Just How Bizarre Have Things Become? A wake-up call from two years ago and a quiz worth taking...

Just How Bizarre Have Things Become? Take This Quiz and Find Out

The world being remade (for the worse) around us makes me long for one we never made, but should have. I'd like to relax here...



Like in the song:

The continent of Atlantis was an island which lay before the great flood in the area we now call the Atlantic Ocean.

So great an area of land, that from her western shores those beautiful sailors journeyed to the South and the North Americas with ease, in their ships with painted sails.

To the East Africa was a neighbour, across a short strait of sea miles.
The great Egyptian age is but a remnant of The Atlantean culture.
The antediluvian kings colonised the world
All the Gods who play in the mythological dramas
In all legends from all lands were from fair Atlantis.
Knowing her fate, Atlantis sent out ships to all corners of the Earth.
On board were the Twelve:

The poet, the physician, the farmer, the scientist,
The magician and the other so-called Gods of our legends.
Though Gods they were -
And as the elders of our time choose to remain blind
Let us rejoice and let us sing and dance and ring in the new
Hail Atlantis!
Way down below the ocean where I wanna be she may be...

("Atlantis," Donovan, 1968)  ¶ 1:37 PM 0 comments

  Red rain falling on flying cars For me, the thing that sucks most about the Web is this: You pour forth your creative energies to put together some words, maybe with a few images or links, and then the power goes out and it's FLUSH! This just happened about two seconds ago, of course. The post I was going to put here (about such miscellany as The X-Files and the alleged extraterrestrial red rain in Kerala) was in the clipboard but not in an actual saved file, so that's that.

So now, without all my typical endless rambling, some random junk which may or may not have any connection to what I had hoped to put up. Okay, first there's

and

Was going with the not-so-original "Where's my flying car?" theme. The Fantasy versus the Reality. And we all know who won that fight. Flying cars - or roadable aircraft - have really been invented, by the way; they're just very expensive, poorly marketed, and only meant for that sliver of the population with plenty of wealth and licenses to fly planes. That's what happened to your flying car. Besides, did you really think Uncle Sam (or any of the world's other Big Brothers, for that matter) wanted the kids getting out of the prom after chugging, snorting and toking whatever's available, and then taking Dad's Skycar M400 for a joyride at 3:30 a.m. which lands them in an office on the 17th floor?

Likewise, whose vision of contact with extraterrestrial life was ever truly likely?

Kubrick's? Or Crichton's?

And I ask that as someone who is a major fan of Kubrick and could generally care less about Crichton. (Crichton really gets huge help in this particular case, however, from awesome director Robert Wise - you know, The Day The Earth Stood Still, The Sound Of Music, West Side Story, The Haunting of Hill House (scariest movie I've ever seen); yeah, that Robert Wise. He's the one who made a statement out of Crichton's Andromeda Strain.) Do we get a Disney future...or what we saw in Blade Runner?



You want your flying cars? Okay, but in any future we're likely to see, only the cops will have them...

  ¶ 2:19 PM 0 comments