February 24, 2012

Great News!

Although the world is, apparently, still well on the road to hell in the proverbial handbasket, with people being slaughtered in Syria, car bombs exploding in Baghdad, Greece in an unsolvable economic dilemma and the American Republican party falling over themselves in a non-stop

Joanne Rowling

who-can-be-the-biggest-asshole contest, there was a piece of news that brightened my day today, and makes me look forward to the future.

Joanne Rowling is writing another book!  (There’s a reason I prefer using Joanne to J K: when Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was about to be published, her publishers, being a bunch of narrow minded male chauvinist pigs, insisted that she use her initials because they didn’t think young boys would want to read a book written by a woman.  Really, one would think we’d have put that nonsense to rest a couple of centuries ago.)

It’s not going to be another Harry Potter book, of course.  She wrapped that series up quite nicely.  We don’t know what it will be yet, except that it is an “adult” book.  No, that doesn’t mean porno.  It just means it won’t be a kid’s book.

I’ll be surprised if it’s as good as the Harry Potter books.  They were inspired, a work of genius.  She says that the idea came to her during a train ride and by the time she arrived at her destination, the framework for the books was complete.

Trains are pretty amazing like that.  Einstein got his idea for the theory of relativity while looking out of a train window and I’ve written plenty of my poems while riding on trains.  I think it’s something to do with the rhythmic clicking of the wheels and the gently rocking motion.

But I’m pretty sure it will be good.  She’s a brilliant writer.  Clear, concise story telling, well developed, believable characters and a fun,  clever and creative sense of wordplay make for great reading, no matter what the genre.

I’m certainly  looking forward to reading it.

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February 23, 2012

A New Kind of Reality Show

First of all, this woman, in my opinion, is probably the worst journalist in the world.  She’s standing there doing her “live” news, a story about high gas prices, standing in front of a gas station for illustration although the story could have been done from inside a studio for all that it

Remember this one?

mattered, when a nasty car crash happens right behind her.  Not a fender bender at all.  This was two cars coming from two different directions at speed who didn’t see each other and – whammo!

She didn’t even turn around.  I don’t know if she  was deaf, totally incurious or just so determined to stick to her script that aliens from the planet Zorgon could have landed – gay, terrorist, glow-in-the-dark aliens – and she would have completed her set piece about high gas prices.

It seems this kind of clip- a live news report being upstaged by actual news, or just something funny- is becoming more common.  Maybe that’s because of Youtube and social media – there are thousands of local TV stations around the world, sending out reporters to cover mundane stuff, and something’s bound to be happening in the background of some of the stories.  The Sarah Palin turkey grinding incident springs to mind, or the reporter who was  out reporting on a hurricane and people were farting around behind him, mooning the camera and so on.

It’s interesting.  It’s a look into reality, past the barriers to it that the news stations try to manufacture.

I think it would be a good idea to just place cameras in several interesting places around the world – Times Square, Venice Beach, Trafalgar Square, Red Square and so on.  Everybody that wants to be on TV could come and be on TV, people could come up to the microphone and report on whatever they felt like talking about or flash mobs and performance artists could do their thing, and it would all be live, real, uncensored and kind of interesting.  The down side is there might be long, boring stretches where nobody actually did  anything.  But that’s life.

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February 22, 2012

Go, Roemer, Go, Roemer, Go, Roemer, Go!*

(* You’re only going to get the joke in the title if you watch “The Hoobs” and you only watch “The Hoobs” if you have little kids, and I don’t know if  it’s broadcast in the States.  It’s a British

President Buddy Roemer (not very likely)

series.)

As everybody knows, there are 4 candidates still in the race for the Republican nomination for which candidate is going to lose to Obama in November.  The thing is, everybody knows wrong.  Up until today, there were 7.  Of course, the press didn’t give a whole lot of coverage to Fred Karger (the gay candidate), Gary Johnson (who, like Ron Paul, is at least in favor of legalizing marijuana) and Buddy Roemer, whose big issue was getting the big money out of politics, which meant he was getting creamed by Romney, who spends millions of dollars per state and has the nearly unanimous backing of the party establishment, Newt Gingrich, who has a quirky Las Vegas gambling billionaire bankrolling his campaign and Rick Santorum, who also has a weird megarich backer, Foster Friess,  who doesn’t think women should have sex.

Ron Paul, like Roemer, is depending mostly on small donations.  He’s doing better than Roemer, but he’s also being left in the dust by dog abuser Romney, religious nut Santorum and evil marshmallow Gingrich.

Taking the money out of politics is a noble goal, but doing it unilaterally means you will lose the election.  You may disapprove of guns but if you go to a gunfight without one, on principle, you would be making a big mistake.

So, Buddy Roemer (who was governor of Louisiana for awhile, about 20 years ago) has dropped out of the Republican race.  He’ll run as an independent.

He’s still not going to be taken seriously.  In every U.S. presidential election, there are a half dozen or so fringe candidates – communist, socialist, libertarian, green, church of cosmic vibrations, whatever – and they get about 1% of the vote between all of them.

Once, on a road trip from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, we picked up a hitch-hiker who said he had run for president several times.  His big issue was that he totally rejected money, didn’t believe in it.  We bought him a meal, paid for his ticket on the roller coaster in the casino at State Line, and dropped him off somewhere after that.

He was a pleasant enough character, interesting to talk to and polite, but I didn’t remember his name a half an hour after he got out of the car and I certainly wasn’t ever tempted to vote for him.

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February 21, 2012

A Huge Amount of Money

Wow!  Check out this story from Britain’s daily mail:  Swiss authorities, acting on a tip from Italian police, have confiscated $6trillion in counterfeit U.S. bonds which were in a Swiss bank.

If you can't trust Woodrow Wilson, then who can you trust?

Prosecutors said the fraud had not been completed, but that it appeared that the suspects intended to try to sell the fake bonds to a developing nation, directly or through an intermediary bank.

Eight people were arrested.

I have a question:  When they say that these were destined for a 3rd world country, does that mean the Nigerian businessman I’ve been corresponding with  is now shit out of luck?  That would be a shame, as he promised to share some of the proceeds with me.

Mostly, though, my reaction to this story is a big OMG WTF – 6 TRILLION!  That’s a major amount of money.  And, despite the absurd amount, the quality of printing (and the fact that they’re going with bonds and not actual currency) indicate that this was not just a prank.  They were totally serious and  thought they were going to become filthy rich.

I remember about 20 years ago, police in the U.S. busted a marijuana growing operation and it made headlines because of the size of the operation.  A cop spokesperson  said “That’s more marijuana than we thought there was in the whole country.”

That’s the way I feel about this.  6 trillion – that’s more money than I thought there was in the world.  And that raises an interesting question:  how much money is there in the world, anyway?

It would make all of the arguments about economics much simpler if we actually knew.

 

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February 20, 2012

Thoughts on Ray Bradbury

O.K., this video I’m linking to here, don’t open it when there are children around, or when you’re at work or anything.  In fact, you probably shouldn’t open it at all unless you a) are a science fiction fan and b) have a seriously smutty sense of humor.

Ray Bradbury

Meanwhile, I will use this column for a few comments on Ray Bradbury, since the singer in the video seems to like him so much.  When I was about 11, Bradbury (who is currently 91 and still alive) was one of my favorite writers, largely on the strength of a short story called “The Pedestrian” which was as much a commentary on modern American life as it was science fiction.  The Illustrated Man is also pretty awesome, as is Fahrenheit 451, but then I read the Martian Chronicles.   I just don’t see how that can be considered a sci-fi classic.  It struck me as pretty much a total misreading of human nature.

It’s nowhere near as good as Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy, or anything by Arthur C. Clarke, or even Robert Heinlein’s highly overrated Stranger in a Strange Land.  They all wrote some good stories, which entertained me in my youth, but things have changed a lot since then.

Science fiction has divided into two types.  There is Cyberpunk which, I am embarrassed to say but it’s true, is just way over my head.  I’m glad that genre is out there, I’m glad that present day hard core sci-fi fans are smarter than me (or at least more knowledgeable)  because that gives me some hope for the future in this grim, evil world.  But I have never been able to get through a whole book by William Gibson.

Then there are those who write speculative fiction, and often set their stories in the future or on other planets, and usually include a bit of humor.  It’s not as educational, as far as science goes, but it’s a lot more entertaining, and those are the favorites of my adult life.  Vonnegut, Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams, people like that.

Vonnegut never liked being classified as a science fiction writer, but he was one.

My favorite science fiction writer of all time, though, was a guy called R.A. Lafferty.  A lot of his short stories had a gang called the “Institute People” who were the greatest minds in the world but there were a couple of people excluded from this group by the “minimal decency rule,” which, like the 3 seashells in Stallone’s Demolition Man, was never explained.

But, whatever the minimal decency rule was, I think the young lady singing in this video may have violated it.

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