WOULDN’T YOU RATHER SEE A good game than a great hit? (Derived from a conversation on a public lament for baseball players on steroids.) (Yes, I said for.)
Tag: Committee For A Bigger Universe
Transcendent Science and Knowery.
Aside
HAPPY SYSTEM ADMINISTRATOR APPRECIATION DAY! In our case, that would be those wonderful folks at sonic.net, whose founders we’ve known since they built Santa Rosa Junior College’s first dialup Internet host as a class project in 1993ish and without whom there’d be no The Metaphorager (among others). O Gallant Knights of the Cables Etheric, Slayers of Spam and Kibitzers of Kludge; Nobly-born Fighters Against Tedium, Keepers of the Causeways Electronic and Guardians of the Never-Ending Taskmasters. (szhhhhwip) I salute you. Keep the toasters flying!
Aside
STOP WHAT YOU’RE DOING RIGHT now and read this article by Patton Oswalt about how instant access to everything has brought about the Death of the Fannish Underground. Oswalt speaks to and for those whose fannish identity was built up layer by carefully wrought layer, recalling when one person could consume an entire year’s output of fantastic and science fictional media (and still have room for more). It’s all, he says, in the effort:
The Lord of the Rings used to be ours and only ours simply because of the sheer goddamn thickness of the books. Twenty years later, the entire cast and crew would be trooping onstage at the Oscars to collect their statuettes, and replicas of the One Ring would be sold as bling.
The topsoil has been scraped away, forever, in 2010. In fact, it’s been dug up, thrown into the air, and allowed to rain down and coat everyone in a thin gray-brown mist called the Internet.
More tragic historian than off-my-lawn ranter, Oswalt perfectly captures the sweaty essence of 80s fandom — and makes me wish I’d written it first. I’m not sure I agree with his conclusions, but I do feel a bit sad for kids who’ll never have the fun that we had(1). Something thrilling there is in being part of something secret that yields unexpected connections in unlooked-for places…
See:
– “Wake Up, Geek Culture — Time To Die” by Patton Oswalt
– “Hey Fanboy!” (Fannish posts on Metaphorager.Net)
(1) (On the other hand, they’re probably having some sort of fun that I can’t, so it all works out.)
Despite The Profanity, He Makes A Good Point
IT’S SO TEMPTING TO SAY “I wish I’d written this” when you find something which crystallizes inchoate feelings into verbal fistpump and hellyeah. I fully recognize the irony in blogging about a piece which calls blogs into question. But reading…
I Am a Religious Man Unthreatened By Science, Secularity And Reason
I Am a Religious Man Unthreatened By Science, Secularity And Reason • 2011.06.09 • 400 words (IN FACT, THE WHOLE “REASON” I “am” “religious” in the first place is only due to a direct perception [some might say delusion] that…
Scrapheap Waters
THAT’S AN ANAGRAM FOR “EARTH Warps Space,” the latest news out of NASA. Put simply: In our 4th-dimensional universe, gravity runs downhill. Put less simply, http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2011/04may_epic/. Quoted lede: “Einstein was right again. There is a space-time vortex around Earth, and…
Yuri’s Night Out
A REMEMBRANCE OF FEATS PAST is a great excuse for a party — that’s the idea behind “Yuri’s Night,” which celebrates the cracking of the final frontier. “Human Spaceflight became a reality 50 years ago with the launch of a…
Boy Oh Boy Oh Boy Oh Boy Oh Boy!
THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN you mount a high-definition camera on a spaceship and send it to Saturn: (More information at http://www.outsideinthemovie.com/. For maximum fun, expand the view by clicking on the arrow-square in the bottom right corner.)
Free Metaphor: “Don’t Poke The Squid”
STUCK FOR AN ANALOGY WHEN your well-intendeds provoke a horrible mess that you should have known better than to bother with? Then “Don’t Poke The Squid.” Squid are lovely, largely inoffensive creatures who flash and lurk throughout the ocean’s vasty…
Ship Geeks Ahoy
IF YOU’RE CURIOUS ABOUT LIFE on the other side of the foghorns, waste no time in clicking on marinetraffic.com — a global, scalable, real-time map of the world’s shipping traffic, from cargo and passenger vessels to navaids and tankers to…
Refining Maslow
THE GREAT PSYCHOLOGIST ABRAHAM MASLOW proposed a pyramid paradigm of human needs, ranking their vitality and importance as physiological, safety, love and belonging, esteem and self-actualization. One must satisfy the first in order to be able to secure the second,…
Culinary Basic
REMEMBER: FRUIT JUICE IS SIMPLY filtered water. (I like mine run through a tangerine tree, or pear, or cherry.)