AdamSmith

...and...

Somewhere in 8th grade I picked up Brave New World and 1984 at the paperback book bin one Friday after school. I remember ripping through the Huxley by that Saturday night, while the Orwell sat around for another week. Aldous Huxley: the prophet of our brave new digital dystopiaCS Lewis may be getting a plaque. But Huxley, for his foretelling of a society that loves servitude, is the true visionary John Naughton The Guardian, Thursday 21 November 2013 Aldous Huxley pictured in the 1930s. 'We failed to notice that our runaway infatuation with the sleek toys produced by the likes of Apple and Samsung might well turn out to be as powerful a narcotic as soma.' Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images On 22 November 1963 the world was too preoccupied with the Kennedy assassination to pay much attention to the passing of two writers from the other side of the Atlantic: CS Lewis and Aldous Huxley. Fifty years on, Lewis is being honoured with a plaque in Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey, to be unveiled in a ceremony on Friday. The fanfare for Huxley has been more muted. There are various reasons for this: The Chronicles of Narnia propelled their author into the Tolkien league; Shadowlands, the film about his life starring Anthony Hopkins, moved millions; and his writings on religious topics made him a global figure in more spiritual circles. There is a CS Lewis Society of California, for example; plus a CS Lewis Review and a Centre for the Study of CS Lewis & Friends at a university in Indiana. Aldous Huxley never attracted that kind of attention. And yet there are good reasons for regarding him as the more visionary of the two. For one of the ironies of history is that visions of our networked future can be bracketed by the imaginative nightmares of Huxley and his fellow Etonian George Orwell. Orwell feared that we would be destroyed by the things we fear – the state surveillance apparatus so vividly evoked in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Huxley's nightmare, set out in Brave New World, his great dystopian novel, was that we would be undone by the things that delight us. Huxley was a child of England's intellectual aristocracy. His grandfather was Thomas Henry Huxley, the Victorian biologist who was the most effective evangelist for Darwin's theory of evolution. (He was colloquially known as "Darwin's Bulldog".) His mother was Matthew Arnold's niece. His brother, Julian and half-brother Andrew both became distinguished biologists. In the circumstances it's not surprising that Aldous turned out to be a writer who ranged far beyond the usual preoccupations of literary folk – into history, philosophy, science, politics, mysticism and psychic exploration. His biographer wrote: "He offered as his personal motto the legend hung around the neck of a ragged scarecrow of a man in a painting by Goya: Aún aprendo. I am still learning." He was, in that sense, a modern Voltaire. Brave New World was published in 1932. The title comes from Miranda's speech in Shakespeare's The Tempest: "Oh, wonder! / How many goodly creatures are there here! / How beauteous mankind is! Oh brave new world, / That has such people in't." It is set in the London of the distant future – AD 2540 – and describes a fictional society inspired by two things: Huxley's imaginative extrapolation of scientific and social trends; and his first visit to the US, in which he was struck by how a population could apparently be rendered docile by advertising and retail therapy. As an intellectual who was fascinated by science, he guessed (correctly, as it turned out) that scientific advances would eventually give humans powers that had hitherto been regarded as the exclusive preserve of the gods. And his encounters with industrialists like Alfred Mond led him to think that societies would eventually be run on lines inspired by the managerial rationalism of mass production ("Fordism") – which is why the year 2540 AD in the novel is "the Year of Our Ford 632". In the novel Huxley describes the mass production of children by what we would now call in vitro fertilisation; interference in the development process of infants to produce a number of "castes" with carefully modulated levels of capacities to enable them to fit without complaining into the various societal and industrial roles assigned to them; and Pavlovian conditioning of children from birth. In this world nobody falls ill, everyone has the same lifespan, there is no warfare, and institutions and marriage and sexual fidelity are dispensed with. Huxley's dystopia is a totalitarian society, ruled by a supposedly benevolent dictatorship whose subjects have been programmed to enjoy their subjugation through conditioning and the use of a narcotic drug – soma – that is less damaging and more pleasurable than any narcotic known to us. The rulers of Brave New World have solved the problem of making people love their servitude. Which brings us back to the two Etonian bookends of our future. On the Orwellian front, we are doing rather well – as the revelations of Edward Snowden have recently underlined. We have constructed an architecture of state surveillance that would make Orwell gasp. And indeed for a long time, for those of us who worry about such things, it was the internet's capability to facilitate such comprehensive surveillance that attracted most attention. In the process, however, we forgot about Huxley's intuition. We failed to notice that our runaway infatuation with the sleek toys produced by the likes of Apple and Samsung – allied to our apparently insatiable appetite for Facebook, Google and other companies that provide us with "free" services in exchange for the intimate details of our daily lives – might well turn out to be as powerful a narcotic as soma was for the inhabitants of Brave New World. So even as we remember CS Lewis, let us spare a thought for the writer who perceived the future in which we would come to love our digital servitude. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/22/aldous-huxley-prophet-dystopia-cs-lewis

See, if we had a dedicated Television subforum, this kind of crap wouldn't have to clutter up the main forum here. Doctor Who's least fearsome foesAs you may have heard, the Time Lord turns 50 this week. But if the UK's favourite teatime children's programme is so great, how do you explain this sorry bunch? Joe Bishop The Guardian, Friday 22 November 2013 08.00 EST Sil Sil has the unfortunate burden of looking like the perfect stool. Top to bottom, Sil's anatomy screams "juice cleanse" and "baked kale". Up from the smooth ridges at his base, his pectorals form those sticky clumps that are bound in crud, fitting together so magically, a shitty Pangaea before the fecal tectonic split. And, as if by magic, the most beautiful pinch atop his browned head, tightly sliced by the anus of some kind of goddess. Imagine observing the toilet bowl and seeing Sil staring back at you. I'd feel like the proud father of a PhD graduate (Ivy League). War Machines These things look like IDS's entry into Robot Wars. I know technology was sparse in 1966, and they hadn't invented Blu-ray yet so TV looked like a yoghurt lid smeared with dogshit and pepper, but Jesus Christ, these things are like the Daleks' parasitic twin: mild resemblance but all round the bend and up the creek. I could imagine these guys as zany robo-sidekicks in some depressing Bolshevik science-fiction sitcom called General Industrious & Steel Working Companion, or whatever. Pretty sure I've chucked a dull sandwich into one of these at the Tate Modern, too. Kandyman As we all know – perhaps too well, some of us – Doctor Who is a programme for children. It doesn't matter how many grown adults will tell you how much they cried when that woman's face got stuck in a paving slab, the show is for the chiblaines. Kandyman, a psychopathic killer hired by Helen A, ruler of human colony Terra Alpha, is some kind of confectionery nonce. The man is dressed as a bag of fucking liquorice allsorts, enticing unwitting youngsters with his sweet, sugary undercarriage and tragically leading them to their early graves. It's sick nonsense and it is not British. The Family Slitheen These lot are a bit dodgy, I reckon. Not because they're a Raxacoricofallapatorian crime syndicate, oh no. Just because they're not the most imaginative of Whovian baddies. It's all there: the glassy black eyes of your typical Roswellian extraterrestrial, big reptilian dragon claws, fat old sinewy Jabba-the-guts – the whole shebang. Even their name sounds a bit like the somewhat racist, genocide-brewing Slytherin house, from the otherwise sparkly spectacle-fest Harry Potter. Plagiarism all over the gaff, not a single original thought. Was this episode written by Johann Hari, or something? Haemovores I think I got a case of the haemovores when I went to Newquay with some friends after GCSEs, once. We went surfing but, in my haste to catch a wave, I cut myself on a rock on the beach that our mate Spag Bol had just spat on. The ensuing infection caused me to convulse violently on top of discarded and torn cans of Holsten Pils, which subsequently gave me a further three infections. I had what appeared to be deep red suction cups covering my abdomen, and resembled something akin to an octopus made of sun-blushed tomatoes. The Great Intelligence Your boy Yog-Sothoth, AKA Great Intelligence, apparently lost his body after fleeing from the Fendahl, a bunch of roving, murderous gangrene sores from the Sol system. The only other times I've seen people described as "losing their bodies" is when I pick up a copy of Heat magazine and see that a woman has apparently been rendered unattractive by having living creatures pulled from her sex organs. It looks like Yog-Sothoth didn't lose that baby fat in time, and is now condemned to an eternity as a sort-of thought-cloud. Circle of shame, am I right ladies?! … Ah. The Doctor Who anniversary celebrations continue for the rest of the millennium http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2013/nov/22/doctor-who-lamest-enemies

Actually not funny.

As my Japanese colleagues like to say: Thank you too much.

Shh, the Anthropophagy Anti-Discrimination League will get after you!

tumblr obsessed with showing the love between Harry & Louis... http://what-love-means.tumblr.com/post/35679605577/october-november-larry-timeline-and-masterpost Gay sex joke that of course only Harry and Louis laugh at Etc.

Not PC at all! Nonetheless...

Another one of these...

I want to read this. The Food of a Younger Land: A Portrait of American Food--Before the National Highway System, Before Chain Restaurants, and Before Frozen Food, When the Nation's Food Was Seasonal, Regional, and Traditional--from the Lost WPA Files By Mark Kurlansky A remarkable portrait of American food before World War II, presented by the New York Times-bestselling author of Cod and Salt. Award-winning New York Times-bestselling author Mark Kurlansky takes us back to the food and eating habits of a younger America: Before the national highway system brought the country closer together; before chain restaurants imposed uniformity and low quality; and before the Frigidaire meant frozen food in mass quantities, the nation's food was seasonal, regional, and traditional. It helped form the distinct character, attitudes, and customs of those who ate it. In the 1930s, with the country gripped by the Great Depression and millions of Americans struggling to get by, FDR created the Federal Writers' Project under the New Deal as a make-work program for artists and authors. A number of writers, including Zora Neale Hurston, Eudora Welty, and Nelson Algren, were dispatched all across America to chronicle the eating habits, traditions, and struggles of local people. The project, called "America Eats," was abandoned in the early 1940s because of the World War and never completed. The Food of a Younger Land unearths this forgotten literary and historical treasure and brings it to exuberant life. Mark Kurlansky's brilliant book captures these remarkable stories, and combined with authentic recipes, anecdotes, photos, and his own musings and analysis, evokes a bygone era when Americans had never heard of fast food and the grocery superstore was a thing of the future. Kurlansky serves as a guide to this hearty and poignant look at the country's roots. From New York automats to Georgia Coca-Cola parties, from Arkansas possum-eating clubs to Puget Sound salmon feasts, from Choctaw funerals to South Carolina barbecues, the WPA writers found Americans in their regional niches and eating an enormous diversity of meals. From Mississippi chittlins to Indiana persimmon puddings, Maine lobsters, and Montana beavertails, they recorded the curiosities, commonalities, and communities of American food. http://www.amazon.com/Food-Younger-Land-Food-Before-Restaurants/dp/1594488657?tag=vglnk-c53-20