Author: Glenn Hauman

Seems there’s a movement
to try and get David Clennon fired from “The Agency” for going on Sean
Hannity’s radio show, criticizing Bush, and likening the current US
“moral climate” to Nazi Germany under Hitler.
The irony, of course, is that there’s a lot of yo-yos out there who are
try to get an actor fired from playing a CIA employee, but who are
curiously silent on wondering why no one has been fired from the real
CIA for missing 9/11. (by way of Tom Tomorrow.)

(Normally, I’d just provide a direct link, but the Globe And Mail
has one of the most link unfriendly sites I’ve seen, so I’m just going
to reprint it. If Spider has a problem with me widely disseminating
this one, he can have Jeanne beat me up in two months at Lunacon.)

Comet of grief and hope

Saturday’s terrible news reminded me and my wife of her
near-rendezvous with the Challenger — and why we believe that space
voyaging must go on
By Spider Robinson – Monday, February 3, 2003 Print Edition, Page A15
I was awake when it happened. I write all night, and retired at a
typical 7 a.m. All seven of them were dead by then, ashes scattered
across east Texas. But who listens to news as they go to bed?
When I finally woke, I knew something was terribly wrong the moment I
saw my wife’s face. “It’s not family or friends,” Jeanne said quickly.
“But it’s bad.” And she told me, and then we held each other, hard.
It has a special meaning for us: She was once supposed to ride one of
those suckers.
In the late 1970s and early 80s, NASA had a Civilian in Space Program.
The idea was that fading public interest in space travel might improve
if taxpayers ever got to see somebody other than jocks and scientists
go up. If they heard a poet or composer sing to them of the stunning
majesty of space, or saw a trained dancer in free fall, or even just an
ordinary person gaping out a porthole at the naked stars, then perhaps
more of them might finally Get It. They would realize that going to
space is going to be like leaving the womb for our species, will make
it at least that much more beautiful and happy and productive and wise.
Jeanne and I won the 1977 Hugo and Nebula Awards for Stardance,a
novella we co-wrote about the first zero-gravity dancers. She’s a
modern dancer and choreographer, and was then the founder/artistic
director of Halifax’s Nova Dance Theatre.
At the 1980 World Science Fiction Convention, in the Boston Sheraton’s
Grand Ballroom, she premiered a dance called Higher Ground,about the
interior mental and spiritual evolution she had undergone in the course
of inventing zero-gee dance for our story. It depicted space travel as
the natural end result of the first monkey that ever stood upright, as
a dancer’s highest leap: the one from which, as they used to say of
Nijinski, you don’t come down again until you feel like it. The dance
incorporated some zero-gee special effects by technomedia wizard Bob
Atkinson toward the end, so that Jeanne seemed to actually go
weightless on stage, while a film backdrop put the starry universe
behind her.
Her performance elicited an eight-minute standing ovation. Backstage,
Ben Bova, then editor of Omni and well-connected at NASA, asked her if
she would be interested in dancing in zero gee for real. Jeanne became
a Civilian in Space candidate… along with singer John Denver and a
number of others.
Then they sent up the first one, great-hearted teacher Christa
McAuliffe, on the Challenger.
When that O-ring seal in the right booster rocket let go, seven
remarkable lives ended, and so did the Civilian in Space Program for
our lifetimes. It was very nearly the end of the entire U.S. space
effort.
Our phone rang off the hook that day, and for days thereafter.
Reporters all around the globe had found Jeanne’s name in the list of
finalists for a shuttle seat. That could have been you, each one
pointed out, in case she’d missed it. Now what do you think of all this
rocket nonsense, Ms. Robinson?
Jeanne spent days saying, over and over, “I’d take the next flight.”
When they expressed disbelief — and they all did, politely or
otherwise — she cited figures for number of fatalities per billion
passenger miles, proving that space travel is the safest form of
transportation ever devised, hundreds of times safer than riding a
tricycle in a living room. Not one journalist quoted that part.
Many will spin this new disaster to support their political agenda.
Within minutes of the shuttle’s destruction, a CBC newstwit was asking
my colleague, novelist Rob Sawyer, on the air if he didn’t agree that
the tragedy was caused by American arrogance in the Middle East? He was
so stunned by the question he answered it.
Back when Richard Nixon chatted with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin
across a quarter of a million miles, he was cutting NASA’s budget with
his other hand. Nobody since has ever raised it. After the Challenger
tragedy, NASA was ordered to become safer, but given no more money to
do it with. Remarkably, they succeeded way beyond any reasonable hope
— about 80 missions have flown safely since Challenger. A space
station is well begun, and until now not one construction worker had
had a fatal accident.
Ask any engineer: you can’t throw a two-lane bridge over a 50-cent
river without planning for at least a few deaths. There are always
accidents when something big is built. The tunnels from Manhattan
Island each had a sandhog casualty rate comparable with combat in a
holy war… and all those projects accomplished was to get you to
Brooklyn, or worse, New Jersey. The space station may one day get us to
the stars.
There are only three buses left in North America that go to that stop,
now. Columbia was the oldest. There are way fewer spare parts around
than there used to be, and fewer technicians trained in their
installation. Just to stand still, to maintain its present bare-bones
agenda, NASA is going to need a huge whack of money. Right away — just
as America is preparing to spend every spare dollar building the kind
of rockets that are supposed to explode and kill people, and to aim
them down instead of up.
Columbia needs replacing, today. It needed replacing last week. We need
to put people on Mars, and in orbit, and keep them there. As the world
simmers and stews in its own madness, the one thing we cannot afford to
cut is our only means to rise above it.
Robert Heinlein said this planet is too fragile a basket for humanity
to keep all its eggs in. We’re easily dumb and quarrelsome enough to
drop the basket one of these days. If that happens, it would be nice if
there were grandchildren somewhere to whom the cautionary tale might be
told.
We all looked up on Saturday. This is a good time to look up. Maybe the
universe is trying to get our attention.
B.C. writer Spider Robinson’s latest book is The Free Lunch. He can be contacted at http://www.spiderrobinson.com.

Copyright � 2003 Bell Globemedia Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.

From Mark Evanier:

As you can see, I have posted a picture of a can of Campbell’s Cream
of Mushroom soup. This is the traditional Internet symbol indicating
that the proprietor of the weblog is too busy with pressing deadlines
to update his site. Whenever you see it, you know that though he’s
swamped, he’ll be back in a day or three — or sooner, if events
warrant — and that he’ll resume posting, just as soon as he gets his
work schedule under control.

As you can see, I have one up too. Here I go again…

H-t-t-p colon,

Forward slash, Forward slash,

Double-u, Double-u,

Double-u, Dot

Nielsen Hayden Dot-com,

M-A-K-I-N-G

L-I-G-H-T slash

Now, your turn, wot?

This
gives you every reason to dislike SUVs save one: because of their
massive weight, they chew up roads far faster than regular cars do,
thereby leading to potholes that damage your car, and massive roadwork
to fix them which wastes your time with traffic congestion and costs
you tax money to fix.
Thanks to this and the dismantling of rail systems, roads that were
built to last 100 years are now falling apart after 70 years or less.

From the State Of The Union Address:
“Imagine those 19 hijackers with other weapons and other plans, this time armed by Saddam Hussein.”

In other words, Saddam had nothing to do with September 11th. So why are we going after him again?

For more textual analysis, try Kinsley’s take here.
I’m going to go for numerical analysis shortly.

After seeing last night’s 24
on Fox, I must say that I’m truly unimpressed with the guy they got to
replace Dennis Haysbert. This guy barely seems smarter than Kim Bauer,
and yet he’s the President of the US? You have to be kidding.
On the other hand, you did get the feeling that he was truly
overwhelmed by the demands of the office and the possible terrorist
actions. He dissembled, he evaded, he juggled by talking instead about
countries that had nothing to do with the terror threats we’re
currently facing. It’s a bold storytelling choice, putting someone in
charge who truly doesn’t seem to belong there. But jeez, couldn’t they
at least have gotten someone who didn’t look like he was reading
everything off of cue cards, somebody with some personal warmth? The
guy they had couldn’t possibly have won a Presidential election.
Here’s hoping they focus more on Jack Bauer next week.

More nuanced stuff to come, but in the meantime, via Teresa Nielsen Hayden:

The State of the Union Drinking Game! (2003 Edition)
This year’s address will be divided into two parts: “The War On and
Around Terrorism” and “The Economy, Stupid.” The rules vary depending
on the subject Bush is tackling, so pay attention:
1) The War: Whenever the President says “evil,” everyone must
raise their glass and take a drink. It’s good form to make a brief
toast of sorts, something like “Down with evil!” or “Evil is bad!”
“Evil” should be pronounced with a soft “i” [“Evihl”].
Whenever the President utters the phrase “weapons of mass destruction,”
everyone drinks. Before downing the drink, however, everyone must
affect a cartoony Evil Arab voice and say things like “Quick, hide the
weapons!” and “They’ll never find ’em here!”
If the President says “inspectors,” think fast! The first person to say
“That’s me!” becomes “the Blix.” The Blix then points out anyone else
in the game (“the Saddam”), who must then prove beyond a shadow of a
doubt that he/she is not hiding a nuclear warhead somewhere within a
twenty mile radius. At any point (preferably after a few seconds)
anyone can yell “time’s up!” at which point the Saddam is obliged to
finish whatever’s left of his or her drink. It’s good form for the
Saddam to mutter something like “And I would’ve gotten away with it,
too…” before drinking.
2) The Economy: Whenever the President says “tax cuts” or “cut
taxes,” everyone must raise their glasses and exclaim “Tax this!” Each
person is then expected to consume whatever they think is a fair
percentage of their drink.
During the Domestic portion of the speech, keep your eyes peeled. At
any time, anyone can choose to silently extend their hand forward, palm
up, to receive a Corporate Handout (though it’s good form to wait until
the President mentions some sort of economic incentive). When you see
someone do this, you must do so as well (thus becoming one of “The
Rich”). The last person to extend their hand becomes “The Bottom 90%”
and must drink, while everyone else yells things like “Who let him
in?!” and “Get a job!” and “You’d be pulling your own weight if you
didn’t drink so much!”
Special note: If, after the speech, a pollster calls your
house, immediately hand the phone to the soberest person in the room.
That person should say nothing but extremely positive things about
George W. Bush. Research indicates that anything less than a 10 point
bump in the President’s approval rating will result in immediate war.
Remember, the Fate of the Union is in your hands.

Dave Barry has a new blog at http://worldcrossing.com/WebX?expandAll@178.bvSweXYDXsU.0@.1ddbc3b5

OBLIGATORY: “Barry’s Blog” would be a great name for a rock band.

UPDATE: He’s moved to the big leagues (if blogspot can be called that) at http://davebarry.blogspot.com/.

The Bush Administration has admitted that the package they’re currently touting will bring less than $60 billion in 2003.

Now, let’s compare this with eBay.
For the fiscal year ended 12/31/02, revenues increased 62% to $1.21
billion. To generate these revenues, eBay moved a bit more than $14
billion of gross merchandise. Following eBay’s growth pattern, it’s a
fair bet to say that eBay will move about $20 billion in 2003.
In other words, the big stimulus plan from GWB does less than three
eBays. And if you can start your own eBay… hey, there’s an idea…