AdamSmith

One of my favorite bits from Forbidden Planet...

All three were publicly critical of Dianetics at one point or another. But although the story about L. Ron bragging that way has long been rumored and repeated, alas there doesn't seem to be any documentation of it. Just word-of-mouth that some fan may have overheard L. Ron say that to Clarke at an sf convention. At least we have de Camp's classic withering bio-sketch, "El-Ron of the City of Brass": http://www.xenu.net/archive/oca/elron.html ...and Clarke did make this succinct crack: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43YakGYQYGc&feature=player_embedded

More from The Wall Street Journal... Bird Die-Offs? Not that Rare By GAUTAM NAIK Birds are dropping in droves. The thing is, it's perfectly normal. In recent days, 5,000 blackbirds dropped dead in Arkansas. Dozens of jackdaws in Sweden fell from the sky as well. So did a few hundred turtle doves in Italy. "Large mortality events in wildlife aren't that uncommon," says Paul Slota, spokesman for the U.S. Geological Survey's National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wis., which has been tracking mass animal deaths since the 1970s. "In the last 10 years we have logged 188 cases just involving birds with mortality exceeding 1,000 animals per event." The causes vary. Some animals starve. Others eat toxic food or get poisoned by people. Many die in severe weather, or succumb to pollution or bacterial and viral illnesses. In many causes, though, the cause remains a mystery. For example, one prevailing theory holds that the blackbirds in Arkansas were startled out of their roost by fireworks set off on New Year's Eve, which disoriented them and caused them to slam into buildings, trees and the ground. But some scientists say fireworks aren't the likely cause; if so similar bird deaths would be reported every New Year's Eve, but they aren't. On average, between 160 and 200 such "mass death" events in wildlife are reported to the federal government each year, according to the USGS. The Associated Press also noted that there have been much larger die-offs than the thousands of blackbirds in Arkansas; twice in the summer of 1996, more than 100,000 ducks died of botulism in Canada. So why the sudden surge in public interest, plus the accompanying fear in some quarters that something sinister might be afoot? "There's much greater exchange of information nowadays" thanks to the Internet, says Mr. Slota. "The more such events get reported, the more people take interest" and see links that aren't necessarilythere. Some wildlife declines are truly worrisome but aren't as attention-getting, says Mr. Slota. For example, in the past three years or so, more than one million bats in the U.S. have died from a fungal affliction called white nose syndrome. The bats are important pollinators for several plant species, and "the mortality is astoundingly greater" than the blackbirds, says Mr. Slota. But public interest is meager. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704055204576068252659717470.html?mod=WSJ_hp_MIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsSecond

What nonsense. Part of Twain's use of that word, over and over and over, was specifically to document and indict the racist hatred of the time. There is for instance that damning passage where Huck says about a riverboat accident: "It warn't the grounding -- that didn't keep us back but a little. We blowed out a cylinder-head." "Good gracious! anybody hurt?" "No'm. Killed a nigger." Here is that chapter, with the word highlighted. The way it is repeated over and over just drives home the callousness, the casual unthinking hatefulness: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:MEy_9WxLF98J:www.literature.org/authors/twain-mark/huckleberry/chapter-32.html+anybody+hurt%3F+no'm,+killed+a+nigger&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

Photo essay comparing European with U.S. attitudes toward teen sex, as depicted in ad campaigns: http://www.slate.com/id/2272631/ "In both Europe and America, the age at which most people start having sex is 17. But that's where similarities about teen sexuality begin and end. Teen pregnancy rates in the United States are three to six times higher than in Western European countries. This means that one out of every three American teenage girls becomes pregnant at least once before she reaches the age of 20. (Even poor countries like Algeria, Sri Lanka, China, and Estonia have lower teen birth rates than we do.) The gap between Europe and the United States for sexually transmitted diseases is even greater—gonorrhea and chlamydia rates are 20 to 30 times higher here than in the Netherlands, for example. "What explains these hugely varying outcomes? At the heart of the answer lies a contrast in attitudes toward teen sexuality. This is clear from research about how families talk about sex. And it's also clear from advertising campaigns. The caption for this light-hearted German ad reads "Prevents Shortsightedness." Can you imagine an ad like it in the United States?" ... Etc. Click on through.

It also seems just about impossible to get this kind of transportation infrastructure project through the public approval process here. The Western Pennsylvania Maglev project was, technologically, ready to start construction in 1996. But to this day, nada. http://www.maglevpa.com/index.html Meanwhile, the Shanghai Maglev started construction in 2001 and commenced operating in 2004. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Maglev_Train Granted there is plenty about such Chinese efficiency that I would not as a citizen want to live with. But still.

If this was in the U.S., I would put it in the Politics forum. But since it's just Old Europe... Cash-strapped city turns to sex tax A city in Germany, strapped with a 100 million euro (or $133 million) deficit, has taken a novel approach to fixing it: taxing sex, according to Reuters. The city of Dortmund has introduced a day tax on prostitutes to help close its budget gap. "The new 'pleasure tax' requires prostitutes in Dortmund to purchase a 6 euro 'day ticket' for each day they work, or face a potential fine," the Reuters report said. "The city estimates that the new tax will add some 750,000 euros [about $1 million] to its coffers each year." The city of Dortmund, Germany, estimates a "pleasure tax" bring in 750,000 euros a year, Reuters reports. http://www.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/12/15/political.circus/index.html?iref=obinsite

Anne Francis, TV and Film Actress, Dies at 80 By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Published: January 3, 2011 LOS ANGELES (AP) — Anne Francis, who was best known for her roles in the 1950s science-fiction film “Forbidden Planet” and the 1960s television series “Honey West,” died on Sunday in Santa Barbara, Calif. She was 80... http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/04/arts/04francis.html?_r=1&hpw

Hope your friend finds this useful. I like how Ms. Lumpkin describes what she is up to.

Still temperate here in NYC. Tom Friedman/NYT was right: Global warming = "global weirding."

He got ruff with me. Wot can I say?

This may not find too much constituency here but it struck me as interesting. The Lesbian Hugh Hefner Once a high-stakes lawyer, Jincey Lumpkin has recently made a name for herself as a successful lesbian pornographer. “My goal is to show real chemistry,” she tells Itay Hod... http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-12-18/lesbian-pornographer-jincey-lumpkin-finds-success-in-realism/?obref=obinsite

Most grateful. Remember when (did they do this in MEM?), back in the '60s, small tanker trucks would roll around the downtown streets during summer, spray-fogging big clouds of insecticide to try to control the mosquito population?

Same here! A nuisance. I could hardly taste any of the Xmas feasts. Also, try coughing and sneezing with 2 cracked ribs. Every little spasm feels like you are about to puncture your spleen.

OK, my top New Year's resolution is to break out of my NYC hypgnosis and get back to the real world -- i.e., posting here!

I was not crazy about Elizabeth Edwards' willingness to throw the Democratic chances onto the fire if John got the nomination and were then discovered about Rielle. Nevertheless, this piece after her death really moved me: Why Elizabeth Edwards Left God Out of Her Last Goodbye DAVID GIBSON Religion Reporter AOL Politics Daily A dying person's last words are often, and perhaps too easily, held out as the key to understanding all that went before, and so it has been with Elizabeth Edwards. Her final public message, posted on Facebook, was characteristically eloquent, to the point, and full of grace -- that last word being one that Edwards herself often invoked, and one that was often applied to her, especially as she bore up under so many trials, the last of them the cancer that claimed her life on Tuesday. But the opening line of her public farewell was especially notable for its careful phrasing (Edwards, who did post-graduate work in literature, was, after all, a student of the novelist Henry James) about matters of the soul: "You all know that I have been sustained throughout my life by three saving graces -- my family, my friends, and a faith in the power of resilience and hope," Edwards wrote. That she seemed to carefully evade a mention of God or Jesus or things eternal and Christian was striking, and it struck some as "odd," in the words of "American Power" blogger and neocon Donald Douglas. "I can't say what it is -- spiritual or otherwise -- that animates her sense of grace, but it's not God," Douglas wrote before proceeding to add some even less graceful conjecture. "Being anti-religion is cool, so Edwards' non-theological theology gets props from the neo-communists," he said. "Still, at her death bed and giving what most folks are calling a final goodbye, Elizabeth Edwards couldn't find it somewhere down deep to ask for His blessings as she prepares for the hereafter? I guess that nihilism I've been discussing reaches up higher into the hard-left precincts than I thought." Douglas drew some sharp critiques in the comments on his post but also strong support, and even in the report on the faith angle at Christianity Today -- the leading mainstream evangelical publication -- some commenters rued Edwards' apparent lack of orthodox Christian faith. But a closer look at the faith of Elizabeth Edwards offers a more nuanced view, and one that might elicit more charity from those who would judge her at her death. What seems clear above all is that Edwards' late-in-life spirituality was forged by the flames of unspeakable heartache, from the death of her 16-year-old son, Wade, in a car accident in 1996 to the faithlessness of her husband, John Edwards, who ran for president in 2008 and thrust his wife into the public spotlight while he betrayed her with a private affair. And of course, there was the cancer that since 2004 ravaged her body and also shaped her theology. As Adele M. Stan recounted in a July 2007 profile of Edwards for the liberal journal the American Prospect, Edwards told audiences that she "grew up in the Christian tradition" and attended a Methodist church with her husband, but that during her early years as a child in Japan -- her father was a Navy pilot, so the family moved around -- "I grew up with Shintos and Buddhists." That Eastern influence seemed to emerge as Edwards faced her illness: "I have, I think, somewhat of an odd version of God," Edwards explained to an audience of women bloggers when asked how her beliefs inform her politics. "I do not have an intervening God. I don't think I can pray to him -- or her -- to cure me of cancer." Edwards, according to Stan, laughed after describing God as "her" -- hardly a heresy and certainly understandable given her audience -- and continued on: "I appreciate other people's prayers for that [a cure for her cancer], but I believe that we are given a set of guidelines, and that we are obligated to live our lives with a view to those guidelines. And I don't believe that we should live our lives that way for some promise of eternal life, but because that's what's right. We should do those things because that's what's right." Stan thought Edwards sounded a bit like John Lennon singing "Imagine," essentially arguing that there is nothing beyond ourselves and this moment, so make the best of it. Yet Edwards clearly seemed far more engaged with the dilemmas of God and evil -- and grace -- than such a narrow reading allows. In a moving interview with Larry King in May 2009, for example, she spoke frankly about the death of her son and the religious questions it raised and the recalibrations it forced her to make. In the weeks and months after Wade's death, she told King, "I had this idea that God was going to find some way to turn back time and he was going to be alive." She continued to ask herself, as many do, whether she had done something wrong -- did she not teach him well enough, not get him a safe enough car? And then when cancer struck, and her husband's affair was revealed, she agonized about the possibility of her own cosmic cooperation in it all. "And I have to recognize with each of these things, they just happen," she told King. "You didn't have to do something wrong to justify them." But she added, "You still sort of wonder: Is there some grand plan where you've done something someplace else?" Edwards said she had to move on from such magical and negative thinking, and she quoted a line from the Bill Moyers PBS special on the Book of Genesis, to the effect that "You get the God you have, not the God you want." "The God I wanted was going to intervene. He was going to turn time back. The God I wanted was -- I was going to pray for good health and he was going to give it to me," she said. "Why in this complicated world, with so much grief and pain around us throughout the world, I could still believe that, I don't know. But I did. And then I realized that the God that I have was going to promise me salvation if I lived in the right way and he was going to promise me understanding. That's what I'm sort of asking for . . . let me understand why I was tested." Such openness to doubt and, in particular, to the persistence of suffering runs counter to powerful currents of American Christianity that stress the blessings (mostly material) that will flow to those who believe (and donate), as well as to the premium so many Christians place on voicing a confident and undiluted conviction, no matter what the reality. For instance, compare the testimony of Elizabeth Edwards to that of her husband, who frequently touted his faith -- as it seems every candidate for office must -- which he said came "roaring back" after the death of Wade. Edwards alternately cited Jesus to reprove Americans for not caring for the poor and for his (albeit reluctant) opposition to gay marriage. John Edwards, who was raised a devout Southern Baptist and is now a Methodist, told Beliefnet in 2007 that his Christian faith also helped him deal with Elizabeth's cancer. "It's important in my case to have a personal relationship with the Lord, so that I pray daily and I feel that relationship all the time," he said. "And when I'm faced with difficult decisions, which I regularly am, I very often go to Him in prayer." This was at the time Edwards was having an affair with a campaign videographer, Rielle Hunter, who would soon bear their child. The testimony of Elizabeth Edwards, by contrast, seems much more human, but is also orthodox in channeling the Stoic philosophy that influenced early Christians along with the biblical tradition of lamentation, from the Psalmist whose words are echoed in the cry of Jesus dying on the Cross: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" And Elizabeth Edwards' view that Christians should take care of others not out of a self-interested salvation but out of selflessness and love of God is also about as mainstream as you can get, since it was the command of Jesus himself. Moreover, Edwards seemed increasingly embedded in what might be described as the "communion of saints," relying on those around her to provide the spiritual support she so badly needed and desired. "Connections have enriched and sustained me; they have strengthened me by holding me up when I needed it, and they have strengthened me by letting me hold up my end when it was needed," she wrote in her 2006 memoir, "Saving Graces." That communal sense of the faith is also characteristic of American believers, as demonstrated by an extensive study released Tuesday, the same day Edwards passed away. The surveys showed that across all creeds, religious people were more satisfied than non-religious people and that the satisfaction was tied to the number of close friends people said they had in their religious congregation rather than factors like individual prayer, strength of belief, or subjective feelings of God's love or presence. Whatever Elizabeth Edwards believed at the hour of her death is known only to God, and is beyond the scope of our ability to judge or to affect. But her honesty in posing hard questions that most leave unasked -- or simply gloss over with biblical bromides -- seems like a legacy equal to the joys and griefs of her life. http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/12/08/why-elizabeth-edwards-left-god-out-of-her-last-goodbye/

P.S. Embarrassed to note what a mere fraction of a gram (of the other stuff!) can do when smeared on the head of one's cock. Much less under one's foreskin, if one is lucky enough to have such, which I am not, but partners have been. OK. 'Enough, or too much!' Quoting (what, again) Wm. Blake.

P.S. In Julia Child's memoir she describes the bureaucratic hilarity of trying to get phone service installed in their Paris apartment. They made the request; then after a considerable wait, some functionary came to the apartment, not to install but rather to verify in person that they were actually there, and needed a phone; then after yet another wait, finally got service. Sounds like La France may have not have changed all that much.

So a pending adjustment to your screen name? You are too particular. If you were BiVerseBoy, it could still work. You would just have to develop a taste for fish, on occasion. Personally, I love sushi!

Of course there is the danger that his recessive genes could combine with whatever hers may be, to generate something worse than Prince Charles himself. We wait in fear and wonder. In the meantime, natch...

Evidently, at least nine inches!

Why not 'O taste and see'? I have.

That is the definition of insurance, no? Health, property, business-interruption, life, whatever. In all those categories I have seen people (individuals or small businesses, as you note; hardly ever big corporations) get screwed over royally when they needed to make a claim.

Agreed. I have several times gone to change the artificial flowers on a relative's grave, and found a black widow nesting in them. But never been bitten. However, I have for decades had a recurrent nightmare where I am in the yard, and suddenly find myself having to very carefully step over and around any number of copperhead snakes. Maybe from memory of, at 8 years old, a very big one actually coming into our back yard, and papa dispatching it via beheading with a shovel, and then the jaws continuing to snap mindlessly for several minutes. Phobias are the weirdest thing.

Just noticed this thread. Right there with you! On Halloween (Saturday actually) I went out to several parties, got all liquored up, then discovered how the cane which was part of my vampire costume was an invaluable aid to staying upright! I may have just added a new essential to my wardrobe.