[Kzyxtalk] If. Hiroshima flaneur.

[Marco McClean]

Subject: If. Hiroshima flaneur.

/"It was all very well going on about pure logic and how the universe 
was ruled by reason and the harmony of numbers, but the plain fact of 
the matter was that the world was manifestly traversing space on the 
back of a giant turtle and the gods had a habit of going round to 
atheists' houses and smashing their windows."/

The recording of last night's (2021-08-06) Memo of the Air: Good Night 
Radio show on 107.7fm KNYO-LP Fort Bragg (CA) is right here:
https://tinyurl.com/KNYO-MOTA-0448

I read Kim Stanley Robinson's story /The Lucky Strike/ starting after a 
music break at about 5 hours and 10 minutes into the show. It doesn't 
matter how many times I've read that story, I always break down crying 
at several points, and not just crying but nearly sobbing. It's one of 
my favorite stories ever. Maybe you'd like to read that for yourself. 
Here's a place:
http://strangehorizons.com/fiction/the-lucky-strike

BESIDES ALL THAT, at https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com you'll find a 
fresh batch of dozens of links to not necessarily radio-useful but 
nonetheless worthwhile items I set aside for you while gathering that 
show together. Such as, for instance:

The Great Flydini.
https://misscellania.blogspot.com/2021/08/the-great-flydini.html

How big are black holes?
https://theawesomer.com/how-big-are-black-holes/633734/

And scenes of the 1890s around the world. In the film it looks so much 
nicer than the way things are now, but it really wasnt'. Unless you were 
rich life was short and hard, shorter and harder than we have it. (It 
was half as long and ten times as hard.) Clothes were expensive, hot in 
the summer and cold in the winter and chafed and itched like crazy. 
Condoms were made of split and stitched farm animal bladders, best used 
fresh because they tended to dry out and flake, also you could be jailed 
for even having one, which might be preferable to using it. Child 
mortality was very high, only partly because of boys and girls as young 
as eight having to work in brutal conditions in claustrophobic mines and 
unsafe factories; mostly it was disease. The only way to fix a tooth 
problem was to yank it out with pliers. But then, as now, if you were 
white and rich you could eat steak, kiss, fuck, sail around looking at 
nice views and having baths drawn and grapes peeled for you and lounge 
in bed till the crack of noon. But in those days if someone murdered 
your rich ass and stole something fungible, they could go a short 
stagecoach or train ride in any direction and call themselves some other 
name and entirely get away with it. That's harder now, though you'd 
still be dead, I suppose. They could open a barbershop and slit their 
customers' throats and drop them through a trap door into the basement 
where their wife would make them into meat pies and sell them in the 
market, and if they didn’t get greedy about it they could make a nice 
living for awhile and retire at 38 and enjoy themselves until they died 
of syphilis or gout or consumption or dropsy. That happened all the 
time. You could go into a bar, have /one drink/ and wake up with a 
headache on your way to Shanghai, kidnapped into slavery, or wake up 
blind or prone to convulsions because the liquor had wood alcohol or 
lead or absinthol in it. But you could knock on Nikola Tesla's door, or 
Mark Twain's door, and they'd open the door and you’d be standing there 
talking with Nikola Tesla, or Mark Twain. You could switch any German 
toddler for toddler Adolf Hitler. You could avoid stepping on that 
butterfly and preserve the original-timeline future spelling of entire 
dictionaries of words. Even so, we have it better now, thanks to 
science, liberals, labor unions, and the separation of church and state.
https://nagonthelake.blogspot.com/2021/08/cities-around-world-c1890.html

-- 
Marco McClean, memo at mcn.org
https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com