The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Mark Bourne:

I too read the Fuller book on "the Hill case" when I was in, oh, sixth grade or so. Devoured everything having to do with UFOs and such. What sci-fi reading kid in rural Arkansas wouldn't want to be spirited away by more interesting beings to more interesting places? Then eventually I put away childish things and found more interesting places and people on my own.

But, lo, what contactee craziness Betty Hill has inspired since then, especially in the Internet age. For instance, the vast, many-leveled parking garage of conspiracies, contacts, and psycho-ceramics found at zetatalk.com, where you can read about the Hills' encounter straight from the ETs themselves here, here, and probably elsewhere.

Looking forward to rest of Jim's report with enthusiasm.

Out of this happy/ugly story comes one of the best/worst pull-quotes from all of 2006: It was Focus on the Family, natch, who responded to the news of the upcoming blessed event with "love can't replace a mother and a father".

There's the whole anti-gay-marriage platform right there in a fetid little nutshell.

From this long-time, hardcore Ralph Vaughan Williams fanboy, thanks for linking us to that. Excellent way to start a snowy Seattle morn.

Oh, and right now the phrase "the Republic of Chad" just makes me giggle.

Good heavens. The sole letter I've ever written to scifi.com was a response to that nattering no-nads. (Also there are replies by Brian Patterson and Matt Frey.) It's not my most eloquent (Rush Limbaugh hisownself ranted for ten on-air minutes about an op-ed I wrote; truly, the pen is mightier than the OxyContin), but ol' Chad got under my collar. Though not with anonymous white powder, granted. May he find himself in a prison block where "anything can happen" ... but not all at once.

Snopes has a page on it here.

Somewhere on another plane of existence, there's a book recording all the sentences that should never have to be written in this one. "...until the house doesn’t smell like dead neighbor any more" is #12.

Our sympathies to everyone involved. And here's hoping that your home soon enough stops reminding you of the awful circumstances. Although as this thread is proving, there are some events -- horrid as they are -- that do force us to stop and reflect, and that in itself isn't a bad thing.

Nice -- "instantly indispensable." If Making Light were a book you'd have a cover blurb right there. Congratulations (and to Whiskey Bar, Interdictor, and the others as well) from a long-time Jon Carroll reader.

As an erstwhile planetarium professional, I can now reveal that not only has the "bar" been suspected through indirect evidence for some time, it's also not merely a "bar." You see, since 1947 the population centers on the far side of galaxy have been aware of our progress, and have determined when we will probably achieve FTL interstellar travel, so they're building this great honkin' wall....

I tend to be -- generally, overall, in the main -- a glass-is-half-full (-even-if-there's-something-weird-floating-in-it) person. And as I've become more and more a politics junkie, reasonably well-read and informed and rounded in my solidly Demo-ideal views, that glass has still tended to remain my norm despite the past set of national elections and the grotesque venality on display in D.C. and across the world stage. But Jesus M. Cohan, that Taibbi article just depresses the hell out of me. I've been aware for decades that "representative democracy" is a term possessing roughly as much connection to objective reality as "pre-war intelligence" does nowadays, though after reading that piece the popping sound you hear is the last of my hopeful, this-too-shall-pass naivete going up. Political good in this country is no more "two steps forward, one step back." Now it's apparently "one step forward, one Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighter zooming overhead in the opposite direction." Makes me even more eager to vote in 2006 and '08, but still. Christ.

(The Rich article, as usual, does provide a certain satisfying Schadenfreude lift, however.)

"Christist," however, would work.

Although it suggests (to me, anyway) that Christ and his teachings are part of the labelee's demonstrated philosophy, and typically the evidence shows that that ain't so, no matter what the labelee says otherwise.


("Blessed," by the way, "are the cheesemakers.")

The Miami Herald's Leonard Pitts has a fine piece in syndication at the moment on the MIA status of the Christian Left. You know, the Christianity of the Beatitudes rather than the Old Testament.

And if you are, as I am, a Christian who remembers what Jesus told Simon Peter, it is galling to see Him reduced to a GOP shill, wrapped in a flag and used as a prop to advance a conservative agenda. Which, by the way, stands the Bible on its head.

And some months ago Kurt Vonnegut made a fine point by saying

For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that’s Moses, not Jesus. I haven’t heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere.

“Blessed are the merciful” in a courtroom? “Blessed are the peacemakers” in the Pentagon? Give me a break!

There, for me, is an obvious place to begin retaking words such as "moral values" and even "Christianity" back from those who have co-opted and perverted them. I can't speak as a Christian, though it seems clear that the "faith-based" Democrats and other believers on the Left need to speak out loud about the words and deeds of the most famous liberal in history, and let the -- my favorite terms -- Christian Supremacists and hypochristians continue to place Leviticus well above the Gospels.

All good, Giacomo. Although I'd change one crucial verb: We are way, way past "Request" now. Demand, insist, enforce, do, get. The current bosses don't "request," they act and stay on task and on message until thir goal is achieved, and so should we. To dip into the current lingua freepa, "requesting" is for pussies, or the French.

"fifteen million dollars"

fifteen million dollars?

I'm thwacking my monitor and hoping that doing so will unscramble those pixels to reveal what you actually typed, 'cuz doing the same to the side of my head hasn't changed the vision at all.

Nope. Still fifteen million dollars.

Lordy.

M.A. in theater here (hello, Madeleine), emphasis in directing. So although I'm not trodding the boards in Manhattan, staging Waiting for Godot in a loft above a Starbucks, or teaching high school drama (anymore), actors do keep popping up in my fiction. When writing, I have all the control, the stage machinery always works on cue (in the final draft, at least), and the only prima donna I have to cope with is myself.

Actually, the theater degree has been very good for me professionally, if serendipitously. Through happenstance (and a little hands-on help from Ray Bradbury) my degree work led directly to a career in the planetarium field, which welded my love for astronomy to my background in theatuh and my lifelong fondness for SF, handing me a chance to write scripts that blended it all for public consumption. All the stars a stage, etc.

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