There was room for one more at the bar, and at a nod from the chef he took the seat gratefully. One often had to wait, stamping feet to ward off the cold. The chef slid the amuse-bouche before him as he unfolded his napkin, and it was exquisite in appearance: a translucent carpaccio of walrus blubber sprinkled with snowflakes. The snowflakes were not unique, in fact they came in precisely two shapes, one sprinkled on the left side of the dish, the other on the right. They made not-quite-imperceptibly different crunches as he ate them. It was touches like this that had made the chef’s name when he was but a young man just arrived from Nunavut.

For his first course the customer ordered a cube, thick and meaty. It was peasant fare, but here elevated to fine cuisine. The chef’s assistants trained for three years in the rituals of icemaking. They knew intuitively what temperature of water to use, how to swirl it through the fourteen squares of the traditional whalebone tray, how to tap the sides to dislodge bubbles. One of those assistants now brought the chef a steaming tray, fresh from the freezer, which the master raised overhead and brought down with a single practiced motion onto the stone slab before him, then raised slowly to reveal the unbroken cubes. He then sorted through the cubes with the point of his obsidian knife, whisking the thirteen imperfect ones onto the floor. The remaining one he slid onto a plate and into the toaster oven behind him.

Twenty-five seconds in the oven grilled the outer layer of the cube to perfection, liquefying a thin sheen of pure water across its surface without defacing the deep-frozen insides with cracks. The customer took it in one bite, seasoning it only with a tiny pinch of sea salt, then sucking appreciatively. (He never chewed, of course: you might hear starlets and pop idols crunching their ice at trendy bars on Melrose, but here such behavior would get you ejected permanently.) The ice in his mouth was frictionless, spinning with every slight touch of his tongue, endlessly reconfiguring itself into new shapes as it melted in his heat. The meltwater had the slight mineral tang of true cube-ice, reflecting both its origin in a remote New Zealand spring and the subtle influence of the seasoned whalebone tray, infused during its months-long deep freeze.

While savoring the final drops, he studied the chalkboard for the daily specials. He was startled to see qainngittunga on the list, as this delicacy was only very rarely found, and its availability in summer was practically unheard-of south of the 49th Parallel. Despite the ruinous expense, as a connoisseur he had no choice but to order it. He was not sure he had pronounced the name quite correctly, but merely ordering this challenging dish was enough to ensure the respect of the staff.

With a single grunt of approval the chef knelt and reached into the hidden freezer beneath the bar. His thickly-gloved hands reappeared cradling a cylinder of ice three inches in diameter and a foot long, which he placed on a small polar-bear rug placed on the counter by an assistant. The ice was a pure, intense blue, mostly clear but punctuated by thin dark layers. It was a core sample that had been painstakingly extracted from thousands of meters below the surface of the Greenland ice sheet. (Such drilling is forbidden by international treaty, but there are limited exemptions for scientific research, and some of the resulting cores do find their way out of geology laboratories and into restaurants.)

Using a small handsaw with a diamond-studded wire blade, the chef quickly sliced off a section measuring a perfectly even three millimeters thick and gently lowered it onto a plate of red pumice, then handed it to the customer. He did not garnish it, nor did the customer apply a grain of salt; nothing was needed. The customer merely raised the plate to his mouth and slid the disc onto his waiting tongue.

The experience was indescribable, transcendent, as it had been once before on that memorable evening in Svalbard. His tongue was covered by the freshly-cut side of the ice (this was essential), which had been sealed inside the glacier, untouched, for a hundred thousand years. Through those ages the intense pressure and cold had distilled every essence of the microscopic bits of dust, sand and pollen that had drifted onto the surface so long ago. He tasted a world where mammoths roamed, and saber-toothed cats. He tasted the smoke of his ancestors’ cave fires, the ochre with which they painted the tales of their hunts.

After a long interval he swallowed. Nothing was left now; the ineffable vapors of impossibly distant pasts were already consumed. Before, in Svalbard, Lena was with him and the sensations had lived on in echoed reflections in each others’ eyes — I felt it, did you feel it too? — but that was the past, and on this day he was alone. Two years ago was no less remote than the Ice Age, and Lena was no less dead than the Cro-Magnon cave painters.

After a dish such as that, there was only one thing left to order. He gestured, holding up nine fingers, and the chef bowed deeply in response. A moment later a waitress appeared with a small brass tube the size of a rifle shell. She unscrewed the end, and tipped out a small crystal onto a silver dish. The customer gravely accepted the dish, and she bowed and retreated. In a reciprocal gesture he bowed his own head and gently lowered the tip of his tongue to the dish. As the water of his saliva made contact with the entropically-enhanced synthetic crystal packing of the water molecules in the ice₉ — an arrangement not found in nature, stable enough to remain solid at room temperature — its molecules too attached to the surface and froze, leading to a wave of crystallization that in two seconds had swept through his entire body and frozen it solid.

The staff quickly folded him into his voluminous sealskin robe, lashed it tightly shut with rawhide, and carried the stiff bundle into a remote corner of the basement. (But not before removing his wallet with tongs; the bill he left behind was quite considerable.)

MySpace: Who? Oh, right, this anorexic high-school girl who threw herself at you at a party once in 2005. She kept bragging about all the bands she knew (and which you could overhear on the tinny earbuds she wore.) After one too many Jägermeister Jell-O shots she barfed Day-Glo all over your shoes. Last you’ve heard, she’s found some 80-year-old media mogul to be her sugar daddy.

Facebook: You vaguely remember him from high school. He was a nonentity then and he’s equally uninteresting now, but he’s somehow infiltrated your circle of friends and shows up at every social event you go to, telling boring anecdotes about last night’s game and what he bought at Wal*Mart. Worse, it seems he’s joined some cult and wants you to join too so he can go up a level.

Tumblr: She’s got impeccable taste, a lovely apartment and fascinating stories, but after a while you realize she only talks about what other people have done; she doesn’t have an original thought in her head. She won’t carry on a conversation, either, so the only way to get her to pay attention to you is to repeat back something she’s already told you.

Soup.io: Similar to Tumblr, but with a cute Austrian accent. She’s more conversational, but on the downside she sometimes insists on talking to you in German.

LiveJournal: A mysterious Goth chick you were introduced to at a club. After you strike up a friendship with her, she starts telling you all her innermost secrets whenever you see her. This is terribly alluring at first, enough so that you can overlook her appallingly bad fanfic, but after a while you begin to realize how seriously disturbed she is. Around then she abruptly stops showing up, and you’re never sure whether she killed herself or just moved to a more elite social circle. You never learn her real name.

[Update: I’ve changed two of them to male. I wanted to be consistent in the personification, but in retrospect that leaves me open to charges of sexism, which absolutely wasn’t intended. They all have male counterparts, of course, whom I’d love to hear about if you want to write about them.]

Take from the manual of monsters
Painted with three crude beasts, that sheet
On which I enumerated his stats once,
And spread it so as to cover his face.
If his bag remains, rifle his hoard
To see who gets his precious +6 sword.
Light the lamp to run away faster.
The only emperor is the dungeon master.

{ after Wallace Stevens }

These jokes are, admittedly, about as unoriginal as my jam recipe. And the list was generated roughly the same way as the jam, by picking pre-existing collections, cleaning off the typos, and boiling them down a lot. In fact, I’ll lead off with an apricot joke:

Q: How is an elephant like an apricot?
A: They are both gray. Well, except the apricot.

Q: How can you tell if an elephant is in the refrigerator?
A: The door won’t shut.

Q: How can you tell if an elephant has been in the refrigerator earlier?
A: Footprints in the butter.

Q: How do you get an elephant into the fridge in the first place?
A: Open door; Insert elephant; Close door.

Q: How do you get a giraffe into the fridge?
A: Open door; Remove elephant; Insert giraffe; Close door.

Q: What’s the difference between a dozen eggs and an elephant?
A: If you don’t know, I’m sure not going to send you to the store for a dozen eggs!

Q: What the difference between a herd of elephants and a bunch of grapes?
A: Grapes are purple, elephants are gray.

Q: How do you stop a charging elephant?
A: Take away his credit card.

Q: What did Tarzan say when the elephants charged?
A: “Look out, here come the elephants!”

Q: What did Tarzan say when he saw a herd of elephants in the distance?
A: “Look, a herd of elephants in the distance!”

Q: What did Tarzan say when he saw a herd of elephants with sunglasses?
A: Nothing. He didn’t recognize them.

Q: What did Tarzan say when he saw a herd of giraffes in the distance?
A: “Haha! You fooled me once with those disguises, but not this time!”

Q: What did Jane say when she saw a herd of elephants in the distance?
A: “Look! A herd of grapes in the distance!” [Jane is color blind.]

Q: Why are pygmies so short?
A: They listened to Jane, and looked at the plums.

Q: How do you get down from an elephant?
A: You don’t! You get down from a goose.

Q: How does an elephant get down from a tree?
A: He doesn’t! Even elephants know you get down from a goose!

Q: Oh, all right. How do elephants get out of trees?
A: They float down on the leaves between 4pm and 6pm.

Q: What do you call an elephant that rides a bus?
A: A passenger.

Q: Why don’t African elephants like to play cards?
A: Because of all the cheetahs.

Q: What’s the difference between an African elephant and an Indian elephant?
A: About 3,000 miles.

Q: Why do elephants wear sandals?
A: So that they don’t sink in the sand.

Q: Why do ostriches stick their head in the ground?
A: They’re looking for the elephants that forgot to wear their sandals.

Q: What did the peanut say to the elephant?
A: Nothing: peanuts can’t talk.

Q: What did the grape say when the elephant stepped on it?
A: Nothing: it just let out a little whine.

Q: Why did the elephant fall out of the tree?
A₁: She slipped.
A₂: She was dead.

Q: Why did the second elephant fall out of the tree?
A: He was glued to the first one.

Q: Why did the third elephant fall out of the tree?
A: He thought it was a game.

Q: Why did the fourth elephant fall out of the tree?
A: Because when his mother asked “If all your friends jumped out of a tree, would you?”, he said “Yes!”

Q: Why did the tree fall down?
A: It thought it was an elephant.

Q: What’s gray on the inside and red and white on the outside?
A: Campbell’s Cream Of Elephant Soup.

Q: Why did the elephant stand on the marshmallow?
A: So he wouldn’t fall into the hot chocolate.

Q: What do you know when you see three elephants walking down the street wearing pink sweatshirts?
A: They’re all on the same team.

Q: What’s gray and has four legs and a trunk?
A: A mouse going on vacation.

Q: What do you call an elephant with a machine gun?
A: “Sir”.

Q: What do you call an elephant wearing pink earmuffs and a dress?
A: Anything you want: it can’t hear you.

Q: Why do elephants drink so much?
A: To try to forget.

Q: What’s gray, yellow, gray, yellow, gray, yellow, gray, yellow … ?
A: An elephant rolling down a hill with a daisy in its mouth.

Q: What’s gray, yellow, gray, yellow, THUMP, gray, black, blue, gray, black, blue … ?
A: An elephant rolling down a hill with a daisy in its mouth, that hit a rock.

Q: Why do ducks have flat feet?
A: So they can stamp out forest fires.

Q: Why do elephants have such large, tough feet?
A: So they can stamp out flaming ducks.

Q: What’s gray and puts out forest fires?
A: Smokey The Elephant.

Q: What do you get when you cross elephants with peanut butter?
A₁: Elephants that stick to the roof of your mouth.
A₂: Elephants that spread easily.

Q: Why did the elephant wear red sneakers?
A: So he could hide in the apple tree.

Q: Why do elephants paint their toenails red?
A: To hide in cherry trees.

Q: Why do elephants hide in cherry trees?
A: So they can jump out and stomp on people.

Q: How did Tarzan die?
A: Picking cherries.

Q: What do you get if you cross an elephant with a kangaroo?
A: Big holes all over Australia.

Q: What kind of elephants live at the North Pole?
A: Cold ones.

Q: What’s convenient and weighs 20,000 pounds?
A: An elephant six-pack.

Q: How do elephants talk to each other?
A: By ‘elephone.

Q: Why do elephants have cracks between their toes?
A: For carrying their library cards.

Q: What’s gray, has large wings, a long nose, and gives money to elephants?
A: The Tusk Fairy.

Q: Where do elephants with skin problems go?
A: Pachydermatologists.

Q: What do you get when you cross an elephant with a rhinoceros?
A: Eliphino _(Hell-if-I-Know)_

Q: What’s the difference between an elephant and a piece of paper?
A: You can’t make a paper airplane out of an elephant.

Q: How do you make an elephant float?
A: Take two scoops of ice cream, some soda, and one elephant.

Q: How can you tell if there’s an elephant in the ice cream shop?
A: His bike is outside.

Q: How can you tell if there are two elephants in the ice cream shop?
A: There’s a dent in the cross-bar.

Q: How can you tell if there are three elephants in the ice cream shop?
A: Stand on the bike and have a look in the window.

Q: Why do elephants have gray skin?
A: To hold their insides together.

Q: Why are elephants so wrinkled?
A: Have you ever tried to iron one?

Q: Why do elephants have trunks?
A₁: Because they’d look silly with glove compartments.
A₂: Because they don’t have pockets.

Q: Why do elephants have wrinkled knees?
A: From playing marbles.

Q: Why do elephants have crinkly feet?
A: To give the ants a chance.

Q: Why are elephants large, gray and wrinkled?
A: If they were small, round and white, they’d be aspirins.

Q: What time is it when an elephant sits on your fence?
A: Time to get a new fence.

Q: What time is it when an elephant sit on your sofa?
A: Time to get a new sofa.

Q: What time is it when an elephant sits on your toilet?
A: Time to run away.

Q: Where do you find elephants?
A: It depends on where you left them.

Q: What do you say when an elephant sneezes?
A: “Gesundheit”.

Q: How do you fit 5 elephants in a Volkswagen Beetle?
A: Two in the front, two in the back, and one in the glove compartment.

Q: What goes, “Clomp, clomp, clomp, squish, clomp, clomp, clomp, squish?”
A: An elephant with a wet sneaker.

Q: Why did the elephant cross the road?
A: It was the chicken’s day off.

Q: Why did the elephant lie down in the middle of the road?
A: To trip the ants.

Q: What would happen if an elephant sat in front of you at the movies?
A: You would miss most of the show.

Q: What is the biggest type of ant?
A: An eleph-ant.

Q: What’s as big as an elephant, but doesn’t weigh anything?
A: An elephant’s shadow.

Q: Why were the elephants kicked out of the swimming pool?
A: They couldn’t keep their trunks up.

Q: Why wasn’t the elephant allowed on the airplane?
A: Because his trunk wouldn’t fit under the seat.

Q: Why were the elephants the last animals off the ark?
A: Because they had to pack their trunks.

Q: Why did the elephant paint her toenails all different colors?
A: So she could hide in a bag of m&m’s.

Q: What would you get if you crossed two fish with two elephants?
A: A pair of swimming trunks.

Q: What should you do to a blue elephant?
A: Cheer it up.

Q: What should you do to a red elephant?
A: Quit telling it dirty jokes.

Q: What should you do to a yellow elephant?
A: Teach it to be brave.

Q: What should you do to a white elephant?
A: Hold its nose until it turns blue, then follow the directions for a blue elephant.

Q: What should you do to a green elephant?
A₁: Wait until it gets ripe.
A₂: Bury it! You were only supposed to hold its nose until it turned blue.

Q: How did the cheerleader die?
A: She tried to catch an elephant doing a split.

Q: How does an elephant get out of a phone booth?
A: Same way she got in.

Q: Why don’t elephants ride bicycles?
A: They don’t have thumbs to ring the bell.

Q: What weighs 5,000 pounds and wears glass slippers?
A: Cinderelephant!

Q: What has 6 legs, 3 ears, 4 tusks, and 2 trunks?
A: An elephant with spare parts.

Q: What’s large and gray and goes around and around in circles?
A: An elephant stuck in a revolving door.

Q: What do elephants have that no other animals have?
A: Baby elephants.

Q: Why do elephants stomp on people?
A: They like the squishy feeling between their toes.

Q: What game do elephants like to play most?
A: Squash!

Q: What did the cat say to the elephant?
A: “Meow!”

Q: Why do elephants paint the soles of their feet yellow?
A: So they can hide upside-down in the custard.

Q: Did you ever find an elephant in your custard?
A: No? Well, it must work.

Q: How do you catch an elephant?
A: Wait at a street corner, and when you see the elephant raise your hand and yell, “Yo, elephant!”

Q: How does an astronomer catch an elephant?
A: With a telescope, a matchbox, and a pair of tweezers. Go to the jungle, and when you see an elephant, turn the telescope the wrong way around and look through it. The elephant will now be so small that you can pick it up with the tweezers and put it in the matchbox.

Q: How does a programmer catch an elephant?
A: Fly to Cape Town and head east. When you reach the ocean, go slightly north and head west. Keep repeating this until you see an elephant, then grab it.

Q: How does an experienced programmer catch an elephant?
A: The same way; but before you start, you place an elephant at Gibraltar, so you won’t fall into the Mediterranean if there are no elephants.

Q: How do you get an elephant into a matchbox?
A: Take out all the matches first.

Q: How do you get an elephant out of the water?
A: Wet.

Q: How do you get two elephants out of the water?
A: One by one.

Q: How do you smuggle an elephant across the border?
A: Put a slice of bread on each side, and call him “lunch”.

Q: How do you shoot a blue elephant?
A: With a blue elephant gun, of course.

Q: How do you shoot a yellow elephant?
A: Wait for it to run away.

Q: What was the elephant doing on the freeway?
A: About 5 miles per hour.

Q: What do you call two elephants on a bicycle?
A: Optimistic!

Q: What do you get if you take an elephant into the city?
A: Free parking.

Q: What do you get if you take an elephant into work?
A: Sole use of the elevator.

Q: Why do elephants wear tiny green hats?
A: To sneak across a pool table without being seen.

Q: How many elephants does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Don’t be stupid, elephants can’t change light bulbs!

Q: What do you get if you cross an elephant with a whale?
A: A submarine with a built-in snorkel.

Q: How do you know if an elephant’s been sleeping in your bed?
A: Peanut shells under the pillow.

Q: How do you know if there’s an elephant in your bed right now?
A: He has a big ‘E’ on his pajamas’ jacket pocket.

Q: How do you know if there’s an elephant under the bed?
A: Your nose is touching the ceiling.

Q: How do you get an elephant on top of an oak tree?
A: Stand him on an acorn and wait fifty years.

Q: What if you don’t want to wait fifty years?
A: Parachute him from an airplane.

Q: Why isn’t it safe to climb oak trees between 2 and 4 in the afternoon?
A: Because that is when the elephants practice their parachute jumping.

Q: Why are elephants’ feet shaped that way?
A: To fit on lily pads.

Q: Why isn’t it safe to go into the pond between 4 and 6 in the afternoon?
A: That’s when the elephants are walking on the lily pads.

Q: Why are frogs so short?
A: They go onto the lily pads between 4 and 6 in the afternoon.

Q: What do you give a seasick elephant?
A: Lots of room.

Q: What’s more difficult than getting an elephant into the back seat of your car?
A: Getting two elephants into the back seat of your car.

Q: How do you know when an elephant has been in the baby carriage?
A: By the footprints on the baby’s forehead.

Q: Why did the elephant wear sunglasses?
A: With all the silly elephant jokes going around, it didn’t want to be recognized.

Q: What do elephants do for laughs?
A: They tell people jokes.

Abstract.

Numerous studies have been conducted upon patients in terminal paresis (GPI), placing the author J.G. Ballard in a series of simulated auto crashes, e.g. multiple pileups, head-on collisions, motorcade attacks (fantasies of Presidential assassinations remained a continuing preoccupation, subjects showing a marked polymorphic fixation on windshields and rear trunk assemblies). Powerful erotic fantasies of an anal-sadistic nature surrounded the image of the award-winning novelist.

J.G. Ballard And The Conceptual Auto-Disaster.

J.G. Ballard died yesterday in his last car-crash. During his life he had rehearsed his death in many crashes, but this was his only true accident. Driven on a collision course towards the royal limousine, his car jumped the rails of the London Airport flyover and plunged through the roof of a bus filled with airline passengers. The crushed bodies of package tourists, like a hæmorrhage of the sun, still lay across the vinyl seats an hour later. Holding the arm of her chauffeur, the Princess Diana, with whom Ballard had dreamed of dying for so many months, stood alone under the revolving ambulance lights, a gloved hand to her throat.

Could she see, in Ballard’s posture, the formula of the death he had devised for her? During the last weeks of his life Ballard had thought of nothing else but her death, a coronation of wounds he had staged with the devotion of an Earl Marshal. The walls of his apartment near the film studios at Shepperton were covered with the photographs he had taken with his zoom lens each morning as she left her hotel in London, from the pedestrian bridges above the westbound motorways, and from the roof of the multi-storey car-park at the studios. The magnified details of her knees and hands, of the inner surface of her thighs and the left apex of her mouth, he matched at his apartment with the photographs of grotesque wounds in a textbook of plastic surgery.

Yesterday his body lay under the police arc-lights at the foot of the flyover, veiled by a delicate lacework of blood. The broken postures of his legs and arms, the bloody geometry of his face, seemed to parody the photographs of crash injuries that covered the walls of his apartment. Twenty yards away, illuminated by the revolving lamps, the princess hovered on the arm of her chauffeur. Ballard had dreamed of dying at the moment of her orgasm.

Before his death Ballard had taken part in many crashes. As I think of Ballard I see him in the stolen cars he drove and damaged, the surfaces of deformed metal and plastic that for ever embraced him.

The Voices Of Time.

You’re not alone, Ballard, don’t think you are. These are the voices of time, and they’re all saying goodbye to you.
Every particle in your body, every grain of sand, every galaxy carries the same signature.
You know what the time is now,
so what does the rest matter?

References.

• Ballard, J.G. “The Voices Of Time” [1962]
• Ballard, J.G. “Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan” [1967]
• Ballard, J.J. The Atrocity Exhibition [1969]
• Ballard, J.G. Crash [1973]

[For the perplexed or appalled: This is a pastiche assembled out of bits of Ballard’s best-known works, with the names changed around. I claim no ownership of these words nor personal identification with their opinions.]

“What the guild is asserting is that authors have a right to a fair share of the value that audio adds to Kindle 2’s version of books.”

And that assertion makes absolutely no sense. The creator of an item does not have a right to impose an arbitrary tax on anyone who adds value to the item. Otherwise we’d be open to all sorts of nonsensical scenarios, like:

Well, back in March I got my feelins hurt
When Apple wouldn’t gimme no developer cert
The SDK they gave me had a “simulator” —
Fooled around with it, then said “see you lator!”

(iPhone, iPhone, iPhone developer)

Don’t care about iPhones on my screen
‘Cause that’s not where I wanna been
I just wanna run on the Device
I just wanna make it look nice

(I wanna be, an iPhone developer)

On Friday all the lucky devs they got paid
But my real cert came in the email today
Got my key set up, my device provisioned
Got my noob questions sent to the cocoa-dev list

(iPhone, iPhone, iPhone developer)

Now I R a l33t iPhone developx0r
Gonna sell my app at the iPhone App Store
I’m gonna price it at 99 cents
In a couple weeks, it’ll be payin’ my rent!

(L33t, l33t, l33t, l33t iPhone developx0r)

My app’s so rad, it’s got things to-do
When you go to White Castle it’ll get your tip too
Gonna raise it to a buck ninety-nine
When all of you buy it, I’ll be doin’ fine!

(L33t, l33t, l33t, l33t iPhone developx0r)

Now I finished my app, I put old books in it too,
Plus some Texas Hold’em and a sudoku
It’ll even tell you ‘bout the stars at night
And a bright white screen makes a bitchen flashlight!

I put it on the store for twenty-nine bucks,
But the reviews are all “D00D, UR APP IS TEH SUX! ! ! !”

(L33t, l33t, l33t, l33t iPhone developx0r…)

Stickies makes its entrance at 0:53, if you want to skip directly to it, but really the entire video (and song) are excellent. I just wish they’d used Stickies in the opening scenes instead of Word—face it, Word is over the hill, especially that old Office 2004 version. (Did you see the bags under the Office Assistant’s eyes? Stickies told me they dragged it straight out of the Betty Ford Center to shoot those scenes, and it couldn’t remember any of its lines even though they were right up on the screen next to it in giant print. It’s sad, really. At least it hasn’t OD’d yet like that pathetic paperclip.)

This seems to be a fan-made video, by the way; but I think it’s better than the official one. Now the question is: will Apple use this in a commercial? I think they should!

[via 37signals]

For example! Take Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, who, having ceased putting any mental effort into their writing at least 25 years ago, now have the free time, in their dotage, to advise top government officials on national security issues … in their own inimitable way:

Members of the group recently offered a rambling, sometimes strident string of ideas at a panel discussion promoting the group at the DHS science and technology conference. Among the group’s approximately 24 members is Larry Niven [...]
Niven said a good way to help hospitals stem financial losses is to spread rumors in Spanish within the Latino community that emergency rooms are killing patients in order to harvest their organs for transplants. “The problem [of hospitals going broke] is hugely exaggerated by illegal aliens who aren’t going to pay for anything anyway,” Niven said. *

[Emphasis mine.] Hmm; this plan wouldn’t by chance require a huge reprint run of a Spanish edition of The Long ARM of Gil Hamilton, to be distributed free at taquerias, would it?

[Disclaimer: I used to love Niven’s books, reading and re-reading Ringworld with slack-jawed amazement. But that was when I was a kid, in that distant era we call “The Seventies”, before he devolved into the Rush Limbaugh of the spaceways. Speaking of which…]

The 45-minute panel discussion quickly deteriorated as federal, local and state homeland security officials, and at least one congressional aide, attempted to ask questions, which were largely ignored. Instead the writers used their time to pontificate on a variety of tangentially related topics, including their past roles advising the government, predictions in their stories that have come to pass, the demise of the paperback book market, and low-cost launch into space.

You have to read the whole thing! Jerry Pournelle goes out on a limb with some far-future speculation that — if portable tele-phone receivers with cameras in them became prevalent — people might use them to take photographs of illegal activities, eliminating the need for professional law enforcement officers! David Brin rants about militias and bangs his shoe on the table!

These people clearly have some brilliant ideas, and should be immediately whisked to an impregnable high-tech Undisclosed Location deep beneath the Rocky Mountains where they can work full time on the long-term project of transforming their thrilling inventions into reality, in time to save the world from terrorists, Communists, fluoridation and injured Mexicans. As a side effect, the quality of SF writing would leap upwards.