I Love Rama!
The above picture pretty much summarizes my overall feelings about the Rama series by Arthur C. Clarke and Gentry Lee. I read the four books over a two-week period. (Spoiler alert). The first one, Rendezvous with Rama, is definitely the best and it happens to be the only one written solely by Clarke. The book describes a mysterious alien spacecraft that is explored by a group of humans who name it Rama. Clarke doesn't reveal anything about the origin of the enormous strange spacecraft. He gives the reader just enough to keep them interested and nothing more. By the time the book is over, you'll barely know anything about Rama and you'll be dying to know more. The next three books (written 15 years later) are by Gentry Lee based on Clarke's outlines. They're really good too, but they're very different. Lee spends more time developing characters whereas Clarke's characters never seem to be much more than servants to the main story, which is just fine b/c the story is awesome. Lee's attempt yields mixed results. I like the characters but the dialogue is horrible. Fortunately it's so bad that it serves as comic relief. More importantly, the last three books (Rama 2, Garden of Rama, and Rama Revealed) continue to tell the amazing story of humanity's confrontation with a universe that is not human-centered. The only drawback is the ending: it ruined the fundamental mystery of Rama by attributing it all to some God-like creator. The picture below summarizes how I felt about the ending. But don't let that stop you from reading the series!
2006-01-30 18:09:57 UTC
The New Coca Leaf Diet
So Evo Morales has appointed a coca grower to be the drug chief of Bolivia (here's the story from Aljazeera.Net). Morales summarizes his drug policy as "no to zero coca, yes to zero cocaine." Of course this is what has had the US upset since the beginning of his rise to power. If he regulates the coca industry, how's the CIA going to benefit from the illegal drug trade? What I've wondered is how he plans to use all the coca if it isn't used for cocaine. I have no way of knowing how much Bolivian coca becomes cocaine but I have a hard time believing that it's mostly used in medicines and herbal teas. Bolivians chew the leaves to ward off hunger and mitigate altitude sickness. Do they really need 30,000 acres of coca leaves for that? How does Morales propose to use all the coca if it won't be turned into cocaine? According to Aljazeera, he plans to add it to toothpastes and soft drinks. What?! Why? Huh? I have a better, less insane idea. Coca leaves ward off hunger. The US is full of hungry fat asses. Sell the coca to the US as an appetite suppresant. Problem solved. And two birds have been killed with one stone: no cocaine and fewer fat asses.2006-01-29 12:26:48 UTC
Double-sockin' and Tight-rollin'
For some reason I woke up this morning thinking about socks. I think it was because I went to bed with knee-his on and by morning the tight elastic fabric around my calves had become irritating enough to wake me up. My feet felt all tingly due to the lack of proper circulation. I'm lucky I didn't lose my legs last night. So in my hazy between-waking-and-sleep state, I started thinking about socks. I pushed my knee-his down around my ankles and thought about how
Japanese girls have some of the strangest sock-wearing habits, including slouching big and baggy "loose socks" down their calves (they even use "sock glue" to keep them from falling down). Then this girl Lisa Daly popped into my head. I haven't thought about her since high school when we had a few classes together. When I was in eighth grade (late 1980s), it was considered, gulp, fashionable to wear your socks over your jeans/cavariccis. Of course this fad had a symbiotic relationship with the equally popular "tight-roll," which consisted of folding the hem of your pants tightly around your leg and then rolling it up to secure it. So a hip young thing would tight-roll her pants and then put a pairy of slouchy socks on over the roll. As if this style wasn't weird enough, soon it became ultra-stylish to wear more than one pair of socks over your tight-rolled pants. And that is all I remember about Lisa Daly. She took it way too far: she'd wear up to six pairs of socks at a time! Her feet must have been so hot! They were usually all pastel and white in color. This was at a time when tight-rolling and double-socking were on the wane and considered to be hopelessly out of style by most of us who kept up with the white trash trends. (Incidentally this was also at a time when I was mere months away from my revelatory first thrift store experience). She'd wear like a sweatshirt with kittens on it and then five or six pairs of pink, white, and purple socks over her tight white jeans. She put a lot of thought into her sock selection. The colors always matched the colors that were in the rest of her outfit. I was repelled by her fashion idiocy. She actually thought she was cool and it didn't seem to matter that no one else did. I never felt like I was cool and I put a ridiculous amount of worrisome energy into making sure I never commited any faux pas that someone could make fun of me for! It didn't seem fair. Ignorance must be bliss, I thought. Give me a lobotomy and make me the coolest girl in school. Thank god my thrift store conversion was nigh. I was headed for a nervous breakdown.
2006-01-29 11:46:55 UTC
You're Not Getting Any Cookies!
Today I got to work with a 6th grader with Down's Syndrome. What a bitch. Toward the end of the day I was asked by her teacher to take her to "The Shredder." I looked at the teacher quizzically and inquired stupidly, "The Shredder?" The teacher explained that every day the Down's girl shreds paper for the school for 45 minutes. Oh, a paper shredder. It turns out some of the other extra specials have also been recruited to "help out" the secretaries. What do they get for their efforts? Some stickers, a package of oreos, and the pride that comes from good, honest shredding. I was informed by the teacher that if the girl were to try and avoid her shredding duties, I should threaten to withhold her cookies. My bargaining chip was an oreo. Great. The girl started out just fine. "Good job. You earned a sticker." Then her teacher left us alone. The quiet scene of a teacher supervising a retarded girl working diligently at the shredder devolved rapidly: the shit soon hit the fan (thank god not literally. In my line of work that needs to be said). She threw the stack of to-be-shredded paper at me. I handed them back and calmly scolded, "If you don't do your work, you won't get your cookies." She started to throw the papers again. I stopped her and asked, "You want your cookies don't you? You have to work if you want cookies." She didn't give a shit about her stupid cookies. I was powerless. I hadn't understood a word she'd said all day, but I heard the next thing she said loud and clear: "Go away." She repeated it over and over. I said, "I'm not going anywhere and if you keep it up, I'm going to eat your cookies." I should have eaten one slowly and torturously in front of her. I should have twisted it open and licked the creamy center, faking an orgasm. Maybe that would've reminded her of what she was risking. She started kicking the shredder. "You're definitely not getting any cookies." I knew she didn't care but I had nothing else to say and no other way to communicate. Within ten minutes she was in one corner yelling, "Go away! Go away! Go away!" and I was in the other countering, "No cookies! No cookies! No cookies!" And that's where your tax dollars go.
2006-01-23 20:52:43 UTC
Who Killed Junior?
This picture is from a 1973 comic entitled "Who Killed Junior?," available in its hilarious entirety here by way of boingboing. Notice the scientifically accurate depiction of abortion. Happy 30th anniversary Roe V. Wade (Jan. 22)!
2006-01-23 20:34:18 UTC