Sorry I didn’t get this posted last night. I tried, but I was exhausted, and at the end of the night I decided to trade bloggery for sleep.

The term “post-modern literature” gets tossed around far too frequently, in my opinion. In literary criticism I’ve seen the term applied to any piece of fiction written after World War II until the present, but in my head there are some very important distinctions in post-modern literature. Post-modern writers tend to explore the link between post-nuclear technology and humanity, and more often than not, the outlook for humankind isn’t good.

There’s a very good reason for this proclivity in post-modern writers. After World War II, advancements in technology forced humankind to face the reality that while science might very well answer many of the questions humankind had been in search of for centuries, we might not be very comfortable facing those answers. Nuculear power offered us amazing energy, the likes of which had never been seen before…and simultaneously, it also contained the ability to murder millions of people in the blink of an eye.

We don’t really need religion to provide us answers to life’s questions anymore, but will science save us…or will it eventually be our downfall?

That’s what comes to my mind when I think of post-modernism: science, hopelessness, and eventually solace found in humanism.

And this is where “Never Let Me Go” confuses me. At first I thought it was going to explore the effects of genetic cloning, but it never really got around to doing that. Genetic cloning, instead of serving as a motif or an allegory for the current human condition, ends up simply becoming a plot device. At the end we eventually see Tommy and Kathy struggling with their relationship, but the emotional aspect never really reaches a crescendo like I thought it would. I guess for some people that might seem more true to life, but after all the talk of deferrals and the false hope I wanted to see more raw emotion.

I suppose the reason the story confused was that without even the hint of free will, these characters were never much more than robots. Like Tank noticed, they never even considered receiving a “pardon” for donations, they only held out hope for a “deferral.” Are they programed? Do they have choice at all? It didn’t seem like it, and without that, I can’t relate to them, and therefore, their plight doesn’t offer me anything.

It’s like trying to identify with the robots in Asmiov’s Robot series. Sure, they often make choices that seem more human than human, but deep down we know that the Three Laws precludes free will.

And likewise with the donors and carers of Never Let Me Go. Whether their own mind-forged manacles prevents them from breaking free, or whether they’re genetically-created automatons, I don’t think they’re human. And without that, any chance for a post-modern exploration of science and humanity goes bye-bye.

I’ll post my final thought Monday night. Till then, what’d you think?

• It’s CATURDAY over at Fark
  I can haz lols?

I was gonna post about Bloomberg’s escape from the GOP, but I spent all night providing my own voice-over to that video.

“You must’ve known…I’m your father!!!”

“She’s actually your sister!!!”

“I poisoned your drink!!!”

You should really never leave nerds unattended in public. Odds are good we’ll go crazy from the lack of supervision and try to pull off some huge comedic stunt. But because we’re nerds our sense of humor tends to be a little different, and usually we just end up looking like huge asses. Hence, the need to supervise your nerd.

Case in point, this dude on Jeopardy. Let’s watch, shall we?

Okay, that was awkward. Alex tried to roll with it, but no one really laughed. Well, I did, and I’m sure all the nerds watching the program that day laughed, too. Here’s why: nerds love jokes that make semi-obscure references. Oftentimes you might need to do a little homework to find a nerd-joke funny. This clip will probably shine some light on the whole thing:

It’s funny now, isn’t it?

I think nerds, and I happily count myself as one, make jokes like this for a very specific reason: it’s an easy way to find fellow nerds. The people who laugh are automatically compatriots. If there was a nerd in the audience I’d bet diamonds to donuts that after the taping he found the contestant and congratulated him on his nerd-joke. They’re probably still lol’ing about it on Gtalk right now.

Here’s another nerd-joke that was caught on film:

Bravo, my little nerd, bravo! Not only did he get a Napoleon Dynamite quote in at a spelling bee, but he so confused the commentators that they thought he was speaking in some kind of code.

So remember, the next time you hear a joke that you might not get, it might just be that you’re not a big enough nerd.

• And now a message from presidential candidate Mike Gravel- via YouTube
  It’s like he’s staring into my soul.
• This is how you solve our fuel problem

I’ve been pleased with the way our reading group has gone so far. I hope it’s been enjoyable for you all, too.

I’d like to try to finish the book by next week, if at all possible. Then we can really get into discussing the book. It’s always hard to try and limit discussion to a small segment.

Let’s say Monday, unless anyone has any major objections?

My parents own a large farm, so during the summers when I was a kid I got to spend a lot of time with my mom and dad. As I’ve mentioned before, my mom and I would oftentimes go to the movies and catch a matinée, but fieldwork pretty much prevented my dad from going with us. Not only did my parents grow all the hay they used as feed for the cows, but they also raised peanuts. So dad was either in his tractor working on peanuts, or in his tractor working on harvesting the hay crop.

Either way, my dad spent a helluva lot of time in his tractor.

Of course, the tractor my dad used was actually a pretty comfortable piece of machinery, which was good, because fields are bumpy, hot, and sandy as all hell. If you plan on spending eight or nine hours a day harvesting a crop your air conditioner had better be cold and your seat better be comfy. The interior always reminded me of a spaceship, what with all the levers, blinking lights, and compression buttons. And lucky for me, directly behind my dad’s seat was a small ledge, which, it turned out, was a prefect place for a little kid to make a pallet with a blanket.

I spent many hours behind my dad on that ledge. With a Road Runner pillow, and a blanket that had really smooth-feeling squares, that ledge behind my dad’s seat was my own special place.

My mom would pack an Igloo cooler with two bologna sandwiches (I liked mayonnaise and dad liked mustard) and sodas, and I would bring some books and my Frogger handheld game, and dad and I would spend a day bumping around in the tractor together. I would nap and read on my ledge, and dad would listen to talk radio. Occasionally, the piece of equipment dad had attached to the tractor would malfunction, and we would get out of the air-conditioned tractor cab and venture forth on a repair mission. The change in temperature always shocked me, and for some dumb reason the bright sun always made me sneeze. A perpetual cloud of fine, dusty sand hung around the idling tractor, and after working outside I’d taste the sand on my lips, and could see it in the creases of my skin.

If I close my eyes and concentrate I can still smell that hot sand. Almost like metal burning but…sweet, somehow. Sand finer than salt and hotter than asphalt in the summertime. And I can still remember being shocked awake from an especially big bump, scared for just a moment, and then calming down when my eyes cleared and I saw my dad’s back.

I’m not too sure when, but at some point when I got a little older my parents bought a new tractor. By that time Case Tractor had merged with International Tractor to become Case International, and the design of the new tractor was a bit different than the old one. For one thing, it had an FM radio (dad still listened to AM talk). The seat was nicer. It a sported a sweet red paint job instead of a boring old white one. And the air conditioner on the new tractor got really cold, instead of just slightly cool.

Despite all the new features, and despite the fact that at that point in my life I thought I was too “mature” to ride around with my dad all day, you wanna know the first thing I noticed when they brought that spiffy new tractor home?

There was no ledge behind the seat.

• SWORD NEWS!
  Take all the jewelry you want…but you touch that gaming console and I’ll take your head.
• A WOMAN who had not cut her hair in 43 YEARS had it destroyed in a freak gardening accident. - via the Sun
  If I had only read the headline, I would have assumed this happened in Texas. I need to work on my home state attitude, I guess.

I’m sure we all have our favorite places on the internet that we visit when we need to kill some time. If I’m bored I tend to go back and forth between Fark, Digg, and Reddit to peruse the stories, always with a watchful eye out for things that might be interesting to discuss here. I always cringe when I see a story on Fark that’s about, or is from Texas, because undoubtably the story will be about some idiot or group of idiots that did something that deserves a Darwin award.

Tonight I found this story, which sports an amazing headline:

Hammer, screwdriver used during fight between cousins.

Police are trying to determine if charges will be filed after two female cousins used tools during a fight on the West Side Thursday morning. According to police, two women, in their 20s, got into a fight in the middle of El Paso Street around 1 a.m. One of the women hit the other in the head with a hammer, and the other was stabbed in the eye with a screwdriver. The woman stabbed in the eye remains in critical condition at a local hospital. The woman hit in the head was treated at the scene. Police have not charged anyone, because of conflicting stories from witnesses.

I’m almost proud to live in the city where this occurred. My first thought after reading this was which woman attacked first? Did the hammer-wielder smash her cousin in the head, thus prompting the retaliatory stabbing in the eye with the screwdriver? Or did the stabbing occur first, with the hammer-blow as an act of revenge? I’m assuming the screwdriver-stabbing occurred last, putting an abrupt end to the fight.

But you never know. Some people are pretty resilient, so I can only hope that at 1 a.m. on El Paso street there was a wild woman with a hammer, smashing her cousin repeatedly in the head, screaming like a banshee, all while a screwdriver was buried to the hilt in her eye.