This showed up on the io9 website today:
I’m suffering from cognitive dissonance, because io9’s choice of a graphic to accompany its story about women dominating the Nebulas is the cover of a Nebula-winning book written by a man, Jeff Vandermeer. Granted, the strongest and most well-drawn characters in Annihilation, as in Authority and Acceptance, the other books of the Southern Reach trilogy, are women, but still.
Yeah, and then there was this:
The story, as I’m sure you’ve heard by now, is the dude posted this photo on Facebook to shame everyone for making too much of Caitlyn Jenner’s “bravery” in coming out as a trans woman … lookie here, here’s a photo of true bravery, etc. And of course it turns out the photo was not only staged and fictitious, but was created by a cross-dressing man. Ha! The irony!
Thing is, isn’t the story a little too perfect? I think it’s bullshit, as staged and fictitious as the photo. No, I can’t prove it, but watch and see, it’ll be debunked soon.
I write about book banning from time to time. A few years ago I read and reviewed Nickel and Dimed, a nonfiction book by journalist Barbara Ehrenreich about the difficulties of making it on waitress and Walmart wages in America. Nickel and Dimed was being challenged by conservative parents in school districts around the country: they didn’t want their children exposed to it, and at the time I couldn’t understand why. Wouldn’t you want kids who might otherwise be tempted to drop out of high school to know how hard it is to live on low wages?
Then I read an article Barbara Ehrenreich wrote back in 1979 and realized why conservatives are so hostile to her book. It’s because they’re hostile to her. She wrote it for a leftist magazine after the US government censored an article about H-bomb development in another radical magazine, The Progressive.
How to Build an H-Bomb is brilliant satire … and contains some very scary truths. My estimation of Barbara Ehrenreich tripled in one reading. I sincerely hope you click the link and read it too. It doesn’t take long, and if you’ve been lulled into complacency about nuclear weapons and proliferation, this’ll cure you of that tout de suite!
I can’t resist including a couple of quotations:
The best way to avoid inhaling plutonium is to hold your breath while handling it. If this is too difficult, wear a mask. To avoid ingesting plutonium orally follow this simple rule: never make an A-bomb on an empty stomach. If you find yourself dozing off while you’re working, or if you begin to glow in the dark, it might be wise to take a blood count.
After your A-bomb is completed you’ll have a pile of moderately fatal radioactive wastes like U-238. These are not dangerous, but you do have to get rid of them. You can flush leftovers down the toilet. (Don’t worry about polluting the ocean, there is already so much radioactive waste there, a few more bucketfuls won’t make any waves whatsoever.) If you’re the fastidious type — the kind who never leaves gum under their seat at the movies — you can seal the nasty stuff in coffee cans and bury it in the backyard, just like Uncle Sam does. If the neighbor kids have a habit of trampling the lawn, tell them to play over by the waste. You’ll soon find that they’re spending most of their time in bed.
Fact: Everything is bad for you if you have too much of it. If you eat too many bananas you’ll get a stomach-ache. If you get too much sun you can get sunburned (or even skin cancer). Same thing with radiation. Too much may make you feel under the weather, but nuclear industry officials insist that there is no evidence that low-level radiation has any really serious adverse effects. And, high-level radiation may bring unexpected benefits. It speeds up evolution by weeding out unwanted genetic types and creating new ones. (Remember the old saying, “Two heads are better than one.”) Nearer to home, it’s plain that radiation will get rid of pesky crab grass and weeds, and teenagers will find that brief exposure to a nuclear burst vaporizes acne and other skin blemishes. (Many survivors of the Hiroshima bomb found that they were free from skin and its attendant problems forever.)