Merideth asked us to name Five things that are such an integral part of your life, you can’t believe someone else introduced them to you. It’s a tough question, but I think I’ll have to say… 1. When I was a kid, the only use I had for computer chips was entertainment. We had an Atari. Boom. Die, alien badguy. Die, evil missile. Boom. But once I got to junior high school, we had to study these machines. It was a room full of Radio Shack TRS-80s that got me going, not my (here, pseudonymous) friend Maurice Fishman’s Commodore 64. …
Month: September 2003
On the Sudden Inappropriateness of Retarded Frog Jokes
It’s weird living in a place where you don’t see physically handicapped people very often. In Iksan, I think they didn’t get out of the house much. I saw one man in a wheelchair a few times, and a crazy guy whose obsession was to jog in front of the university carrying banners and wearing a track suit with his name on it (the name being one character different from the name of a famous Korean runner). I actually saw a few crazy people wandering about the city day-by-day, but I almost never saw anyone with a physical disability. At …
Jules Verne: Paris in the Twentieth Century
I just finished reading Jules Verne’s Paris in the Twentieth Century about fifteen minutes ago. This book was quite surprising, for Verne is now much more well-known for his adventure stories, like Around the World in Eighty Days and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. In fact, there is a reason that this book remained unknown until the 1990s… his publisher, Hetzel, ironically rejected it as being too unbelievable. Far too unbelieveable to us is this verdict, for in Verne’s Paris of 1961, we see Paris with a working Metro, with electric lights and tap water everywhere, gas automotives and spun-metal …
Edward Said is Dead
Here’s the BBC news report on the death of Palestinian literary scholar Edward Said.
ET and Religions
An ex-girlfriend and I once discussed the idea of life on other planets. I, of course, told her that I was rather certain life had developed all over the universe, but that the universe is such a dangerous place that probably most of it gets routinely wiped out by Mass Extinction Events (more, more, more, more, more, more) before it has a chance to get offworld, develop tech powerful enough to sustain it after a MEE, and that would be why we never see any evidence of anyone else out there. I was flabbergasted to hear her thoughts on the …