Say you're thinking about a butt of sack. Suddenly someone says butt, or sack, or butt of sack. Out of the blue. No explanation. No use looking for one either. It's all part of the cosmic unconsciousness.

Arthur Rimbaud, darling. Before all the African nonsense.

Well, that tends to cut into the gross. We need to figure out a way to make offending the flat-earth crowd *profitable*, as well as fun and morally right.

You have to *earn* your parents? Hmmmn. That explains a lot, actually.

Indifferent?

I would go without insurance entirely rather than buy from Geico, on account of their airplane-towed ad banners in the S.F. Bay area. Nothing like defiling the fucking SKY to breed a whole generation of domestic terrorists. I knew all of that Estes experience in middle school would come in handy.

WTF?
I'm sorry, but it is not possible to seek reality without aestheticism and ideological apparatus. Nice try, though.

So watch "soccer" like the rest of the world, you fucking idiots. Unless you *like* watching pitchers scratch their nuts, and, um, whazzizname, Mia Hamm's husband, do his OCD redo-his-velcro routine after EVERY FUCKING PITCH, and so on. Let's face it, baseball fans are teh gay. And football, also.

His five-minute mini-lectures on the below-sea-levelness of the field at Candlestick will be sorely missed.

Not only New England, but the entire San Francisco Bay Area as well.

(Godel)

Thanks for the reminder, messiestobjects - have recently read _Infinity and the Mind_, Rucker's popularization of Cantor & Gödel, which was great, but haven't quite got around to his fiction yet.

I thought _Snow Crash_ was brilliant, but i was already a big Julian Jaynes fan, so i *would* think that… have to agree about Cryptonomicon though. And i'm afraid i can never forgive John Varley for the ending of _Titan_.

@top scallop: TLHoD is about *human* gender and sexual politics issues, IMHO — her aliens are little more "alien" than the typical english-speaking humanoid with funny head wrinkles featuring on sci-fi TV. They're mostly human, just slightly more ambisexual than actual humans, which aids her in making her points. …

Hmmmn. So are you, apparently.

Not to mention both the Black and Red Knights in "Jabberwocky". Bummer.

There's certainly a continuum, twif. People like Ursula LeGuin and Margaret Atwood are certainly writing about the present, using S.F. tropes as shortcuts and conveniences. But, at the other end, there's very little concern with the minor-epiphanies-of-ordinary-people "present" in, say, (some) Greg Egan.

'it's getting more and more difficult to come up with original ideas, i.e., the "idea-space" has almost all been explored'

It's not really *about* that, but Dan Simmons's _Hyperion_ describes a society with such a thing ('farcaster portals') fairly well. I'm kind of meh about Simmons, mainly because some of his books strike me as book-length advertisements for the next book, but he might be worth checking out.

I've got a whole bunch of Ballard on my list - The Wind From Nowhere, The Burning World, The Drowned World, The Crystal World - just haven't found any yet. (I like my books like i like my women - used, and cheap.)