this is a total stab in the dark, but are there any Making Light readers in the Raleigh-Durham area who might be going to the Samuel Delany - John Kessel panel discussion at Duke U. on Sunday?
Could you drop me an email if you are?
thanks in advance.
serge, i missed that part of the speech, actually.
Howard Dean was in town for the SOTU viewing party that the local Dems had organized, and i was busy helping out with that, so i didn't pick up on the Underpeople reference till i got home and found it being discussed on message boards and blogs.
a review of the transcript yields no mention of the Spider Overlords, alas, but the entire speech reflects an alternate reality that i really don't want to spend any more time in.
So, was the State of the Union speech more of the same? Sounds like it, from what they said on Salon.com.
You mean, besides the fact that one of his speech writers has been reading Cordwainer Smith?
A hopeful society has institutions of science and medicine that do not cut ethical corners, and that recognize the matchless value of every life. Tonight I ask you to pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research: human cloning in all its forms, creating or implanting embryos for experiments, creating human-animal hybrids, and buying, selling, or patenting human embryos.
chris, perhaps you're right. i don't have a copy of the book. and it may have been dawn, or midnight or some such time, and Venus was in the west, or high overhead, or some other place where it pretty clearly didn't belong. i certainly remember my reaction to it much more clearly than the text itself. if i'm mistaken in my recollection, well i suppose there are worse skeletons in my closet to be embarrassed over.
hey, speaking of poorly written best-sellers with religious themes, anybody read Joe Bageant's latest rant on the Left Behind books and their culutral significance?
Carrie:
i always assumed it was because sliced bread made everybody's life a little bit easier, expecially working people.
this site claims that sliced bread came into being in the late 20s in the mid-west US, a time of change in American culture. Wikipedia claims the phrase is an outgrowth of an early Wonder Bread advertising campaign, which makes a certain amount of intuitive sense, even without research.
The late, lamented Random House Word of the Day, never got around to that phrase, although they did have a wonderful discussion of the New York colloquialism sliding pond. Cecil doesn't have anything on "sliced bread" either.
It seems that current usage is more sarcastic than the original earnest use of the phrase.
The great thing about sliced bread, of course, is that it's already sliced! The slices are nice and uniform and fit well into the toaster and make easy to hold sandwiches, and you don't have all those messy crumbs to clean up.
DVC is the only book a total stranger ever approached me and told me i had to read (at one of my daughter's soccer tournaments in Greensboro sometime in 2003). when i did read it, i had to keep reading to find out it it ever achieved any sort of redemption. It didn't, but as i recall, near the end, the main character walks out into the dusk and admires Venus's shining beauty high in the eastern sky.
You can't buy that kind of research anymore, can you?
The earliest memory I have of it is one of my classmates saying that when Oswald was shot, he blurted out, "Ruby--!"
as i recall it, it was the sheriff (or one of the law officers who was escorting LHO at the time) who shouted out "Jack, you son of a bitch!"
i don't recall ever reading that LHO was supposed to have recognized his own killer.
Her kind of stooopid doesn't just grow in the wild. It has to be lovingly and carefully cultivated by professionals.
Whatever else you may think of this thread and its participants, the fact that it generated this sentence, in any context, is cause for a celebration of its existence.
Richard - at the risk of detouring this thread away from it's more entertaining aspects, let me respond to your thesis about reaching out to so-called centrist Republicans.
For the past X years (X is an arbitrary number. For me, it's 11; corresponding with Newt Gingrich's Contract with America. Others may say it's 25, going back to Reagan's campaign against Carter. whatever.) Democrats have been debating issues, Republicans have been assassinating characters. When Republicans try to debate issues, the results are the Social Security Bamboozlepalooza (Josh Marshall's wonderful coinage) which collapsed in a heap of dung and straw and which must never be mentioned again if you are a good Republican. Republicans know this, which is why they attack exaggerated personality traits. This methodology reached its peak (or nadir, if you prefer) during the 2004 Republican convention with the Purple Heart bandages and related Swift Boat attacks on John Kerry.
The unfortunate aspect of this kind of politics is that it wins elections. It wins elections because the people practicing it appear stronger to the electorate than the party ignoring it.
Democrats need first and foremost to stand up and fight back, the way they did when Jean Schmidt attempted to smear John Murtha. At some point, the playing field will then be levelled, and we'll elect a government on the issues. But we're not there yet.
In Ohio, for example, if Democrats don't run against the corruption of Ney, Noe, and Taft, they don't deserve to win elections next year, regardless of whether more Ohioans agree with Democratic positions on Social Security, health care, balancing the budget, etc.
Tim, i agree that that the sight of all of the teachers crying was the most significant to my own 7 year old self.
i think, though, that i'd trade not having made it to the moon by 1969 for not having JFK assassinated. yeah, i think i'd make that trade in a heartbeat.
Here's the first place i'd look.
The Republicans' ploy back before the mid-terms of 2002 of forcing Democrats to commit to the war was masterful, and is still paying dividends. Despite the logical fallacy that the vote was not, in fact, a vote for war, it certainly looked, smelled, and quacked like a vote for war. Democratic Senators such as Clinton, Biden, and Lieberman allowed themselves to be completely manipulated. Things were better in the House, where a majority of the Democratic caucus actually voted against the authorization for war, but the trashing of Howard Dean during the primary season negated any possibility of an anti-war Democratic flank.
Dean's elevation to party chair was merely an acknowledgment of his fund-raising abilities with the grass roots of the party, and not an endorsement of his original anti-war position. At the rate things are going, the Republicans are more likely to call for a withdrawal from Iraq than the Democrats, whose key leaders remain so afraid of appearing weak on national security that they allow themselves to be bullied by Republicans, thus appearing even weaker.
Here in NC, pressure on our local liberal Congressman has helped push him into calling for a withdrawal plan. It's not my ideal position, but it represents movement in the right direction.
Can the voters of Delaware, New York or Connecticut have the same effect on their influential Senators? That's the key qeustion over the next 90 days, isn't it?
The Female Man
Babel-17
anything by Josephine Saxton
This letter from Cindy Sheehan to Barbara Bush is worth a read.
Send Harry 10 bucks if you want to encourage more of this kind of thing.
Stefan Jones:
I used to help run a campus SF convention (I-Con, out in Stony Brook) that then and now invites lots of "media guests." I still keep in touch with the comittee. It's been an open secret for years that Takei was gay.
Hey, Stefan, i was doing radio at WUSB when I-Con first started up. I interviewed Nic Yermakov and Michael Swanwick the first or second year of the convention. I've got the tape somewhere . . .
Just wanted to happily announce that it appears that Miers has withdrawn her nomination...not that I have any high hopes of a more appropriate candidate being offered .
i've noted elsewhere that Bush has described Miers as the "most qualifed" candidate for the position.
Therefore, anybody else who is nominated is less qualifed than she was.
Getting back on topic, when Hurrican Fran came through the Triangle back in September 96, we had lots of property damage in town, and widespread power outages lasting up to 7 days, but nothing life threatening for most people, at least in Durham. Other parts of the state were hit harder, and two dozen people were killed, mostly from flooding or falling trees, as i recall. We had received an above normal amount of rainfall in the previous three weeks, and the ground was already saturated.
As power came back on in different parts of town, the supermarkets would reopen and distibute ice for free, which was the most critical need for many people as temperatures climbed back into the 90s within a day or two of the storm.
FEMA didn't really take any responsibility for distributing food and water, but i don't recall there being any shortages or need. Lots of us had well stocked freezers which needed to be emptied, and the shelters were the beneficiaries of a lot of that food. FEMA did set up the claims process within a week, and that went smoothly, as i recall. We got the check for our roof repairs within a month. i can't speak to how FEMA handled things in other parts of the state nearer the coast.
Hiring Michael Brown to consult on FEMA's response to Hurricane Katrina is like hiring Jeffrey Dahmer to ghostwrite your next cookbook.
if anybody is interested, i've posted a few photos from yesterday's little get-together in DC over here:
Photos.
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