Cohen (re oldest SF song): Blows Against the Empire is also from 1969; it could older or newer by a few months than "2525" (which I recall as a summer release). "The House at Pooneil Corner" (~1968) slips from prophecy to post-holocaust narrative ("From here to heaven is a scar ... all the idiots have left."); "Wooden Ships" (also Summer/Fall 1969) is mostly images rather than narrative but was mostly believed at the time to be post-atomic-war.
I can't think of anything older that I'd label SF even if I wanted to stretch Patrick's frame; "Telstar" (~1963) was music for an existing satellite, not a narrative of the future. OTOH, I am hardly an encyclopedia of 60's music.
Mike -- you even left out the two cases I considered obvious enough to be ironic about: Brian May ("Year of '39" etc., although I forget whether he was the one who got Freas to adapt an old ASF cover for a Queen album) and Paul Kantner (Hugo nomination for Blows Against the Empire)
JvP: I thought Paul knews better than that; he's either ignoring generations of great writers or restricting "musician" to "rocker". Outside of that classification there are (off the top of my head) Kushner, Biggle, and Sturgeon (see "Die, Maestro! Die!"...). Now name a couple of rockers who wrote SF music.
To short-circuit the diversion, may I recommend the Merton music-joke page.
Andrew: it can't have been Whisper; the cold Duke of Coffin Castle fed Whisper to his geese.
JamesG: I would like to have seen how they managed with a one-armed drummer -- but I suspect it involved lots of practice (and maybe a prosthetic). I've also heard of bands so loud the drummer uses both feet on ]bass[-drum pedals, so losing one wouldn't have been fatal -- but that doesn't sound like Patrick's style.
Alex -- I never knew there were additional verses. (Sturgeon used the first verse in "The [Widget], the [Wadget], and Boff".) Thanks!
Stefan: >25 years ago, when I was still working in a lab, I was introduced to (IIRC) Oilon(tm), nylon mixed with a dash of lubricating oil; it was medium brown and could be machined like other medium-stiff plastics. It's not much known because it can't be used for food, but I suspect it's even slicker than Teflon -- and unlike Teflon (which can peel or scratch) it's slick all the way through
The piece on mining 311 is fascinating; I'd love to see what would be found about noise complaints in this area, given the inability of the local civic association (when I went to meetings) to distinguish between a restaurant that wanted to serve wine and a show-a-straight-razor-and-puke-blood-to-get-in bar. But it would have been nice if they'd had some sense of history; e.g., possibly the first instance of such mining being John Snow's 1854 discover of a pattern in cholera cases, such that shutting down one infected well stopped an outbreak. (Thanks to Wikipedia for date & name; I'd remembered only the rough description.) I hope 311 manages to keep an adequate signal-to-noise ratio.
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