ramonarjona

There was an op-ed in the Seattle Times today by a former city council member who strongly opposes the keeping of elephants in zoos. This is part of a movement lead by a bunch of well-intentioned hippies and Lily Tomlin. Really, what they want to do is get rid of zoos in general.... And I wouldn't think any more of them than I do every other group of well-intentioned, poorly informed hippies that hangs out in the public dialog except that I have to walk through a crowd of them once every year on my way home because I have to go past the zoo. So, they irritate me a lot more than, say, PETA.

I am rereading the Shannara series on the Kindle because the books are very heavy and unwieldy. (Seriously. They're huge books.) I wanted to see if they held up to my memory. They do not.

The are, in a word, bad. They seem to be the product of the same profound misreading of Tolkien that gave us the beloved Nimoy album and the Rankin-Bass cartoons. It's hard to imagine but it's as if someone was so inspired by Ulysses that they decided to write fan fic about all the characters but change their names, and maybe through in a topical theme or two--like maybe turn it into a post-apocalyptic story or something.

I saw the acceptance letter for the Sword of Shannara at the Science Fiction Museum. The editor was enormously nice and profuse with their praise before laying out in simple terms the bits that had to be cut. Apparently there was a giant spider in the book at one point--I don't remember one, but maybe I've forgotten and it's still in there.

There is something inherent to Western culture from Damascus to Amsterdam that hopes for the end of the world. There is Ragnarok, Gotterdammergung, the Apocalypse, and even the Marxist notion of the "end of History."

It's like the entirety of Europe and Near East just really, really want to get this over with already.

Conversely much of Asia, influence by Buddhism & Hinduism, figure this is going to go on for a while so you might as well settle in a bit.

I have, however, no clear idea what the aboriginal cultures of Africa, the Americas or Australia felt before contact. If we're to believe the quotes that have been attributed to the Native Americans we might expect that there's a cultural expectation that we're going to be at this for a while--but we know that many of these quotes were fabricated.

Gofundme.com is a crowdfunding site, like Kickstarter but without a promised project. It basically allows a person to go a-begging for anything they want and friends and strangers can chip in. People are fundraising for vacations, for school, for mortgage payments--and many, many people are fundraising for medical care. I imagine this is something that's strange to our friends in Europe and Canada. For instance, on my FB feed today a fellow popped up from the local arts community who needs a new liver. He had a persistent infection that required some strong meds, and the meds destroyed the liver he was born with. They won't give him a new liver unless he shows that he's able to pay for appropriate care following the transplant--so, off to the Web to ask for money.

People used to turn to churches for this sort of thing so I suppose it's not all that new. But the fact that people are asking for charity from total strangers on such a massive scale is relatively novel, at least in this country. We've changed as a culture such that we're comfortable asking for help from Earth, and for some reason this is easier to swallow than single-payer health care.

I doubt that healthcare will be repaired in this country, even with the changes coming in 2014.

I have abandoned Livejournal, finally, and adopted Dreamwidth along with everyone else. I'm not sure if I'm the last or merely the next-to-last person to give up on LJ utterly. The last straw was finding that almost everyone else in my LJ feed was cross-posting from Dreamwidth, making it impossible for me to comment.

Also, FB is only good for sharing pictures of cats, not so much good for talking about things.