Namely, "The Diamond as Big as The Ritz", his sole (and perhaps unwitting contribution to SF.) In it, a family lives in decadent seclusion in a wildly furnished mansion in Idaho, squarely settled on a gigantic diamond the size of a small hill. The plot is standard Fitzgerald: nice young man of the Gilded Age is horrified by the actions of his "betters", but the idea of the hill-sized diamond is worked out expertly, except the geological freak that produced it. Now, maybe it was an asteroid?
Point being, that out of respect, I would much rather honor the deceased's faith or taste or lack thereof, than project upon them some hazy speculations of my own.
"Dead", "died", is proper, dignified, and accurate. "Passed (away, on, or ?)" without an implied religious agenda is an American vulgarism that, frankly, makes me queasy: "He passed" makes me think of gas building up in a corpse (at worst), and the co-option of yet another part of living as a wholly gratuitous symbol of mourning (quilts, stuffed animals, sunglasses, etc.) at best. Can we now "celebrate a life" without the person being dead?
Ms. Bradley is dead, as is Jon Postel, but we'd never know from the news....
Guys....when the Christian Science Monitor coined the expression, they didn't think that "dead" was "too harsh", they meant that souls "pass on" to somewhere else. The lady (in every way but the Peerage) is dead. Unless you can prove her to be of strong religious convictions otherwise, I would rather that you be proper, instead of euphemistic.
He didn't want to be Scrooge, but aced it anyway. "I played him as the lonliest man in the world." he said, and managed to go through an entire spectrum of emotion in two hours. From his solitary Christmas eve meal (of Scotch oatmeal, very much in period) to cowering in fear at the thought of his own demise, to hoisting Tiny Tim aloft in wild manic glee, he made you BELIEVE the story, so much so that I kept saying "This is modern. This is not Dickens at all. The scriptwriters must have tossed this or that in for TV." Nope. I wanted to break my own nose. And I'm a girl.
It's the sexiest math book ever written. Really! The two characters, Alice and Bill get it on like crazed weasels every other chapter! But what can you expect of a man whose canonical photograph shows off his enormous organ?
Having started out in ye hoary old PDP days, I find the concept of "computer literacy", as implemented in most school systems, to be the lamest! Mostly, it's been a sop thrown to parents who've already been pressured by computer salesmen to put their newborns in front of the sanctified glow of a Wintel since it's axiomatic that "you need to get them started early, or they won't do well in school." In turn, the school systems turn around and make impressive-sounding pronouncements that "computer literacy" is essential for the job market and computer-trained workers are necessary to make America competitive in the world marketplace. You don't want your kids to have to become servants to the slant-eyed Japs, now, right, moms & dads? Damn straight! (unfurl American flag, show WWII newsreel) Meanwhile, what is it that they're learning? Well, mostly, they go to a "computer room" for an hour or so every week to fiddle around with educational games, perhaps participating in a class project where they get to use the exciting Internet! and send email!! Do they learn such real-world job-market skills as spreadsheet macros or database design? Well...no...I mean, they're only kids, it's more important thay they have fun, right? And look at how much fun they're having -- we're making a web page about the rainforest next week! Oh, so they're learning HTML and Javascript? Well, no, we're using this software...frankly, it's enough work having to wade through their Math essays much less having to learn something like that for just one page. For the whole class? Well...it's not all that good for kids to do individual work...it divides kids and makes the slower kids feel real bad about themselves so we don't do that kind of thing here. So this is kind of like letting them watch TV for an hour, right? Sure, if you put it that way...(giggle)...it's a real help to me, almost like an hour off... Programming might introduce, stealthily, such lost arts as spelling, grammar, logical structure, mathematical rigor, individuality, and creativity. I'm all for it. However, I don't think most Dales (teaching jargon for "good enough" teachers) will have the time, patience, or left-brainedness to learn coding themselves. Old-timers may remember New Math. Nuff said.
My grandmother, who I loved dearly, is dead. My kitten died, and I was upset, but hardly less so upon reading her autopsy. I do not think that many others will be torn apart by reading the word "dead". It's sweet to think that his widow will be consoled by everyone around her telling her (metaphorically) that "he's not really dead, simply gone to some other place" when that may not be her beliefs at all.
I second the motion. "X is dead." is clear and concise. "X has passed (away, on, or simply "passed")" has unfortunate resonances with passing the bar, passing a test, and passing gas. "We lost him." suggests he should be found. However, one can say (at least around me) "the passing of an era" (time passes) or "community mourns loss of a leader" (who might not be dead, but retired, incapacitated, or simply not leaderly any more. Rob, DO something.
I watched the eclipse on the asahi site, and for my money, the best view was in Austria...Since eclipses are something like the Kentucky Derby...several hours of build-up, two minutes of glory, I fired up my UNIX box next to the iMac and played Paranoia while waiting. I was rewarded by a view of the last sliver of sun disappearing...a suspicion of a lunar mountain...and then... Glory. The solar corona must have been especially active. Beads of reddish light, the only thing missing was abberant starlight. Fantastic. It took two whole minutes, then a brilliant burst of pure SUN....Watched the rest of the spots...Hungary, Roumania...Iran was a wash, the connection kept dropping... It suddenly hit me...no sound. Wish I had had the Eclipse music from "Einstein on the Beach", the Eclipse music from Farinelli, or even a good percussion section...gotta scare that dragon away... But a cosmic event nonetheless. (BTW, I'm first!!!)
I'm not Christian, in that sense, being an agnostic myself. I do, however, find "Wicca" less than admirable after having been in the occult (as a real-live pre-teenage witch, OTO member, student, and scholar) for 30 of my 40 years. As a Jewish friend of mine once said, "Wicca is identical to Christianity, except that no Christian ever said that all Christians were entirely without sin or human failings."
In other words, if it's all sweetness and light, why do you have this compulsion to prefix the word "Shadow" to everything? Celebrate the Eve of All Saints' Day (OK, Halloween, er, Samhain...) when it's dank and dark? The Goddess was a hot babe when I knew her, now she's the Drama Queen of Guilt. And where is the Horned God when we need him? While girls are still swooning over Lestat, the group that should be giving them support is counselling a new chastity, where it's a source of pride to be a lesbian, and a shame to be in love with a Man.
Witches have given themselves a wussy stereotype that has little to do with real, Dionysian paganism, and everything to do with trying to return to the prissy narrowmindedness of The Little Church on The Corner...on their own terms, of course.
INNOCENT CHILDREN should be kept from seeing INNOCENT CHILDREN cruelly exploited by CHILDREN on the Web!!!! They might get IDEAS, and you know what that means....They should be PROTECTED from the evil Internet, BARRED from any participation...
At the same time, fifteen minutes a day of computer participation, started as soon as it comes home from the hospital, is strongly recommended to all parents...Increase computer time to two hours by eighteen months, and to four hours by school age. (Tip: Leather straps are a good way to ward off "fidgets", and a dandy way to get Mom some "time off"!) Naturally, it's a given that you'll want the very NEWEST hardware for this...step right this way...
What? You don't like it?? You wonder how they're going to socialize, excercise, even go outdoors now and then?? Why, don't you know that it's IMPERATIVE that ALL children be taught "computer literacy", especially as it refers to the "information superhighway", to insure employability as we build a "bridge to the twenty-first century", and make the United States competetive in the "world marketplace"...
Yawn. I'm kind of sick of hearing how "kids" are the focus of computing -- children needing computers, being wizards with computers, misbehaving with computers, being threatened by computers, being taught by computers...Fact is, I'd really like to take computers out of schools...I'd like to see more cybercafes, more arcades with computers, more computers at home (preferably in the living room) where everyone can use them. Instead of cities and towns paying twice over to have state-of-the-art hardware K-12 (that are totally unused at night, on weekends, and during the summer) and overbooked terminals in public libraries, I'd rather have them put them all in one place, where retirees, jobseekers, and the curious of all kinds can learn from them.
"Computer literacy" is a joke, similar to the "New Math" -- in the hands of someone like Wozniak, you can teach 10 year olds to do something more than pointing and clicking (anyone remember Logo? BASIC?) with "educational" software little better than bad video games -- but most teachers either don't know or don't want to learn. Meanwhile, most parents who don't use computers at work (and a considerable number who do) consider their home WinTel boxes to be little more than electronic babysitters -- in my experience teaching adult computer literacy, the continual refrain is that "it's something kids do -- they're naturally better at it than I am, I'm too old, I can't learn..." -- with the result that the family computer is in the oldest son's room, regarded with holy dread by the parents and womenfolk, while he's pretty much stuck in there. Is it any wonder that he's checking out www.youngest.com, www.kkk.org, and the like? It's the only thing he can do, and all we've left to him...Sorry to ramble, but come on, Bill, will you please make up your mind?
1) His eyes and tongue, and some teeth, if I recollect rightly. The fact that you can still hear him scream coherently makes me think he's already dead, and leading them on. 2) He's bewitched. 3) It seems to refer to the "Wicker Man", a Celtic custom of making a huge basket and setting it aflame with a man inside. They also suggest crucifixes, with their implied flavor of sacrifice, etc. A major point is that this isn't what's expected of witches-as-peaceful-nature-worshippers, instead this is...something else.
Well, I was speaking in a traditional sense. However, *some* Buddhists have a pantheon, some do not. It is not true, I would submit, that all "pagans" follow the creed of Celtic Wicca. Thank you for the clarification.
Paganism has been around longer than Christianity: true. Anything that isn't Christian is pagan, including such non-witchy faiths as Buddhism and Confucianism.
Druidism died out about a thousand years ago, and was revived somewhere in the last century as a romantic bit of British nationalism. It was only one stratum of historic British faith, which includes Norse, Teutonic, and Roman beliefs, and various forms of Christianity from the Roman era on.
"Witchcraft", historically, was defined as the practises of baptised and confirmed Christians who had turned against their faith, which usually involved malicious pranks, poisoning family members, promiscuous sex, and worshipping the Devil. Their purported spellbooks called "grimoires", or grammars, are an interesting hodgepodge of Latin-like gibberish, borrowings from the Cabbala, folk charms of love, prosperity, and revenge, and (sometimes) home remedies more fanciful than practical. There is no mention in them of anything that could be construed as an organized system of beliefs, no Gaelic holidays, nor any deities outside the Christian pantheon of angels/demons.
"Wicca" is a purely 20th century phenomenon, which was largely invented in the 1940's by Gerald Gardner (with help from Aleister Crowley) who claimed that his "Book of Shadows" (cobbled together from Greek, Egyptian, and Masonic sources) came from a woman named Dorothy Clutterbuck, whose coven had kept an unbroken chain of belief from the Paleolithic times onward. Since then, his ideas have undergone several layers of revision, the most important of which was the shift in focus from the Horned God (concieved as a phallic hunting deity, similar to Pan) to the Green Goddess (originally a sex/fertility goddess but now concieved as a Virgin Mary-like figure -- celibately parthenogenic and a "wounded healer".) As practised now, it bears no likeness to any historic or anthropologically recognized strain of nature worship: while "native" animism is usually concerned with bribing, tricking, or placating a variety of gods whose nature is capricious at best, Wicca's response to its near-monotheistic Goddess is more akin to pity.
"True" Wicca is neither dark nor mysterious, yes: if you consider the current version to be the true one. Mostly, it's largely indistinguishable from most liberal Christianity: their ideals are to hold services, be nice, and feel guilty about the environment. Since the heyday of witchcraft in the late 60's and 70's as an excuse (by lapsed Christian young folks toying with blasphemy) to celebrate Halloween and full moons (by getting nekkid, high/drunk, and screwing to loud music) Wicca has been reborn as an excuse (by lapsed middle-aged Christians toying with going back to church, on their own terms, of course) to celebrate Halloween, Christmas, and May Day (by holding ersatz group therapy meetings with the a few Renaissance Faire trappings thrown in). While most Christians will readily own that there have been other members of their faith that have been less than nice people, Wiccans will become enraged at the mere suggestion that any of the historical witches hurt so much as a feeling.
Part of the story hinges on just such a sentimental view of nature worship, and of nature itself. When the kids go to the woman in the trailer park, they are most certainly meeting someone who would have been called a witch in the day: she's old, lives alone, comes on as more than a little schizzy, and surrounds herself with a grab-bag of patriotic and religious symbols (a flag, a Bible, a rosary...) that are most probably not being given their usual meanings. (She also has a gate of bound-together twigs, similar in technique to the effigies found in the woods, and spoke at length of stones as well. Hmm..) Heather doesn't recognize this: apparently, the old woman wasn't up enough on modern witchcraft to invite her in for a nice hot cup of estrogen analogues and a chat about the latest developments in eco-feminism. The dolls and rockpiles would be perfectly understandable to many animists throughout history, and even a few modern ones: these kids are going to be sacrificed to propitiate the gods angered by their profane intrusion on sacred ground. (Their verbal profanities probably were the deciding factor: you just don't swear in church.) If this sounds a far cry from the activities of your local Spiral Dance Drum Circle, it should: as I alluded before, most real nature gods (including fairies) are petty, vain, tricky, capricious, and mostly, downright nasty.
As it befits them. As we see in the film, nature is not, as we like to think, a gentle, caring, mother: she's more like a drunk housewife with PMS. It's dark after the sun goes down. It's cold. There's little food readily available, it's dirty, and you may have to get your feet wet. There aren't even any cigarette machines! When I think about how many Gen X'ers I've met who claim that they would like to go off and live "in nature", implying that all that's involved is a couple of purchases at the local trendy wilderness gear shop (campfire espresso pot, anyone?), I think about Heather's speech before the flashlight. It took only a week to turn a post-modern womyn, well-schooled in every stereotype of the nature-worshipping witch and nurturing Earth Mother, into a weeping, remorseful wreck. I don't think that's anything you can find in Starhawk.
It's kind of ironic that this man believes that Graffiti represents some kind of milestone in human slavishness towards computers. As a kid in the 1960's, I used to watch endless This Is Your Future documentaries, all which assumed that the crooked looking alphanumerics that you see on the bottom of your personal checks were going to be how all printed media was going to look....about the year 2000. While "computer literacy" (for want of a better, less anachronistic, term) was trumpeted as the greatest thing since sliced bread, the specifics usually boiled down to learning to read the patterns of punched cards, which, along with the binary system, would slowly render our fusty old Roman alphabet and decimal arithmetic obsolete.This would be necessary, since even quite modest homes would own a computer, or at least a terminal, and it would be simply more convenient to apply the same system to everyday life than to demand anything more of the machine. Well, it's true that quite modest homes own computers, and microwave ovens, too. But I wonder out loud how many of you could read an 80-column card, or for that matter have used binary arithmetic outside of technical life. (Note: Playing NIM as a sucker bet doesn't count.) Truth is, the history of computing since that time has been one of progressively increasing "user-friendliness"--we don't have to (personally enter the source code for every program we want to use, struggle with huge decks of potentially slippery cards, worry about paper tape chad, deal with large rolls of newsprint, keep our silicon friends--and ourselves-- in large glass climate-controlled boxes in order to work, READ TYPE THAT LOOKS LIKE THIS, etc.) The fact that the Palm only reads Graffiti isn't so much a experienced butler's demand from an aquiescing employer as it is the pleading of a newly hired counterman at Mickey D's to please, please, decide what you want before ordering, and to do so in English. Experience will come in time, and with it, a degree of sophistication. Till then, I suppose, we'll all be patiently having to explain that the Number 4 Supersize is a double quarter pounder with cheese, with large fries and drink.
In 1986 I met a shy, studious, man named Bill in San Francisco (both he and I were down on business) and spent a pleasant evening in his company doing...um, whatever 2 nice young single professionals do together on off hours. In 1997, I filed into a hot, muggy, auditorium in Boston to hear another man speak, with whom I had had a short, but meaningful correspondence.
Whoever those people were trying to portray were not these two men. Nowhere did I see any evidence that either one of them was intelligent, charismatic, or charming beyond what we are told by the narrators. There was no defining point in which we see that Jobs could distort reality (I felt triumphant and almost personally complimented as I walked out of the auditorium) or that Gates could use his gamesmanship (awkward he was, yes, but he played that as a *strength* -- it connotes honesty) to achieve their goals. Instead we're given The Hippie Nerd and The Nebbish Nerd: Evil Steve, powerhungry and cruel, versus Luckless Bill, striking out with women and hanging out with the boys in between speeding, ogling strippers, and fooling with computers. Nowhere do we see that there is any other computer industry other than these two guys and the older mainframe companies they used as stepping stones, even the music seemed irrelevant (this takes place 1976-84, but the music was a potpourri of general "counterculture" standards--where is Dylan (Jobs's favorite), Pink Floyd (Gates's favorite), or the music from the US festivals? Or MTV techno-pop?). In this world, video games don't exist, no one ever got an Apple II under the Christmas tree, and Jobs and Woz weren't married. The gestation of Lisa seemed to take an eon, and Gates has the quietest rises to power ever-- first you see them toiling in a cheezy motel room and then -- poof! they're millionaires. As my friend kept reassuring me, this won't be the last movie to come out of this. I certainly hope so.
A few facts: Jobs has stated that he wants Pixar to be as big as, and independant from, Disney, with all the trimmings (theme parks, games, TV, toys, music, etc.) The Pixar/Disney deal is merely a marriage of convenience until Pixar gets known and established enough to be independantly distributed. Meanwhile Dreamworks is chafing under M$'s rule, and Katzenberg (late of Disney) is full of rancor for his old employer. Jobs is still a friend of his fellow farm-boy, George Lucas, who has just launched one of the most profitable films in history. With a few small stretches, this looks extremely promising for animation. Dreamworks kicks out Gates, reforms around Spielburg and Geffen. Spielburg and Lucas hire Katzenburg, lure Jobs over to their side of the Force, bringing Pixar over. Together they buy Apple, meaning that they not only have control over the whole means of producing movies, but even the computers used to produce the special effects, the game software, the light shows at the new Pixar theme park, etc. Disney finds itself up against a studio that makes FAR better movies than Prince of Egypt, and the Cosmic Balance is restored. AMEN! and pass the popcorn.
It seems as if Katz has a definite blind spot regarding recent history: he has (incorrectly) regarded Bill Gates as a celebrity of the 80's who seized upon the Internet, now he is downplaying Star Wars to a "sleeper film" that was "underpublicized" because there was no World Wide Web in which to spread the word. The fact that he isn't twenty years old makes this more shocking. OK, well, let's see: as I recall, I didn't see Star Wars at first since I thought it was overhyped, and I don't think that the Web is (yet) so big of a Force in peoples' lives that they won't hear about something without it. In 1977, Lucas had already scored big with a little film called "American Graffiti", which begat a short-lived;-) dead-end;;-)) series on TV called "Happy Days". Spielburg had already done another "sleeper" (athem) about some sashimi odori called "Jaws" that in my school, was *the* movie to avoid (no lie) for being a "typically overhyped piece of studio and commercial manipulation". So when everyone started *raving* about a film that seemed to have nothing going for it but some special effects and a heroine who didn't act like a damsel in distress, I held off. And held off. It stayed in the theaters for about a year. (Really, it did.) Some people saw it a dozen and more times. Breaking down, I finally saw it...and was conquered. No, it's not deep. No, it doesn't really do much more than rehash classic space opera in a new, jazzy, package with some added new twists. BUT, nothing else looked like it, not even 2001. After years of "normal" looking folks bumbling around with cloudy intentions in movies, these people looked and behaved like Gods and Goddesses (even the aliens and droids). The sets avoided sterotyped Art Decoish sets and the "too new" look of whiz-bang SF (or most film and TV, for that matter) for a grungy universe where there was dust and dirt everywhere, where things seemed to have a past, a present, and a future, and most of the aliens, sets and costumes looked like nothing anyone had ever seen before. Never mind it had ships making noise in space. It was a feast! It was also the first film, I think, that engendered a lifestyle. Previous to this, there had been great films (Gone With The Wind), endlessly repeated films (Wizard of OZ), and even revered films (Citizen Kane), but no one ever dressed up as Charles Foster Kane for anything but a Guess Who I Am? costume party, or quoted whole scenes from OZ from memory, or took bits and pieces of Gone With The Wind out of context as being Guiding Philosophies in Life. (To do so would have seemed like writing Dr. Kildare for advice about a suspected cancer.) Within a year, however, Princess Leia wigs were a huge seller, earth-toned tunics-and-leggings-with-boots became an instant fashion classic, people quoted the dialog verbatim at the drop of a hat, and ministers in the pulpit spoke approvingly of Obi-Wan's guidance and wisdom. It engendered books, cartoons, radio drama, comics, arcade games, board games, and made George Lucas rich beyond all dreams of old Hollywood. That said,its not at all surprising Joseph Campbell spoke of it : it's like hearing a middle-aged English prof quote Madonna. As for its philosophy, it seems like nothing more than recycled Zen Buddhism and Christianized Tao, with a lick of hippie portentiousness thrown in (Lucas has said that he first contacted the Force while convalescing from a concussion.) To say that its message is that "technology cannot solve our problems" is like saying that Dorothy learned nothing from her experience/dream but the futility of trying to move out of Kansas: here Campbell seems to be cleaving to the time-honored aristocratic/intellectual tradition of denigrating the New (with its confusing machinery) in favor of the Old (which left such matters to the servants, dahling) while the real issue is something like "your instincts can work more adaptably than logic" (If he'd really wanted Luke to abandon technology, then why didn't he have Luke fight with an actual sword, instead of some glorified flashlight?) While left brained logic was a specialty of the computation of 1977, right brained functions (or simulations thereof) are the new frontier of the 90's. That said, I wonder how Campbell would have responded to my news and sales agents being able to pick out what I might like as well as an old-time sales clerk, or to computer-generated animations that indistinguishably simulate the "organic" motion of a flock of birds, or a school of fish. It's also intreguing to note the values he assigns to the Bright and Dark sides of the Force. In 1977, it was still a given that heroic individuals = good, while society = bad. Nowadays, we would talk about Darth being a representative of an upstart authoritarian society that champions the selfish will to individual power (Darth's posture as he kneels to the Emperor looks anything but humble) while Luke is a rootless orphan who comes to realize the value of the continuity of tradition and of subduing his selfish wants and desires to a greater community. (That he also gets to run away from home, hang out with a pretty girl (before he knows this is incest), and have the cheers of a vast auditorium is immaterial.) Neither of these views is hard-and-fast reliable in my humble opinion: organic relations to one's homeland were one basis of Nazi philosophy, and remain a problem in Kosovo right now, while "heroic" Bill Gates (who defied his competators, his old boss, and even the United States Government) is now pitted against the "beaurocratic" and "collectivist" Linux community, with its operating system that was based on something from AT&T, for krissake! Unlike THX 1138, Star Wars was an effort that required lots of teamwork and lots of individual vision, and I don't think that the prequel is going to be any less awesome for that. Damn, I wasn't going to write this much. sorry.
Re:Hype! I bought Jar Jar boxer shorts already.
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More Star Wars Hype
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Yes! Those shoulders, that insouciant posture, those ears...I would commit rithsharsha (sp?) with this being....
People like me? Feminist logic? Right because I say it is? Mentally deficient? Ethically suspect? Pissing on his grave?(Who's slinging mud, now?) Did you even ever read the last paragraph? Yeah, he wrote fairy tales about fucking, which I like better than this book. I'm not trashing him so much as a blind sheepishness among Baby-Boom parents (and their kids) that this book is sacred, while it's based on an attitude that society now disagrees with. It's a good book, it's just not a kid's book anymore. There are lots of kid's books that fit that description
Gee...Look, I was only trying to voice a different opinion (which wasn't even mine at the outset) of what is becoming to me, a rather tiresome book. I'm glad you don't "need" feminism--it's one measure of our success. I'm sure that you probably don't think of being able to work and have your own money before, after, and during marriage as a feminist triumph, or not having to live with your parents or in a women's residence (with a dress code, a strict curfew, and NO males let upstairs) after college and before marriage, or being able to wear anything from ripped jeans to a Goth gown as anything but an inevitable product of modern times. I'm sorry that you see the feminist side of things as being so thoroughly negative: goodness knows that I've been inclined to regard their cause as a form of "victim chic", where a memory of a chance encounter with a pin-up picture is the same as being painfully raped. There is not one feminist movement, but feminisms, and every single one of the negative issues you've discussed has been promoted by some feminists, and decried by others. You clearly need to find some other way to find men than work--the kind of regulations you discuss are as much an institutionalization of pre-feminist chivalry as a response to a bunch of whiners. Women's medical issues are very much in the feminist platform, and the problems that you talk about your mother having are now a very hot (flash) issue.
Think about this: would you feel the same way if you were told, endlessly, in college that your whole mental well-being depended on your function as a source of male pleasure, housewifery, and motherhood? That doing engineering was equivalent to impugning your future husband's manhood? That even using your left brain that much is an invitation to sexual dysfunctions, including lesbianism? That should give in to any man who asks you to have sex, no matter how he feels about you, because otherwise you are sick and neurotic? That you can and should bow to any demands put upon you by your sons, lest they grow up homosexual, stunted in social development, or schizophrenic? This was the reality of most women in 1962, when the book was written. PLAYBOY at that time had a damned if you do, damned if you don't attitude toward women: if they didn't sleep around, they were prudes and should be avoided, if they did, they were cheap trash that could be discarded at whim. Later, they got wise, and actually supported the Equal Rights Amendment, among other issues geared towards realizing that the person on the taking end of the penis is human, too.
I simply don't get warm fuzzies over Uncle Shel as the author of this book. As I've abundantly made clear, I respect his work for other things. I kind of liked some of his other books for children. He's a good satirist, and a very good artist. For crying out loud, you're young enough to be my kids, most of you! Can't an old lady have her own point of view?
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Namely, "The Diamond as Big as The Ritz", his sole (and perhaps unwitting contribution to SF.) In it, a family lives in decadent seclusion in a wildly furnished mansion in Idaho, squarely settled on a gigantic diamond the size of a small hill. The plot is standard Fitzgerald: nice young man of the Gilded Age is horrified by the actions of his "betters", but the idea of the hill-sized diamond is worked out expertly, except the geological freak that produced it. Now, maybe it was an asteroid?
"Dead", "died", is proper, dignified, and accurate. "Passed (away, on, or ?)" without an implied religious agenda is an American vulgarism that, frankly, makes me queasy: "He passed" makes me think of gas building up in a corpse (at worst), and the co-option of yet another part of living as a wholly gratuitous symbol of mourning (quilts, stuffed animals, sunglasses, etc.) at best. Can we now "celebrate a life" without the person being dead?
Ms. Bradley is dead, as is Jon Postel, but we'd never know from the news....
Guys....when the Christian Science Monitor coined the expression, they didn't think that "dead" was "too harsh", they meant that souls "pass on" to somewhere else. The lady (in every way but the Peerage) is dead. Unless you can prove her to be of strong religious convictions otherwise, I would rather that you be proper, instead of euphemistic.
He didn't want to be Scrooge, but aced it anyway. "I played him as the lonliest man in the world." he said, and managed to go through an entire spectrum of emotion in two hours. From his solitary Christmas eve meal (of Scotch oatmeal, very much in period) to cowering in fear at the thought of his own demise, to hoisting Tiny Tim aloft in wild manic glee, he made you BELIEVE the story, so much so that I kept saying "This is modern. This is not Dickens at all. The scriptwriters must have tossed this or that in for TV." Nope. I wanted to break my own nose. And I'm a girl.
As a going-away present to a friend of mine who liked conspiracies, but never had a chance to play the game. Is there no Dog?
Sorry. It's correct. Doubly so if you're American.
It's the sexiest math book ever written. Really! The two characters, Alice and Bill get it on like crazed weasels every other chapter! But what can you expect of a man whose canonical photograph shows off his enormous organ?
Having started out in ye hoary old PDP days, I find the concept of "computer literacy", as implemented in most school systems, to be the lamest! Mostly, it's been a sop thrown to parents who've already been pressured by computer salesmen to put their newborns in front of the sanctified glow of a Wintel since it's axiomatic that "you need to get them started early, or they won't do well in school." In turn, the school systems turn around and make impressive-sounding pronouncements that "computer literacy" is essential for the job market and computer-trained workers are necessary to make America competitive in the world marketplace. You don't want your kids to have to become servants to the slant-eyed Japs, now, right, moms & dads? Damn straight! (unfurl American flag, show WWII newsreel) Meanwhile, what is it that they're learning? Well, mostly, they go to a "computer room" for an hour or so every week to fiddle around with educational games, perhaps participating in a class project where they get to use the exciting Internet! and send email!! Do they learn such real-world job-market skills as spreadsheet macros or database design? Well...no...I mean, they're only kids, it's more important thay they have fun, right? And look at how much fun they're having -- we're making a web page about the rainforest next week! Oh, so they're learning HTML and Javascript? Well, no, we're using this software...frankly, it's enough work having to wade through their Math essays much less having to learn something like that for just one page. For the whole class? Well...it's not all that good for kids to do individual work...it divides kids and makes the slower kids feel real bad about themselves so we don't do that kind of thing here. So this is kind of like letting them watch TV for an hour, right? Sure, if you put it that way...(giggle)...it's a real help to me, almost like an hour off... Programming might introduce, stealthily, such lost arts as spelling, grammar, logical structure, mathematical rigor, individuality, and creativity. I'm all for it. However, I don't think most Dales (teaching jargon for "good enough" teachers) will have the time, patience, or left-brainedness to learn coding themselves. Old-timers may remember New Math. Nuff said.
My grandmother, who I loved dearly, is dead. My kitten died, and I was upset, but hardly less so upon reading her autopsy. I do not think that many others will be torn apart by reading the word "dead". It's sweet to think that his widow will be consoled by everyone around her telling her (metaphorically) that "he's not really dead, simply gone to some other place" when that may not be her beliefs at all.
I second the motion. "X is dead." is clear and concise. "X has passed (away, on, or simply "passed")" has unfortunate resonances with passing the bar, passing a test, and passing gas. "We lost him." suggests he should be found. However, one can say (at least around me) "the passing of an era" (time passes) or "community mourns loss of a leader" (who might not be dead, but retired, incapacitated, or simply not leaderly any more. Rob, DO something.
I watched the eclipse on the asahi site, and for my money, the best view was in Austria...Since eclipses are something like the Kentucky Derby...several hours of build-up, two minutes of glory, I fired up my UNIX box next to the iMac and played Paranoia while waiting. I was rewarded by a view of the last sliver of sun disappearing...a suspicion of a lunar mountain...and then... Glory. The solar corona must have been especially active. Beads of reddish light, the only thing missing was abberant starlight. Fantastic. It took two whole minutes, then a brilliant burst of pure SUN ....Watched the rest of the spots...Hungary, Roumania...Iran was a wash, the connection kept dropping... It suddenly hit me...no sound. Wish I had had the Eclipse music from "Einstein on the Beach", the Eclipse music from Farinelli, or even a good percussion section...gotta scare that dragon away... But a cosmic event nonetheless. (BTW, I'm first!!!)
In other words, if it's all sweetness and light, why do you have this compulsion to prefix the word "Shadow" to everything? Celebrate the Eve of All Saints' Day (OK, Halloween, er, Samhain...) when it's dank and dark? The Goddess was a hot babe when I knew her, now she's the Drama Queen of Guilt. And where is the Horned God when we need him? While girls are still swooning over Lestat, the group that should be giving them support is counselling a new chastity, where it's a source of pride to be a lesbian, and a shame to be in love with a Man.
Witches have given themselves a wussy stereotype that has little to do with real, Dionysian paganism, and everything to do with trying to return to the prissy narrowmindedness of The Little Church on The Corner...on their own terms, of course.
At the same time, fifteen minutes a day of computer participation, started as soon as it comes home from the hospital, is strongly recommended to all parents...Increase computer time to two hours by eighteen months, and to four hours by school age. (Tip: Leather straps are a good way to ward off "fidgets", and a dandy way to get Mom some "time off"!) Naturally, it's a given that you'll want the very NEWEST hardware for this...step right this way...
What? You don't like it?? You wonder how they're going to socialize, excercise, even go outdoors now and then?? Why, don't you know that it's IMPERATIVE that ALL children be taught "computer literacy", especially as it refers to the "information superhighway", to insure employability as we build a "bridge to the twenty-first century", and make the United States competetive in the "world marketplace"...
Yawn. I'm kind of sick of hearing how "kids" are the focus of computing -- children needing computers, being wizards with computers, misbehaving with computers, being threatened by computers, being taught by computers...Fact is, I'd really like to take computers out of schools...I'd like to see more cybercafes, more arcades with computers, more computers at home (preferably in the living room) where everyone can use them. Instead of cities and towns paying twice over to have state-of-the-art hardware K-12 (that are totally unused at night, on weekends, and during the summer) and overbooked terminals in public libraries, I'd rather have them put them all in one place, where retirees, jobseekers, and the curious of all kinds can learn from them.
"Computer literacy" is a joke, similar to the "New Math" -- in the hands of someone like Wozniak, you can teach 10 year olds to do something more than pointing and clicking (anyone remember Logo? BASIC?) with "educational" software little better than bad video games -- but most teachers either don't know or don't want to learn. Meanwhile, most parents who don't use computers at work (and a considerable number who do) consider their home WinTel boxes to be little more than electronic babysitters -- in my experience teaching adult computer literacy, the continual refrain is that "it's something kids do -- they're naturally better at it than I am, I'm too old, I can't learn..." -- with the result that the family computer is in the oldest son's room, regarded with holy dread by the parents and womenfolk, while he's pretty much stuck in there. Is it any wonder that he's checking out www.youngest.com, www.kkk.org, and the like? It's the only thing he can do, and all we've left to him...Sorry to ramble, but come on, Bill, will you please make up your mind?
Anyway, there's a "Dylan/Eric fan club" on Yahoo! that is very much like this site...
1) His eyes and tongue, and some teeth, if I recollect rightly. The fact that you can still hear him scream coherently makes me think he's already dead, and leading them on. 2) He's bewitched. 3) It seems to refer to the "Wicker Man", a Celtic custom of making a huge basket and setting it aflame with a man inside. They also suggest crucifixes, with their implied flavor of sacrifice, etc. A major point is that this isn't what's expected of witches-as-peaceful-nature-worshippers, instead this is ...something else.
Well, I was speaking in a traditional sense. However, *some* Buddhists have a pantheon, some do not. It is not true, I would submit, that all "pagans" follow the creed of Celtic Wicca. Thank you for the clarification.
Druidism died out about a thousand years ago, and was revived somewhere in the last century as a romantic bit of British nationalism. It was only one stratum of historic British faith, which includes Norse, Teutonic, and Roman beliefs, and various forms of Christianity from the Roman era on.
"Witchcraft", historically, was defined as the practises of baptised and confirmed Christians who had turned against their faith, which usually involved malicious pranks, poisoning family members, promiscuous sex, and worshipping the Devil. Their purported spellbooks called "grimoires", or grammars, are an interesting hodgepodge of Latin-like gibberish, borrowings from the Cabbala, folk charms of love, prosperity, and revenge, and (sometimes) home remedies more fanciful than practical. There is no mention in them of anything that could be construed as an organized system of beliefs, no Gaelic holidays, nor any deities outside the Christian pantheon of angels/demons.
"Wicca" is a purely 20th century phenomenon, which was largely invented in the 1940's by Gerald Gardner (with help from Aleister Crowley) who claimed that his "Book of Shadows" (cobbled together from Greek, Egyptian, and Masonic sources) came from a woman named Dorothy Clutterbuck, whose coven had kept an unbroken chain of belief from the Paleolithic times onward. Since then, his ideas have undergone several layers of revision, the most important of which was the shift in focus from the Horned God (concieved as a phallic hunting deity, similar to Pan) to the Green Goddess (originally a sex/fertility goddess but now concieved as a Virgin Mary-like figure -- celibately parthenogenic and a "wounded healer".) As practised now, it bears no likeness to any historic or anthropologically recognized strain of nature worship: while "native" animism is usually concerned with bribing, tricking, or placating a variety of gods whose nature is capricious at best, Wicca's response to its near-monotheistic Goddess is more akin to pity.
"True" Wicca is neither dark nor mysterious, yes: if you consider the current version to be the true one. Mostly, it's largely indistinguishable from most liberal Christianity: their ideals are to hold services, be nice, and feel guilty about the environment. Since the heyday of witchcraft in the late 60's and 70's as an excuse (by lapsed Christian young folks toying with blasphemy) to celebrate Halloween and full moons (by getting nekkid, high/drunk, and screwing to loud music) Wicca has been reborn as an excuse (by lapsed middle-aged Christians toying with going back to church, on their own terms, of course) to celebrate Halloween, Christmas, and May Day (by holding ersatz group therapy meetings with the a few Renaissance Faire trappings thrown in). While most Christians will readily own that there have been other members of their faith that have been less than nice people, Wiccans will become enraged at the mere suggestion that any of the historical witches hurt so much as a feeling.
Part of the story hinges on just such a sentimental view of nature worship, and of nature itself. When the kids go to the woman in the trailer park, they are most certainly meeting someone who would have been called a witch in the day: she's old, lives alone, comes on as more than a little schizzy, and surrounds herself with a grab-bag of patriotic and religious symbols (a flag, a Bible, a rosary...) that are most probably not being given their usual meanings. (She also has a gate of bound-together twigs, similar in technique to the effigies found in the woods, and spoke at length of stones as well. Hmm..) Heather doesn't recognize this: apparently, the old woman wasn't up enough on modern witchcraft to invite her in for a nice hot cup of estrogen analogues and a chat about the latest developments in eco-feminism. The dolls and rockpiles would be perfectly understandable to many animists throughout history, and even a few modern ones: these kids are going to be sacrificed to propitiate the gods angered by their profane intrusion on sacred ground. (Their verbal profanities probably were the deciding factor: you just don't swear in church.) If this sounds a far cry from the activities of your local Spiral Dance Drum Circle, it should: as I alluded before, most real nature gods (including fairies) are petty, vain, tricky, capricious, and mostly, downright nasty.
As it befits them. As we see in the film, nature is not, as we like to think, a gentle, caring, mother: she's more like a drunk housewife with PMS. It's dark after the sun goes down. It's cold. There's little food readily available, it's dirty, and you may have to get your feet wet. There aren't even any cigarette machines! When I think about how many Gen X'ers I've met who claim that they would like to go off and live "in nature", implying that all that's involved is a couple of purchases at the local trendy wilderness gear shop (campfire espresso pot, anyone?), I think about Heather's speech before the flashlight. It took only a week to turn a post-modern womyn, well-schooled in every stereotype of the nature-worshipping witch and nurturing Earth Mother, into a weeping, remorseful wreck. I don't think that's anything you can find in Starhawk.
It's kind of ironic that this man believes that Graffiti represents some kind of milestone in human slavishness towards computers. As a kid in the 1960's, I used to watch endless This Is Your Future documentaries, all which assumed that the crooked looking alphanumerics that you see on the bottom of your personal checks were going to be how all printed media was going to look....about the year 2000. While "computer literacy" (for want of a better, less anachronistic, term) was trumpeted as the greatest thing since sliced bread, the specifics usually boiled down to learning to read the patterns of punched cards, which, along with the binary system, would slowly render our fusty old Roman alphabet and decimal arithmetic obsolete.This would be necessary, since even quite modest homes would own a computer, or at least a terminal, and it would be simply more convenient to apply the same system to everyday life than to demand anything more of the machine.
Well, it's true that quite modest homes own computers, and microwave ovens, too. But I wonder out loud how many of you could read an 80-column card, or for that matter have used binary arithmetic outside of technical life. (Note: Playing NIM as a sucker bet doesn't count.) Truth is, the history of computing since that time has been one of progressively increasing "user-friendliness"--we don't have to (personally enter the source code for every program we want to use, struggle with huge decks of potentially slippery cards, worry about paper tape chad, deal with large rolls of newsprint, keep our silicon friends--and ourselves-- in large glass climate-controlled boxes in order to work, READ TYPE THAT LOOKS LIKE THIS, etc.) The fact that the Palm only reads Graffiti isn't so much a experienced butler's demand from an aquiescing employer as it is the pleading of a newly hired counterman at Mickey D's to please, please, decide what you want before ordering, and to do so in English. Experience will come in time, and with it, a degree of sophistication. Till then, I suppose, we'll all be patiently having to explain that the Number 4 Supersize is a double quarter pounder with cheese, with large fries and drink.
In 1986 I met a shy, studious, man named Bill in San Francisco (both he and I were down on business) and spent a pleasant evening in his company doing...um, whatever 2 nice young single professionals do together on off hours. In 1997, I filed into a hot, muggy, auditorium in Boston to hear another man speak, with whom I had had a short, but meaningful correspondence.
Whoever those people were trying to portray were not these two men. Nowhere did I see any evidence that either one of them was intelligent, charismatic, or charming beyond what we are told by the narrators. There was no defining point in which we see that Jobs could distort reality (I felt triumphant and almost personally complimented as I walked out of the auditorium) or that Gates could use his gamesmanship (awkward he was, yes, but he played that as a *strength* -- it connotes honesty) to achieve their goals. Instead we're given The Hippie Nerd and The Nebbish Nerd: Evil Steve, powerhungry and cruel, versus Luckless Bill, striking out with women and hanging out with the boys in between speeding, ogling strippers, and fooling with computers. Nowhere do we see that there is any other computer industry other than these two guys and the older mainframe companies they used as stepping stones, even the music seemed irrelevant (this takes place 1976-84, but the music was a potpourri of general "counterculture" standards--where is Dylan (Jobs's favorite), Pink Floyd (Gates's favorite), or the music from the US festivals? Or MTV techno-pop?). In this world, video games don't exist, no one ever got an Apple II under the Christmas tree, and Jobs and Woz weren't married. The gestation of Lisa seemed to take an eon, and Gates has the quietest rises to power ever-- first you see them toiling in a cheezy motel room and then -- poof! they're millionaires.
As my friend kept reassuring me, this won't be the last movie to come out of this. I certainly hope so.
A few facts: Jobs has stated that he wants Pixar to be as big as, and independant from, Disney, with all the trimmings (theme parks, games, TV, toys, music, etc.) The Pixar/Disney deal is merely a marriage of convenience until Pixar gets known and established enough to be independantly distributed.
Meanwhile Dreamworks is chafing under M$'s rule, and Katzenberg (late of Disney) is full of rancor for his old employer.
Jobs is still a friend of his fellow farm-boy, George Lucas, who has just launched one of the most profitable films in history.
With a few small stretches, this looks extremely promising for animation. Dreamworks kicks out Gates, reforms around Spielburg and Geffen. Spielburg and Lucas hire Katzenburg, lure Jobs over to their side of the Force, bringing Pixar over. Together they buy Apple, meaning that they not only have control over the whole means of producing movies, but even the computers used to produce the special effects, the game software, the light shows at the new Pixar theme park, etc. Disney finds itself up against a studio that makes FAR better movies than Prince of Egypt, and the Cosmic Balance is restored.
AMEN! and pass the popcorn.
...up until a few years ago, I heard rumors of people using old PDP's now and then. Wish I had a 10...or merely an emulator that worked for Macs.
It seems as if Katz has a definite blind spot regarding recent history: he has (incorrectly) regarded Bill Gates as a celebrity of the 80's who seized upon the Internet, now he is downplaying Star Wars to a "sleeper film" that was "underpublicized" because there was no World Wide Web in which to spread the word. The fact that he isn't twenty years old makes this more shocking. ;-) dead-end ;;-)) series on TV called "Happy Days". Spielburg had already done another "sleeper" (athem) about some sashimi odori called "Jaws" that in my school, was *the* movie to avoid (no lie) for being a "typically overhyped piece of studio and commercial manipulation". So when everyone started *raving* about a film that seemed to have nothing going for it but some special effects and a heroine who didn't act like a damsel in distress, I held off. And held off. It stayed in the theaters for about a year. (Really, it did.) Some people saw it a dozen and more times.
OK, well, let's see: as I recall, I didn't see Star Wars at first since I thought it was overhyped, and I don't think that the Web is (yet) so big of a Force in peoples' lives that they won't hear about something without it. In 1977, Lucas had already scored big with a little film called "American Graffiti", which begat a short-lived
Breaking down, I finally saw it...and was conquered. No, it's not deep. No, it doesn't really do much more than rehash classic space opera in a new, jazzy, package with some added new twists. BUT, nothing else looked like it, not even 2001. After years of "normal" looking folks bumbling around with cloudy intentions in movies, these people looked and behaved like Gods and Goddesses (even the aliens and droids). The sets avoided sterotyped Art Decoish sets and the "too new" look of whiz-bang SF (or most film and TV, for that matter) for a grungy universe where there was dust and dirt everywhere, where things seemed to have a past, a present, and a future, and most of the aliens, sets and costumes looked like nothing anyone had ever seen before. Never mind it had ships making noise in space. It was a feast!
It was also the first film, I think, that engendered a lifestyle. Previous to this, there had been great films (Gone With The Wind), endlessly repeated films (Wizard of OZ), and even revered films (Citizen Kane), but no one ever dressed up as Charles Foster Kane for anything but a Guess Who I Am? costume party, or quoted whole scenes from OZ from memory, or took bits and pieces of Gone With The Wind out of context as being Guiding Philosophies in Life. (To do so would have seemed like writing Dr. Kildare for advice about a suspected cancer.) Within a year, however, Princess Leia wigs were a huge seller, earth-toned tunics-and-leggings-with-boots became an instant fashion classic, people quoted the dialog verbatim at the drop of a hat, and ministers in the pulpit spoke approvingly of Obi-Wan's guidance and wisdom. It engendered books, cartoons, radio drama, comics, arcade games, board games, and made George Lucas rich beyond all dreams of old Hollywood.
That said,its not at all surprising Joseph Campbell spoke of it : it's like hearing a middle-aged English prof quote Madonna. As for its philosophy, it seems like nothing more than recycled Zen Buddhism and Christianized Tao, with a lick of hippie portentiousness thrown in (Lucas has said that he first contacted the Force while convalescing from a concussion.) To say that its message is that "technology cannot solve our problems" is like saying that Dorothy learned nothing from her experience/dream but the futility of trying to move out of Kansas: here Campbell seems to be cleaving to the time-honored aristocratic/intellectual tradition of denigrating the New (with its confusing machinery) in favor of the Old (which left such matters to the servants, dahling) while the real issue is something like "your instincts can work more adaptably than logic" (If he'd really wanted Luke to abandon technology, then why didn't he have Luke fight with an actual sword, instead of some glorified flashlight?) While left brained logic was a specialty of the computation of 1977, right brained functions (or simulations thereof) are the new frontier of the 90's. That said, I wonder how Campbell would have responded to my news and sales agents being able to pick out what I might like as well as an old-time sales clerk, or to computer-generated animations that indistinguishably simulate the "organic" motion of a flock of birds, or a school of fish.
It's also intreguing to note the values he assigns to the Bright and Dark sides of the Force. In 1977, it was still a given that heroic individuals = good, while society = bad. Nowadays, we would talk about Darth being a representative of an upstart authoritarian society that champions the selfish will to individual power (Darth's posture as he kneels to the Emperor looks anything but humble) while Luke is a rootless orphan who comes to realize the value of the continuity of tradition and of subduing his selfish wants and desires to a greater community. (That he also gets to run away from home, hang out with a pretty girl (before he knows this is incest), and have the cheers of a vast auditorium is immaterial.) Neither of these views is hard-and-fast reliable in my humble opinion: organic relations to one's homeland were one basis of Nazi philosophy, and remain a problem in Kosovo right now, while "heroic" Bill Gates (who defied his competators, his old boss, and even the United States Government) is now pitted against the "beaurocratic" and "collectivist" Linux community, with its operating system that was based on something from AT&T, for krissake! Unlike THX 1138, Star Wars was an effort that required lots of teamwork and lots of individual vision, and I don't think that the prequel is going to be any less awesome for that.
Damn, I wasn't going to write this much. sorry.
Yes! Those shoulders, that insouciant posture, those ears...I would commit rithsharsha (sp?) with this being....
Gee...Look, I was only trying to voice a different opinion (which wasn't even mine at the outset) of what is becoming to me, a rather tiresome book. I'm glad you don't "need" feminism--it's one measure of our success. I'm sure that you probably don't think of being able to work and have your own money before, after, and during marriage as a feminist triumph, or not having to live with your parents or in a women's residence (with a dress code, a strict curfew, and NO males let upstairs) after college and before marriage, or being able to wear anything from ripped jeans to a Goth gown as anything but an inevitable product of modern times. I'm sorry that you see the feminist side of things as being so thoroughly negative: goodness knows that I've been inclined to regard their cause as a form of "victim chic", where a memory of a chance encounter with a pin-up picture is the same as being painfully raped. There is not one feminist movement, but feminisms, and every single one of the negative issues you've discussed has been promoted by some feminists, and decried by others. You clearly need to find some other way to find men than work--the kind of regulations you discuss are as much an institutionalization of pre-feminist chivalry as a response to a bunch of whiners. Women's medical issues are very much in the feminist platform, and the problems that you talk about your mother having are now a very hot (flash) issue.
Think about this: would you feel the same way if you were told, endlessly, in college that your whole mental well-being depended on your function as a source of male pleasure, housewifery, and motherhood? That doing engineering was equivalent to impugning your future husband's manhood? That even using your left brain that much is an invitation to sexual dysfunctions, including lesbianism? That should give in to any man who asks you to have sex, no matter how he feels about you, because otherwise you are sick and neurotic? That you can and should bow to any demands put upon you by your sons, lest they grow up homosexual, stunted in social development, or schizophrenic? This was the reality of most women in 1962, when the book was written. PLAYBOY at that time had a damned if you do, damned if you don't attitude toward women: if they didn't sleep around, they were prudes and should be avoided, if they did, they were cheap trash that could be discarded at whim. Later, they got wise, and actually supported the Equal Rights Amendment, among other issues geared towards realizing that the person on the taking end of the penis is human, too.
I simply don't get warm fuzzies over Uncle Shel as the author of this book. As I've abundantly made clear, I respect his work for other things. I kind of liked some of his other books for children. He's a good satirist, and a very good artist. For crying out loud, you're young enough to be my kids, most of you! Can't an old lady have her own point of view?
Thanks for seeing that. So many people do not.