Watched my new VCD this weekend, and became even more convinced of the true wackiness of Japanese animators. I've already filled my perverted things quota for this month, so I won't go into specifics, but... wow. You'd think a light, fluffy show like Macross 7 wouldn't contain that much wackiness, but no, it's just brimming over with it. Chock-full of good ol' fashioned weirdness. Mmm. Weirdness.
Anyway, our subject for today: Philanthropy.
Yes, philanthropy. Why is everyone looking at me like that, anyway?
I'm in favor of the surlier sorts of philanthropic groups, the kind that say "sod government lobbying, we'll do it ourselves". Groups like the Nature Conservancy (motto: "How do we save the environment? We'll BUY it.") and the Civil War Trust (motto: "How do we save important historical sites? We'll BUY them."). I used to be fairly well travelled in my younger days, and it's my opinion that having plenty of wilderness sites and old civil war battlefields (not that there are any *new* civil war battlefields, but you get the point) to poke around in is a Good Thing(tm). The fact that often this involves giving bloodthirsty developers a good, swift kick in the groin is merely icing on the cake.
See, here in the south, we've got a lot of leetle beety states (not quite as small as up north, but not like those behemoths out west, either). Development of this somewhat restricted terrain generally proceeds at a mind boggling pace. This, as far as I'm concerned, is a bad thing. We don't need tons of people. If they want to live in huge cities, let 'em go out west. Give me a nice, sprawling, lazy sort of southern town over a megalopolis any day.
The other thing we have lots of in the south are important civil war landmarks. Go fig, eh? Something about being invaded by hostile forces, and all that, does tend to leave plenty of battle sites scattered around the landscape... Regardless, many of these tend to take place near major intersections and cities and such, for obvious reasons. For equally obvious reasons, this makes them drool-inducing objects for developers to lust after, seeking to entwine their cancerous tendrils into the monuments of yesteryear. After all, what town _doesn't_ need another strip mall?
The other sort of group it's good to support are people like the Planetary Society, because, hey, those of us who'd like to see a bigger space program eventually need someone in Washington bitching about it. Besides, the Planetary Society apparently designed this thingie called the "Mars Microphone", which is exactly what it sounds like, a little microphone that's riding along with the latest lander aimed at Mars. I mean, the idea is really keen when you think about it. Sure, all you're likely to hear is faint gusting from Mars' pathetic little shroud of an atmosphere (assuming the device functions and you pick up anything at all), but still, sound from an alien world. Geek-a-riffic, man.
Which, by the way, is a good way to distinguish between those who actually "get" the space program, and those who don't. Why do we want to send stuff to Mars to pick up gusts of wind, which we can do perfectly well down here on Earth? Because we can. Because nobody's done it before. Exploration for the sheer hell of it. I mean, sure, we could send all the money we normally spend on the space program on food and ship it to Africa, and after the local gangs and government bureaucrats had taken their cut, enough of it might get through to the people to keep a few villages alive until the next wave of ethnic purges clean 'em all out, but really, why should we? This is, true, mere "conspicuous consumption", mere gratification, but dammit, at least this has some scientific value. Let's face it, if we don't do things that have never been done before, if we don't push the limits of what the human race as a whole has been responsible for, then why the hell are we wasting our time with this whole industrialization thing, anyway? It may be possible to fix all the problems on Earth, as some have suggested we put as our top priority, but I don't think those words mean what they think they mean, and I don't think I'd want to live in the kind of totalitarian society you'd need to pull it off (unless I was running it - positions are still open in my Legions of Terror! Join today!). As Mark Twain said, without our dreams, we may continue to exist, but we will have ceased to live.
And you thought "cynical idealism" was an oxymoron.
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In other news, a big hallo to the beta-software "Googlebot.Com", which has been relentlessly, mercilessly downloading all of my journal pages. Just think, soon you'll be able to run a search on the phrase "surly bastard" and go right to the source. Ain't technology dandy?
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