David-J-Aronson-H@CMU-EE-AMPERE@CMU-10A@sri-unix (12/11/82)
1) There have been some good stories on reality alterations in Isaac Asimov's SF Magazine (at least I liked them). There was a series about a man with the innate ability to "edit events", by making things "[not] have happened." Very strange. Better was a series of stories about a "temporal detective," whose job is to patch reality when it's been tampered with (using a time travel machine which looks like a garbage can, and has tracers to detect residual energy from previous tampering). It deals a lot with the inevitable frustration at having to wipe out better alternative realities, and (more importantly) your customers not "having hired you" after you patch reality, since there "never was" a need for it. 2) Now that we know Darth Vader == Dark Father, I can't help wondering about the Jedi. That sounds like some sort of plural, of some Latin word like Jedus. Anybody out there know Latin? I sure don't. 3) While we're on the subject of Jedi, I don't recall anybody mentioning, in the music discussion, "Yoda", by Weird Al Yankovick (sp?). Surely there must be many Demensions and Dementites on this list.... 4) A comics digest might be a good idea. I'm not into it myself, but I know a few people here at CMU who would read it regularly. 5) This stuff about explosive decompression and better spacesuits (like better mouse-traps?) is taking up a lot of space (no pun intended, oddly enough) both here and in the Space digest. Why don't we save disk and real space and confirm our suspicions? Take somebody from death row and let him die for science. ( :-) ) Keep on randomizing, (entropy, entropy, all winds down...) Dave Aronson dja@cmu-ee-ampere@cmu-10a