Haunting the net [was: Re: [UA] Short Cons]

[Kevin Mowery]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Gaston Phillips" <gaston at math.sunysb.edu>
To: <ua at lists.uchicago.edu>
Sent: Monday, July 02, 2001 1:12 PM
Subject: Re: Haunting the net [was: Re: [UA] Short Cons]

> I like that a lot.  But what if we generalized it slightly?
>
> An encyclopedia entry that gets cited often but is almost impossible to
> track down once, and absolutely impossible to track down twice - (Borges
> wrote something similar to this... Tlalon of Uqbar, or something?), the
> pilot of a series that never got aired, a song by a band who had to be
> long dead by the time the song was written...

    The Thunderbird photograph.

    Over on Pyramid, Ken Hite just did an excellent couple of articles on
the idea of "reality quakes."  The concept is that the past can change, too,
and we here in the present may never know it--except for the odd artifact or
memory, like the Thunderbird photograph, "Episode IV" in the opening crawl
during Star Wars' first run in theaters, the water erosion marks on the
Sphinx, and sparkplugs encased in solid rock.

    Of course, it's always possible to go the Phil Dick route and make
everyone's "now" wrong--all the things that seem like they don't fit into
our reality are actually parts of the real world leaking into our mass
hallucination.

Kevin Mowery_____________ kemowery at earthlink.net
Mad science comics updated daily at www.narbonic.com


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