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Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
Club Notice - 10/10/97 -- Vol. 16, No. 15
MT Chair/Librarian:
Mark Leeper MT 3E-433 732-957-5619 mleeper@lucent.com
HO Chair: John Jetzt MT 2E-530 732-957-5087 jetzt@lucent.com
HO Librarian: Nick Sauer HO 4F-427 732-949-7076 njs@lucent.com
Distinguished Heinlein Apologist:
Rob Mitchell MT 2D-536 732-957-6330 rlmitchell1@lucent.com
Factotum: Evelyn Leeper MT 3E-433 732-957-2070 eleeper@lucent.com
Back issues at http://www.geocities.com/Athens/4824
All material copyright by author unless otherwise noted.
The Science Fiction Association of Bergen County meets on the
second Saturday of every month in Upper Saddle River; call
201-933-2724 for details. The New Jersey Science Fiction Society
meets on the third Saturday of every month in Belleville; call
201-432-5965 for details. The Denver Area Science Fiction
Association meets 7:30 PM on the third Saturday of every month at
Southwest State Bank, 1380 S. Federal Blvd.
1. URL of the week: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/4824/lsc2.htm.
Evelyn Leeper's LoneStarCon 2 report. [-ecl]
===================================================================
2. Well, so there we were at a friend's house having dinner and
meeting our friend's mother. Our friend did not really like
dealing with her mother, but considered it her responsibility. I
am not really sure why her mother was the way she was. It may have
been some sort of mental imbalance; it may have been just bloody-
minded insistence on being overly frank. It did not stop her from
being a bank teller--she had not been committed--but her mind was
not quite like ours either. Her frankness about how much she
disliked our friend's father had been expressed with a pair of
scissors at one point and the woman had to be restrained. Care for
a mother she disliked had a wearing toll on our friend and she had
apologized in advance in case her mother said anything nasty.
Our friend introduced us to her mother and said that Mark was a
mathematician. (I am, though not professionally, but it was a nice
thing to say.) The mother responded "Oh, I don't like
mathematicians." "Why not," I asked. "I think they have lost touch
with humanity." I fought the urge to ask her how many
mathematicians had she known. But what she said was probably
perfectly true. She did think that. That is the stereotype of
scientist and particularly mathematicians. Scientists are the guys
who are ruining the world, that is the impression you would get
from the media. How often do you see a scientist positively
portrayed? Almost never. On the new OUTER LIMITS, for example,
one scientist after another is portrayed as risking the common good
for a discovery that will mostly benefit only himself.
Back at Stanford I first noticed that the mathematicians I ran into
there seemed to have a very broad set of interests. One of my
professors went into the courtyard each lunch time and played the
recorder. I remember discussing science fiction and classic
literature with other math students. When there was a classical
concert in San Francisco, people would go in for it. ("You really
should take advantage of all the culture you can. You could end up
some place like Buffalo," one of the guys told me.) I wonder if
bank tellers are so fascinated with art and literature. The woman
probably considered gossiping with her friends and going home and
watching TV as being in touch with humanity. I would be willing to
give heavy odds that the mathematicians I knew, myself included,
know more about art, about literature, about classic music than
almost any liberal arts people know about math. Forget the big
painters like Picasso and Van Gogh, I can picture paintings by
Monet, Cezanne, Chagall. Ask the average liberal arts person what
sort of thing did Euler do, and how about Gauss, you will probably
get blank stares. Or you get, "Well, heh-heh, I never was very
interested in math."
I was in my college honors program and we used to get together in
the honors lounge and just shoot the bull. One guy who was very
proud of his great erudition--you get some like that in the honors
program--saw I had a book on Group Theory. "That sounds very
interesting." (His stock shot up a few points in my estimation.)
"What is that about?" (Up another few points.) "Well, it's a
structure in mathematics." "It's a math book?" (Back down a few
points.) "I thought it was psychology or sociology." (Down a few
more.) "I guess you can have groups of numbers." (His stock took
a nose-dive.) I offered to explain to him what Group Theory was,
but he said if it was math he wasn't that interested. (The bottom
fell out of the market.) This was someone who expected to be a
leader of tomorrow but he didn't want to learn math along the way.
People, educated people, back away from having anything to do with
reading about math and science. Sometimes they give themselves
political reasons. Our book discussion group at our library reads
some Ibsen, some Steinbeck, and books about social problems. I
suggested we read the book INNUMERACY, about this very problem.
"Is that about how women can't do math?" "Well, no it's about how
PEOPLE don't understand math." In the vote it was resoundingly
defeated.
When you come right down to it reading Melville, seeing a van Gogh,
seeing a ballet, these are just elevated forms of entertainment.
We are called on to make decisions on nuclear power, on the Hubble
Space Telescope (which a friend of a friend in all seriousness
calls the Hubble Space Telephone), biological and medical research,
funding for the supercollider. Now, if you have no better mind
than to think of the supercollider as a big icky expensive toy that
some male chauvinists want to play with, how good a decision can
you make on whether we need one?
I guess everybody has to feel superior to someone. And I guess it
should be obvious from this article that I am as guilty of this as
anyone. But I doubt I would ever feel superior to someone because
they know something I don't. And that is what this anti-math and
science thing is. [-mrl]
===================================================================
3. And here's a guest editorial from retired member Pete Brady:
Being an almost Senior Citizen: some moral problems.
I am now 60 years of age, and qualify for senior citizen discount
in some, but not all places.
I went to the movies recently and the price for adults was $7, ie
$14 for two, or, for senior citizens, $4.75, ie, $9.50 for two. I
asked for two tickets and gave a $20 bill to the young woman
selling tickets. She gave me two tickets and $11.50 change.
As I was walking away from the booth, I realized she had given me
the senior citizen rate, but I didn't spend much time thinking
about it, and I certainly did not try to misrepresent myself to
her. She had decided that my wife and I qualified for it.
A week later, with a different ticket seller in the same theater, I
bought two tickets and handed the clerk a $20 bill, and she gave me
two tickets and $6 change. This time, I looked at the rate posted
on the sign, and realized that the threshold age was greater than
60 (I think, 62). Then, the clerk looked at me and mumbled almost
inaudibly, "Do you get a discount rate?" I said no, and that was
that.
But this makes me realize that the clerk is routinely, many times
an evening, put on the spot. Does she ask if a person qualifies,
only to insult, say, a person 52 years old by thinking that he or
she looks 10 years older? Or, does she fail to offer the discount
only to be chewed out by a genuinely old person? And, let us say
that from this point forward, I simply hand the clerk a $20 bill
each time, and just accept whatever happens. I of course am
stealing from the theater, but many people would think I am not; I
am just benefitting from their mistake. After all, don't people
take pencils and other, more valuable, items home from work?
I don't know the answers to these questions. I have observed that
most "senior citizens" who are qualified for the discount speak
right up at the time of purchase, as I will certainly do when I am
qualified.
So, in that line of thought, I used to shop at the Suburban
Pharmacy, Route 35, Middletown, where their Sr. Cit. age was 60,
and when I finally reached 60, I asked for, and got, the discount.
But Suburban is now out of business, and they sent all their
prescriptions to Rite Aid in Red Bank. When I had an old
prescription refilled at Rite Aid last week, I asked for the
discount and was refused, since I do not satisfy their age
requirement, which is higher. I stated that if they were absorbing
Suburban's customers, they should give the same treatment, but this
failed to work. So, I'll go elsewhere, not to save much money (only
a few dollars a year), but on principal.
Finally, I relate an amusing incident on this subject. My wife and
I were in Edinburgh in August 1994 (at the festival) and, with
another woman in our group who was about our age, went to purchase
tour-bus tickets at 9am. (A good deal -- you can get on and off all
day at any of the intermediate stops, and therefore you've bought
yourself a day-long city taxi, plus an interesting tour.)
The ticket taker, a man perhaps 40 years old, looked at the three
of us and said, "That will be two adults and one senior citizen --
right?" There was silence. I then said to him, "Which one of us do
you think is the senior citizen?" He was mute for about 5 seconds
and then said, "Tell you what -- I'll give ALL of you the senior
citizen rate." A good recovery on his part! [-ptb]
===================================================================
4. U-TURN (a film review by Mark R. Leeper):
Capsule: Oliver Stone gives us a story that
would have been good had it not followed RED
ROCK WEST and LONE STAR. This film might have
made a decent low-budget film with a nothing
cast. Instead it under-uses several major
stars who brought little special to their
roles. Sean Penn plays a small-time crook who
is trapped in an Arizona town and becomes a
pawn in conflicting deadly games. Rating: low
+1 (-4 to +4), 5 (0 to 10)
There is nothing superior about Superior, Arizona, an all but dead
town with a few people living in the carcass. Small time hood
Bobby Cooper, played by Sean Penn, has engine trouble and must pull
into Superior to get his car fixed. The one garage near town is
run by a desert rat of a mechanic (Billy Bob Thornton) who gives
more trouble than service. Cooper leaves his car and goes into
town and after a bizarre interchange with a blind half-Indian
beggar (a well-disguised Jon Voight) he gets himself involved with
attractive Grace McKenna (Jennifer Lopez of SELENA). Too late he
finds she has a husband Jake (Nick Nolte whose performance owes a
lot to Bruce Dern). Soon Jake and Grace are each trying to embroil
Cooper in a plot to kill the other. If that were not enough of a
problem there are people coming to town to collect on a bad debt.
And to further complicate matters a local bully wants to show how
tough he is by beating up Cooper. Cooper cannot expect too much
help from the town's unfriendly Sheriff Potter (Powers Booth).
This seems to be a fly-speck town where everybody either has a dark
secret or is working full time on getting one, and too many of
these plots involve Cooper. Most of the plot twists are
telegraphed as the film wends its way to a rather bloody and
violent last reel. But by this point we do not care particularly
what happens to Cooper who is not particularly likable, even less
smart, and who basically floats like a cork and generally is acted
upon rather than acting himself.
In general this film is top-heavy with style touches that add to
uneven effect where less might have been considerably more. John
Ridley's script based on his novel STRAY DOGS might have made a
more effective as a low-budget independent film with fewer self-
indulgent style experiments. Oliver Stone has just a bit too much
fun here laughing a little too hard at exaggerated eccentrics for
us to really take the story seriously and the light-hearted score
by Ennio Morricone is a little too flippant. Stone under-utilizes
expensive actors where unknowns might have worked a lot better.
Since NATURAL BORN KILLERS weird camera effects have been a Stone
hallmark. Even NIXON had to have a few weird visual effects and
here there are more than the story needs. The film opens with
Cooper driving down a road under credits that look like they were
scratched into the film. There are repeated images of vultures
showing how little sympathy this corner of Arizona has for the weak
or unprepared. Robert Richardson's cinematography experiments with
film stocks as much as it does with light. He will drop into black
and white and then jump to a grainy super-saturation of color.
None of this does much to help the mood of the film.
U-TURN is one of those films in the middle ground. Its flaws are
in large part ones we could overlook in a new filmmaker and still
say he is promising. From a now major filmmaker like Oliver Stone,
it probably must be considered just a minor effort and perhaps a
false step. I give it a low +1 on the -4 to +4 scale. [-mrl]
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