Category Archives: Popular Culture

Popular Culture

I’ve Heard Of Walking A Mile For A Camel

10 Comments

…but this is ridiculous:

63-year-old Lions fan walks 425 miles to attend practice.

Now that’s a fan. Twenty-five miles a day is a pretty good pace for someone that age. If he keeps it up, he might live to a ripe old age.

[Update a while later]

Speaking of Michigan football, what is the world coming to? First the Big Televen becomes the new Big Twelve with the addition of Nebraska (that’ll rev up a new rivalry with the Wolverines, who haven’t forgotten having to unfairly share the title in ’97), but will also screw up the traditional game with tOSU as the last game of the season. Apparently, they’re going to put the Wolverines and the Buckeyes in separate divisions (which makes no sense geographically) so they can hope for matchups in a title game, but don’t want to risk having them play each other two weeks in a row. Bo and Woody are both rolling in their graves, I suspect.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Science And Society

The Feeling Is Mutual

19 Comments

James Cameron says that climate-change skeptics are “swine.”

[Tuesday morning update]

Well, he can dish it out, but he can’t take it:

A real shame [he chickened out of the debate]. Would have been fun to watch the reaction to him calling skeptics “swine” to their faces, for once. Exit question: Forgive and forget? C’mon — he has important things to do this week!

Bwwaaack, buck buck buck buck, Bwwwaaaaack.

[Bumped]

Popular Culture, Space

Bradbury At Ninety

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A perspective, over at National Review. Two things struck me about the piece, one of which has nothing to do with Bradbury per se:

While he is a great advocate for NASA and space travel, his greatest fictional works address the recurrent theme of much of the modern age’s more significant literature: the separation of spirit and imagination from technological achievement and the dangers that attend this divorce.

Note that James Person assumes that NASA and space travel are synonymous. This is a mind set that we have to break if we are to move forward in space. Here’s the other:

All too soon it was time to take our leave. Hamner, ever the gracious Virginia gentleman, shook hands with Bradbury and quietly expressed his thanks again for that long-ago piece of advice. As Bradbury turned to me, I shook his hand and said quietly, “Ray Bradbury, live forever!” Tears sprang into his eyes — he is a man who cries for joy at every kindness — and his mouth moved soundlessly for a moment, searching for words. Quickly he raised my hand to his lips and gave it a quick kiss. “God bless you, Jim,” he said. “God bless you — and I wish the same for you!”

What a contrast with Asimov, who was a notorious deathist (a major theme of The Bicentennial Man). Asimov is gone now, as he wished, and Bradbury is still with us, as he apparently continues to wish.

It’s not clear though, whether things like this will increase, or decrease his remaining time with us. If it’s the end of him, not a bad way to go.