"A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in."
-- H. L. Mencken
Links:
- Lewis Black on Texas
- James Fallows, 2010, on memory holes
- Wonkette: OMG, Obama will make Rachel Maddow Supreme Court Justice per Fox
- Jeremy Scahill on Colbert (at around the 15:45 mark)
- Worst columns of the week from Brooks, Friedman, Cohen, and Rubin!
- driftglass on David Brooks
- Tucker Carlson sends a sixteen-year-old to a White House briefing.
- Gawker talks to young Blacks so Mike Barnicle doesn't have to.
- Time Magazine: The Christian Witness of Trayvon's Mother.
2 comments:
Good morning, Mr. Glass.
Thanks for answering my essay question.
As for Aaron's Mass Effect question, I don't know much about the series other than the ending PISSED people off (as Aaron said), but it sounds like the Q Continuum in Star Trek: The Next Generation, the Drej from Titan AE, or ancient mythologies with the gods freaking out when humans got too ambitious (Tower of Babel).
Enjoy the rest of your weekend.
Kevin Holsinger
In another yet strange similarity of our relative upbringings, I too spent the 70's immersed in Scifi and abandoned it in the early 80's.
I also wrote more than a few short stories, with a few published ...and ultimately abandoned it as a viable career choice, but for what may be slightly different reasons.
It wasn't so much the genre or the publishing arena changed, as that I did.
Being born in 1961, (about one month later than this President) in 1981 I turned 20, and it seems that I was being confronted with a world that would require more concrete tools for survival, than would be provided by an education and career based in literature.
In fact, I can remember, given Reagan, and the economic outlook at the time, being quite afraid that if I did not choose an education and vocation that would be in high demand, I would end up on the street..or dead.
When I finally went to college, I told myself that rather than immerse myself in the classics, or history (subjects I was already well acquainted with and enjoyed), I would instead, study economics and computer science (and maybe attend law school..)
Economics being something I had no interest in whatsoever (accept in it's broad social implications), but I had owned and operated computers since the mid 70's, and had always been kind of tech geek (my scifi tastes were always more tech as well..big Niven fan).
In any case, I didn't start college until 1984 (got my masters in 1990). Partly because I was going to have to pay for it myself, and partly because I wanted to spend some time gathering "life experience" for my eventual writing career.
In short, I spent 4 years Kerouacing around the country..before the country... scared me into college, and out of writing for a living.
Which may also explain how you seem to remember all the details of that Scifi read in the 70's much better than I.
(ahem....a life of traveling and excess.. in 48 states in..four years)
Which brings me to your ideas about peoples differing perspectives on the future.
Out hear in flyover country, you will often hear the lament "ahh was born 100 years too late".
My outlook has always been.."I was born about 50 years too soon".
Things are about to get really amazing, if the Morlocks can be stopped..or at least slowed down a little.
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