Wednesday, July 4, 2007

Going South

Scant posts for the next little while: I'm heading off to Readercon, just outside Boston, at the crack of dawn tomorrow. I may even see some of you down there, assuming I don't end up the token white guy in the little room at the border because some slack-jawed imbecile at Customs doesn't like the way I answered his inane questions. It's happened before.

I may get a chance to post from down there; don't count on it. In the meantime, I see the director's cut of the Nature piece has gone live (click on the pdf link for "supplementary materials); it does contain substantially more bits than the printed version did. (For one thing, my comment about farting human seals in Vonnegut's "Galapagos" has a little more context to back it up. Sadly, the Paris Hilton enema remark remains lost for all time.)

You may have noticed a paucity of real science postings lately. I'll try to rectify that upon my return. But seriously, the deadlines just keep on fucking coming, and no matter how short they are, when you're living gig to gig you don't feel comfortable turning any of 'em down. It's just a question of finding the time to read the source material.

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6 Comments:

Blogger Jena said...

"I fly into JFK / My heart goes boom-boom-boom / I know that customs man / is gonna take me to that little room... / Oh no, no...! Oh no no...!"

*insert sound of rubber glove being snapped on...*

July 4, 2007 10:03 PM  
Blogger Nicholas said...

Readercon is just outside boston?? I'm just outside boston! sweet.

July 5, 2007 9:50 AM  
Blogger TheBrummell said...

Sadly, the Paris Hilton enema remark remains lost for all time

Not necessarily true: put it up here, for us to enjoy.

Have fun in Beantown!

July 5, 2007 9:56 AM  
Blogger Oliver said...

Aaaargh the typo. Can't believe we missed it. Suspect that we were so bewitched by the Other of Banana staring out of the page at us that we couldn't read the damn words. Aaargh.

As to the enema -- not edited out for prudery, but more because that part of the discussion didn't really get anywhere in a way that felt good on page. When we say director's cut round here we still mean a cut, not just a string of dailies (DVD re-re-release pirates take note -- there *is* a difference...)

Anyway, the context was that Joan had been saying that SF gave people a context in which to think about novelty, and Peter wasn't sure how much he bought it:

Peter: I don't know if I necessarily buy that. I mean, these days Paris Hilton gets an enema and within thirty seconds it's all over the news and people are talking about it twenty-four hours a day. I think at this stage you could drop pretty much any novel concept into the mix and within a very short period of time you'd have all sorts of self-proclaimed experts holding forth on the good, the bad and the ugly aspects of it.
And of course, most of it would be drek, most of these people would not know what they were talking about, but we're so wired in now and we have so much access to so many different sources of authority that if you actually sieve out the garbage, I rather suspect you've got a pretty fast response time to new innovations and new development.

July 9, 2007 11:56 AM  
Blogger Brenda said...

I'm not sure that Paris Hilton getting an enema is a novelty.

July 9, 2007 11:04 PM  
Blogger Peter Watts said...

Oliver said...

Aaaargh the typo...

And some other stuff, but people, this is Oliver Morton! News/Features Editor at Nature! Actually reading the 'crawl!

I believe I may have made it.

July 11, 2007 4:37 PM  

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