Bedab!

Judy Curry's website Climate Etc. has comm box posts by someone named Mike Flynn.  Be advised that this is not TOF.  About a week or so ago, our local paper featured a letter to the editor signed by "Mike Flynn" that was likewide non-TOFian.  What is going on here?  A plethora of Mike Flynns?  Or did the Michael Flynn Manufacturing Company put out one last shipment?  An entire company for producing Michael Flynns?  No wonder they went into liquidation.  Lack of demand.

Not as high-power as Kress or as widespread as Resnick, nor so wheeler-dealer as Haldeman.

Retroview: The Wreck of "The River of Stars" -- Dritte Teil

THE REMAINDER OF THE FIRST CHAPTER, now on the Excerpts page, introduces several characters, one by one:

• Fransziska Wong, MD, the ship's doctor
• Ramakrishnan Bhatterjee, chief engineer
• Mikoyan Hidei, engineer's mate
• 'abd al-Aziz Corrigan, the second officer, soon to be acting first
• Timothy "Moth" Ratline, cargo master
• Nkieruke Okoye, first wrangler
• Ivar Akhaturian, least wrangler
• Eugenie Satterwaithe, third officer and sailing master
• The Lotus Jewel, sysop

The POV dips into the heads of or close-focuses on the bold-faced characters. 

An Interview with David Berlinski

 

Found upon the Web and reprinted here without comment, but with some formatting. Berlinski is a mathematician and well-known gadfly and works with the infamous Discovery Institute. However, he also has a wicked sense of humor, very much like the late C. Hitchens. TOF does not know when this interview was written or for what outlet. He is not, for all that, a supporter of "intelligent design." He's better described, says Jonathan Witt, as a skeptic toward Darwinism and a friendly critic of Intelligent Design.

An Interview with David Berlinski

Jonathan Witt

Apotemnophiliac Rights Now!

From The Atlantic a sign perhaps of the happy future:

Even wannabes who describe their wish for amputations as a wish for completeness will often admit that there is a sexual undertone to the desire. "For me having one leg improves my own sexual image," one of my correspondents wrote. "It feels 'right,' the way I should always have been and for some reason in line with what I think my body ought to have been like." When I asked one prominent wannabe who also happens to be a psychologist if he experiences the wish to lose a limb as a matter of sex or a matter of identity, he disputed the very premise of the question. "You live sexuality," he told me. "I am a sexual being twenty-four hours a day." Even ordinary sexual desire is bound up with identity, as I was reminded by Michael First, a psychiatrist at Columbia University, who was the editor of the fourth edition of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. First is undertaking a study that will help determine whether apotemnophilia should be included in the fifth edition of the DSM. "Think of the fact that, in general, people tend to be more sexually attracted to members of their own racial group," he pointed out. What you are attracted to (or not attracted to) is part of who you are.

It is clear that for many wannabes, the sexual aspect of the desire is much less ambiguous than many wannabes and clinicians have publicly admitted. A man described seventeen years ago in the American Journal of Psychotherapy said that he first became aware of his attraction to amputees when he was eight years old. That was in the 1920s, when the fashion was for children to wear short pants. He remembered several boys who had wooden legs. "I became extremely aroused by it," he said. "Because such boys were not troubled by their mutilation and cheerfully, and with a certain ease, took part in all the street games, including football, I never felt any pity towards them." At first he nourished his desire by seeking out people with wooden legs, but as he grew older, the desire became self-sustaining. "It has been precisely in these last years that the desire has gotten stronger, so strong that I can no longer control it but am completely controlled by it." By the time he finally saw a psychotherapist, he was consumed by the desire. Isolated and lonely, he spent some of his time hobbling around his house on crutches, pretending to be an amputee, fantasizing about photographs of war victims. He was convinced that his happiness depended on getting an amputation. He desperately wanted his body to match his self-image: "Just as a transsexual is not happy with his own body but longs to have the body of another sex, in the same way I am not happy with my present body, but long for a peg-leg."

How dare we interpose ourselves between apotemnophiliacs and their right -- their right, TOF says -- to a body that conforms to their desires!   Also, one hopes, for a more user-friendly name for their polysyllabic blessing.  Perhaps, translimbers. 

Retrospective: The Wreck of "The River of Stars" (INTJ)

From the notes compiled for The Wreck of "The River of Stars" lo these many years hence.  All were copied from various M/B sources with "Gorgas" replacing "INTJ." 

Retroview: The Wreck of "The River of Stars" -- Part Dieux

LAST WEEK, YOU MAY RECALL, TOF began his rumination on the recursively-titled The Wreck of The River of Stars.  Recusive, because there is a title (the ship's name) within the title (the book's name), throwing down the gauntlet for typographers everywhere.  How much and which portions are to be italicized?  Great minds must ponder this. 

Meanwhile, we shall occupy ourselves otherwise.  





Previously, we discussed the title, which derived its ancestry from such as "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" and the desire to write a story of a tragic shipwreck.  Since TOF writes in the genre SF, the ship wrecked would be ipso facto a space ship.   

We also discussed Where do you get your ideas, and saw the idea for The Wreck came from a confluence of several things:

• The aforesaid desire to write of a tragic shipwreck.
• The desire to use Mayer-Briggs personality classifications to define sixteen distinct characters, just to see if I could pull it off.  
• The notion in William Trevor's The Boarding House of a landlord who deliberately sought out misfits to rent rooms to. 

Kick-Off

This Should Get Your Goat. Or Not.

Some of you may remember the woman who married the Eiffel Tower, or perhaps the one who married the roller coaster.  (What marriage does not have its ups and downs?)  Or the fellow who married his Laborador retriever.  (The bride was very fetching.)  Perhaps even the woman who married herself, or the woman who married a warehouse; though those last two may have been stunts.  (Only the last two?  Oh, the humanity!) 

Well, fans of the untergang, another blow has been struck in the demolition of the West, albeit in a more remote corner of the West. 

A Brazilian man is to wed his pet goat – but has promised not to consummate the marriage.
Former stonecutter Aparecido Castaldo, 74, has decided to end his days as a single man to marry his beloved Carmelita.
The happy couple will walk, or trot, down the aisle on October 13 in Igreja do Diabo, or Devil’s Church, in the city of Jundiai, Brazil.
Aparecido has been in love with the pet for two years and says a goat has advantages over a human companion.
‘She doesn’t speak and doesn’t want money,’ says the father of eight children – four women and four men from four different marriages.

 Of course, there are multiple problems, as there always are when one contravenes the natural order.  If he does not consummate the marriage, is there a marriage?  Lack of consummation has been grounds for dissolution since the Code of Khammurapi, and in many cultures the rule has been "the act makes the marriage."  Which is why it's called "the marriage act."  So the lovely bride already has grounds for an annulment in the groom's prior stated intent. 

Pagan Rome and Christendom added another requirement: "consent makes the marriage" and it is unclear whether Senhorita Carmelita has given her consent to this union, or even whether she is competent to do so.

It may be that for Sr. Castaldo, a goat does have advantages over a human companion, especially if, as one suspects, he may have troubles attracting the latter.  And when one realizes that he regards normal conversation and the support of his spouse as disadvantages.  We will pass over in silence the name of the "church." though we may roll our eyes a bit as we do so.  At least, Sr. Castaldo should have no problem finding a nanny. 

But come, let us celebrate their love for each other.  To do otherwise would be capraphobic.