Hagenart comic 01/17/23

 

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Hagenart comic 10/02/22

 

Hagenart comic 07/29/22

 

The end of The End of Eternity is not the end

I re-read books a lot. If I like them.  For this post I’d planned to read End of Eternity again but I lost my copy. I didn’t really like the book enough to re-read it per my usual standards but I wanted to keep re-reading it and come up with pun titles for the posts and amuse myself so I felt some disappointment when I couldn’t find it. I daydreamed about using one of the “kettles” in the book to go back in time and retrieve my copy while it sat on my nightstand and then take it back to my time to re-read it, but by the time travel rules in End of Eternity this act would change my reality and prevent my past self from ever finishing the book in the first place. So my past self would post a humorous blog entry with an “Eternity got Longer” pun and go back in one of the “kettles” and retrieve my copy while it still sat on my nightstand.  These hijinks would continue until I had completely unraveled all my reading progress on End of Eternity until I hadn’t read it at all and I would post something like “The Eternal Beginning of the End of Eternity” and I would give up until the future when I had the copy again but could not for the life of me think of another terrible pun. 

I also imagined an alternative reality where I used one of the time travel cell phones in the Marvel series Loki to go back and grab the copy on my nightstand and by the time travel rules in Loki and the Marvel universe in general - as explained in detail by Smart Hulk in Endgame - my reality wouldn’t change and I would still have read the End of Eternity once before and I would have plenty of punny post titles to use. But, also by Marvel universe time travel rules, when I took the book from Past Andrew’s nightstand, I would create an alternative reality, and in the alternative reality, alternative Andrew would lose the book before finishing it and would never post any idiotic posts about End of Eternity at all and might complain to the TIme Variance Authority from Loki who would arrest me for taking Alternative Andrew’s book but now I’ve really pushed it because I really doubt that the TVA from Loki would care about a missing copy of an old Sci Fi book and they would more likely tell Alternative Andrew to get over it unless - get ready for it - I myself am and always have been Alternative Andrew all along, and a careless Andrew from the future has taken my book and all the infinity stones holding our universe together and left our precious timeline to suck it - all to post one more dumb pun variant on the End of Eternity. 

Short Post script:

I found the copy of End of Eternity and I watched some of the Eternals movie again but I haven’t started to re-read End of Eternity. There’s always another book to read, I have a stack of books on my nightstand and I don’t see how I’ll ever get to it. I need a time machine. Ba-dat ssssss.  

Predator worship

 You read that title correctly.  Especially lions and eagles. Almost every country on earth incorporates lions or eagles into their logo or coat of arms or whatever you want to call it. Gigantic groups of people trying to live together in lawful harmony, for mutual benefit, and to symbolize that endeavor we choose the nastiest, most violent creatures on earth, who live by tearing other animals apart with their talons or teeth and consuming their flesh, usually in front of their mothers. That’s right, the predators usually target baby animals. Don’t believe that “old and the sick” crap in your biology textbook. How often do you see the predators taking down an “old” gazelle in the videos? How often are they grabbing the baby animals? 

But humans seem to adore these monsters. Coat of Arms, flags, sport teams. The American Eagle. The Russian Bear. The British Lion. Lions. Eagles. Tigers. Bears. Ravens. Wolverines. Panthers. Hawks. Raptors, for god sake. Raptors! Dominant Alphas. Apex Predators. Richard the Lionhearted (He was a crappy king, by the way). The Lion of Judah.  The American Eagle. Year of the Dragon. Griffindor (Griffins are a combination of Lions and Eagles). 

And of course everyone’s favorite dinosaur, the Iguanadon. Ha ha, kidding of course, you’ve met Tyrannosaurus Rex, dubbed King of the dinosaurs by some overexcited scientist. Because that’s everybody’s ideal King, right? A giant eating machine who relentlessly hunts his people for food. 

You have to wonder about scientists sometimes, although there are fantastic and heartwarming examples of scientists who spend their lives studying mollusks and humble creatures. But you still get these old style Nat geo types with the open shirts and the safari hats, crowing over sharks, orcas, tigers, panthers or cheetahs and their kills. I’ll never forget a conservationist type ad in a nature magazine calling for preservation of lions. The ad was sponsored by some sort of save the lions group led by some demented old husband and wife team. The ad featured a horrible photo of a group of lions attacking a baby elephant. Like lions on the baby elephants back, biting it’s ears and back, and the baby elephant had its mouth open in a scream, and you could see one of the baby elephant’s eyes wide open with terror and horror. How do I know it was a baby elephant and not a grown up elephant? The ad used the words “photo of a pride bringing down a baby elephant”. They seemed quite pleased with the ghastly scene, like it was neat and they wanted their friends to see. 

Now I know there are people who practice a kind of Nature Worship and believe in a kind of magic line between human construction and Nature and that anything that happens in Nature is beautiful and okay and that humans are a kind of devil spawned cancer that has invaded the perfect natural world. Well, I kind of believe the devil spawned thing. But Nature is not heaven. Disney movies are not real. I’m quite certain the baby elephant did not enjoy being eaten just because the lions were part of Nature. Nature sucks sometimes. I kind of feel they should have shot the lions and saved the baby elephant. Of course the lions probably had baby lions at home that were going hungry, so if the lions didn’t bring their kids slaughtered baby elephant flesh to eat, the baby lions could starve to death. Nature is fun that way. 

But Nature has spawned many wondrous amazing  creatures, like elephants, who eat leaves instead of other creatures. Antelope, Buffaloes, giraffes, bats, lemurs, dolphins, octopuses…  well some of those eat insects and fish, but they don’t eat any creatures I care about. You can even be a vegetarian and eat fish according to some religions, I believe. And definitely insects. Humans should eat more insects. Why don’t we? Are they poisonous? If they are poisonous, what about all the spiders we eat at night?

So why not worship these fantastic vegetarian or insectivorous beasts? I think it’s because they run away from fights. Humans perceive a lion as never backing down from a fight, so they admire the beast as a symbol of courage. Of course this perception of any animal is based upon lies. 

I won’t bother deconstructing the Lion Mythos in this post because I believe Mark Twain completely eviscerated the species in a brilliant essay published in the New York Times. I think it was Mark Twain. It might have been Ignatius Reilly. But it doesn’t matter who did it, the point is that Lions are just a big animal with teeth and claws and they hardly ever have to fight a bigger animal with teeth and claws, so how is that brave? Weasels are much much braver than lions. I know I’m not the first person to point this out.  I often allude to a personal experience to illustrate this point:

At one time in my youth (early 30s) I shared an apartment with a weasel owner. She kept the creature in a cage in our shared kitchen and repeatedly cautioned me to keep my fingers away from the bars of the cage because the adorable little specimen would bite your fingers. Eventually the weasel got loose and I encountered it in the bathroom where it was attempting to abscond with a bottle of hand lotion and I grabbed a broom to defend myself and this minuscule little animal dropped the bottle of lotion and there it stood facing me, and I was at least five times its height and a hundred times its mass, and this little weasel raised its tiny forepaws and hissed at me with a level of menace that I will never forget, and I yelped and tried to hit it with the broom and it rose in the air like yoda and bit my hand. 

I guarantee you that if a lion ran into a creature five times its height and a 100 times its weight, it would not rear back and offer to fight it, not a chance. 

But truth: I’m really just paraphrasing Mark Twain’s essay about the bravery of predators. Look it up. I can’t be bothered to google it right at the moment because I’m busy with a client

Critique of “End of Eternity”

 I just finished another book; End of Eternity, by Isaac Asimov. I know, you immediately thought about the movie with the couple rolling around on the beach. That’s From Here to Eternity. They were copying Asimov. Ha ha, I don’t actually know that. I haven’t seen the movie, nor do I have a strong desire to see the movie - except that I kind of want to write a book comparing the movie and the book, which as far as I know have nothing to do with each other except the word “Eternity” in the title. But I would argue very strongly in the book that From Here to Eternity was a subtle ripoff of Asimov’s End of Eternity. I would call the book “Battle of the ‘Eternity’s”.  Note the punctuation. I would begin the book as a Critical Theory Tour de Force. In Chapter One I would discuss my own bodily functions and hang ups, then I’d smoothly transition to whatever similar issues the characters in the movie share with characters in the book. The personal details in Chapter One would jar the casual Reader of Critical Theory, but as  the book transitioned to an actual battle, in my mind, as detailed by its effect on my daily habits, the Reader would begin to realize that in fact I had never intended to write a Critical Theory book.  Those few readers who would ever think to purchase a Critical Theory book with the intent to read it would feel cheated. They would hopefully go online to post vengeful reviews that would explain the execrable dishonesty of the book in detail. 

I’d be willing to bet that the outrage burning in their souls would  flame through the stifling objectivity lashed into their verbal cortex by years of Lit classes, enabling them to compose insulting and mean-spirited and delightfully readable diatribes, all inextricably connected to the book in online searches. 

In the epilogue I would admit that From Here To Eternity came out in 1953, two years prior to the publication of End of Eternity, and that although Asimov might have come up with the central concept of End of Eternity years before, it is extremely doubtful that whoever wrote From Here to Eternity could have known anything about it. 

I would add a postscript to the epilogue with an additional confession for readers who hadn’t ever seen From Here to Eternity, admitting that I haven’t seen it either, and that the scenes referred to earlier in the book and ascribed to From Here to Eternity were not actually in the movie. 

In the same postscript I would admit that while I had read End of Eternity, many if not all of the extracts purported to be taken from the book were as fictional as those I pretended to take from the movie. 

At this point in the blog post I would like to assure the reader that I have no intention to submit “Battle of the Eternities” for publication in book or novel form, and that I have destroyed the proofs and all drafts and that I intend to fully comply with all terms of the settlement. 

“Battle of the Eternities” is of course the title of one of five Star Trek episode scripts submitted to Paramount by Gene Roddenberry for consideration to be produced and aired during the fourth season of the series.  The episode represents one of the primary examples of Roddenberry’s seminal “Crossing the Streams” concept, originating in the hyper cube of his mind some fifteen years before Terminator X popularized the DJ Remix. 

The episode begins with the Captain ruminating on past relationships in the Captain’s Log. Most of the ruminations concern “Yeoman Crantor”, a relatively recent flame that the Captain admits he is reluctant to discuss with Spock. As he speaks, a dreamlike image of a woman’s unsmiling face appears over Kirk’s scowling visage.  The woman possesses the elf-like ears of a Vulcan. Kirk’s reverie is broken by ship’s alarm. Spock’s harshly unpleasant voice chimes in immediately after the alarm, indicating, unnecessarily, that the ship has encountered the object they’ve been searching the quadrant for after the nearest colony’s distress signal about a large anomalous object set on a collision course with their home, and on and on, he won’t stop until Kirk issues a stinging rebuke and a reprimand that seems to finally register on his alien Vulcan mind because that’s the only way to talk to these people. 

The object is a gigantic alien structure spinning slowly through space, a chunk of something much larger, almost planet-sized, with twisted metallic framing covered in ancient ice crystals. Spock is scared and wants to go home, but Kirk has had enough. He leaves the bridge and visits McCoy, delivering a verbal tongue-lashing that leaves McCoy in tears, just weeping, hysterical. Kirk doesn’t slap him because of the recent disciplinary hearings. But he insists that McCoy join them in their exploration of the object. He takes the ship transporter to the floor below McCoy’s office, where he sees the door to Yeoman Crantor’s quarters at the end of the hallway. Kirk wanders around the hallway like an angry chimp. He ignores the calls to his breast logo and keeps an eye on Yeoman Crantor’s door.  He angrily accosts any crew members emerging into the hallway from their quarters, demanding to know their names and rank and proper whereabouts. Then he gets a text from Spock that begins; “Jim, I know you’re scared…” Spock means emotionally scared because he knows about Kirk’s relationship troubles, but Kirk takes it as a provocation. He runs to the elevator. He means to surprise Spock on the bridge with his patented two-fisted thunder punch. The elevator takes too long, so Kirk takes the stairs, taking three steps at a time until he’s bent over, gasping for breath. He’s too late to catch Spock on the bridge, so he hurries to the transporter room. Spock and McCoy and Yeoman Crantor are waiting on the circles. Kirk glares at Spock, but he walks with quiet dignity to his circle. Before they beam down, he informs McCoy that he has been demoted to Yeoman, and that Yeoman Crantor is now the ship’s doctor. “But Captain, I cannot heal,” Doctor Crantor says. 

“Neither can I,” Kirk says softly. 

They find two alien skeletons in one of the rooms in the object, intertwined in what Kirk interprets as a lover’s embrace, but Doctor Crantor deduces is in fact the final stage of a grim struggle to the death. 

Their argument grows heated, with McCoy egging them on until Spock administers a Vulcan grip to the Yeoman’s left eye socket. Kirk lunges at Spock, but Doctor Crantor administers a Vulcan grip to Kirk, removing his shirt in the process. They collapse together, their bodies entwined in a fashion intriguingly similar to the contorted alien skeletons.  Scotty beams them all back at once, humans and Vulcans and alien skeletons together. Back on the enterprise, Kirk commands Crantor to keep the skeletons in her quarters, as a reminder of “what might have been.” 

The last shot is of Crantor lying glamorously in her bed, gazing across her bedroom to a museum style exhibit with a placard reading “love is what you make it”.  The camera pans to a clear shot of the skeletons, their hands at each other’s throats. One of them wears a crumpled black robe. The other has Darth Vader’s helmet on. 

The credits roll to a jazzier version of the Star Wars theme, and end with a special note of thanks and tribute to the guy that played McCoy, making it crystal clear that the character passed away during the episode. The note also makes it clear that he passed away as a Yeoman, not as a doctor