Xopher, I followed the link through to the site and it explains at some length that President Bush is the Anti-Christ. Don't you think that's more of a public service link than a spam link?
my brother shot it full of BB's
I'm picturing that old cliche where a guy gets shot in the chest, but is saved because the bible he carries next to his heart stops the bullet.
Escapism does not equal optimism. Frequently escapist fiction is an expression of pessimism. Two scientific discoveries that were troubling to people of the latter half of the 19th century were (1) mass extinction of species and (2) entropy. The first of these meant that God, if real, was willing to exterminate his own creations; the second meant that the sun was going to eventually cool off and die, taking all earthly life with it.
These ideas led to a whole genre of "steady state" stories (the most enduring of which was Doyle's "The Lost World,"), in which a modern man discovers a hidden tropical land (at the North Pole or inside the earth, generally) where dinosaurs still live and where it's always hot - basically, where the laws of nature don't apply. My college's library had a complete run of The Strand (heaven!), and these stories appear over and over. I think they're another example of fear of the future and deliberate turning to the past - in fact, much as I like the idea that SF is about the future, I think that escaping from the future is also a fundamental building block of the genre. (Pardon my ungainly metaphor)
After all, I don't think you can find a more pessimistic tale than The Time Machine, (which, incidentally, features the heat-death of the sun along with the whole evolution story), and that's pretty much the rock on which we've built our church.
Personally I like the "truth" ad that shows the lady who's bald from chemo. Really there are only a very few reasons for not smoking, with "it's dangerous" being at the top of the list (and "it's unbelievably expensive" being the next one). "It's uncool" - well, that's just not true. Anything that's dangerous and that your parents don't want you to do is, by definition, cool. But since the tobacco companies are making the ads, they're not going to say "smoking might cause you to die horribly."
Imagine an equivalent series of ads about that had the message "it's not particularly cool to drive drunk" instead of "drunk driving kills!"
The "my anti-drug" ads are doing something similar - trying to show that drugs aren't as cool as other things young people do, rather than focusing on the risks of using drugs. Possibly because they want to say that all drugs (except alcohol, of course) are equally bad, and talking about consequences makes that impossible. The problem is that most of the activities they present don't actually preclude doing drugs. "Music...my anti-drug" for example. So the ads provide some self-esteem reinforcement for kids who've already decided to spend their time in other ways, but they don't make a strong case for shunning drugs in general. IMHO anyway.
"0 chances of huffing things to get high" is just a stupid thing to say. Phrased this way, it sounds like a bad thing: "My mom's gonna be there, dude, so there is like, zero chance of huffing things to get high."
And if you do your beading in your kitchen, you have as much of an opportunity to do "wip-its" as with any other activity.
This whole series of ads seems to be pushing the idea that you're cooler if you don't do drugs, and then backing it up with one classic nerd activity after another. What ever happened to good old fashioned "this is your brain/this is your brain on drugs" scare tactics?
As for the "tobacco is whacko, but only if you're a teen" pitch, well, since teenagers never would dream of prematurely engaging in adult behaviors, that's gotta have been effective.
Vox's statement contains two separate assertions: (1) few women write hard sf, and (2) women can't hack the physics required for hard sf. He's repetitively demanding that readers disprove assertion (1) by providing a list of female writers of hard sf, when in fact the majority of readers here are objectiong to assertion (2).
Sneaky.
My favorite science fiction songwriter - in the sense of genuine SF narrative - would be David Bowie. "Five Years" and "The Supermen" in particular are nice little stories.
Well, thanks to google I now know where Robertsdale is - it's between the lake and that enormous water recreation area that spans the toll road. Possibly the water recreation thingy wasn't there yet when you were growing up - my brother's father-in-law is a city planner who worked on the project. I don't know when, though.
This isn't "water recreation" in the sense of slides, pools, etc - it's an expanse of big flat water with little strips of pavement and grass for folks to fish or launch boats from. Probably the most industrial-looking play area I've ever seen...
JMF: I'm from South Bend - I'm a "bender!" More specifically, I'm a UND/SMC faculty brat. Didn't know you were a fellow Hoosier. Hammond? East Chicago? My region friends are mostly from Highland, which is a fairly nice, suburb-ish place. I'll have to look for the book you mention.
Have you seen the South Shore Line "Workshop of America" poster? There's a bunch of terrific South Shore Line posters, including new ones, here, and IU press recently came out with a lovely book full of them, "Moonlight in Duneland," which you should get, if you're nostalgic about the most uncomfortable, ugly commuter train of all time.
As for Hyde Park, nowadays it's an oasis of money--not tons of money, but enough--surrounded by poorer neighborhoods. There have been some small improvements in some of the surrounding areas but not enough. There was a big deal made recently about a Starbucks finally moving into a poor south-side neighborhood - apparently a Starbucks is what you need to show potential residents that your neighborhood is improving. There's a charity that's subsidizing the Starbucks and the neighborhood aldermen campaigned for years to make this happen. Behold the power of coffee.
JMF: dudess, check. I've never gotten close enough to tell...I just go with non-squeamish friends and stand in another room with my hands over my eyes going "eeyew! deli-sliced corpse! eeeyew!" Seems like it's in a pretty well-lit, open area nowadays.
When I was a kid (1970's thru 80's) Sci&I was known for having several dull, broken exhibits about things like natural gas. You know, "Press this button to see how coal becomes a diamond" and then nothing happened. It redeemed itself by having the Colleen Moore Fairy House, the terrifying coal mine (the elevator drops down into it in total darkness), and a few other showy exhibits. And also by being in Chicago - I grew up in Northern Indiana, so even buttons that didn't do anything were pretty exciting.
Now that I live in the area, I go with visiting friends sometimes, and the exhibits are mostly not broken and they seem more interesting than they used to be...not so much like walking through a textbook. And this new exhibit on the body is the most talked-about thing they've done in ...well, maybe forever.
Here's the link for the corpse-fest at the Museum of Science and Industry. My husband keeps trying to get me to go, but his pleas of "Honey! now they have a Stukka, a terrifying coal mine elevator, AND way more corpses than usual!" have somehow failed to move me. I like my corpses properly organ-free and wrapped in linen, the way they keep them over at the Field Museum.
People who aren't squeamish, however, love the slices-of-some-dude exhibit that's been there for years, and this is supposed to be magnitudes cooler. So yes, do consider finding time for it if you can.
Is there a "blog post zero" someplace that tells the whole story, or at least is the right place to start reading? Most of what I've been able to find is analysis, rather than a rundown of the facts. Which is all to the good, but I'm missing out on the prurient details, and that's no fun! If someone can point me to the starting line I can try to catch up - thanks!
My dad mentioned today that he'd just signed a contract with a publisher for his latest book. This one's on jurisprudence - a followup of sorts to his textbook on symbolic logic for lawyers. So, definitely going for a niche market. I facetiously asked him if he got a six-figure advance and he said "yep! zero,zero,zero,zero,zero,zero."
He said he tells his students that his payment for writing books (aside from the occasional dinky royalty check) is that the Dean says "oh, look, you wrote a book this year!" and gives him a raise.
Too bad they don't do that at most day jobs...
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| 2005 | 15 |
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