No Treat for Bernard

The Pharyngula Mutating Genre

When my two Dads (Archaeopteryx and Kiefus ) fell in love, they decided to produce children like me so that their Mum's meme could live on, even if it end end up a little mutated.

There are a set of questions below that are all of the form:

"The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is…".

Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them in a limited way, carrying out no more than two of these operations:

You can leave them exactly as is.

You can delete any one question.

You can mutate either the genre, medium, or subgenre of any one question. For instance, you could change "The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is…" to "The best time travel novel in Westerns is…", or "The best time travel movie in SF/Fantasy is&hellip", or "The best romance novel in SF/Fantasy is&hellip".

You can add a completely new question of your choice to the end of the list, as long as it is still in the form "The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is…".

You must have at least one question in your set, or you've gone extinct, and you must be able to answer it yourself, or you're not viable.

Then answer your possibly mutant set of questions. Please do include a link back to the blog you got them from, to simplify tracing the ancestry, and include these instructions.

Finally, pass it along to any number of your fellow bloggers. Remember, though, your success as a Darwinian replicator is going to be measured by the propagation of your variants, which is going to be a function of both the interest your well-honed questions generate and the number of successful attempts at reproducing them.


My Ancestry:

My great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparent is Pharyngula.
My great-great-great-great-great-grandparent is Metamagician and the Hellfire Club.
My great-great-great-great-grandparent is Flying Trilobite.
My great-great-great-grandparent is A Blog Around the Clock.
My great-great-grandparent is archy.
My great-grandparent is Why Now?
My grandparent is Hipparchia.
My dad is Archaeopteryx. My other dad is Kiefus.


My version of the questions:

• The best “bad” movie in scientific dystopias is: Battlefield Earth.

• The worst earworm in pop is: You're Having my Baby, by Paul Anka.

• The best alt-country album in country music is: Kentucky Thunder.


To keep the meme alive, I'm passing it along to:

Saint Nick at Nick's Bytes, because he's soooooo good to me.

The Secret Agent at OE, because I think he's up for a mission like this.

Anonymous at Birds Anonymous, cuz, she's upside down, and she likes birds.

and Gypsy at Tireless Watcher, because I like the way she thinks.

It's Really, Really, Really Real

The zeal
that you'll feel
is fantastically real.

It's tremendously real,
verifiably real,
excessively, exceptionally,
stupendously

Wearing Pants

There was time, in the olden days, when only boys were allowed to wear pants in school.

I remember it was 1958, and we’d come back to the states from Japan to a small Air Base outside of Lincoln, Nebraska.

The winters there, while not as cold as Japan’s, brought plenty of sleet. Please understand that sleet does not fall – it stabs. It is driven into bare skin by horizontal winds that invariably blow from the direction you are walking into.

For a little girl in a dress, sleet is excruciating. Mercifully, the principal of our elementary school decreed that on wintry days, for the walk to and from school, girls might wear pants under their dresses.

And I remember those coldest days when Mom would have me slip on corduroy pants. Up under my skirt and tucked into my boots, they kept me snug and warm.

For most girls, this was enough. They walked to school, gathered close, by the doors, and talked till the bell rang. And then, along with their earmuffs, mittens, and coats, they dutifully removed their pants, and draped them over the radiators to dry.

Not me. It didn’t take long before I figured out that if I tucked my dress into my pants, I could climb onto the jungle gym, race little boys on the gravel, and even play chicken on the monkey bars.

Eventually, it got so that with just a hint of cold in the air, I’d slip on a pair of pants, and as soon as I was out of Mom’s sight, I’d tuck my dress in, and run to school. I got away with it for a while, until one day a teacher recognized me, and sent me to the principal’s. He sent me home with a note, reminding my mother that girls were only allowed to wear pants when the temperatures were below freezing or if the sky was actually falling.

~ ~ ~ ~

By 1969, we were living in northern California. (If anyone ever tells you these are a liberal people, he is lying.)

I was in high school, and it was still illegal for a girl to wear pants in school. This was such utter bullshit to me, and I was about fed up. I got together with two other girls, and we decided to say something about it. We organized a protest. We convinced 100 or so girls to bring a pair of slacks to school. And during the break between 2nd and 3rd period, we all met in the girl’s room just east of C-wing, and changed.

Quietly, we lined up outside the wing, in pairs, and waited till ten minutes into the classes we were all now missing. We opened up the double-doors, and marched in singing:

♪ All we are say-ying is, ‘give pants a chance.’ ♪

We marched down the hall, and out through the double-doors at the other end, did a once-around the administration building, and then stopped once we had completely circled. We started clapping while we sang.

Several of the office ladies looked out to see what the commotion was. I remember two who smiled, but most of them were shocked, and the principal - he was outraged. He called the Wheatland Police(man), who showed up within minutes. Together, they threatened us all with arrest if we - didn’t - shut - up.

The cop took all our names, and one by one, we were lead into the vice-principal’s, principal’s, and nurse’s offices for questioning. “Who instigated this?” “Who convinced you to break the law?”

It didn’t take long for someone to spill the beans, and give up the names of the 3 bad seeds who’d evilly influenced these otherwise innocent girls.

All participants were sent home for the day. This was no small feat, by the way. The high school was a good twenty-minute drive from Beale Air Force Base, and while busses were provided to bring us there, the school wasn’t about to waste good money to taxi a bunch of juvenile delinquents home. The parking lot only had enough spaces for employees, so our parents were forced to park their cars all along the narrow lane that led to our school from the highway. 100+ students meant 100+ cars and 100+ very angry parents.

The other protestors were allowed back to school the following day, but my two cohorts and I were suspended for 3 days, and the entire disgraceful incident was documented on our transcripts – our permanent records.

The slacks I wore that day were of thin-waled corduroy. A fine black and white hound’s-tooth. I kept them for years as a reminder.

Open

Free Burma

http://free-burma.org/

APPENDUM: Send your panties to Burma!