sutin@astrovax.UUCP (Brian Sutin) (09/01/86)
FLAME ON -- Recently there was a surprising posting from Marty Smith, the first to this newsgroup which contained any value whatsoever. What really fucking pisses me off is the responses. Thses are the first three I saw: > > I think you were already outside the universe when you posted this, > Marty. Or at least outside reality. Or on a very bad trip. Or > something. > -- > Paul Markowitz ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- > I have a suggestion: strap on your backpack, lace up your boots, > fill up your canteen and start walking. You'll eventually > get where you're going, or you'll die on the way. Either way, > you won't be bothering us any more. > > > Lewis Barnett,CS Dept, Painter Hall 3.28, Univ. of Texas, Austin, TX 78712 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- > Ok, you may leave. > > -your humble [G,god] > > > ps. personal computers do have a use. i dropped them on your > world and had a grand time watching them fall. drop one out of > a window sometime it is about the same experience. > When Marty posted that, if he was looking for an argument, he would have posted to net.philosophy or net.religion. I think he was trying to stimulate some thought. Perhaps he though that the people who read talk.bizarre are more capable of independent thought, capable of considering something original without letting junk their parents fed them mess up their heads. Those above are certainly doing their best to convince me otherwise. FLAME OFF -- > This relativity thing makes me feel like a prisoner in a very smelly place. > These idiots in net.space talk about rockets like they can actually use them > to go someplace. Give a break here. Interstellar travel is a lot of bunk. > Who wants to go someplace if you can't come back? I want to go someplace > and then come back, and then go again, and then come back again. > And then these clowns in net.sf_lovers or whatever. They talk about the > Starship Enterprise like some people talk to their dogs. There is no > Starship Enterprise, folks; no warp drive; no transporter beam. There is a > Spock, but he's a baby doctor, not a logician with pointy ears and a bad > disposition. There is a book, "Hero With a Thousand Faces" which puts all adventures, religious stories, romances, fairy tales, etc, on the same footing, in which the "hero," among other things, goes someplace, and must return in the end. Relativity prevents adventure, because there is no return. Not for you, physically. But Trekky-itis does. Two trekkies can get together, talk about phasers and beam around, and when they are done, they can go eat dinner. A successful adventure. If you want anything better, you'll have to stick to this planet, I'm afraid. Or do you just want to escape the world of home computers and "should we get BSD or SysV for the new machine?" Make yourself a new world. Steal a yacht and try to sail down the coast of South America. Join the Sandinistas. How about the French Foreign Legion? Now there's a new world. And you forgot to mention the most usual route: net.rec.drugs. Certainly more adventurous than the Trekkies, because you might not come home for dinner, but you can go a lot further. If there were a solution to this problem, would "Raiders of the Lost Ark" have been a success? Brian Sutin Department of Astrophysical Sciences/Princeton University { princeton, ... }!astrovax!sutin