Follow-up to previous post: about the film Don’t Look Up.
So, I give the film a thumbs-up, even though it’s uneven. It follows through on its premise. It effectively parodies the denialist nature of the anti-vaxx crowd, with a crucial difference.
(Spoilers.)
No links political or scientific today. Instead I’ll indulge on what’s happening now, and what happened in my childhood, on Christmas Eve.
Henry Gee is a long-time editor of Nature, one of the two (along with Science) general interest scientific journals. Gee came to notice of the science fiction community in the 2000s (iirc) when he commissioned short science fiction stories from many of the top authors in the field. He’s published several books, most recently A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth: 4.6 Billion Years in 12 Pithy Chapters.
Here he is in Scientific American, 30 Nov 2021: Humans Are Doomed to Go Extinct, subtitled, “Habitat degradation, low genetic variation and declining fertility are setting Homo sapiens up for collapse”
Finished my Christmas shopping today — I had to be done today — though one or two ordered items won’t be here until next week.
It rained fairly heavily last night and the residue set in today; supposedly not raining, according to iPhone Weather, but still overcast and drizzling just enough to trigger the wipers regularly. I’m always amazed — pet peeve alert — by how many drivers don’t understand they should turn on headlights in such conditions so that other drivers can see them, lest their cars go unseen in the gray fog; it’s not about their being able to see better through the rain. (My car has a setting that turns on the lights automatically in dim conditions.)
After cardiac therapy stopped in Montclair Village for my last round of Christmas Shopping. Found some things on my list, not all. So it is.
One more thing: in yesterday’s mail came not one not two but three “Christmas cards” consisting of postcard sized photo collages of various family members. Including some family members who had seemed to cut me off, back at the beginning of the pandemic. Nice to see such lovely families.
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Links from today: how the Fox News audience’s hostility towards Anthony Fauci shows its insecurity, and resentment of those who know things; how Joe Manchin’s lack of imagination betrays a similar hostility toward change and making things better.
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How shocked parents are fighting back against school boards and public libraries; how other parents respond; how and when abortion became so important to the Christian right; and about the usual Republican gerrymandering.
With an endpiece about The Sound of Music.
Continuing my stroll through my nonfiction library, of books I’ve read that I think are worth remembering.
Carl Sagan, Other Worlds (produced by Jerome Agel). Bantam, 1975.
This is a thin little book (160pp) with text by Carl Sagan but “produced” by Jerome Agel, who apparently was an editor or designer at Bantam Books, the publisher here. He had a similar credit on Sagan’s THE COSMIC CONNECTION and, per Google, did similar support for books by Marshall McLuhan and R. Buckminster Fuller. Most famously, he “produced” without author credit the book THE MAKING OF KUBRICK’S 2001, a fat paperback full of reviews and interviews and essays about that film, a book published in April 1970 in the aftermath of the unexpected popularity of that 1969 film.
This weekend is this year’s World Science Fiction Convention, in Washington D.C., and again I am not attending, as I have not attended any conventions at all since when Worldcon was near me, in San Jose, in 2018. Tonight, beginning at 6pm PST, the Hugo Awards winners will be announced.
About how language changes, how some cultural assumptions are common among some but unknown by others, and how some people don’t know any of the things that anyone reading this blog know. With my own personal experiences of such matters, and samples of Adam-Troy Castro.
Union Square; Going for the Kill; the Need for a Villain
Perhaps from time to time I’ll move the “endpiece” discussion to the *top* of the post. So: Today we visited Union Square in San Francisco, on this the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year. (Which means the shortest proportion of daylight to darkness of any day in the year — not a day that is literally shorter than 24 hours. I suspect there are people who don’t understand this.)
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