Lawyers have the most interesting stories...
It's been a weird day.
It started wierd because of a short story I read by Catherine Wells called, "Ghost Town." Science fiction is supposed to be different from reality. Instead, this was way too close to home. I won't say much more than that (it's in a recent edition of Asimov's if you want to check it out)...but things made sense when I looked at her bio and found out she grew up in ND.
I wish I could do more to help Mike with the paper...but it's hard with kiddo home. Of course, he wasn't happy with me when I said we needed to revise a section. Poor guy.
On the up side, the little guy and I had a great day. We read books and played with Legos. We made houses and space-ships and train tunnels.
I've also been reading some blog responses to that "funny post" I mentioned a couple days ago. The story hit the AP wire (the title I've seen in the local papers is "Man Shown in Film Not Allowed to See It").
My lawyer once told me that when he was in law school, they staged a scene where someone came in and supposedly assaulted the prof. The students didn't know what was going on until the prof stood up and told them to write about what they just saw. Every student had a different version of the story.
What I find amusing (and terribly annoying at the same time) is that both sides are running around and doing their victory dance. Everyone has a different impression of the event, and none of them really match up. Yet, no one is taking the time to look and see what anyone else is doing or saying happened. Or they're interpretting their side as being the slick one while the others bungle around like doofuses.
Everyone thinks they won the battle. The reactions range from "we've exposed their hypocrisy!" on one side to "they've done us the biggest favor ever". Also saw interesting commentary on how good, Christian people were exposed to the evil Dawkins (and you should pray for your brothers and sisters who were put in this unfortunate circumstance...lol), how the movie is going to be some awesome expose, and how it's a bunch of propaganda.
A lot of the intermediate reactions seem to be strongly flavored by the individual's reaction to Ben Stein. I think folks from my parents generation think about him as Nixon's speech writer and are a little more leery of him. My generation only knows him from Ferris Bueller and the Wonder Years, so he's interesting or cool or whatever.
I hate to admit it...I did like him when I was living in CA and he actually went on the news to discuss the nasty ramifications of Prop. 13. This was the one where we were trying to prevent the power companies from adding all these nice little fees pertaining to nuclear power. (I think it had something to do with decomissioning the plants...can't remember exactly...but initially it was supposed to have been the power company's deal until a nice lobbying effort worked in their favor. It just remember stomping about for it, and running into some PG&E employees who were rather unpleasant.) It never passed, unfortunately. I can only hope that his stab at this effort is likewise minimally effective.
I'm just waiting for someone in my family to want to drag me to this because they heard from someone at work how awesome and funny it is. Gah.
However, I would like to conduct a little experiment here (since you guys make the most awesome guineau pigs). Please tell me your reaction to this video clip. I'm incredibly curious how the random person takes it. No matter what you say about the clip, it won't hurt my feelings. And yeah, I realize you guys are all "Lake Wobegon"...everyone on my f-list is above average, so this isn't the same as putting it out for the masses to see. :-) I'll give you my take tomorrow. (And I'll keep it to a minimum.)
It started wierd because of a short story I read by Catherine Wells called, "Ghost Town." Science fiction is supposed to be different from reality. Instead, this was way too close to home. I won't say much more than that (it's in a recent edition of Asimov's if you want to check it out)...but things made sense when I looked at her bio and found out she grew up in ND.
I wish I could do more to help Mike with the paper...but it's hard with kiddo home. Of course, he wasn't happy with me when I said we needed to revise a section. Poor guy.
On the up side, the little guy and I had a great day. We read books and played with Legos. We made houses and space-ships and train tunnels.
I've also been reading some blog responses to that "funny post" I mentioned a couple days ago. The story hit the AP wire (the title I've seen in the local papers is "Man Shown in Film Not Allowed to See It").
My lawyer once told me that when he was in law school, they staged a scene where someone came in and supposedly assaulted the prof. The students didn't know what was going on until the prof stood up and told them to write about what they just saw. Every student had a different version of the story.
What I find amusing (and terribly annoying at the same time) is that both sides are running around and doing their victory dance. Everyone has a different impression of the event, and none of them really match up. Yet, no one is taking the time to look and see what anyone else is doing or saying happened. Or they're interpretting their side as being the slick one while the others bungle around like doofuses.
Everyone thinks they won the battle. The reactions range from "we've exposed their hypocrisy!" on one side to "they've done us the biggest favor ever". Also saw interesting commentary on how good, Christian people were exposed to the evil Dawkins (and you should pray for your brothers and sisters who were put in this unfortunate circumstance...lol), how the movie is going to be some awesome expose, and how it's a bunch of propaganda.
A lot of the intermediate reactions seem to be strongly flavored by the individual's reaction to Ben Stein. I think folks from my parents generation think about him as Nixon's speech writer and are a little more leery of him. My generation only knows him from Ferris Bueller and the Wonder Years, so he's interesting or cool or whatever.
I hate to admit it...I did like him when I was living in CA and he actually went on the news to discuss the nasty ramifications of Prop. 13. This was the one where we were trying to prevent the power companies from adding all these nice little fees pertaining to nuclear power. (I think it had something to do with decomissioning the plants...can't remember exactly...but initially it was supposed to have been the power company's deal until a nice lobbying effort worked in their favor. It just remember stomping about for it, and running into some PG&E employees who were rather unpleasant.) It never passed, unfortunately. I can only hope that his stab at this effort is likewise minimally effective.
I'm just waiting for someone in my family to want to drag me to this because they heard from someone at work how awesome and funny it is. Gah.
However, I would like to conduct a little experiment here (since you guys make the most awesome guineau pigs). Please tell me your reaction to this video clip. I'm incredibly curious how the random person takes it. No matter what you say about the clip, it won't hurt my feelings. And yeah, I realize you guys are all "Lake Wobegon"...everyone on my f-list is above average, so this isn't the same as putting it out for the masses to see. :-) I'll give you my take tomorrow. (And I'll keep it to a minimum.)
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