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(Beer) Coma

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I’d mentioned this…elsewhere, but when we were at a bar in Massachusetts when we saw buckets of food going to other tables.  “Buckets?”, I thought “that’s my favorite form factor for food!”

 We ordered one out of sight and it turned out to be a bucket of New England clams steamed with chorizo, yum!  Although…seafood and beer, um, don’t really get along together.  (As I rediscovered later when a pound of sushi and a quart of Sam Adams dueled away in my stomach).

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Some noise about the Smashing Pumpkin’s Billy Corgan’s anti-SJW rant.  My favorite part was the SJW-leftie sympathizers ranting about how they were pulling his music, blah blah.  Well that’s a very tiny taste for them of what it’s like for conservatives every waking minute of their lives when all their music, TV shows, books, movies, video games, and whatever else you have are written by the SJW crimethought police.

I thought of it recently while reading Neal Stephenson’s critically acclaimed (of course!) sci-fi novel Seveneves.  His (way) previous novel Snow Crash was rather inventive and somewhat politically incorrect, but his latest efforts reeks of SJW appeasement.
Homersexuals?  Of course!
Unrealistically ethnically diverse cast?  Well he has to stay appealing to that vast tract of black sci-fi readers!
Climate change rants?
Anti-militaristic tones?
Multicultural cheerleading?  It’s all in there!

So tiresome, and it’s cut from the same cloth as the rest of the tired sci-fi crap that came out in 2015.  I can’t help but think back to the slate of Philip K. Dick books that I’ve read that, despite their often copious flaws, featured normal people in extraordinary situations (rather than weirdos on stupid adventures).  It says something about western culture when it takes a guy living in a communist country to write a homersexual free sci-fi novel where the bad guys are left wing death cultists (though I repeat myself).

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I’ve been looking for an excuse through the years to mention the Guns N’ Roses song Coma.  Clocking in at north of ten minutes, it’s a curse filled, angst driven, overly indulgent song on GNR’s already overly indulgent Use Your Illusion double album.  It’s not everybody’s sound that’s for sure (maybe only me and five other people like it), but it’s a sound which was very predominant and is now dead, gone to the age when sci-fi space ships weren’t full of fraggets (I’m ever amazed that GNR’s One in a Million is still on YouTube; any big time producer who pumped that tune out today would have to undergo years of self flagellation under the all-seeing eye of merciless thought police).  Some may view such passing as a good thing, though with no normal morals left to slay, the crime thought police have moved on to made up crap like gay marriage and judgement free molester zones (I repeat myself again).

And songs?  I went to a bar with Mrs. Sandmich and remarked that when we were dating (we’re talking dinosaurs here) the bars played the exact same songs, modern pop music being a wasteland of auditory abuse.

Anyway, while loading up on sushi (at a different bar and at a different time) a young couple was joined by the young lady’s friends.  The conversation got tedious, quick:
Girl one (to guy): “Oh what do you do?”
(note: obviously they’re white because only white people “do” stuff)
Guy: “Well-”
Guy’s girfriend: “He saves DOLPHINS!”
Girl two: “Oh wow neat”
Guys: “-Coast Guard and-”
Girls (same tone and as quickly as possible): “That’s/Pete down at/AWESOME!/car repair/Julie said that/I had to move/car repair/nails done/”etc. etc. for five minutes.

If I was the guy I would’ve gotten up and walked out, heck I didn’t even know them and I wanted to leave.  However Coma came to mind since as part of the angsty guy’s get-away-from-it-all frustration just such a vocal track was crammed in late to the song (between 7:10 and 7:40), scrub to listen and relive the enthralling experience! (For those who are not fans of the song, which will be all of you, it will be pain on top of pain!)

Bartender (afterwards): “Wow you really ate all of that!”

Although, for the single guys out there, apparently “saving dolphins” is a thing…
Girl: “And you said that saving dolphins is part of your job?”
Guy: “Oh yeah totally baby.”

Notable Quotables

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While plowing through e-books I’ll regularly highlight portions that I find clever.  Below are a few quotes that I’m pulling from my various e-readers.

In the book The Forever War a space marine recounts his first encounter with the extraterrestrials that he’s tasked with fighting:

I didn’t want to see them dead, but I’d just as soon not have seen them in any condition.

An interesting metaphor to be sure; I’m sure troops sent to third world dumps carry a similar train of thought!
In a passage in Martian Time Slip PKD predicts the dawn of academic “paper chasing” wherein people become more and more educated for more and more menial work (keep in mind the book was written in 1964):

He himself had emigrated due to his having only a B.A.  Every door had been shut to him, and then he had come to Mars as nothing but a union plumber, and within a few short years, look at him.  On Earth, a plumber with only a B.A. would be raking up dead locusts in Africa as part of a U.S. foreign aid work gang.

Only those with their PhDs in plumbing will be accepted!
In Metro 2033 the protagonist who lives in a post-apocalyptic Moscow metro system, comes to the realization that mankind will never reach the heights that he once had:

Only now did he start to sense how far man now was from his former achievements and conquests.  Like a proud soaring bird, mortally wounded and dropping to the ground in order to hide in a crevice and, having concealed itself there, dies quietly….

Now, when Artyom himself was able to evaluate from what heights mankind had fallen into the precipice, his faith in a beautiful future evaporated once and for all.

One does not have to survive a nuclear war to have that opinion.  I’m sure inhabitants of Europe during the dark ages didn’t have that different of an attitude.
Within the Metro system in the book are various factions which adhere to every ideology under the sun. The most successful and enviable clan is the one that controls the ring and when the protagonist, who had survived fascists, cultists, communists and other near-do-wells comes in contact with this clan it turns out to be controlled by a clan which espouses free markets and individual success.  This clan is careful to keep its success close to the vest and is leery of letting anyone in, to which the protagonist remarks in regard to immigration:

The number of places in paradise is limited; only in hell is entry open to all.

In the book Roadside Picnic a comment is made in regards to the inevitability of the types of “trades” that some men fall into:

Pigs can always find mud.

Elsewhere in the book a comment is made in regards to the deviation to ignorance (or more kindly, “normalcy bias”) that the vast majority of people default to:

He knew that billions and billions didn’t know a thing and didn’t want to know and, even if they did find out, would act horrified for ten minutes and immediately forget all about it.

At the back of the book, the author makes some comments in regards to getting his book published.
On commie control freaks who kept the book from being published for many years:

I don’t even want to mention them here-let them be swallowed up by the past, like evil spirits, and disappear…

A statement on small minded control freaks (PC zealots, I’m looking at you):

The only people who boggle at what is perfectly natural are those who are the worst swine and the finest experts in filth.  In their utterly contemptible pseudo-morality they ignore the contents and madly attack individual words.

In Starship Troopers, the character played in the movie by Michael Ironside goes on a pages long rant against communism, all of which is very good but too much to quote in full.  However, along the way he also makes some social commentary; on the failure of criminal justice, specifically in regards to juveniles:

As for ‘unusual’, punishment must be unusual or it serves no purpose.

On social workers:

…except that the time-tested method of instilling social virtue and respect for law in the minds of the young did not appeal to the pre-scientific pseudo-professional class who called themselves ‘social workers’ or sometimes ‘child psychologists.’  It was too simple for them, apparently, since anybody could do it, using only the patience and firmness needed in training a puppy.

What inspired this post was an excellent line from the PKD novel Counter-Clock World:

I mean, we all lie to ourselves; we tell our own selves more lies than we ever do other people.

Completely Unrelated

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On a completely incompetent judge that even her liberal peers say should be sacked:

I’ve detailed complaints about her before, in a 2009 story and 2011 column. In the latter, I urged voters to look past her political name and support her opponent in her re-election bid. I pointed out that Stokes had received a zero rating in the fall of 2011 from four separate legal groups, which go to great lengths to vet judges.
Stokes, on the bench since 1996, easily won another term.

On a (pointless) drive to make testing in Ohio public schools more difficult:

If the cut score were set where it’s expected to be, 77 percent of Rocky River eighth-graders — instead of 96 percent — would pass the math test. At the other extreme, 4 percent of East Cleveland eighth-graders — instead of 37 percent — would pass.

Even more fun in that last story is the high-to-low pass chart listing the school districts. Locals will immediately notice the demographic differences between the top and bottom, though everyone else can make a pretty good guess.