{"id":22203,"date":"2018-05-03T11:35:34","date_gmt":"2018-05-03T18:35:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=22203"},"modified":"2018-05-03T11:39:23","modified_gmt":"2018-05-03T18:39:23","slug":"the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=22203","title":{"rendered":"The End of the World As We Know It"},"content":{"rendered":"

Facebook challenge posts: gussied-up “pokes” or unsolicited invasions of privacy?<\/p>\n

So of course yesterday, when for the first time a friend challenged me and not someone else, I jumped on it with both feet. I’m doing a “seven-day book challenge” thing where you post covers of books you love and, with each post, challenge different friends to do the same.<\/p>\n

It’s the last part I hate, the chain mail aspect of it, which I have to believe most of my friends hate as well. Plus, which seven? I’m tempted to give my friends a break and instead challenge Facebook celebs: Stormy Daniels, Crusoe the Dachshund, Sarah Palin (“Which books do you read?” “All of them, Katie!”)<\/p>\n

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The Upside-Downs who celebrate the unelected president’s cowardice, racism, treason, and overall assholishness at last have a superior moral justification* for abandoning the values civilization is based upon. Such behavior is “very common among celebrities and people of wealth.” Well okay then!
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\n* “The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.” \u2014John Kenneth Galbraith<\/span><\/p>\n

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Going back to books, I’ve been posting book reviews<\/a> on Goodreads since 2011, and for two years before that on Virtual Bookshelf (RIP). But I don’t review every book I read, like for example the ones I rotate in & out of the throne room: short story anthologies, David Sedaris essays, and the like. I have at least a hundred classic science fiction short stories and novellas on my Nook, most of which I read as a teenager and now re-read from time to time: I don’t review those either.<\/p>\n

Anyway, I wanted to mention the throne room livre du jour<\/em>, “The End of the World,” a collection of apocalyptic science fiction stories by generally well-known authors of the 19th and 20th centuries, ranging from Lord Byron to H.P. Lovecraft. I’m halfway through, and so far most of the stories attribute the end of life as we know it to comets and asteroids, though one involved a mad inventor and the unintended consequences of manipulating “ether.”<\/p>\n

Then, this morning, this cell phone video greeted me on Twitter:
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A grown man stormed a high school protest about gun violence and tried to fight them so it’s really great the NRA wants him to have a gun pic.twitter.com\/J32pShuPm1<\/a><\/p>\n

— jordan (@JordanUhl) May 2, 2018<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n