Ken Murphy has a bunch of reviews of solar fiction for kids.
Hook ’em while they’re young.
Category Archives: Popular Culture
It’s That Time Of The Week Again
Lileks examines the train wreck that is Garrison Keillor’s latest:
I’m sorry, but I’m just fascinated by his column. Each is nearly identical in formlessness, subject and general pointlessness. To be fair: we all write at haste and repent at leisure, unless we can somehow get it out of the Google cache. We all make inelegant remarks that seemed wonderfully writerly at the moment but curdle when exposed to another pair of eyes. It’s the perils of blogging. But he has an entire week to write these things. Never does he attempt to make an argument or explore a line of thought – it’s just flat assertions ladled out with nuance or shading. The sun rises, Bush is bad, life is long but also short and so you should sit outside and drink lemonade and think of the people who came before you and sat outside and drank lemonade and there is a comfort in that continuity and we need all the comfort we can get in these days when nihilists in golf pants are everywhere and the Republic lies in ruins. Also, he is given to run-on sentences. This week has perhaps the finest example yet.
If that’s not enough, there is some cereal blogging, too.
Get Ready To Split A Gut
…at the world’s oldest jokes.
Well, OK, not so much. It says they’re old jokes, not good jokes.
Speaking Of General Zod
At least one will be saved from the coming carbon apocalypse:
Al Gore–or, as he is known in his own language, Gore-Al–placed his son, Kal-Al, gently in the one-passenger rocket ship, his brow furrowed by the great weight he carried in preserving the sole survivor of humanity’s hubristic folly.
“There is nothing left now but to ensure that my infant son does not meet the same fate as the rest of my doomed race,” Gore said. “I will send him to a new planet, where he will, I hope, be raised by simple but kindly country folk and grow up to be a hero and protector to his adopted home.”
Hope the poles aren’t so warm there that he can’t build an arctic fortress of pomposity.
The Era Of Carbon Craziness
Is it almost over? Let’s hope so.
Not This Again
The “rocks have rights” crowd are worried again about vandalizing space:
Edward O Wilson has suggested that biophilia, our appreciation of Earth’s biosphere, is a by-product of evolving in this environment. If he’s right, we might find we don’t care about other worlds in the same way. This raises the alarming prospect of rapacious lunar mining altering the view from Earth.
Maybe our biophilia will kick in here: after all, our view of the Moon is one of Earth’s natural vistas. Surely we can agree that we don’t want that changed? It is an awesome thing to look up and remember that human footprints once marked the Moon’s surface. It’s quite another to imagine the moon looking like an abandoned quarry.
No, we can’t agree. Note that this was in the context of a discussion on “eco issues” on the moon.
Here’s the “eco issue” on the moon (and in the rest of the universe, as far as we know right now). There is no “eco” there. There is also no “bio” for our “biophilia” to kick in about. Ecology and biology are about life, something that exists only on earth. It’s one thing to want to preserve an ecosystem, but when one simply wants to preserve the entire universe in its current “pristine” state, there’s something unsettling and misanthropic going on.
Why is it all right for a meteroid to slam into the lunar surface and leave a crater (which has happened billions of times throughout history, and continues today) which is how the moon got to look the way it is, but a pit for mining is verboten? Would he object to seeing the lights of a lunar city up there? Does he have any idea how far away it is and how much mining one would have to do to see it from earth, even with a telescope?
What is this worship of entropy? What is this loathing of humanity? What is this apparent loathing of life itself?
Obamamania
The distinction again is that Obama appeals to the gullible and puerile as a sort of James Dean candidate. And thus he is not to be cross-examined, but instead free to shun interviews and clarifications, and prone to avoid reporters who might be less than adulatory — the normal stuff that so irritates the supposedly sensitive press that has now gone brain-dead.
What is fascinating about the tingly-leg press is that they are exhibiting the very symptoms of arrested development and star-struck immaturity that they always accuse America in toto of suffering. The usual critique of the elite media is that we are a nation of mindless followers, who go from one fad to another, and value looks, youth, and pizzazz over substance.
But the current spectacle suggests something worse — that the press who claims they know better and are more sophisticated are, in fact, far more infantile than most Americans, and essentially Access Hollywood, People Magazine, and the National Enquirer dressed up with network logos and NY-DC bylines.
I think that’s been clear since Katie Couric was given the anchor at the CBS Evening News.
The New Blacklist
Maybe in an Obama administration, the House will set up a Pro-American Activity Committee, and properly investigate these subversives out in Hollywood:
David Horowitz, another Hollywood conservative and founder of the Los Angeles-based Center for the Study of Popular Culture, said the group is serving a good purpose but he worries its members won’t be aggressive enough.
“There’s a kind of … intellectual terror in this town. People are terrorized; they’re afraid to say what they think. So what Gary is doing to provide aid and comfort to its victims is admirable, and I applaud him for it,” he said. “But my concern is it’s not going to be much more than that.”
They told me that if George Bush was elected, that brave artists would live in fear of losing their livelihoods for their freedom of expression. They were right!
“Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the National Rifle Association?”
Rocket Racing Meets Fashion
Over at Alan Boyle’s place. I think that this is a very encouraging development.
Just A Rant
And probably a futile one, and one that I’ve even probably kvetched about before. But when did top posting become the norm for email? Was it Microsoft and AOL’s fault?
And is there anything that can be done at this point? In many extended discussions, I feel like I’m driving on the wrong side of the road in my own country.