Young Geoffrey's lament

Young Geoffrey's Breakfast

By Geoffrey (A.A. Milne) Dow

Young Geoffrey asked
Da Google
And Da Google
Asked the Coder:
"Could we have some documen(tation)
For Young Geoffrey new website?"

Da Google asked the Coder,
The Coder

The best art looks upon the face of change without blinking; the best art acknowledges death.

That's why A.A. Milne's seemingly simple and superficial children's story's, commonly known as Winnie-the-Pooh, brought me to tears when I was very young and why it still does now that I am but one year away from being (forty) six.

That's right, reader, Winnie-the-Pooh makes me cry and I don't care who knows it. Further, it is heartbreaking because it is indeed, about the little deaths each of us face, over and over again, as we grow up. For, like snakes sloughing off a season's skin, to gain a new place in the race of our lives, is to leave the old one behind.

Children's stories or no, A.A. Milne's gentle, loving stories about a small boy and his menagerie of stuffed toys does not shy away from the hard truths of life.

* * *

The inscription (at right) is as simple as it is sentimental — and yet as profound as it is cognizant of the unusual boy that was my parents' first child, then making the transition from 12 to 13 years old.

I was a kid who read The Globe and Mail with breakfast and romped with Batman when I came home from school; I was as interested in politics as I was fanatical about the fate of the Montréal Canadiens; a kid whose long-term ambitions were torn between wanting to go into cosmology in one way or another, or into politics with an eye towards becoming Canada's first socialist Prime Minister.

I still built sand-castles in the summer, yet thrilled to CBC Radio's international affairs program, Sunday Morning, "a week in the life of the world." I was growing up, I knew it, but I happily embraced those parts of me that were still childish.

In the long and storied SF tradition that sees such devices as Ursula K. le Guin's ansible become, in effect, an open-source idea, free to be modified, played with, argued about or even just used as a word to indicate "faster-than-light communication", rather than locked-down and copyrighted as le Guin's personal play-thing, "The Things" is Peter Watts' re-telling of John W. Campbell Jr.'s classic story, "Who Goes There?" and of John Carpenter's 1982 movie adaptation, The Thing.

Using the same plot and even the same character names, Watts, the author of the excellent novel, Blindsight (among others, all of which are available on his site under a Creative Commons license) re-tells the story from the monster's point of view. Or rather, from the (very alien) alien's point of view.

A biologist by training, in 7,000 words Watts has created what I suspect will be long regarded as a classic hard SF tale. There would be no story here (or at least, it would not be the same story) if this narrative was not about the shape-shifting alien's gradual discovery of the very strange way that life on Earth is organized.

Those who know neither the original story nor the movie adaptation might find "The Things" a little confusing, but anyone who knows the source material as something more than just a horror story will find it fascinating — and one of those rare, successful attempts in science fiction to depict an alien as genuinely, really, alien, not just in what in can do and what it physically is, but in terms of how those differences affect how it perceives the world.

A very good story from a very good writer. And happily, it is online at ClarkesWorldMagazine.com.

A city without alleys

A city without alleys is no city at all — and yet, here I now live (again).

In truth, I have not yet revisited enough of our nation's Capital to talk about it as a whole, save to note the obvious. Ottawa doesn't feel like a city.

A young and brilliant^1. online friend of mine has recently been paying me the rather high complement of dipping into the archives of my Livejournal, and recently reminded me of a review I wrote back in 2004 of Bob Dylan's Chronicles, Volume One. To frankly toot my own horn, it's an excellent essay and so I am very grateful to her for reminding me of its existence. That it includes some reminiscences of my paternal grandfather makes it of even more interest to me (and, just possibly, to at least some of you). Click here to read the full 1,600 word review. ____

Notes:

1. Yes, yes, I know, it may sound as if I am returning flattery with flattery, but I have been reading her journal with a great deal of interest since she was something like 15 years old and so I don't hesitate to use the word. Also, it's not a word I throw around with reckless abandon. Back to top.

I was going to post an up-date explaining what's going on with the store (electrician's coming in on Tuesday, after which we'll really be able to start building!) and how I don't have a life worth blogging about — then I decided not to blog about them. Meanwhile, Sooguy has provided me with inspiration in another form. To whit, a meme — click the "Read More" button if you're interested in which movies pique this viewers fancies.

I'd really rather not promote the moral idiot Christopher Hitchens, an "intellectual" who shamefully broke with his own alleged principles when George W. Bush decided it would be fun and profitable to invade Iraq, but when he's right, he's right.

See, Yale University Press is publishing a book called Cartoons That Shook the World, which "tells the story of the lurid and preplanned campaign of 'protest' and boycott that was orchestrated in late 2005 after the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten ran a competition for cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed." As you may recall, lives were lost during the subsequent riots and, while the subject was covered extensively in the Western press, the vast majority of our newspapers and magazines refused to permit their readers to actuall see what the fuss was about (if anyone's interested, my own reaction shortly thereafter is online here).

Nearly four years later, that short-sighted moral and intellectual pusillanimity is still going strong. Hitchens writes,

So here's another depressing thing: Neither the "experts in the intelligence, national security, law enforcement, and diplomatic fields, as well as leading scholars in Islamic studies and Middle East studies" who were allegedly consulted, nor the spokespeople for the press of one of our leading universities, understand the meaning of the plain and common and useful word instigate. If you instigate something, it means that you wish and intend it to happen. If it's a riot, then by instigating it, you have yourself fomented it. If it's a murder, then by instigating it, you have yourself colluded in it. There is no other usage given for the word in any dictionary, with the possible exception of the word provoke, which does have a passive connotation. After all, there are people who argue that women who won't wear the veil have "provoked" those who rape or disfigure them … and now Yale has adopted that "logic" as its own.

The full article is online at Slate.com (though it's interesting to note that, while Hitchens proivides a link to the cartoons, none of them appear alongside the article itself).

A problem with permissions, or is Slate refusing to practice what Hitchens is preaching?

Bill Needle is a Contributing Editor to Edifice Rex Online. The noted television critic, political commentator and Canada's only accredited Doctor of Liberty. He lives in Mellonville and monitors the world via the fair and balanced reporting of Fox News and The National Post, among many others.

Let the chimes of freedom ring!

By Bill Needle, Contributing Editor

"President" Barack Hussein Obama — What else does this man have to hide?

It's been a good week for Liberty south of the border, folks!

After the the tragic events of January 20, freedom-lovers around the world watched in horror as "President" Barack Hussein Obama spear-headed his slow-motion Socialist coup d'état of the nation that saved the world from Hitler and Stalin in World War Two and fought the long fight against Communism for decades longer, while the rest of the "west" sat on the sidelines, when it wasn't actively siding with the enemy.

For a while there it looked like the last best hope for Liberty and Democracy in the world would end up on the scrap-heap of history as Hussein-Obama did his best to bankrupt his "own" country.

But freedom-loving Americans have a long history of fighting back against the forces of tyranny and it looks like they have finally have finally won a victory!

The New York Times reports the good news that the battle against "President" Hussein-Obama's so-called health care "reform (can we say "socialized medical care" boys and girls?) has been stopped in its tracks.

The American people have said "No!" to Hussein-Obama's Trojan horse!

Apparently I'm not the only person who thinks race may not have been the cause of Gates' arrest.

Thanks to Livejournal's supergee for this article, and to the internet in general for this one.

Leelah learns the truth about life in civilization
(compound interest — and taxes):

"Then the people should rise up and slaughter their oppressors!"

(Screenshot from "The Sunmakers", season 15, episode 95, part I.)