Ah, not to speak evil of the dead, buuuutttt....
on
Shel Silverstein Dies
·
· Score: 3
...he probably died after reading a recent rereview of "The Giving Tree", which was called "the most overrated children's book of the 20th century". The gist of it was that the boy gets older, but never does anything to appreciate the tree: he simply consumes it in stages until it's nothing but a dead stump. The tree, on the other hand, is called "she" and willingly gives up each and every bit of itself -- the boy is happy, the tree is content. This is supposed to sound noble: such self-sacrifice! She's a perfect mother!
However, it's not so nice when you consider this to be a model of male/female relationships. The tree doesn't have a life of her own, doesn't have much choice over whether she gets carved into or cut down, and even gets neglected for long periods of time while the boy is off "in foreign lands" or wooing a human female: somehow, I can see him telling his wife that he needs to be seeing a younger, prettier, woman, no offence, hon, understand? It's just that he needs someone that will get him over this little problem he's been having in bed... He'll come back, promise!...Meanwhile, he needs your bank account, continued housekeeping and, um, iron my shirts without starch, eh? See you at dinner tonight, six, have it on the table... RIGHT. Or telling that younger woman, sorry honey, gotta dump you, I'm married, and geez, if it weren't for that no-fault divorce law, I'd of paid for that abortion, understand? Uh-huh....Or telling a psychiatrist "You know, all my problems come from having to cater to women all the time, you know my mother never really loved me...Understand?"
Somehow, it's the kind of thing I'd expect from a staff cartoonist for Playboy (which he was) written at the height of the feminine mystique (which it was). Can't really hate him, his adult work was so appealing. Love him, hate him. Bye-bye Shel. Pinch an angel's butt for me.
Let's see...if you'd read my profile, you'd see that I am a) female, b)have been a nerd since the cradle, and c)fairly feminine. I'm fat now, but wasn't then. I didn't date at all in high school....does that make me an "ugly fat chick"? (Interesting how those words all fit together, these days...) Coward, I'd love to know how I could have survived without a "crutch" like feminism...if I'd been born a few years earlier, I would have thought that the highest thing I could aspire to in the field of office work was to type and file for the menfolks while spending 3/4ths of my salary on looking as if I'm looking for a quick fuck on the reception room couch...Don't look at me, that's what I was more-or-less told when I looked into "business school" after high school. My father, who worked for the local telco did everything to discourage me, and my mom was one of those "Maybe if you didn't think so much..." women.Meanwhile, in the Computer Lab I was surrounded by MEN! (yum.) and far more interesting things to think about than losing five pounds.
I didn't read (or have read to me) Silverstein as a child -- he was a bit after my time as a children's author first. I do remember him as a PLAYBOY cartoonist and staffer -- my favorite feature in my dad's magazine was how he (ugly fat dude) would go to some place (a nudist camp, a Californian experiment in instant consensual sex, a Caribbean resort famous for hot and cold running rum and pot) and report back just how life could be if lived to the hilt and with no inhibitions. Being a sex-positive type myself, I feel nothing but an amused fondness for that part of his career -- the fact that he wrote a book that sounds, on reflection, to sound like a child-version of one of his shamelessly self-indulgent fantasies I thought intersting enough to write about. I don't think it's at all "twisted" to point this out...
I'm not calling for censorship, just a reevaluation. Many kid's books from the era fall short of positive female images, but many (particularly those from the first half of the century) abound in them. Lots of kids' books get read for a while (even becoming wildly popular), and then get totally forgotten for various reasons ("Rabbit Hill", "Roller Skates", "The Singing Tree", and "You Will Go to the Moon" are some) without anyone issuing a specific ban on them: some are good, very good, some are not worth remembering, and some are just plain bad. "The Giving Tree", to me, just seems to be one of those books that deserves to be on the wane, for kids, at least.
Wonder what "Shel Silverstein Goes to Heaven" looks like?
...you were something like this? So much of what I've seen in the *nix community is like a pissing constest...you might not be bragging about rootshells or how 3133t3 you are, but that only means that the beam has been raised higher. I like the way the article points out that you tend to learn in this silly hobby, which is something you can't exactly say about being good at Quake. Yes, it's a waste of time, and bears the same relationship to real hacking that paint-by-number kits do to actual oil painting...but more people tend to go on to real hacking than advance in painting...it's just more fun that way!
...um, almost anything is better than the indiscriminate use of the word "galaxy" in SF (Prize example: Goddard's Alphaville, where Lemmy Caution tells someone that the "other galaxies" are reporting civil disturbances also. Must be some communicator he has there...)
As for "Terran", the wimps will probably change the name of our planet to the more ecological "Gaia", and we will be "Gaians", a name that doesn't exactly trip off the toungue. There's a transvestite warlock who uses that term 'round these parts...Not good to look at, but a militant feminist...
I'm with most of the people here in that I don't side with those who believe that the games do much harm. It does kind of disturb me that people think of "The Basketball Diaries" as being a movie only, when the book is so much more potent, and likely to (in certain cases) cause harm.
Most of these "my kid read comic books, let's ban Superman" lawsuits seem to revolve around situations where the parents really have no idea of what their kid is doing, other than holing up with a handful of idols drawn from media that they don't (or don't think it worth their while to) understand. Having had a set of nightmare parents myself, it's easy for me to see how his world might have shrunk into a tiny one of obsessive game-playing and fantasy violence where the hero emerges not a convict but a charismatic Wild Boy poet/counterculture hero, with scarred veins and a pure face, an archetype that a sensitive parent could well turn around into any number of productive role models, up to and including an interest in a real-life military career. (Hey, someone's got to do it.)
An insensitive parent only sees a retreat into what seems like trivialities, and shrugs off all this as being "what all kids do", maintaining that one day, he'll magically become a chip off the old block overnight. Until something like this happens. Then, with everyone saying "You idiots! Couldn't you see what they were doing?" every bit of their kid's environment becomes suspect: it must have been those video games. Or that terrible book, "The Sorrows of Young Werther" (the original Goth suicide novel) that all the young folk are reading. My, Doctor, if I'd only known...
...Bill Gates might get a sense of humor, Larry Ellison might appear in public with his fly open, and Eric Raymond might retire. OK, that's too strong....maybe cats might fly. Anyway, I wouldn't worry too much. True, the man has had a lot to do lately, taken WAY too much flack from the Linux "community" (which is beginning to resemble the Balkan situation) and is generally overtaxed on all fronts, but there's something about him that seems to tell me that he's actually ENJOYING all this, and would really want to do more, if everyone would stop throwing peanut shells at him. Point is, most of the people who enjoy flaming him can't write as clearly and entertainingly and inspiringly as he does, don't know as much about UNIX as he does, and can't program worth a lick, much less do what he does. True, he is an egomaniac and sometimes whitewashes things into unreality (reading "A Portrait of J. Random Hacker" in the Jargon file is sometimes painful in just how goody-two-shoes he makes us look -- lean, extreme-sports teetotalers who actually choose to live in tacky tract houses and crappy apartments) but gosh darn it, we don't have anyone else who could make Linux, or us, seem so appealing. (Steve Jobs, alas, is still at Apple.) So, calm down, put your eggs back in your Easter baskets, and let the dude be. You won't regret it.
First, most business-oriented people I talk to in the Real World don't care whether they have to spend $X to get a system running, don't care about the nobility of the FSF, and don't care that the end-user is happy or not (if they did, LinuxPPC would be hell on wheels). What they want is what all the other kids want: Microsoft.
Bill is the sort of guy they can relate to, or at least think they can relate to: a tough-as-nails, suit-wearing, golf-playing, short-haired WASP who looks good in annual reports, and clawed his way up from the bottom to make it to where he is. No one ever points out to them that he never wrote anything worthwhile, much less Windows, has almost no status (except as flamebait) in the hacker (in the RMS sense) community, and is probably given large doses of Valium before interviews so he doesn't start rocking, mumbling, or scratching himself. It's only Big Government who doesn't like him, (like the IRS, right?) and all the other guys really just wish they had that kind of money. (As if a couple more billion would buy Steve Jobs a better wardrobe, or Scott Mc Neely a nicer collar for Network, right?)
CNN caters to these people.
Linus and Richard and Eric are people they can't understand: they like working, for chrissake! So of course they're going to think, if it's free, it's not worth anything, and even if it was, it carries a hidden pricetag. The abovementioned aren't exactly starving: so they're doing it for the money, after all. They act like the hippies they stopped being fifteen years ago and dismissed as being incompetants: so of course anything they do is just MTV hype and hot air.
I'm glad I don't have to deal with them without a drink in my hand.
I must commend the policeman who reported his death. "Stanley Kubrick, I'm afraid to say, is dead. His family wished someone to report his death to the press." (Emphasis mine.) Now, how many times in the last few years have we heard "passed away" (a low-class euphemism, similar to "little girl's room" for Women's Lav) or "passed" (which sounds like he passed a stone, a test, or merely the Bar). A man is dead. We want to say so. Turning the event into a kind of nebulous "time to remember" (something like "...we are here to celebrate a life", right?) doesn't make up for the fact that we aren't going to ever see the remastered 2001. Damn, I'm gonna miss him.
I decided that the best use of my 6100 was to turn him (his name is Alan Turing) into a Linux box. Why? Well, 6100's are notoriously ssssslllooooowwwww, and have NuBus (a strange interior config) as well. They vie in general wonkyness with the iMac that replaced him. However, he does right dandy with a command-line interface, and can render KDE with exquisite color and graphics. As a matter of fact, after playing with the iMac running 8.5.1, I began to really crave Linux...
No, I'm talking about a very real and documented strain of thought at the time. In the late '50's, it was thought that religion = visionary experience = some kind of physiochemical imbalance brought on by chanting, fasting, drugs, or what have you. I'm not talking here about the class of drugs usually considered addictive, I tried to make it clear that LSD and the other psychedelics were meant. And what is religion but "following"? I'm not advocating religious fundamentalism here, nor do I believe that so-called "changeless" faiths are the answer. Judaism in particular has changed greatly over the years, Islam less so, but still has had to adapt to the wide variety of peoples it's attracted throughout the globe. I hope this will clear things up.
My feeling is that religion has been mostly a "do-it-yourself" proposition ever since the late 50's. At that time, most organized religions, even everyone's favorite whipping boy, the Catholics, were trying valiantly to deal with the modern age. (Anyone remember Vatican II? Come on, someone's grandparents could tell you...) Folk-rock services, the reintroduction of sacred dance, updated sermons, all of these were tried. And failed.
Real religion was to be found in a pill.
LSD, mushrooms, or even just plain old grass was more "meaningful" than any number of Sundays spent in the newly remodeled burnt-orange and walnut pew of the local Reformed Congregational Lutheran Episcopalian Universalist House of Worship, so most contemporary thinkers decreed. Drop some acid, meditate, eat only organic food for a year or two and you'll find a faith many times more in tune with your life than anything taught at a stuffy seminary.
Unfortunately, DYI religion lacks rootedness. It's one thing to claim that your personal rituals are rooted in ancient practices (as almost anything is, or could be) and yet another thing to be practising something that you knew from childhood, that binds you to your parents and your parents' parents, and is relevant to the reason why you live where you do. Evangelical Christianity is as au courant as it is mostly because everyone who lives in America has heard of the Bible, everyone knows about Jesus (right or wrong), and everyone "knows" that they have done "wrong" at one time or another.
Madonna is irrelevant: all she's ever been able to do is to act "naughty", meaning that she understands that there is a *borderline* to be crossed, and in doing so, she's somehow putting herself above people who don't dare (or care) to do so. Modern tribalism is a joke: take a little from one tribe, a little from another, mix with a bit of fashionable cynicism, and you're communing with Nature. Right. Most parents these days never had anything more binding on their belief system than a vague idea that there is right and wrong: most kids never spent enough time off from soccer practise to learn that there's anything more to mainstream liberal Christianity than a set of rules that keep them from wanking off to porno magazines and fucking their girlfriends.
Naturally their own efforts towards faith are going to be mix and match -- a little Goddess worship, so they can wear starshaped silver rings, a little shamanism, so they can whine to their parents that they really *need* $200 so they can get tattooed, pierced or whatever, some Hinduism, so that they can sit and sing to themselves while attempting to pretzel, and a good deal of Christianity, because, right or wrong, they *know* that Armeggedon is gonna kill all the uncool people.
Someone ask Donald E. Knuth?
The web is irrelevant. People will believe what they want for awhile. Then it will all settle down to two sects, which will each consider each other puritanical. Then maybe, someone will come up with a *really* relevant faith.
The only thing that sticks in my mind here is that Katz keeps calling the Internet a force in the 80's, with Gates standing atop it like a surfer on a tsunami. Surely he means the PC revolution of the late 80's and early 90's! Microsoft was never all that Internet-savvy...and the Internet, up until about six years ago was a quirky little community of colleges, defense and government sites, not a consumer one. It's true that Gates's image was perfect for the business culture of the era following the glitzy Reagan administration: Gates 1.0a seemed to be an unpretentiously oafish Ivy Leaguer, so bewildered by his sudden fortunes that he hadn't time to upgrade his lifestyle. Gates 2.1, on the other hand, has been recast as a sharply wheeler-dealer, the kind of person most middle-management types love to fantasize about. "He's all...business!" I heard a suit once murmur, enraptured. "Never even takes time off! No wonder he made all that money..."
It's interesting how we tend to see things... differently...
...it seems to be a new stock plot device: disillusioned city dweller gets new purpose in life through political action aligned with religion, which gets them back in touch with a simpler, more rural life, and their true place in the universe. We had the same thing happen in this country too: a whole generation staked their entire being on the cause of pacifism and helping the oppressed and doubtlessly saintly monks and peasants of Southeast Asia. Disillusionment set in when the Vietnam war ended and there was no mass nudity in the streets, drugs weren't legalized, and we didn't live in peace and harmony as the Revolution broke out. Worse, we found that the working class actually supported the war (since their college education was being paid for by the GI Bill) and the newly Communist regimes were twice as bad as the old ones. We've been paying for this shortsightedness for 25 years. New Tibet is a tragedy. Old Tibet will never be again. A Po-Mo Tibet would simply be a high-priced mountain Disneyland, with spiritual inititions going out to the richest tourists, and Yak-in-the-Box franchises in every village. There's got to be a better way.
No, but we have planned the Bill Gates Raggedy Andy Doll, the Hockey-Action Scott McNeely, the Debonair Fashion/Samurai Fantasy Larry Ellison, and the Wozniak Soft Toy! (Send me your email if you want a picture of the Steve Jobs doll. He lives on my printer.)
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However, it's not so nice when you consider this to be a model of male/female relationships. The tree doesn't have a life of her own, doesn't have much choice over whether she gets carved into or cut down, and even gets neglected for long periods of time while the boy is off "in foreign lands" or wooing a human female: somehow, I can see him telling his wife that he needs to be seeing a younger, prettier, woman, no offence, hon, understand? It's just that he needs someone that will get him over this little problem he's been having in bed... He'll come back, promise!...Meanwhile, he needs your bank account, continued housekeeping and, um, iron my shirts without starch, eh? See you at dinner tonight, six, have it on the table... RIGHT. Or telling that younger woman, sorry honey, gotta dump you, I'm married, and geez, if it weren't for that no-fault divorce law, I'd of paid for that abortion, understand? Uh-huh....Or telling a psychiatrist "You know, all my problems come from having to cater to women all the time, you know my mother never really loved me...Understand?"
Somehow, it's the kind of thing I'd expect from
a staff cartoonist for Playboy (which he was) written at the height of the feminine mystique (which it was). Can't really hate him, his adult work was so appealing. Love him, hate him. Bye-bye Shel. Pinch an angel's butt for me.
I didn't read (or have read to me) Silverstein as a child -- he was a bit after my time as a children's author first. I do remember him as a PLAYBOY cartoonist and staffer -- my favorite feature in my dad's magazine was how he (ugly fat dude) would go to some place (a nudist camp, a Californian experiment in instant consensual sex, a Caribbean resort famous for hot and cold running rum and pot) and report back just how life could be if lived to the hilt and with no inhibitions. Being a sex-positive type myself, I feel nothing but an amused fondness for that part of his career -- the fact that he wrote a book that sounds, on reflection, to sound like a child-version of one of his shamelessly self-indulgent fantasies I thought intersting enough to write about. I don't think it's at all "twisted" to point this out...
I'm not calling for censorship, just a reevaluation. Many kid's books from the era fall short of positive female images, but many (particularly those from the first half of the century) abound in them. Lots of kids' books get read for a while (even becoming wildly popular), and then get totally forgotten for various reasons ("Rabbit Hill", "Roller Skates", "The Singing Tree", and "You Will Go to the Moon" are some) without anyone issuing a specific ban on them: some are good, very good, some are not worth remembering, and some are just plain bad. "The Giving Tree", to me, just seems to be one of those books that deserves to be on the wane, for kids, at least.
Wonder what "Shel Silverstein Goes to Heaven" looks like?
...you were something like this? So much of what I've seen in the *nix community is like a pissing constest...you might not be bragging about rootshells or how 3133t3 you are, but that only means that the beam has been raised higher. I like the way the article points out that you tend to learn in this silly hobby, which is something you can't exactly say about being good at Quake. Yes, it's a waste of time, and bears the same relationship to real hacking that paint-by-number kits do to actual oil painting...but more people tend to go on to real hacking than advance in painting...it's just more fun that way!
...um, almost anything is better than the indiscriminate use of the word "galaxy" in SF (Prize example: Goddard's Alphaville, where Lemmy Caution tells someone that the "other galaxies" are reporting civil disturbances also. Must be some communicator he has there...)
As for "Terran", the wimps will probably change the name of our planet to the more ecological "Gaia", and we will be "Gaians", a name that doesn't exactly trip off the toungue. There's a transvestite warlock who uses that term 'round these parts...Not good to look at, but a militant feminist...
I'm with most of the people here in that I don't side with those who believe that the games do much harm. It does kind of disturb me that people think of "The Basketball Diaries" as being a movie only, when the book is so much more potent, and likely to (in certain cases) cause harm.
Most of these "my kid read comic books, let's ban Superman" lawsuits seem to revolve around situations where the parents really have no idea of what their kid is doing, other than holing up with a handful of idols drawn from media that they don't (or don't think it worth their while to) understand. Having had a set of nightmare parents myself, it's easy for me to see how his world might have shrunk into a tiny one of obsessive game-playing and fantasy violence where the hero emerges not a convict but a charismatic Wild Boy poet/counterculture hero, with scarred veins and a pure face, an archetype that a sensitive parent could well turn around into any number of productive role models, up to and including an interest in a real-life military career. (Hey, someone's got to do it.)
An insensitive parent only sees a retreat into what seems like trivialities, and shrugs off all this as being "what all kids do", maintaining that one day, he'll magically become a chip off the old block overnight. Until something like this happens. Then, with everyone saying "You idiots! Couldn't you see what they were doing?" every bit of their kid's environment becomes suspect: it must have been those video games. Or that terrible book, "The Sorrows of Young Werther" (the original Goth suicide novel) that all the young folk are reading. My, Doctor, if I'd only known...
...Bill Gates might get a sense of humor, Larry Ellison might appear in public with his fly open, and Eric Raymond might retire. OK, that's too strong....maybe cats might fly. Anyway, I wouldn't worry too much. True, the man has had a lot to do lately, taken WAY too much flack from the Linux "community" (which is beginning to resemble the Balkan situation) and is generally overtaxed on all fronts, but there's something about him that seems to tell me that he's actually ENJOYING all this, and would really want to do more, if everyone would stop throwing peanut shells at him. Point is, most of the people who enjoy flaming him can't write as clearly and entertainingly and inspiringly as he does, don't know as much about UNIX as he does, and can't program worth a lick, much less do what he does. True, he is an egomaniac and sometimes whitewashes things into unreality (reading "A Portrait of J. Random Hacker" in the Jargon file is sometimes painful in just how goody-two-shoes he makes us look -- lean, extreme-sports teetotalers who actually choose to live in tacky tract houses and crappy apartments) but gosh darn it, we don't have anyone else who could make Linux, or us, seem so appealing. (Steve Jobs, alas, is still at Apple.) So, calm down, put your eggs back in your Easter baskets, and let the dude be.
You won't regret it.
First, most business-oriented people I talk to in the Real World don't care whether they have to spend $X to get a system running, don't care about the nobility of the FSF, and don't care that the end-user is happy or not (if they did, LinuxPPC would be hell on wheels). What they want is what all the other kids want: Microsoft.
Bill is the sort of guy they can relate to, or at least think they can relate to: a tough-as-nails, suit-wearing, golf-playing, short-haired WASP who looks good in annual reports, and clawed his way up from the bottom to make it to where he is. No one ever points out to them that he never wrote anything worthwhile, much less Windows, has almost no status (except as flamebait) in the hacker (in the RMS sense) community, and is probably given large doses of Valium before interviews so he doesn't start rocking, mumbling, or scratching himself. It's only Big Government who doesn't like him, (like the IRS, right?) and all the other guys really just wish they had that kind of money. (As if a couple more billion would buy Steve Jobs a better wardrobe, or Scott Mc Neely a nicer collar for Network, right?)
CNN caters to these people.
Linus and Richard and Eric are people they can't understand: they like working, for chrissake! So of course they're going to think, if it's free, it's not worth anything, and even if it was, it carries a hidden pricetag. The abovementioned aren't exactly starving: so they're doing it for the money, after all. They act like the hippies they stopped being fifteen years ago and dismissed as being incompetants: so of course anything they do is just MTV hype and hot air.
I'm glad I don't have to deal with them without a drink in my hand.
Actually, I was talking to a friend right after Bondi Blue came out, and said "Wouldn't it be just great if they had some other colors? Like purple."
"Who'd buy purple?"
Biggest selling color after blue.
I must commend the policeman who reported his death. "Stanley Kubrick, I'm afraid to say, is dead. His family wished someone to report his death to the press." (Emphasis mine.)
Now, how many times in the last few years have we heard "passed away" (a low-class euphemism, similar to "little girl's room" for Women's Lav) or "passed" (which sounds like he passed a stone, a test, or merely the Bar). A man is dead. We want to say so. Turning the event into a kind of nebulous "time to remember" (something like "...we are here to celebrate a life", right?) doesn't make up for the fact that we aren't going to ever see the remastered 2001.
Damn, I'm gonna miss him.
I decided that the best use of my 6100 was to turn him (his name is Alan Turing) into a Linux box. Why? Well, 6100's are notoriously ssssslllooooowwwww, and have NuBus (a strange interior config) as well. They vie in general wonkyness with the iMac that replaced him. However, he does right dandy with a command-line interface, and can render KDE with exquisite color and graphics. As a matter of fact, after playing with the iMac running 8.5.1, I began to really crave Linux...
No, I'm talking about a very real and documented strain of thought at the time. In the late '50's, it was thought that religion = visionary experience = some kind of physiochemical imbalance brought on by chanting, fasting, drugs, or what have you. I'm not talking here about the class of drugs usually considered addictive, I tried to make it clear that LSD and the other psychedelics were meant. And what is religion but "following"?
I'm not advocating religious fundamentalism here, nor do I believe that so-called "changeless" faiths are the answer. Judaism in particular has changed greatly over the years, Islam less so, but still has had to adapt to the wide variety of peoples it's attracted throughout the globe. I hope this will clear things up.
My feeling is that religion has been mostly a "do-it-yourself" proposition ever since the late 50's. At that time, most organized religions, even everyone's favorite whipping boy, the Catholics, were trying valiantly to deal with the modern age.
(Anyone remember Vatican II? Come on, someone's grandparents could tell you...) Folk-rock services, the reintroduction of sacred dance, updated sermons, all of these were tried. And failed.
Real religion was to be found in a pill.
LSD, mushrooms, or even just plain old grass was more "meaningful" than any number of Sundays spent in the newly remodeled burnt-orange and walnut pew of the local Reformed Congregational Lutheran Episcopalian Universalist House of Worship, so most contemporary thinkers decreed. Drop some acid, meditate, eat only organic food for a year or two and you'll find a faith many times more in tune with your life than anything taught at a stuffy seminary.
Unfortunately, DYI religion lacks rootedness. It's one thing to claim that your personal rituals are rooted in ancient practices (as almost anything is, or could be) and yet another thing to be practising something that you knew from childhood, that binds you to your parents and your parents' parents, and is relevant to the reason why you live where you do. Evangelical Christianity is as au courant as it is mostly because everyone who lives in America has heard of the Bible, everyone knows about Jesus (right or wrong), and everyone "knows" that they have done "wrong" at one time or another.
Madonna is irrelevant: all she's ever been able to do is to act "naughty", meaning that she understands that there is a *borderline* to be crossed, and in doing so, she's somehow putting herself above people who don't dare (or care) to do so. Modern tribalism is a joke: take a little from one tribe, a little from another, mix with a bit of fashionable cynicism, and you're communing with Nature. Right. Most parents these days never had anything more binding on their belief system than a vague idea that there is right and wrong: most kids never spent enough time off from soccer practise to learn that there's anything more to mainstream liberal Christianity than a set of rules that keep them from wanking off to porno magazines and fucking their girlfriends.
Naturally their own efforts towards faith are going to be mix and match -- a little Goddess worship, so they can wear starshaped silver rings, a little shamanism, so they can whine to their parents that they really *need* $200 so they can get tattooed, pierced or whatever, some Hinduism, so that they can sit and sing to themselves while attempting to pretzel, and a good deal of Christianity, because, right or wrong, they *know* that Armeggedon is gonna kill all the uncool people.
Someone ask Donald E. Knuth?
The web is irrelevant. People will believe what they want for awhile. Then it will all settle down to two sects, which will each consider each other puritanical. Then maybe, someone will come up with a *really* relevant faith.
It's true that Gates's image was perfect for the business culture of the era following the glitzy Reagan administration: Gates 1.0a seemed to be an unpretentiously oafish Ivy Leaguer, so bewildered by his sudden fortunes that he hadn't time to upgrade his lifestyle. Gates 2.1, on the other hand, has been recast as a sharply wheeler-dealer, the kind of person most middle-management types love to fantasize about.
"He's all...business!" I heard a suit once murmur, enraptured. "Never even takes time off! No wonder he made all that money..."
It's interesting how we tend to see things... differently...
It's a miracle that someone hasn't brought up the waterPOWERED computer in the New Hacker's Dictionary...
Isn't there a section of "proprietary" or "fictional" symbols where they keep the Elvish?
...which would be an elegant name, except no one likes Armenian! (Sergar Argic must have been busy.) BTW, "Jack" Kevorkian is actually Murad...
Shouldn't she be called Suze? (for S.u.S.E)
...it seems to be a new stock plot device: disillusioned city dweller gets new purpose in life through political action aligned with religion, which gets them back in touch with a simpler, more rural life, and their true place in the universe.
We had the same thing happen in this country too: a whole generation staked their entire being on the cause of pacifism and helping the oppressed and doubtlessly saintly monks and peasants of Southeast Asia. Disillusionment set in when the Vietnam war ended and there was no mass nudity in the streets, drugs weren't legalized, and we didn't live in peace and harmony as the Revolution broke out. Worse, we found that the working class actually supported the war (since their college education was being paid for by the GI Bill) and the newly Communist regimes were twice as bad as the old ones. We've been paying for this shortsightedness for 25 years.
New Tibet is a tragedy. Old Tibet will never be again. A Po-Mo Tibet would simply be a high-priced mountain Disneyland, with spiritual inititions going out to the richest tourists, and Yak-in-the-Box franchises in every village.
There's got to be a better way.
highersource.com?
Wasn't that the domain for Heaven's Gate?
No, but we have planned the Bill Gates Raggedy Andy Doll, the Hockey-Action Scott McNeely, the Debonair Fashion/Samurai Fantasy Larry Ellison, and the Wozniak Soft Toy!
(Send me your email if you want a picture of the Steve Jobs doll. He lives on my printer.)
...and make a tiny working laptop for my Original Steve Jobs Action Figure!