Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology,alt.fan.beable From: mmcirvin@world.std.com (Matt McIrvin) Subject: Re: Ars Grata Ars Sender: mmcirvin@world.std.com (Matt McIrvin) Date: Fri, 25 Jun 1999 03:53:03 GMT Organization: The World @ Software Tool & Die
Beable "van" Polasm <beable@my-deja.com> wrote:
Rebecca Hunt <huntr@wam.umd.edu> wrote:
Ooo! Another person who took creative writing has been let loose on the world! In a similar vein, here is another sample of writing from Baltimore. [the context: a pedestrian bridge collapsed over the Baltimore Beltway during rush hour]
"It is a crowded, concrete Internet where thousands of people share the same road without knowing each other."
[..]MY LIFE WILL NEVER BE THE SAME, AND IT'S ALL THANKS TO THE INFORMATION SUPER-HIGHWAY!
You mean the "Information Super Concrete Information Super Concrete Internet."
Douglas Hofstadter will now demonstrate infinite recursion and write a doctoral thesis about something that his easy-to-impress buddy calls "a picture of God" because it is a fractal but he doesn't know it because Benoit Mandelbrot has not yet been invented by IBM scientists who will create him by painstakingly stacking atoms with a scanning tunneling microscope powered by a patented Micro Piezo Mechanism as demonstrated on TV by Neil Armstrong the noted lunar musician and plastic man.
[HIGHLY TECHNOLOGICAL THEME MUSIC]
Landsat transmits its information to Earth in "Binary," or "Dead Beef," notation.
[dooDOOdooDOOdooDOOdooDOOdooDOO
DEEdeeDEEdeeDEEdeeDEEdeeDEEdeeDEEdee]
This string of electronic ones and zeroes form the alphabet of outer space. Modern silicon technology allows NASA scientists to read the numbers on the steel plate in your head at an altitude of over a hundred feet.
[EXCITING 1970's STOCK THEME SONG-WOCKACHICKA]
In late 1978 this technology will be used to explore the planet Venus, also known as "Earth's twin." Today we know that Venus is not the dinosaur- infested paradise imagined by idiot science fiction writers, but is, in fact, an overpopulated urban wasteland littered with hypodermic syringes. Science has enlisted the services of brainy science fiction writer Thomas Disch to help make sense of this forbidding alien landscape and its pressing social problems.
[Bar graph, with bars labeled 1950s-IDIOT, 1970s-BRAINY]
In the 1980s, after the depletion of Earth's oil resources cause massive population diebacks, man may be forced to relocate to Venus. We will no longer be able to stand aloof from the chronic troubles of our disadvantaged twin.
[Flash cuts-- empty beer cans, traffic jam behind heat haze, stoned post-hippies on streetcorners]
[Artist's conception of interstellar photon rocket]
Social scientists using advanced Delphi polling methods are gathering even now in group encounter sessions, with all the machinery of modern social dynamics-- padded bats, primal scream, electronic computers, Kirlian photography, tortoiseshell glasses, and new forms of Nim not yet dreamed of by mathematicians-- to help solve these problems.
[Scientists, some lab-coated and some nude, whack a refrigerator-sized Honeywell tape drive with padded encounter bats.]
With compassion and sacrifice, we may yet succeed in bringing the planet Venus into the 21st century and beyond.
[Swelling music. NASA worm logo. Smiling people wearing the Amazing Bone Fone. The end.]
-- Matt McIrvin http://world.std.com/~mmcirvin/