Y'know, I can imagine Elvis doing that, if he had a gooogle prototype in graceland, back in the day. <"Go, Gooogle - Go ogle googols of go-go gals...">

Doesn't mean it's good for you, anymore than two-ton cheeseburgers with buffalo mozzarella and a whole buffalo.

In Frog, on peut dire "lors que..." et "au contraire" ... so I guess it means 'Except when it isn't'. Or is that 'sin embargo'?

Only problem is now there's too much to respond to. :s

What a curiously convoluted way of saying 'LOL'. Although using many words *does* permit many nuances: yer average lollard-in-the-street can't really do tenses ('to be about to have been lolled at?') or conditionals ('if 'twere lolled then it were well it were lolled lollaciously') ... and so lollickingly on.

But SF writers (and therefore readers) DID imagine Earth as a "green planet" a lot (nice new additions to your profile btw), and so it was indeed with some surprise and a touch of disappointment that I saw the planet turn out to be anything but. ;s

Now there are many such photos around, and many of them contain significant expanses of greenery; but that particular photo I saw first (I believe it was in an issue of Time magazine, maybe even cover...?) happened to contain no green at all, just a swirl of blue, white, and brown. Very pretty, but not what was expected!

<And The Times, it ain't worth readin'>

Best cover version of the lot. :D

<It was *always* 'sado-lollery' that I hated, and still do.>

I don't even object to verbal violence, if it has finesse. It's that particular *tone* ... the finger-pointing primate-rictus LOL ...

I reckon we agree. Uh, were we all bullied as kids or something?

John Cooper Clarke summed up the type:

"Or something" will do, public laundrywise. ;)

<the finger-pointing primate-rictus LOL>

Hey, that reminds me of Jack London's excellent prehistoric fiction piece, 'Before Adam'. Do you know it? If not, highly recommended - and can be found online at http://london.sonoma.edu/Writings/B...

Such opinions exist, in principle, but it's such a long time since I read any of them ...

I recall one phrase of Heinlein's: a teen Martian named Poddy with "burgeoning secondary sex characteristics". Ouch.

Pre-Gibson, I preferred Ballard, Dick, and the Aldiss of 'Barefoot in the Head'. And Delany: Dhalgren and Babel-17.

<Ballard, Dick, and Aldiss>

Never got around to those three. I always tended to start reading a "new" (to me that is) writer going on recommendation from a friend or a mention by an earlier favorite writer - and if I liked them, I would read everything of theirs that I could find. So I know everything, or as close to everything as was possible at the time, written be certain authors - and others not at all, except by name. Exception being that I also read a lot of "Best of... [year or theme]" collections, so I know shorter works of many other authors too. Some I followed up by adding them to my "official" favorites list and reading more of their work, others I didn't get around to.

Samuel R. Delany, I have read his 'Star Pit', which is a first class work IMO, with very memorable characters. But his work was hard to find here pre-net, and so I haven't followed up with more. :\

Interestingly, he shares one theme of Heinlein's that I've always liked... the group (/line) marriages. I used to agree with a lot of Heinlein's ideas way back when - well, I was just a kid - maybe even up to about 15% or so... ;p By now, I think I'm down to more like 5% agreement with him, but that one I still like. :D

I've been on a slow train through a place called the Bog of Allen. I shall have something to say to Ginsberg on reaching Nirvana. Could have sworn he said it was a 'Beat Bog' and I imagined a louche lavatory with 'Scouting for Boys' as its Users' Manual ... but it turned out to be a large, damp, featureless *peat bog*.

The natives pass the centuries by inventing new vowels and sneering at 'foreigners' from the next parish. Authentic Ur-Lollards, I suppose.

Bog: the Slavic god, the Scandinavian book, the English toilet, and something *soft* in Irish. Speaks volumes.

Then I had a trip in a Rasta Taxi, mon. Routine, I'm sure, for all you worldly types, but for me this constituted some major depositioning and repositioning. Culminating in the return of the repressed ... I must try to avoid saying "Honey, I'm Home" while visiting my small but daunting apiary.

I shall try to pick up the threads in due course, but <Tristram Shandy's Pair o' Docs> is inevitable. Zeno - yer man from beyond over in Elea - with an infinitely regressive autobiography.

I accidentally read a page of John Stuart Mill last night, and was hugely impressed. And touched that JSM thought that 'freedom of speech' and 'freedom of religion' had been achieved, or would be soon.

Writing in 1851, the poor buzzard. But I'm a sucker for articulate optimists, able to put words on ideas that nobody else shares.

And my thoughts, mysteriously, range even further back, converging on 18th century novelists, philosophers, conmen, revolutionaries, social climbers, and formalists. At more or less random ... c'est bizarre, ca.

The Draughtsman's Contract. Pope's Dunciad. Swift's Tale of a Tub, and his poem 'Celiashits'. Bloody Diderot, Jacques le Fataliste. Berkeley's exquisite put-down of Calculus, infinitesimals, Newton and Newtonians: "Are these, then, the ghosts of departed quantities?"

Bach. Euler. Mozart. De Moivre. Bernoulli & Bernoulli. Adam Weishaupt. Mesmer. Cagliostro. Voltaire and Gibbon exhuming the story of the last great 'pagan' mathematician, Hypatia, and her brutal murder by a Christian mob in Alexandria - led by a vile specimen named 'Saint' Cyril - who scraped the flesh from her screaming bones with oyster shells.

And our versions of all of these, starting (again) with Peter Greenaway and The Draughtsman's Contract. That moment in Doctor Who where the Doc defeats clockwork alien robots in Versailles, where they've come to take the heart of Mme Pompadour. As the last creature dies the Doctor says "I'm not winding you up".

A novel, <Lempriere's Dictionary>, by Laurence Norfolk, not to be confused with the actual 18th century dictionary of classical mythology by Lempriere. Shakespeare's lost 'Tragedy of Hypatia', rumoured (by crazy people) to have been *found* by Pynchon and partly hidden again in his Wharfinger tragedy. Pynchon's extraordinary <Mason & Dixon>; the author signature, genuine or not, which adorns my copy and led me to abandon my attempt to read it in Danish -- I tried, I did, really, but 18th century Danish with those archaic 'aa' vowels is so far beyond me that it qualifies as lunacy rather than erudition or even showing off. Why struggle with a translation when you can struggle with the original? Again and again ...

<Snow-Balls have flown their Arcs, starr'd the Sides of Outbuildings, as of Cousins, carried Hats away into the brisk Wind off Delaware,-- the Sleds are brought in and their Runners carefully dried and greased, shoes deposited in the back Hall, a stocking'd foot Descent made upon the great Kitchen ...>

Cut. To, say, Leonard Cohen, brisk, crisp, pointed, our holiest contemporary and final visionary, even as vision secedes from the sensorium: <"And the homicidal bitchin'/ that goes on in every kitchen/ to decide on who will serve and who will eat">

Basta. I am drenched in alterity and etheritude. There's more. There's always so much more. All tree searches are infinite.

And people claim to be bored? I 'ad nuffink ter do, 'ad I? So I stabbed 'im.

A mad world? Not even *close*. The bacteria are building spaceships to escape from us, but first they need to use us a power source.