LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment

SF Signal: Is SF Too Geeky?

Dave Itzkoff, SF reviewer for The New York Times, recently listed his favorite SF books. But he is also making waves with some comments about the SF genre he makes in his review of David Marusek's Counting Heads. "HERE'S a question I don't expect to come anywhere close to answering by the end of this column: Why does contemporary science fiction have to be so geeky?"

Cause it always has been. Sheesh when I went to school the geeks wore glasses, pocket protectors and carried slide rulers to the daily chess club meeting. And they read sci-fi. I know I was one.

The Writers

Having Isaac Asimov at a Star Trek convention might seem odd. After all, Asimov may have been one of the grand old men of SF but he had no connection to the series at all. (He acted as a technical advisor to Space: 1999 around this time, which to True Believers was another strike against him.) On the other hand, he was local, he was willing and he was a hero to those of us who had discovered science fiction (and nonfiction) long before the Enterprise ever left dry dock. Best of all Asimov was one of the nicest people I've ever met, the kind of person who'd sit and sign autographs and trade jokes with the fans for hours on end. He was like that lovable uncle you always wanted but few of us get. (Apologies in advance to my uncles should they ever read this comment. You're wonderful and all but you're no Isaac Asimov!)

Harlan Ellison was once the angry young man of SF, the writer who had the nerve to write a script about drug dealing on the Enterprise called The City On The Edge Of Forever. Ellison had a reputation, probably deserved, of being touchy and unapproachable at conventions. Which is funny, because the few times I've met him I have found him exactly the opposite. He even agreed to pose with a friend of mine for a picture, which sadly didn't turn out. And whatever else you think about him, the man can surely write.

Also See:

Science Fiction



Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
science-fiction, culture, america, writing, books, sf, sci-fi,

Instead of searching bank accounts in North America perhaps those fighting the so called war on terror should be checking into Muslim trusts in Pakistan.

Quake money' sent to Pak used to finance UK plane bombing plot

Money sent to Pakistan for quake rehabilitation was used to fund the Heathrow bomb attack plot that was foiled by British authorities following inputs from their Pakistani counterparts, if an investigation by a leading Pakistani daily is to be believed.

According to The Daily Times, the Muslim Charity of UK remitted a huge amount of money to three individuals in three different bank accounts in Mirpur, Pakistan occupied Kashmir (PoK) in December last year as earthquake relief.

But the money in the three accounts in Saudi Pak Bank, Standard Chartered and Habib Bank Ltd was solely for the purpose of financing the foiled bomb plot, the paper said.

According to the report, two of the recipients are British citizens of Kashmir.



Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
terorrists, UK, Pakistan, earthquake, Muslim, Islam, banks, donations, earthquakerelief, aid, humanitarian, funds

Ok conspiracy freaks this ones for you. It's Deja Vu, this is like the missing minutes off the Nixon tapes.

The company handling electronic document production in the Enron civil suits says a software bug may have erased text in e-mails produced for discovery in the case over an 18-month span.

Software Bug my ass. This is what happens when you outsourcee/privatize your email and IT services.

Applied Discovery Inc., a Bellevue, Wash.–based division of LexisNexis, says one client has reported a problem so far. And lawyers handling the Enron litigation said it was too early to predict the potential impact. But several of the lawyers, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that if the problem was widespread and had corrupted the discovery process, it could cost tens of millions of dollars to fix and could foul up both pending and settled Enron litigation.

Convienant that. No alleged bribery was reported.



Alsop See:

Enron



Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Enron, e-mailo, etextxt, software, bug, Applied-Disvcovery, Inc., US, law, courts, civilsuit

He appears at first to be a compasionate captialist, but then he lets the cat out of the bag.

Reforms have not benefited poor: Narayana Murthy

Bangalore, Aug 12: Software icon N R Narayana Murthy, who has often termed Infosys a shining example of economic reforms initiated in 1991, said economic liberalisation has not touched the poor and makes no sense unless it addressed their basic needs. "I keep telling my colleague Nandan (Nilekani, CEO of Infosys) that it's funny in this country that we can buy whatever...BMWs...we can have 800 channels on TV...All of that," the Chairman and Chief Mentor of Infosys said. "But the real progress in India has not taken place simply because the reforms have not touched the poor people," he said at a book release function here today. "Unless you address the basic needs of the poorest of the poor, which are decent primary and secondary education, decent health care and decent nutrition...All of this (reforms) makes no sense".

"Unless, we completely delicense the primary and secondary education, unless we create an environment where more and more investment get into primary health care, I don't think we can truly claim to have embraced reforms".

There ya go privatization is a failure in India because they have not privatized education and health care. Like the WTO, World Bank, and IMF this compasionate capitalist sees only one solution to poverty, increasing privatization. Which of course by the real world example of Bolivia was and is a complete failure.

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
privatization, Indai, Bolivia, Murthy, poor, poverty, WTO, WoldBank, IMF, education, healthcare

The Navvies were traveling labourers who built the Great Lakes Canals, the railroads and the mines in Canada and England. They were exploited by the upper classes in body and spirit even after death. This is an excerpt from an online biography of the Navvies. Those in Canada were Irish labourers, Catholics whose bosses were Orangemen. In England they came from the North, Scotland and Ireland. They were the epitome of the English proletarianized peasantry.
In Canada they are celebrated in song by Gordon Lightfoot with his Great Canadian Railway Triology.




Navvies built canals, railways, dams and then pipe tracks, the big nineteenth century sea-port docks, and the Manchester Ship Canal.

Navvying began suddenly in 1763 in the Bridgewater Canal: it ended around 1943, after a twenty-year fade-out. Along with the rest of Britain there was a kind of kink in the navvy's history in the 1870s when things began changing, generally for the better.

At first they were just skilled earth shifters digging canals at prodigious speed. Later they were skilled in tunnelling, mining, timbering — skilled enough to set up as one-man contractors employing local unskilled labourers to shift their muck. You could set a gang of prime navvies down in an untouched valley, they said of themselves, and they'd build you a dam without aid of an engineer. At times they slotted into the pay scales at twice a common labourer's wages, though they never equalled apprenticed craftsmen like masons.

It is easy for the urbanised and pensionable to romanticise them. They seem free, fearless above the humdrum conventions of shopkeepers, clerks, factory workers, vicars, and the legally wed. Perhaps we glamorise cowboys, blue-water sailors and the hell-bent navvy for the same reasons. In reality, isolation was the biggest thing in a navvy's life. They were perpetual outsiders: a people apart. Sub-working class. Sub-the-bottommost-heap of English working society. Sub-all, almost.

Left: Railway Navvies. Right: Navvies, 1890s

Click on thumbnails for larger images.

The navvy never called a spade a spade, always a bloody shovel. Everything he shovelled he called muck. Earth, blasted rock, clay, all were generically and indiscriminately muck. With the muck he created new landscapes and changed old societies. It was mass transformation by muscle and shovel.

To do so navvies worked in geographical and social isolation; crude, muck-caked men on a helix spiralling down from prejudice [4/5] to more isolation, isolation to more prejudice. Eighty per cent were English, most of their work was in England, yet they lived like aliens in their own country, often outside its laws, usually outside its national sense of community. They were their own country's non-belongers. They belonged to themselves only tenuously. Mostly they lived apart in navvy settlements. New habits of life, thought, dress, speech, and a tightening of the ring against outsiders came out of their isolation. Their own countrymen were terrified of them, and despised them. Heavy drinking was normal, death by alcohol common. Drink was a common cause of riot, along with an unhesitating hatred for their own Irish minority. Their accident and death rates were higher than any other group in Britain, including colliers, including soldiers fighting nineteenth-century wars. Often they were nameless, known to each other only at second-hand by nickname. They were a homeless, wandering itinerant people belonging nowhere except to the island as a whole.

They survived the Great War as a separate community, but not for long. Nawying was killed by a lack of large scale public works (worsened by the Slump), by bureaucracy and by the petrol engine. Probably in that order. By the mid-1950s they were quietly ending as a recognisable separate community. Individuals did live and work on. Their descendants still do (at their height, just before the Great War, there may have been as many as a hundred and seventy thousand of them).

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
navy, navvies, Canada, England, canal, Great-Lakes, CPR, labor, labour, labourers, labor-history, labour-history, working-class,

Liberal MP Wajid Khan is going to try and sell Harpers Middle East policy to those in the Middle East and to Canadians. Good thing he has experience. Middle East advisor has experience in sales

Like the PM's Emerson deal this one has the Liberals all in a tither . Interestingly neither the Blogging Tories nor the Liberalbloggers have made much of a fuss over this.

Perhaps because, as at least one Liberalblogger admits , it is a very smooth move by Harper. While gaining Jewish Liberals with his unconditional support for Israel, Harper mollifies Arab and Muslim Canadians with a special envoy who is a Liberal.

Khan of course is espousing a Lieberman type of bi-partisanship. And why shouldn't a Liberal promote Harpers foreign adventurism, it originated with them in the first place.

For Liberal MP's to criticize the Harpocrites over Afghanistan or heck the evacutation of Lebanon, is the hieght of hypocrisy.

They would like us to forget that the Liberals voted with the government to support the Harpocrites. And to forget the two week waiting period before the dithering Liberals launched DART to help the survivors of the the Indonesian Tusanami.


Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Khan, Harper, Canada, Middle-East, Lebanon, Israel, Syria, Iran, Politics, Governement, Liberal, MP, Conservative, foreign-policy