More Than True, A journal of. Published under the auspices of the HiSky* Trust, founded 1957 to promote disorder. (*Hiss-Key)
HiSky Trust Review
Emoticon by Richard F. Yates
via his site image links to
I lost my emotions in a previous decade.
Coincided with a war, I think.
I simply put them somewhere and they disappeared. I can only assume someone took them. And somebody is out there right now, you see, playing with my emotions.
People think Trauma Bunny is funny. Yes, even that time he was drowning in honey. People laughed and laughed and helped not at all. It was lucky for the bunny he got out of that sticky situation at all. Nightmares in the day has he. Yes, he is always dreading the return of the bumble bee.
John Cleese says the best joke he ever wrote was inadvertently cut out of the film Life of Brian due to “camera angles.”
In the film Cleese’s character says, “There are two things you have to know about the meaning of life. The first is that people are not wearing enough hats. The second is that there are several paths to enlightenment but they all involve a lot of work, time, and concentration. Unfortunately people get bogged down by things that don’t really matter and concentrate on them above all else.”
At this point one of the listeners says, “Wait… What was that thing again about the hats?”
Jelly Roll Morton’s participation in recording with the all white New Orleans Rhythm Kings was history in the making: it is an early example of mixed race recordings.
Today the Scots are voting on independence.
Here’s a song by the late Alistair Hulett.
Everytime I hear “Pease Porridge Hot” I think, “What a terrible advertising jingle.” But then I note that I become desirous for pease porridge of any sort, and I further marvel at the longevity of the ad jingle; as well as the porridge itself.
Pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold,
Pease porridge in the pot, nine days old;
Some like it hot, some like it cold,
Some like it in the pot, nine days old.
I also note that its popularity is possibly spurred by the fact that it long ago fell into the public domain. Now anyone can sing about pease porridge. Or make it in any combination of consistency or temperature. This takes the chill off even the coldest of pease porridge.
[Pease Porridge on Wikipedia, though that page is not as authoritative as this one.]
Great interview in The Wild magazine with Mark Mothersbaugh of DEVO.
The people that are able to influence our world the most are evil! But their techniques work! We were impressed with Madison Avenue, that they could talk people into doing things that were bad for them. But what if you used those techniques to spread good information?
[…] It seemed that subversion worked better in our culture than rebellion.
Mark Of All Trades: An Interview With DEVO’s Mark Mothersbaugh « The WILD Magazine.
Their last album was Something for Everybody.
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I came here to praise Robert Sheckley.
He was a prolific short story writer. In the fifties and sixties his work was featured in many of the science fiction magazines of the day (and there were more of them then.) Sheckly was witty. He could write a hell of a story about an alien who burned down orphanages on many planets.
I have all of his old short story collections. Some of them are tattered. One of my favorites, Shards of Space, is the most tattered. It is almost split in two. It came that way. The lady at the used bookstore, years ago, said, “I’m only going to charge you a quarter for this, but I won’t buy it back.” As if I would trade back a Sheckley collection.
While a master of the short story he did write a small number of novels. They tend to be episodic in nature, novels that are really groups of short stories with the same characters. Novels such as Journey Beyond Tomorrow aka The Journey of Joenes. This is a great novel presented as the biblical text of a religion in the future which follows the life of Joenes, who travels the world before and after WWIII. Intermixed is ancient myth. There is also political commentary about McCarthyism, the book was written in the late 50s.
For a time he lived not 50 miles from me and I regret that I did not go see him. My friend Richard F. Yates was also a fan and Sheckley was mostly forgotten as an author by then in the US. He was considered a master of the golden age abroad and died while in Russia speaking about his work in 2005.
A number of his stories that appeared in Galaxy magazine were adapted for radio and appeared as episodes of X Minus One. Here is the episode The Native Problem. (By the way, the ebook of The Status Civilization is free.)
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David Raffin
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