Transcendental Bloviation

Politics, Space, Japan

Monday, March 28, 2005

Like Having Sex with the Future

John Carter McKnight points us to "Pocky - Scooby Snacks of the Illuminati", and asks "So ... what *else* is like having sex with the future?"

To which I responded:

Maybe it's only because I read too much news and don't get enough sex, but certain news stories are like having sex with the future, even when they are about antiquity.

Today I had a good roll-in-the-hay with a story about how Cleopatra was really no looker, but quite the Renaissance Woman. She wrote books about science, designed buildings .... oh, the list goes on, and it makes you a little suspicious, since Kim Il Sung was credited with a wide range of accomplishments, including levitation and clairvoyance. But let's say it's true, that they aren't just digging up and translating Egyptian state propaganda from the first century BC (or, in this case, Arabic translations of it).

It suddenly becomes easier to imagine Marc Antony tooling up the Nile to port, and this flushed geekette rushing out to meet him, pushing past all those diplomatic-protocol smoothies rolling their eyes at her lack of composure, and her yelling "Marc, Marc, you've got to come see this -- I just scored the coolest Greek astrolabe you've ever seen ...."

Think how refreshing Marc Antony might have found her, after years of parrying (or falling for) the wiles of perfumed aristocratic manipulative types playing hard-to-get. OK, maybe this may seem more like having sex with the past, to you. But for me, it works: I'm having sex with the future, even if it's the future of our picture of Cleopatra.

Make sense? No? All right, I won't try again ....

Monday, March 14, 2005

My Dad has Started Blogging

... at age 84. Here it is.

Talk about your shock and awe. He's even kinda good at it ....