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The Big Kerplop
This novel isn't really new, although it is for all practical purposes. The author, Bertrand Brinley, had much success with the collections of short stories about the seven boys who dreamed of being scientists one day. The short stories continued to stay in print and even seemed to inspire a hack Disney adaptation, but only rumors about The Big Kerplop circulated on the Internet. When the copies of The Big Kerplop would trade on Ebay, they often closed at prices in the hundreds of dollars. Free markets can't ignore messages like that and the Purple House Press purchased the rights and relaunched the books.
It's easy for a Slashdot reader to understand how the stories could command such affection. The boys in the stories live in the netherworld between capability and responsibility. (Enjoy it if you're still there.) They have ham radio sets, fishing boats, weather balloons, and plenty of other gadgets to put to use in tweaking the noses of their buffoonish elders and only a few chores to get in the way.
The books are set in the early 60's before Bhopal, Three Mile Island, and Agent Orange rained on the big Science parade. Brinley worked for Lockheed and Martin during one of the the most romantic periods in aviation history, save perhaps the early days of the Wright Brothers. The books are infused with a certainty that rational thought guided by the scientific method and salted with a bit of pluck and wit could solve any problem. I think everyone here can agree that the entire club would be open source coders today, although it's not clear if they would embrace the BSD or GPL license. It may not even be stretching things to say that groups who wrote and distributed DeCSS are working through the same themes as the Mad Scientist Club, albeit on a global scale.
The novel is prequel to the collection of short stories that tells the backstory of how the boys found each other and discovered how a firm devotion to scientific principles could be put to work showing up the grownups. As they say on Fark, hilarity ensued many times.
The earlier short stories took up only 20-30 pages apiece, but this novel stretches to more than 200 pages, making it an entirely different animal. The characters are better drawn, the scenes are set with more than a sentence or two, and the plot twists back upon itself a few times. It's a leisurely read that makes the earlier stories seem a bit cartoonish or slapstick. This sophistication is a pleasure for me to read at my technically grownup age, but it may be why the novel didn't gain the same traction as the short stories. The laughs are driven more by character and dialog than by the setting and action. The short stories are basically set pieces, but the novel is more of a study in character. That's good for anyone who grew up loving the books, but it may mean that the current crop of 8-12 year old boys should wait a year or two before diving in.
The length of the novel also gives Brinley more room to flesh out the adults and let them play more than rubes to the Mad Scientists' schemes. The town's politicians are still a bit overstuffed, but Colonel March, the commander of the local Air Force base, is hardly a foil or a nemisis. Constable Billy Dahr, though, is still around to be the goat.
I suppose I should say something about the story. The Club, or at least the early core of what would become the Club, is out fishing on Strawberry Lake when a fleet of B52s flies over. Something makes a big kerplop in the lake and the Club spends the rest of the book saving the day, defying their elders and deploying some cool gadgets and the scientific method. This is a deeper, richer and very satisfying return for the characters.
Some of these tricks could get you some scars I guess but that's not the worst future awaiting a young reader. First, chicks dig scars -- although that theorem lies well outside of the scope of this book. Second, this may be the adult in me, but kids today seem fatter, lazier, and more hogtied than ever before. Yes, these words will haunt me when my children get bigger, but I think that Brinley hits the sweet spot between obedience and irreverence. Forethought and care save the day in these books, not caprice and whim. The characters are neither insolent nor cowed by authority. The important thing to remember is that the scientific method celebrated by the books does not suggest replacing a few candles with a burning pie plate filled with gasoline. At least not without first doing a bit of research on the safest way to ensure all of the energy turns into hot air.
You can purchase The Big Kerplop from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page. Peter Wayner is the author of several dangerous and incendiary books like Disappearing Cryptography and Translucent Databases . Don't burn them without standing at a safe distance.
Trolling around a new thread, declaring a First Post!
Hell I got karma to spare
Kerplop.
Three games I play very well on the pot.
Anyone else experienced this?
I re-installed Win98 Second Edition on one of my old Pentium I class computers, so it's a fresh install. I wanted to have Mozilla and I downloaded and installed the new version of Mozilla.
Well.. Everything was OK for a couple of weeks until Windows downloaded (Start/Windows Update) and installed some new updated components from Microsoft. After that I have experienced problems with Mozilla browser. Every time I've used Mozilla for a while the fonts get screwed up! It starts to render pages in a way it looks like Mozilla would be crippled. Really ugly fonts and wrong font sizes.
If someone is interested, I can post a picture of Mozilla when it behaves like this. I'm QUITE sure Microsoft update intentionally crippled Mozilla! This is something worth investigating!
yeah yeah, here it is. The ASCII goatse. blah blah blah, enjoy
*_g_o_a_t_s_e_x_*_g_o_a_t_s_e_x_*_g_o_a_t_s_e_x_*_
g_______________________________________________g_ _
o_/_____\_____________\____________/____\_______o_ _
a|_______|_____________\__________|______|______a_ _
t|_______`._____________|_________|_______:_____t_ _
s`________|_____________|________\|_______|_____s_ _
e_\_______|_/_______/__\\\___--___\\_______:____e_ _
x__\______\/____--~~__________~--__|_\_____|____x_ _
*___\______\_-~____________________~-_\____|____*_ _
g____\______\_________.--------.______\|___|____g_ _
o______\_____\______//_________(_(__>__\___|____o_ _
a_______\___.__C____)_________(_(____>__|__/____a_ _
t_______/\_|___C_____)/______\_(_____>__|_/_____t_ _
s______/_/\|___C_____)_______|__(___>___/__\____s_ _
e_____|___(____C_____)\______/__//__/_/_____\___e_ _
x_____|____\__|_____\\_________//_(__/_______|__x_ _
*____|_\____\____)___`----___--'_____________|__*_ _
g____|__\______________\_______/____________/_|_g_ _
o___|______________/____|_____|__\____________|_o_ _
a___|_____________|____/_______\__\___________|_a_ _
t___|__________/_/____|_________|__\___________|t_ _
s___|_________/_/______\__/\___/____|__________|s_ _
e__|_________/_/________|____|_______|_________|e_ _
x__|__________|_________|____|_______|_________|x_ _
*_g_o_a_t_s_e_x_*_g_o_a_t_s_e_x_*_g_o_a_t_s_e_x_*_
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"Blowjob" refers to fellatio--oral sex performed on a penis.
Generally, a "male" is defined as a person who has a penis. There are condidtions (hermaphrodism, gender reassignment) that produce a penis in a person not traditionally understood to be male. However, these conditions fall outside of traditional social conceptions of gender; therefore should not be understood within that paradigm. In such cases, it is more appropriate to ask the owner of the penis whether (s)he chooses to identify hirself as male or female. For purposes of this analysis, one stipulates that there are persons that fall outside of the dominant gender-paradigm, and continue on the premise that a person who has a penis is male.
The question specifies that the person providing the blowjob is male. Receiving a blowjob from a man thus requires that both participants be male.
The gender of one participant in the strap-on scenario is specified as female.
Naively, one might assume that the gender of the participant being penetrated has a 50% probability of differing from the gender of the penetrating (specified female) participant.
It is possible, though not necessary (see below) to poll the general populace regarding sexual habits vis-a-vis anal penetration from a female wearing a strap-on. One could then determine a more precise estimate of the probable gender of the participant receiving the penetration in the strap-on scenario.
However, most persons are born with an anus, regardless of gender. It can be reasonably assumed, then, that the probability that the person receiving anal penetration from a female (wearing a strap-on) is not female is greater than zero.
In summary, of the two scenarios, the blowjob scenario has zero probability of occurring between members of different genders. The anal penetration via strap-on scenario has greater than zero probability of occuring between members of different genders.
Therefore, the scenario in which a person is anally penetrated by a female wearing a strap-on is "less gay" than the scenario in which a male receives a blowjob from another male.