Denial

I am not bashing on religion, per se. :)

For no particular reason at all

..other then withdrawal syndrome from my addiction: EVE

Elbonian Defense

This Monday is an interrupt in my long weekend. Since tomorrow is a state holiday (Elbonians traditionally celebrate International Work(ers) Day by not working)*, vast numbers of my countrymen have decided to take a day off and just enjoy one really nice, relaxed and long weekend. Unfortunately for me, due to bureaucratic difficulties in moving various multicolored pieces of paper throughout the system on time, I actually have to work today. This is not too bad, though, since the rest of the firm's employees don't have to work, and so I have zero work to do.

I decided to catch up with the news.

First thing that I saw was that our own Minister of Love held a joint (meaning, Air Force, Navy and Army) military exercise for the benefit of an elementary school class (in Elbonia, class is about 40 kids). This is slightly strange, for two reasons: a) the exercise was held in Elbonian capital, which has no sea, and b) it was held *in* the capital itself, in military depot/garrison in one of the suburbs, instead of the more usual approach to hold it in the nearby swamp, err, field exercise complex. The apparent reason why the exercise was held at all, was because of our Minister's son, who had to bring his parent to school to tell about his work. Our beloved Minister decided not to give a speach to a class of 10 year olds, but instead opted to bring the school to his work. His son is now officially the coolest kid in his school.

According to the people in flats neighboring the base, the show was not too exciting - no military policemen fell out of the helicopters (like the last time a public exercise was staged).
How much did it cost? Well, far less then an U.S. day in Irak, and actually comparable with the cost of a day for our Elbonian troops in Jerka Jerkastan.

I say, money well spent.

All the other news were full of eulogies for our main opposition party leader, who died last night. Since in times past he was a leader of communist party, declared atheist (after meeting Pope John Paul, he decided he was "only" an agnostic), then leader of the social-democrat party, I found it rather strange that most of the articles focus on how he "accepted the faith", even though there is no evidence for it (he recently explicitly stated that he is not a believer). I mean, what the heck?! When did our Elbonian Catholic Church manage to hijack our newspapers?!
I suppose that many famous deathbed conversions originally started up as a story in religion-influenced newspapers..;)

Shaking my head, I surfed some more and I found out about recent interview of our Minister of Economics (the chubby guy-his team wore "Cho" T-shirts) who showed his complete ignorance of not only economics, but also the professional jargon. He managed to get an interview on TV after which everyone who knows anything about economics probably started to sell his government bonds and move their stock portfolios into other countries, like Hrbia and Crotoboltavia, who seem to have marginally more competent ministers (even though most of them had at some point of their past been unsuccessfull premiere league soccer club managers, crime kingpins, warlords, war crime suspects, state monopolists and local firefighting society presidents, kinda like our minister himself).

This was the moment I decided to just go away and watch some undead seafood instead.

* Traditionally, we all go out to a park and eat charity bean soup.

Bruce

I spent my last weekend wallowing in my geek roots - visiting local SF convention (SFerakon). I had great amounts of fun, even though the "grown up" parts of my brain were stopping me from engaging in some of the more outrageous activities (like SFerakon Survivor, an activity that looks like a weird younger brother of Fear Factor and Edward Elizabeth Hitler's idea of a nice dinner). Guest of Honor was Bruce Sterling, who was awesome, even up close and personal, even though he is generally an unpleasant person. So why awesome?

Well, he managed to future shock us. :)

Imagine this: a room full of Elbonian SF fans - most of them young, some of them Trekkies, about third of them are either science students or scientist, the rest is usual mix of SMOFs, SFoldster/burnouts and wandering outsiders. All of them think that they are cool, in touch with technopulse, living at the edge of today's imagination, proud in their utter geekiness. Zoom on the speaker: early 50ties red faced, grey haired potbellied glasses-wearing geek, talking with nasal Texas drawl about 20db louder then is actually needed. He looks unhappy and annoyed*, and is taking it all out at us - by subjecting us to each and every one of our favorite SF fantasies (that we never before though of as fantasies) and systematically destroying them.
When I say destroying them, I am being nice: he takes our cherished ideas by their neck, twists them around, cuts them into little pieces, jumps up and down on them, digs a hole, throws them in, pisses on that and drops a huge tombstone on top. When he kills an idea, it stays dead.

At first I was shocked. Then I looked at the audience and saw that unforgettable "deer in headlights" stare on their faces, and almost burst out from laughter. It was so funny! All these ubergeeks being geeked over by a 50+y.o. nerd from Texas (who probably voted republican ;)!!
He was especially nasty towards anything that (in my opinion) smelled of fairy tale new ageism - things like singularity, AI, religion (quote: "if you believe in that, you might as well believe in holy trinity and transubstantiation", which made some people very angry :), and impending golden age brought to us through technology. He also seems to have a red button thingie about climate change - very vehement against people who don't believe in it - almost funny to watch while he elaborates all the bad things that are going to happen, whatever we do. Somehow, though, he still managed to come off as an optimist - world *can* be saved, if rich people decide so. Which is something I find incomprehensible (probably due to not being rich) - why would someone who built his business empire by taking advantage of global commons (our biosphere), decide to repair the damage? That person, after all, isn't going to have problems finding clean water, air, etc. - being rich means that you have access to resources denied to the rest of the population. But I digress.

After Sterling's panel, we all walked out feeling a bit like being hit by a near-light speed proton stream. He held two more panels in the coming days, and I definitely felt old and out of date by the end of it - though still determined to catch up. :)

I am not yet ready to go and visit Mount Fuji, I think....

* Possibly due to not being served enough beer while being harassed by very 20th cen. sf nerds. I do remember that he didn't listen very closely to questions we asked him, but then again, he heard it all, so many many times before...:)

Why Cathedral?

Well, one of my reasonably close friends (meaning, reasonable *and* close) is a freelance artist/industrial designer. His works range from designing shampoo bottles to making bronze microcast objects to re-creating historical statues on new-built lakes (as weird as it sounds). The problem that he has is that he very rarely actually gets paid for his work. The last case is, of course, connected to the Cathedral. As long as two years ago, he was preparing a multimedia project for one of Cathedral's outer towers, on order from No.2 guy in our unofficial Church hierarchy (ie, the guy with money who was not an archbishop). The project was pretty huge and promised to bring substantial profit for my friend. Well, he worked pretty hard, and when he completed most of the project documentation, he gave it for review to that same No.2.
Few weeks ago, I was reading a newspaper, and in it was a 2 page article about a new multimedia project planned for the Cathedral, in which my friend's name was conspicuously absent. Not only was it absent, but another name was mentioned as an author, a name of a female architect who is known to be close to the current major of my city. The details of the project were the same as those that I knew about from talking with my friend, so it obviously wasn't some other project ordered parallel with this one.
I asked my friend about this, but he refused to talk about this.
It seems that the complete project was shamelessly stolen by Church, and given to others. I suppose that this is also a way to finance the rebuilding of the Cathedral. :/