"You guys," or even "guys," seems to be an acceptable standard substitute for the even more colloquial "y'all." I'm glad we have an equivalent to the German "ihr."

Got out of class a half hour early. Trying to decide what to do with this extra time.

Kept awake last night by Jubb's worst snoring to date, I had some time to think.

Once it became clear that I couldn't reach anything with which to hurt Jubb from where I lay, I thought about other things.

Flippancy is too close to banality, I decided late late last night, and it's something I should shy away from in the future, if I can figure out a good way to be cynical without being flippant.

My English skills, last seen defending the word "misanthropy" against a literate freshman's doubts, finally came in handy again today when Prof Ryckman asked for a word to classify incorrectly stated idioms, a hobby of his wife's.

His example: "To wear one's kidney on one's cuff."

He asked if that was a spoonerism, then corrected himself and asked what a spoonerism was. The stupidest person in class—someone must fit that description, after all, and this is my best guess—proffered a homemade definition of "spoonerism" which I've already forgotten.

I do remember sitting there and getting frustrated, because it was wrong. I reluctantly blurted out something to that effect and volunteered the real definition of "spoonerism", using "Frocolate Chosty", the name of a band I'm not sure even exists anymore, as my example for some reason.

The second-stupidest person, a naif with a big heart and a bigger voice, then returned to Ryckman's problem and labeled the Prof's wife's idiomatic mistakes "malapropisms." This is closer, but still a stretch from the real definition of "malapropism", unless you understand it in a way only very loosely related to its original sense.

And here's where my real reluctance came in. I'd come to class late, bumbled to the back, and to make myself even more conspicuous I'd already somewhat harshly corrected a class regular who wanted to sound smart. Now I squinched up my eyes, grimaced, and prepared to do the same again.

I couldn't help but choose to defend the language I love against the forces of the Illiterati, after all.

Everyone in class turned around at that point.

Including the guy who writes our staff editorials, who'd gotten an email from me last night after I'd decided myself against allowing sentences like "It is also beyond our ken to see whether this is a benign vicissitude or a self-inflicted wound" to be printed in The Lawrentian without a good/ironic reason. I'm probably going to get a reputation for my copy-editing power trips.

[Update: At the moment, it seems like my more iron-fisted staff ed corrections won't be implemented anyways. Also, Miss Bates found an error in the (admittedly casual) email I wrote to the editorial guy, which, as per Lawrentian policy, was forwarded to all the editors. Authority diminished.]

Back to class. With everyone still looking at me, I blurted out (I did a lot of blurting today) a workable definition of "malapropism" and sent Prof Ryckman back to square one.

We never found a word for what Ryckman was talking about, and I doubt there is one. The important thing is that I'm smarter than everyone else.

Well, actually the important thing is that I might be able to major in philosophy after all. I felt I should come to class and talk—even if it meant coming late and convincing some that I'm the third-stupidest person there—so that I could get on my Prof's good side again.

Because I figured out a way to get the last of my required classes: writing for credit.

Ryckman said we'll work something out; the second-stupidest person tried to warn me about writing for credit, but he's lost a lot of authority in the classes I've had with him and I no longer value his input.

And even if this is hard, if it's the difference between a major and a minor I should probably do it. Well, we'll see if it actually works out.

Watercolor

My contacts seem to be fogging up, somehow, so perhaps I'm in the early stages of a mind-boggling hallucination. I'll add more as the situation progresses.

Actually, that's a lie. I'll just keep writing. You can't stop me, after all.

For the past month or so, I've divided my REM time between scatological dreams (the latest involved Brainerd's own Adam giving a White House press conference on nanotechnology while I used my press pass to unite an aging rock star with the shrooms his career so desperately needed) and eerily mundane, incredibly realistic dreams.

It's the latter that worry me, in a way. I've always had a bad memory, unless we're talking about conversations in grade school or whether something was on a right-hand or a left-hand page, and doubting the events I remember only makes my problem worse.

For example, we're scheming again, so as to get a good room next year, and for a week I thought I'd talked to Representative Man, my boss at the Lawrentian, during lunch at Lucinda's.

I tapped him on the shoulder and asked about his housing situation next year. He thought I wanted to live with him and it got mildly awkward after that. Like most of my mildly awkward moments, I can see this with crystal clarity.

But none of that happened. The Politician had to broach the subject late last week, because I wasn't sure if I already had. And I hadn't (though, on a less blatantly narcissistic note, the scheme wheels are in motion).

This is just one example. Usually, the dreams are much more trivial. I'll wake up thinking I did my homework or that my professor has cancelled class. I'll remember watching a show on my computer I still haven't seen.

O.k., that last one was a lie. But it will happen!

Rather than contemplate my senility, I've decided to explain it away. It's been a while since I've dreamt this often, and deja vu or something similar is bound to happen. Also, spring is responsible. And all the devil-white-sugar I've been eating recently.

And I'll throw in stress, because people are always willing to pretend to believe that someone is under a lot of stress.

(I'm not, as far as I can tell. Which means I'm not.)

Whatever the cause, the implications are a bit frightening. If my some of my memories are false, and I'm the sum of my experiences, then my perception of myself is false.

If these dreams continue, I'll have the odd luxury of actually watching myself become someone I'm not, or I'll wake up as a giant insect, or something.

I don't know. It's two-thirty, past my bedtime, and I should be dreaming bland confusing dreams by now. Goodnight.

Yesterday we had the long-awaited '40s 40s party. Someone came up with this theme first term but we'd never gotten around to actually doing it.

But really: people dressed in 1940s garb, drinking 40s? It had to be done.

Getting the 40s was easy; we bought every bottle of Old English (about 35 bottles in all) from a nearby liquor store, receiving a ten percent discount for our trouble.

We also bought a few wine coolers, so any willing fool could make himself a "Moe," a poor man's mix drink otherwise known as a "Cash Money" mix.

The costumes were more difficult. However creative the theme sounds, the fact is that there wasn't "typical" forties dress. What with the war and all, most people were wearing clothes from the previous few decades. Or so I'm told. It sounds plausible.

To give the more lazy or stupid Lawrentians a disincentive, we locked the door, only (for a while) letting in people with actual costumes. Jubb appointed himself costume judge for the night.





Here's us. Jonas is a soldier and his wife, joined together bodily either by some mad scientist or, if my catechism is any guide, the sacrament of marriage. I'm "Little Boy," the atom bomb responsible for the worst Monday morning in Hiroshima history. Jubb is a 1940s tennis player, suspiciously excused from the draft.





Several people deserve props for their elaborate costumes; most guests spent about five minutes on theirs. Here are three fine examples of good costume design: Jagger (one Lawrence's most universally beloved sophomores) is the Iron Curtain, Jinx is Cleopatra as seen by Marc Antony in 42 B.C., and Light Spinner (a.k.a. Jubb's girlfriend) is a Jackson Pollock painting.





Here, Jagger explains her costume to The Politician, who came as a bleak vision of 10040 and the horrors to come, while Half-Moon, one of those Trever freshmen, looks on from 1740. Iron? Curtain?

Freshman Matt (size-40), Sockless Pete (the baby boom), and a few other regulars put in some effort, but otherwise I wasn't especially impressed.

Thankfully, our strict costumes-only entry policy kept out quite a bit of rabble, but our lax definition of "an acceptable costume," especially as our bouncer got drunker and drunker, let in a lot of questionable attempts and questionable people.





Just as I'd expected, basically. I decided, even before this party began, that '40s 40s was, philosophically, a Jubb party. Crowds of people, lots of alcohol, a sea of acquaintancehood and anonymity. And so it was.

The general consensus today, even from those who didn't get plastered and throw up, is that our party was a success. But I honestly didn't enjoy myself.

I don't know if that was because I spent most of the night playing photojournalist and not really talking to anyone, or because I'm just tempermentally opposed to such large gatherings (I'm "particular," and I saw almost all the Lawrentians I despise last night).

Probably it's a combination of the two.

The Politician and I ditched the party around 1:00 and met with Miss Bates at Jekyll's. I had drunk almost my entire 40, enough that I didn't feel I needed to spend more money on booze that night.

We exchanged compliments, gossip, and secrets and otherwise sat around enjoying second-hand smoke before returning to the room a half-hour later. The Politician and I rather hastily decided to throw an Elitist party, one more akin to our own temperments, at some point in the future.

Halfway through a discussion, back in the room with Sockless Pete, of our favorite movies, Jubb wandered drunkenly wandered into the room and passed out on Fort Makeout, temporarily disrupting conversation.





I think I prefer not ending up like that at the end of the night, and I am rather fond of my memories, even mediocre ones (which is partially why I'm blogging about the party at all), so I'd rather keep them.

Jubb recalls "very little" and Jonas recalls "almost everything."

I've passed out on our couch before too, but Jubb's drinking/partying style, what the Germans would call eskalieren, is a bit much for me, just as it was apparently too much for him.

All in all, though, it wasn't too bad of night, and even if I didn't really like where the party ended up, I had the sense to make sure that I ended up somewhere else. The intellectual deliciousness of the theme more than makes up for any perceived failures in the party itself.

Oh, but we somehow have four leftover 40s. Ugh.

Bad Replicant

So I don't know what the hell to make of this.

Having my blog cribbed or, in some entries, only slightly altered, by some (apparently Brainerdite, obviously liberal, and, judging from the clumsy radicalness of his views, presumably teenage) blogger without the attribution (otherwise I have no problem with people quoting huge chunks of my blog) that my Creative Commons copyright quite reasonably demands is a bit unnerving.

Even frustrating, for a would-be writer.

Seeing a link to Graham's blog (labeled "My Other Site") on the sidebar is more humorous.

Seeing my terminology "Bold Hero," "Bombastion," and so forth, coopted was flattering for a second, but now seems creepy. The nicknames thing is a good meme and all, but, as I told Ben, I stole it from H.G. Wells fair and square.

If I knew anything about this person besides the fact that we share a few common acquaintances and he seems to go to Brainerd High and think I'm worth aping for some reason, I'd feel a bit better about the whole thing.

But, well, I'm tired and I feel superior enough already, so I'll let this lie for now.

[Update: Manney has identified the plagiarist, an annoying novice debater and apparent pathological liar named "Chris Derby." Case closed.]

A Few Feet To Go Before I Sleep

Accidently bounced his email back right after I'd finished replying to it (which should give him a good impression of my competence) but at least I'm finally in touch with Prof Renner, the German who taught my "The European Novel" class in Freiburg.

If all goes well I'll have a hefty paper to write in the next week or two. And that "NR" will not turn into an "F" and make a jagged cut in my potentially-important GPA.

Also, we finished work on The Lawrentian early tonight, some time ago in fact (writing an email in German takes me a while), and I think it's a pretty good issue. I'm sure there are a few mistakes, but it looked nice when I left.

Tomorrow, now that the proverbial wheels are rolling with this and a few other businesses, I can thrift shop, and buy supplies, for Friday.

I still don't know what to go as… everything seems either lame or, if funny, too obvious.

Elitist and A Waste of Time

According to my very scientific Google search, there are over five million websites with "amateur" spelled incorrectly. You can guess what kind, for the most part.

"Amature" is the most popular misspelling, with half a million more hits than the almost-good-enough "amatuer."

While I was being a spelling snob, I decided to research some other gaffes, with the ultimate goal of finding a word spelled incorrectly more often than it is spelled correctly.

Here I go. Should I find such a word, I will probably attempt to destroy the Internet in some way. It'll be like a buddy comedy, with me and China.

Here are the results, in Google hits. I tried to stick with words that could (currently) never be used correctly in the "wrong" spelling.

I've ranked them in order from somewhat understandable, to completely unacceptable.

Right: Daylight-saving time       280,000
Wrong: Daylight-savings time   313,000

Right: Canada Geese        95,600
Wrong: Canadian Geese    22,900

Right: Barbecue    3,040,000
Wrong: Barbeque   947,000

Right: Surprise    11,200,000
Wrong: Suprise    393,000

Right: Misspelling    196,000
Wrong: Mispelling    36,300

O.k., even I'm already bored with this. I'll forgive the first two because I once made the same mistake, and I suppose that "BBQ" has probably messed up some people, who would otherwise spell barbecue correctly. (These are the same kind of people who have a problem with "xmas", I'd wager.)

"Suprise" is a shame, but spelling "misspelling" incorrectly (quicker Readers will notice that I used the word earlier, and make their own conclusions) is tragic.

Especially here, for example.

Bürokratie

Trying to figure out how to save myself from impending doom. "Doom" being the state of affairs if Freiburg really won't let me annul the "NR" that's going to turn into an "F" soon.

Well, "doom" would be the state of affairs if I lost my scholarship, I suppose. This is "near-doom."

Only the sympathy and coordination of two registrar's offices can help me now…

The Politician's B-day




Well, I don't seem able to sleep anyways, so I might as well write something about the birthday party tonight. It was an odd affair, as only half the people there chose to drink and our guest of honor was a bit late.

More power to all. Whoo! Choice!

There were gifts. We got The Politician a copy of the golf game he's been addicted to for the past few weeks, and I threw in a bottle of gin because I bought one on Saturday and I'm not a huge fan of the stuff.

Jubb had homework and midterms and such, but Jonas and I sacrificed some time for our future roommate and drank on this fine Sunday night. Despite our reduced manpower, we still managed to get the The Politician sloshed and ourselves pretty drunk. Sockless Pete, Rock Show Girl, and her fall-term roommate from London all drank with the best of them.

Miß Sarah and Freshman Matt also drank very small amounts of alcohol, but not with the best of them. Just with The Politician.

In my case, I should add, drinking on a Sunday was no sacrifice at all: I don't have class until tomorrow afternoon. Jonas (as well as several other partygoers, I'd wager) has an 8:30 class, so he's really the hero here. All hail the hero.




Of course, Jonas wasn't old enough to get into a sketchy bar, so I guess he's not so great after all. The Politician claims that he hasn't been this drunk since before he started dating his current fiancee, the mysterious dark-haired girl who seems to appear in every picture.

I don't believe him, but I think we might have accomplished our mission: the drunkening of The Politician on this holy day.

Back from the bar, I watched an episode of Freaks and Geeks with Rock Show Girl and now, having decided to fix The Deathtrap at some point in the vague future, I'm off to bed.

Crush! Kill! Destroy!

Over the past few months, I've noticed an increase in the number of anarchic thoughts I entertain.

I don't actually whip fruit at cars or innocent passerby, but is it a problem that I think about doing it? Semi-daily?

Also, trashing antiques and blowing up cars at car dealerships.

Actually, it's not a problem. I've decided that these thoughts are very entertaining, and I will continue having them.

As for actual entertainment…

Postlapsarian

So here I am. There isn't much to say.

I feel like some emo kid, sitting here in front of my computer with my head full of "things" I can't quite "express."

The only difference would be that I'm willing to stay silent. There's a lesson for you emo kids.

Here's where I'm refraining from quoting a song. This space intentionally left blank.

Easy target, sorry.

I wonder that I haven't become a worse person, and since it would be too easy to claim that even thinking such a thought lets me off the hook, this might become an actual problem.

For the moment though, let's keep it here, on the Internet, the place where people's problems go to die. It sounds good, anyways.

I was thinking about Nietzsche. Thus Spake Zarathustra, a book I admittedly didn't finish in English or in the original German, dealt with moving on, with finding a purpose.

(Because that's the whole point of "God is dead." Moving on.)

I was thinking about Nietzsche, because that's the kind of thing a whiz-kid super-genius like myself is prone to do, and I was wondering what I am going to do about this religion business.

I would never, like some condescending idiots tried to do a while ago, try to refer to myself as "a bright." The ugly word, atheist, is closer to the truth, because I don't have all the answers and have never claimed to have them.

I believe I'm right in my lack of faith, but I'm not about to bow down before No-God and worship him. As I gather many atheists do.

Having reluctantly passed the proverbial "last stop" of Agnosticism, I find myself at Atheism as if by accident. I certainly didn't mean to ride this far. Now it's cold and late.

Nevertheless, I'm here. Time for a bit of travel literature.

I remember quite distinctly that I used to believe—in the most earnest sense of that word—in many things.

I still believe, for example, that there is an essential difference between "love" and "infatuation," however vague both terms seem to be. I believe in the basic goodness of the several dozen or so people I trust and, inexplicably, I believe in America.

Once, though, these beliefs (supplemented nowadays by more cynical convictions) were joined by others. I used to believe in the Sacraments and the Holy Trinity. I used to believe in all three flavors of Mystery (it comes in Joyful, Glorious, and Sorrowful, as I recall). I used to believe in Transubstantiation, and I even understood the word "Consubstatiation," a Lutheran heresy.

I used to be a Roman Catholic, and at times this belief made me happy. I won't go into the specifics here.

In Freiburg, The Urbanite and I would talk about fate. She believes in fate and purpose. I'm probably a determinist, but I find the compounding effect of life's coincidences merely impressive, not divinely planned.

It's from this perspective that I see how a younger Old Bold Hero lost his faith.

I'm not sure how or when it started, but I've pinpointed two or three minor events that I think contributed:

(I'm narcissistic, as you can probably already tell, but I'm not narcissistic or motivated enough to dig up my old journals and know for certain what caused my Fall.)

#1. A Random Unrelated Book
I read Guns, Germs, and Steel, one of perhaps two nonfiction books I would read on my own in high school. The anthropologist author takes a surprisingly deterministic approach to world history. Seeing how circumstance could have spread any proto-religion (instead of early Christianity) all over the world was humbling.

#2. Proper Nouns in Genesis
Catholics, unless they aren't really Catholics, don't take Genesis literally. But I for one had a problem with the different names for God (one of which is plural) early in the book. Linguistic evidence points to a shift from polytheism to monotheism in early versions of the Creation story, I decided.

#3. The Voice
The last minor cause that comes to mind is the eerie sound my congregation made when saying the Profession of Faith. I wanted no part in that zombie conformity, preferring to pray silently.

And everything snowballed, and five years later I'm wondering if I need a "why." With no God, how do I move on?

It's, as I said, a problem. I think that I do try to be a good person; not every atheist is a sinful hedonist (though I do find myself more inclined towards hedonism, as well as elitism, now that I know there won't be anything left on my permanent-permanent record).

The part I can't help is being a jerk, at least that's my worry. Not everyone will get his just deserts, it's true, but it's in my best interest to act morally. It's probably even "fair."

Non-moral issues are what give me this potential problem. Could give me. There's little reason for me to be nice to strangers, under this system. There's little reason for me to be especially nice to anyone without a watchful God around (which has always stuck me as one of the weak point of Judeo-Christian morality).

So maybe I'll become a worse person. Maybe I am. Maybe, like that dead German guy thought, I'll have to suck it up and be a good person without a theology to inspire me.

Tired and stupid, not necessarily in that order.

It looks like I'll have to get up early to write a paper on racism for my German class. I'm sure to dream of dörners.

Plot Summary

Bought shoes this weekend, boldly deciding against the Target-brand "Hadley"s I'd been wearing for a year or two now.

I had the clerk at Payless measure the laces which came with this new pair, confirming my suspicion that shoelaces have become ludicrously long over the past few years. At 54″, the laces were nine inches longer than they needed to be; I bought new laces and expect no problems once I learn to tie my shoes properly.

But the excitement of my trip to Brainerd was not limited to new shoes, buster.

Jenna came home for Easter as well, and while I carted her around we had several enlightening conversations, the (narcissistic) kind I could only have with someone as obliging as Jenna.

I felt quite wishy-washy (in the bad, non-political way), and in an amazing feat of role-reversal, Jenna seemed dead sure of many things. Astrology was only mentioned once or twice.

These conversations may actually have made me a better person. We'll see.

In nonautomotive settings, I really didn't do much with Jenna because of her strep throat. Our plan to visit one of Brainerd's seedier bars will have to wait.

Jenna drove The Deathtrap briefly, from Best Buy to the new mall, and I attempted to teach her everything I know about driving. I'm a sloppy driver perhaps, perhaps even careless. A "bad" driver in the sense that, as Graham would have it, people who can't find places while driving are bad.

But word on the street to the contrary, I'm not literally a bad driver. Unless it rains. I still haven't fixed my windshield wipers.

My cousin Amy, one of my better cousins, was around on Saturday, a day early for Easter. I helped her take some snowmobiles up north so I wouldn't be around to help put in the dock. We talked about various amusing trivialities (fingersnap teleportation), and I learned some important details about my other relatives, details I've already forgotten.

98% of my good conversations this weekend occurred in cars. But mostly, I stayed at home and got some face time with my family. Mostly.

We watched Runaway Jury and I was the only person willing to claim that Lost in Translation was (much) better. The next day, my grandma would perform a similar act of defiance, half-heartedly standing up for Kerry (she liked Edwards) at dinner in the face of insurmountable odds.

She wanted Bradley in the last election, I remember. And I wanted McCain…

On Saturday night, I stayed up late and watched Wes Craven's They and a new episode of Penn and Teller's show. The first was fun, the latter was somewhat uneven, but still enjoyable. The new intro shows a church with dollar signs on it.

I just hope that Penn and Teller don't spend all season attacking easy Middle-American targets; last year's critiques of Environmentalism, bottled-water, and second-hand smoke fears were brilliant.

I stayed up well past midnight and got maybe five hours of sleep. Church.

Easter was a big deal. Many of my relatives came (my cousins from one family seem to have developed a fine sense of irony since Christmas) and we ate and talked and ate and hunted Easter eggs.

My youngest of younger brothers hid the eggs Saturday, with Amy. Our backyard is moderately big, the best kind of big, and finding the plastic name-eggs proved exhilaratingly difficult.

After half an hour of vainglorious searching, I grudgingly resorted to the hot/cold system, unearthing my purple "Dan" egg in the garden soon after. It was buried under a half inch of black dirt, but I regret giving up so soon.

I could have found it. O yes, I could have…

The last of my relatives left at six, and I finished washing the last of my dirty laundry in time to pick up Jenna at 7:30; she ate dinner quite late.

At Hamline for the night, I stood up for my earlier sci-fi–bashing and watched a few (taped) episodes of The Simpsons with Manney and one of their housemates before collapsing on the couch for my first good night's sleep in days.

Speaking of which…

Oh, and the new Modest Mouse CD rocks in a surprisingly upbeat way.

To Greet The New Day

Couldn't sleep last night, even though I had all of five hours of sleep the night before. I blame the catnap I took yesterday afternoon.

I feel fine today though, and should be good for the seven hour drive home.

A Newly Typical Wednesday Night

Another issue of The Lawrentian, finished.

Need to step up the quality of my blogs, which have drifted in a stuffy direction lately.

They're too… well, nevermind.

My older posts always look better. Back to the art that conceals art, I think.

So I've been sitting here doing some copy-editing, because I find it both enjoyable and productive. Plus, I need to learn AP style, which is often counter-intuitive (they have you spell some words in very strange ways in order to retain "consistency) but nevertheless enlightening.

Prof Ryckman's philosophy class was interesting today, for the first time ever. We're talking about what words actually signify, discussing several different theories and their flaws.

It's English at the nuts-and-bolts level. Wonderful.

Our Bold Hero with his mind full of clutter.

I'll say something about the real world tomorrow, I think.

The Politician hooked up Jubb, Freshman Matt, and myself with a sweet antiques-moving job yesterday. After five hours of light-to-moderate work, I finally have enough money to buy that pair of shoes I've been talking about. The one papa needs so badly.

Friday night, a spectacular failure event-wise, shall be glossed over.

Saturday we rounded up some people for a low-stakes game of Texas Hold 'Em.





Here's The Politician gathering up his chips after a successful hand. Besides Sunday's antique-movers, Ben and Lawrence's own Alan M. were there for the game.

Needless to say, Our Bold Hero's unique blend of ignorance and skill won the day, and he walked away with over six dollars in actual money. All of which was wisely invested, not twenty-four hours later, in a reuben sandwich.

That was Sunday. Suprisingly, one of the most enjoyable moments of this earnings-filled weekend was Sunday night, after all the work, at Perkin's.

See how I mess with timelines? I'm practically Vonnegut.

First off, The Politician yelled at Jubb for being an irritating drunk, I yelled at The Politician for doing the same to me, and then we all mentally hugged Freshman Matt for being so consistently inoffensive…

Then we ordered some food. We mocked strangers and acquaintances and generally had a jolly good time, as I hope they still say somewhere or other. It was one of my more enjoyable conversations in recent memory, although that isn't saying too much since recent memory only stretches back for a couple of weeks.

But who needs good acquaintances or good times? I have money now! Money!

A continuing series in which Our Bold Hero whines about something he's just barely capable of understanding. It's really pretentious, and almost certainly elitist. Hence this disclaimer.

Part I: The State of Sci-Fi

So I'm tired again today, an unexpected side effect of finishing Ringworld late last night and getting up early this morning.

The cover calls Niven's book a "legendary award-winning classic," and while I think that the ideas are interesting (especially considering that this book was written in 1970), I'm baffled by the poor writing that surrounds them.

I mean, Ringworld won the Hugo and the Nebula awards, two of the three most prestigious awards a sci-fi book can receive. But the characters are forgettable, awful, and often eerily similar. The main character's use of "tanj" as a futuristic expletive is frustrating.

And by the time I was halfway through the book, I stopped sympathizing with the characters at all: Niven can write ideas, but he seems to suck at writing believable emotions.

Am I wrong to want more from sci-fi than thin writing propping up impressive ideas? I don't think so. Anthony's God's Fires, while tending more towards historical fiction, had brilliant characterization, plot, setting, you name it.

Asimov was undeniably idea-oriented, but he got us to care in short stories like "Breeds There a Man…?." P.K. Dick did the same in Ubik, back before he went pink-laser crazy and died.

Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game is renowned because the main character is believable. In fact, his thoughts and actions are more important in that book than any futuristic technology.

So I know it can be done. As you can see, I haven't read any proper sci-fi written within the past twenty years, so maybe good writing is being done.

Or maybe cyberpunk prevailed, and sci-fi is dead as a genre. It's plausible but unlikely.

Probably, it's more of the same. There are a few luminaries writing well and a few thousand bored scienticians writing populist dreck.

In sci-fi, which went the opposite direction as mainstream fiction some years ago, leaning too heavily on ideas at the expense of other elements is an obvious problem.

The more sinister problem here is the acceptance of such flaws by the critical community. Readers and critics who reward sci-fi that succeeds in just one or two ways encourage a dangerous trend.

No wonder no one takes sci-fi (or writers of sci-fi) that seriously nowadays, if its best works could only be appreciated in some sort of parallel world. Separated from a mainstream tradition where many of them would be deemed mediocre at best.

Done. Missed the X-files and the five hours of sleep I could have had afterwards.

I've been assured that this Lawrentian all-nighter was due to the highly unusual circumstance of having both a new layout editor and two issues to do for the week instead of the usual one.

I'm relatively sure that the new issue is as clean as a Lawrentian has been in months, if not years. With my AP Style book, I can make nearly anything pretty.

And if it's not clean, who reads our little school newspaper anyways? I've read everything in it at least twice and at this point I certainly don't plan to go anywhere near this issue for any purpose other than simple vanity.