No Fear of the Future

When Paizo Publishing announced the demise of Dragon Magazine and its sister publication Dungeon, I felt a wave of nostalgic regret. Sure, I hadn't read Dragon in maybe 15 years or more, but it had a tremendous impact on my teen years and was a presence of varying familiarity throughout college.



I remember my first issue, bought at a Waldenbooks tucked away in a Victoria, Texas, mall in 1984. I'd been reading fantasy and classic science fiction--courtesy the Science Fiction Book Club--for a number of years, and was just starting to learn about this cool game called Dungeons & Dragons. The whole Basic, Expert and Advanced rules systems were so much Greek to me, but for someone who grew up on a steady diet of Godzilla and Harryhausen films, D&D was a veritable siren song. And, wonder of wonders, there was an entire magazine devoted to it!. Issue 91, pictured above, was the first issue I picked up. The cover art may go a long way toward explaining my obsession with airships in fantasy and SFnal settings--along with my own personal close encounter with Goodyear decades back. I sent in my subscription the next day, and for the next five or so years faithfully read every issue until 143, when my subscription finally lapsed. Along the way, I read some interesting fiction on occasion, saw games such as Gamma World and Boot Hill die, delved briefly into the now-quaint world of Play By Mail and spent quite a bit of money on Kelstar Enterprises' "The Melding" along with others I no longer even remember the names of. I even had a subscription to the PBM industry magazine "Paper Mayhem" for a year. In hindsight, the PBM scene was the direct forerunner of today's overwhelmingly successful massive multiplayer online games, but at the time the concept of playing against other folks across the country via once-a-week mail-in turns was a novel one. Issue 100 had rules for a new game by Gary Gygax, Dragon Chess, a three-level fantasy variant on chess that really caught my fancy. I even built my own tri-level board and painted dozens of miniatures to create my own set. I still have it, somewhat worse for the wear after umpteen moves, but I fully plan to restore it completely in the not-too-distant-future and proudly display it once again (and hopefully play it, too).

My favorite part of every issue, though, wasn't the articles or the fiction or the nifty games. It was the comics section in the back. Specifically, Wormy by David Trampier.



I couldn't really appreciate it at the time, but by the time I started reading it, Trampier's writing had improved significantly from the first strips that appeared back in 1977 and contained more subtext and nuance than most gamers I knew ever picked up on. He satirized the gaming culture, sure, but also expanded the boundaries of what was expected with a sword-and-sorcery comic with deft metaphor and confident storytelling. His work on Wormy is not unlike Dave Sim's Cerebus, at least before Sim went off the deep end, and in some of the longer, nearly wordless installments of Wormy near the end of the run hold faint echos of Alan Moore's writing. In addition to the main characters Wormy and Irving the Imp, two of my favorites were Ace and Hambone, a backwoods cyclops and his giant, one-eyed hound. I'd forgotten all about them until researching this post, so imagine my surprise to realize that Ace apparently had more than a slight influence on the creation of Daniel from my 1998 story Cyclops in B Minor. I certainly wasn't thinking about Trampier and Wormy when I wrote it, but looking back now the lineage is obvious and undeniable. I'm just glad I didn't give Daniel a one-eyed dog named "T-Bone."

Like everyone else reading Dragon back then, I saw the ads for Trampier's collected volume of Wormy strips, and made plans to send in my money. But I never quite got around to it. Then, abruptly, in the middle of an ongoing storyline, Wormy vanished from the pages of Dragon, with only editor's terse "We regret to announce that 'Wormy' will no longer be appearing in DRAGON Magazine" statement to answer any lingering questions on the parts of the fans.

All sorts of wild rumors took root over the years. To my best ability to sort it out, it appears that there was a payment dispute of some sort that poisoned the well for ever and always. Trampier was so angry at TSR that he returned some checks for his work on Wormy uncashed. TSR retaliated by sending back several completed but unpublished Wormy installments. And Trampier effectively disappeared until 2002, when he was interviewed by a newspaper in conjunction with his current job as a taxi driver in Carbondale, Ill. Shortly after I took over fiction editor duties at RevolutionSF I got it into my head to try and reprint the Wormy strips. I found that newspaper article, and through the magic of Google, tracked down the then-current address for Trampier. Alas, my letter was returned unopened, and I never could bring myself to intrude with a phone call. Not that it would have mattered, though--apparently Jolly R. Blackburn, Vice President of KenzerCo, followed the same process as I did and actually telephoned Trampier in 2005 to discuss a Wormy compilation. Trampier apparently turned him down flat, saying he wants nothing to do with Wormy or gaming ever again.

Personally, I find it disheartening that such a talent creator is willfully trying to diminish his creation. Unlike trademark law, where a trademark can be abandoned and enter the public domain, copyright law is fairly airtight--the copyright persists for 70 after the death of the creator, entering the public domain before then only if the creator releases said work in writing. So Trampier refuses to create any more Wormy strips, and refuses offers for authorized reprints. There are several unsanctioned sites online that publish Trampier's old strips as well as new creations by fans, and apparently Trampier hasn't bothered to address these one way or the other. That's the creator's right, however, and I'll defend that right even if I disagree with the decision. Wormy is a worthy creation that ended far before its time, and if anything, its legacy will outlast that of the magazine that first spawned it and ultimately spurned it.

Two years ago I stayed for the first time at the renovated Thunderbird Hotel in cosmic Marfa, Texas. Kind of the poor man's Vermilion Sands, that place, a refuge in a remote West Texas plain where the sun bleaches the prairie grass a certain iridescent shade of beige and the only place left to go is off the edge of the planet and through the Chinati Mountains to the hot springs at the end of the world.

Best of all, the Thunderbird, just like the Ballard short story, has an actual poetry-generating machine available for the use of guests. I borrowed it the last night, head filled with fresh aesthetic alterations from the West Texas moonscape, and figured out how to make it work, cranking out otherworldy missives to friends. I liked it so much that, when I returned home, I searched for one just like it. And found it. 7ドル.00 on eBay.



The manual typewriter is a green machine of irrevocable text for an age of electrified malleability. It does not make any noise other than the pretty punchy cinema newsroom sound of the keys hitting the paper as you type. It promotes a careful selection of words. It promotes brevity. When you stop to think, it does not whir like the fan on the roof of an office building or crackle like an electric popcorn machine. Just the silence of your own thoughts. The only hard drive the soft wet fallible one between your ears.

Find yourself one, write a letter to someone you care about, and you will see what I mean. They are easy to find. The trick is finding the ribbons, but most towns of any size usually have one weird shop where some grizzled ostiary in lab coat maintains an inventory and the ability to jury rig a fit.

There are a few writers who still use them exclusively. Well, at least there's Howard Waldrop, who transforms the vintage courier font into a mind-blowing hieroglyphic. For a while, he was even blogging on a typewriter. Ask Eileen.

Careful, though. As Thomas Jones insightfully notes in the May 10 issue of London Review of Books, if you go there you need to avoid the potential film noir self-delusion:

"There is a wearisome machismo inherent in much of the iconography of typewriting. In The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting (Cornell, £15.95), Darren Wershler-Henry describes the typewriter as ‘the symbol of a non-existent sepia-toned era when people typed passionately late into the night under the flickering light of a single naked bulb, sleeves rolled up . . . lighting each new cigarette off the smouldering butt of the last, occasionally taking a pull from the bottle of bourbon in the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet’. Replace that evasive ‘people’ with ‘men’, and the fantasy’s spot on.

"The Iron Whim (the title comes from a phrase of Marshall McLuhan’s) begins with an account of the making of Ed Ruscha’s Royal Road Test. On the afternoon of Sunday, 21 August 1966 – the year before my father’s typewriter was made – Ruscha drove a 1963 Buick Le Sabre at 90 miles an hour along Highway 91 through the Nevada desert. Shortly after five o’clock, the writer Mason Williams rolled down the passenger window, and threw out a Royal Model X typewriter. Patrick Blackwell photographed the results.

"Although Wershler-Henry devotes twenty pages or so to ‘the typewriter girl’ and ‘Remington priestesses’, and notes that between 1870 and 1930, the female proportion of typists in America soared from 4 per cent to 95.6 per cent, the bulk of The Iron Whim concerns itself with the likes of Paul Auster, Bram Stoker, William Burroughs, David Cronenberg, Mark Twain, Jack Kerouac, Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, J.G. Ballard and Hunter S. Thompson: in other words, men. He says more than once that he’s less interested in typewriters as machines (once upon a time the word also referred to the people, usually women, who used the machines) than in typewriting as discourse. But this is typewriting as it appeals to geeks who like guns: all those dates and serial numbers; all that metal. Incidentally, or not so incidentally, the first mass-produced typewriter, as Wershler-Henry notes, was made by a gun manufacturer, E. Remington and Sons. And the Tommy gun, invented by a one-time Remington engineer, John Taliaferro Thompson, was known during prohibition as the ‘Chicago typewriter’."

Though I have to say, the idea of throwing a typewriter from the window of a '63 Buick blowing down a Nevada highway is pretty fucking cool. Suggestions for a next generation homage are welcome.



(Thanks to the ever-erudite Tim Chapman at the JGB listserv for the LRB link.)

Peter Raftos' The Stone Ship


There are few things more satisfying than a reading experience which functions as wish-fulfillment for desires you didn't realise you had, or which you didn't let yourself articulate. That was one of the aims of Dada, I know: the revelation of what we are suppress because it's too disturbing to acknowledge. But, silly old school me, I prefer my revelations to come in the form of linear fiction.

So there's Peter Raftos' The Stone Ship. I liked it. So did Cheryl Morgan, among other reviewers. It's entertaining, it has some vivid imagery, it's got one of the great fictional universities, it has a proper loathing for the administrative and bureaucratic side of higher learning, and it nicely balances the grotesque and the amusing.

All to the good, and I was quite happy with the money I spent on it.

But.

There's a scene in which a mob of crazed librarians, carrying "knives and staves and torches," rampages through the stacks, eviscerating, decapitating, and disembowelling the students and professors and researchers they find.

As I read that passage, my pituitary and hypothalamus flooded me with endorphins. I reached rapid conclusion of plateau phase. My eyes turned blue and I saw through time. My soul expanded, and my faculties were awakened to a high degree of life. I slipped the surly bonds of Earth, looked down on the clouds with contempt, and punched God in the face.

Needing a cigarette ain't in it, as Patrick O'Brian might have written, if he wrote Jack/Stephen slash.

I hadn't really admitted to myself just how much I wish death-by-explosive-dysentery on the students and faculty here. And I've only been doing this six years, and have yet to officially get tenure. I can only imagine what the Secret Masters of Librarianship say (besides "ook," I mean) about the students and faculty they have to serve when they meet in the shadowy offices of the A.L.A.

Ah, well. Being a librarian is hardly financially or emotionally rewarding, but at least I'm not a high school teacher. Those poor bastards have it rough.

New Horizons is winging its way toward Pluto, but along the way it's recording some really nifty scientific observations. The image of Jupiter's moon, Io, below is one of the most impressive ones thus far.



Ponder, just for a moment, the enormity of that volcanic plume. Keep in mind that Io is roughly the size of our moon. The mind boggles. And the sub-compact space craft New Horizons, not even designed to explore the Jovian system, continues to give us valuable science from that corner of the solar system. I can hardly wait for it to actually reach the Pluto-Charon system. No telling what wonders will be revealed.

PLUTO-BOUND NEW HORIZONS PROVIDES NEW LOOK AT JUPITER SYSTEM

WASHINGTON - NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has provided new data on
the Jupiter system, stunning scientists with never-before-seen
perspectives of the giant planet's atmosphere, rings, moons and
magnetosphere.

These new views include the closest look yet at the Earth-sized
"Little Red Spot" storm churning materials through Jupiter's cloud
tops; detailed images of small satellites herding dust and boulders
through Jupiter's faint rings; and of volcanic eruptions and circular
grooves on the planet's largest moons.

New Horizons came to within 1.4 million miles of Jupiter on Feb. 28,
using the planet's gravity to trim three years from its travel time
to Pluto. For several weeks before and after this closest approach,
the piano-sized robotic probe trained its seven cameras and sensors
on Jupiter and its four largest moons, storing data from nearly 700
observations on its digital recorders and gradually sending that
information back to Earth. About 70 percent of the expected 34
gigabits of data has come back so far, radioed to NASA's largest
antennas over more than 600 million miles. This activity confirmed
the successful testing of the instruments and operating software the
spacecraft will use at Pluto.

"Aside from setting up our 2015 arrival at Pluto, the Jupiter flyby
was a stress test of our spacecraft and team, and both passed with
very high marks," said Science Mission Directorate Associate
Administrator and New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern,
NASA Headquarters, Washington. "We'll be analyzing this data for
months to come; we have collected spectacular scientific products as
well as evocative images."

Images include the first close-up scans of the Little Red Spot,
Jupiter's second-largest storm, which formed when three smaller
storms merged during the past decade. The storm, about half the size
of Jupiter's larger Great Red Spot and about 70 percent of Earth's
diameter, began turning red about a year before New Horizons flew
past it. Scientists will search for clues about how these systems
form and why they change colors in their close observations of
materials spinning within and around the nascent storm.

"This is our best look ever of a storm like this in its infancy," said
Hal Weaver, New Horizons project scientist from the Johns Hopkins
University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), Laurel, Md. APL built
and operates the New Horizons spacecraft. "Combined with data from
telescopes on and around Earth taken at the same time New Horizons
sped past Jupiter, we're getting an incredible look at the dynamics
of weather on giant planets."

Under a range of lighting and viewing angles, New Horizons also
grabbed the clearest images ever of the tenuous Jovian ring system.
In them, scientists spotted a series of unexpected arcs and clumps of
dust, indicative of a recent impact into the ring by a small object.
Movies made from New Horizons images also provide an unprecedented
look at ring dynamics, with the tiny inner moons Metis and Adrastea
appearing to shepherd the materials around the rings.

"We're starting to see that rings can evolve rapidly, with changes
detectable during weeks and months," said Jeff Moore, New Horizons
Jupiter Encounter science team lead from NASA Ames Research Center,
Moffett Field, Calif. "We've seen similar phenomena in the rings of
Saturn."

Of Jupiter's four largest moons, the team focused much attention on
volcanic Io, the most geologically active body in the solar system.
New Horizons' cameras captured pockets of bright, glowing lava
scattered across the surface; dozens of small, glowing spots of gas;
and several fortuitous views of a sunlit umbrella-shaped dust plume
rising 200 miles into space from the volcano Tvashtar, the best
images yet of a giant eruption from the tortured volcanic moon.

The timing and location of the spacecraft's trajectory also allowed it
to spy many of the mysterious, circular troughs carved onto the icy
moon Europa. Data on the size, depth and distribution of these
troughs, discovered by the Jupiter-orbiting Galileo mission, will
help scientists determine the thickness of the ice shell that covers
Europa's global ocean.

Already the fastest spacecraft ever launched, New Horizons reached
Jupiter 13 months after lifting off from Cape Canaveral Air Force
Station, Fla., in January 2006. The flyby added 9,000 miles per hour,
pushing New Horizons past 50,000 miles per hour and setting up a
flight by Pluto in July 2015.

The number of observations at Jupiter was twice that of those planned
at Pluto. New Horizons made most of these observations during the
spacecraft's closest approach to the planet, which was guided by more
than 40,000 separate commands in the onboard computer.

"We can run simulations and take test images of stars, and learn that
things would probably work fine at Pluto," said John Spencer, deputy
lead of the New Horizons Jupiter Encounter Science Team, Southwest
Research Institute, Boulder, Colo. "But having a planet to look at
and lots of data to dig into tells us that the spacecraft and team
can do all these amazing things. We might not have explored the full
capabilities of the spacecraft if we didn't have this real planetary
flyby to push the system and get our imaginations going."

More data are to come, as New Horizons completes its unprecedented
flight down Jupiter's long magnetotail, where it will analyze the
intensities of sun-charged particles that flow hundreds of millions
of miles beyond the giant planet.

Every so often, it's time to recalibrate my reasons to fear for my personal future. Having a good enough imagination to imagine all kinds of dire fates, I have to keep anxiety about the future on a short leash, preferably by translating worry into planning. Good pilots do that:have Plan A, Plan B, perhaps C, and plans for emergencies. By being prepared for most outcomes, you can fly—or exist—without wasting too much time and energy on anxiety.But I, for one, have always regarded the prospect of serious health issues as unvarnished doom.

This morning's Houston Chronicle had an article about the famous physicist Stephen Hawking experiencing weightlessness yesterday at Cape Canaveral.

Dressed in dark-blue flight suits, Hawking and an entourage of caretakers boarded a Boeing 727 that roared out over the ocean and carved huge parabolic arcs in the sky, creating for passengers the floating "zero-gravity" effect of being in outer space.While levitating, Hawking, who has been in a wheelchair for nearly four decades, was spun twice — pirouetting like a "gold-medal gymnast," a crew member said. Someone else floated an apple in the air alongside him in an allusion to Isaac Newton, whose esteemed chair Hawking now holds at Cambridge.Once each of the 25-second spells of zero gravity ended — as the plane headed to the bottom of each arc — assistants ensured that the celebrated physicist's body was lowered to a mattress on the plane's floor as gravity kicked back in.

I've had friends who rode the original weightlessness airplane:NASA's "Vomit Comet." It was not for the faint of stomach.For everybody who ever took to it like a duck to water, there were a lot of people who lost their lunch repeatedly, plus one or two poor people who crawled into a corner to be miserably sick the whole flight.

After one ride, crew members asked if he wanted to go again. Hawking dramatically raised his eyebrows in an emphatic yes.

Hawking sees the brief experience of weightlessness as a step toward space.He regards space travel as important for the long-term survival of the human race.And he wants to go into space himself some day. The paralysis from Lou Gehrig's disease is so severe that he talks with a speech synthesizer operated by twitches of his eyes.But he was game for eight roller-coaster climb-dive maneuvers.The article is accompanied by a photo of a weightless Hawking grinning widely.

But Hawking said ending a message about what people with disabilities can achieve was only a small part of his motivation. He wants to encourage copycats — people who will say, "If he can do it, I can, too."

Maybe not take a Vomit Comet ride under quite those circumstances. But hold onto the determination to realize one's dreams, and have fun at it, even while living with a serious physical (or other) affliction—yes.We should all copycat that.

It is really kind of sad, for one who has grimly enjoyed the unintentional Strangelovian surrealism of it all, to see the national security state's ham-handed efforts at WWII-style citizen warrior mythmaking breathe their last emphysemic gasps.

I suppose the spin doctors in charge grew up watching late night replays of The Fighting Sullivans and the like — heroic tales of average American fellas who give it all up for the noble cause of freedom and Democracy. All as remixed through the (now quaint and harmless, almost nostalgia-worthy) age of California Über Alles, with its Top Guns, Rambos, and Chuck Norris-as-Bo Gritz craptaculars.

(Speaking of which, I see where Stallone is working on Rambo IV. Not much out there about the latest scenario, but he'd be wise to look back to David Morrell's original material, the fine First Blood, whose tale of hunter-killer veteran wreaking havoc on a cush society that does not know how to re-integrate him into the highly socialized fold is likely to be far more germane archetyping than the steroid-fueled jingoism of the mid-1980s.)



Jessica Lynch has finally come clean, testifying before Congress about the true lies of her rescue attempt. Remember that one? The perfect 21st century descendent of Sgt. York — scrappy West Virginia girl in a convoy of mechanics that took a wrong turn in some Shiite southern province, blasting away solo at the Republican Guard, a working class Valkyrie who redeemed our lost valor. And the daring rescue by an elite squad, who conveniently had a videographer along for the show.

In case you hadn't figured it out already, it was, to put it charitably, spin-doctored a bit. (News too late for the made-for-TV dramatization.) But hey, Matt Lauer is no Edward R. Murrow, because that's not what the American public wants anymore.



And then there's the Pat Tillman thing. The NFL player who quit the Cardinals after 9-11 to join the Rangers, only to get fragged by his squad on some Afghan moonscape. Subject to an elaborate cover-up complete with burned evidence and an unearned posthumous medal, until his savvy lawyer dad busted the brass. Conspiracy theories involving Tillman's nascent anti-Iraq War stance and planned meeting with Noam Chomsky (!) no doubt abound. The investigation of that one continues.

Too bad the spin doctors weren't a little more up-to-date. Perhaps they should add a little cyberpunk, a little Pranks!, a little Baudrillard to the curriculum at whatever war college it is where they teach the big thinkers of America's domestic propaganda during the age of the GWOT. (It's actually illegal for the Pentagon to direct psychological warfare at "homeland" audiences, but apparently real-time hagiography from the front with no more attachment to objective reality than made-for-TV docudramas doesn't count.)

If the Pentagon were smart, it would feature dramatic profiles of more Zeitgeist-ready 21st century archetypes of that weird combo of American civilian savvy with warrior service to the national cause. Like:

- The guys who bombarded Iraqi officers with one-on-one cell phone psyops in the run-up to the 2003 invasion, implementing smart mobbing as counter-guerilla warfare.

- The guys who blasted continuous loops of Barney and Metallica at detainees as a fun alternative to waterboarding (heirs to the masters of The Noriega Playlist).

- The female interrogators at Gitmo who came up with such ingenious techniques as wiping faux menstrual blood on torn out pages of the Koran, flashed in the faces of their charges under the hot light.

- The young Predator Drone pilots, sitting in their air-conditioned trailers in some desert lot, cruising onscreen over the world (viewed through crosshairs), playing the awesome new first-person shooter that actually kills. (A society whose most mind-numbing juvenile pasttimes now unintentionally incubating an Army of latchkey Enders.)

Those are some reality action movies that might actually get my patriotic hormones pumping. But the cyberpunks aren't in charge of our psyops yet (so far as we know).

The Enormous EggAs a parent, I long ago decided that I would participate in that time-honored ritual of reading to my children at bedtime. We started out, naturally enough, with various Dr. Seuss books and eventually found our way to My Little Pony stories and some (atrociously written) young reader Sailor Moon novelizations. The Junie B. Jones series, as well as Beverly Cleary's various books (which still hold up well, although Ramona the Pest isn't quite so uproariously funny in comparison to Junie B. Jones, a character obviously inspired by Ramona Quimby) have also gained quite a following in the Blaschke household. That's not to say my influence is negligible. Genre-leaning books have included Tolkien's The Hobbit, L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time and Rowling's Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.

Two books in particular I remembered fondly from my childhood were Oliver Butterworth's The Enormous Egg and Danile Pinkwater's The Hoboken Chicken Emergency. I made a point to track down copies of these books to read to my daughters, and The Enormous Egg was the first one I happened across.

Simply put, it's amazing the stuff that's in "children's books" that you never pick up on as a kid.

The Enormous Egg is, on the surface, a fun children's story about a triceratops that hatches out of a hen's egg--a profoundly large hen's egg. Beneath the surface, however, it's a very political book. It casts a cynical eye at politicians, lampooning them with over-the-top satire and contrasting their buffoonery with the everyday, down-to-earth common sense and resolve of the common man (or in this case, the common boy, represented by Nate Twitchell of Freedom, New Hampshire). Butterworth also goes after the conspicuous consumption society as well as layering in a good dose of conservation advocacy for good measure. There's a kind of idyllic libertarian theme running throughout. Here's a particularly beautiful exchange from the latter half of the book, in which a U.S. senator crusading against government waste pretty much lays it all on the line:

The Senator raised his big hand over his head, and waggled a finger at the other Senators, the way Miss Watkins does when she's getting ready to scold us in class. "The animal I speak of is a dinosaur, gentlemen, of the type known as the Tyranno--ah, rather, I should say the Triplo--no, that's not it... The scientific name escapes me at the moment, gentlemen, but it makes no difference what we call it; it is still the ugliest, evilest-looking reptilian I have ever seen, and it's a disgrace to our National Zoological Park and to the department that operates it. Can you imagine for one moment bringing the innocent, bright-eyed children of good American families to look at this inefficient, outmoded and outlandish specimen of a bygone age? Do we want our children to grow up to be forward-looking citizens of our forward-looking country? Then we must not let them dwell on the useless creatures of the past, the foolish mistakes of Nature discarded long before Columbus planted the American flag on our beautiful shores. No, gentlemen, there must be no living in the past for us, but rather we must bravely face the future, and march on together, hand in hand and shoulder to shoulder, to that glorious destiny that lies before us."

Some of the Senators clapped, and Senator Granderson took a few swallows of water from a glass on the table.

"I propose to get rid of this monster," Senator Granderson went on. "I am submitting a bill before the Senate to make the possession of all such unnatural animals a Federal offense. It should be exterminated, and the sooner the better."

Another man near Senator Granderson stood up. "I agree with the honorable Senator, and I want to propose an amendment to his bill. I propose that this dinosaur be skinned and stuffed, and presented to Senator Granderson as a trophy in recognition of his untiring work in searching out waste and error in the National Government."

Naturally enough, the dinosaur taxidermy would be paid for at the public's expense. Certain grandstanding politicians today could well see this book as an attack on them personally, were it not for the fact that it was originally published in 1956. Yet the brilliance of Butterworth's writing is that it can be read as an allegory for pretty much any issue in which the government is dictating social standards from the top down. I don't have to list them here--I'm certain anyone reading can come up with half a dozen without breaking a sweat.

As I'm reading this to my girls, I keep thinking how it would make a fun children's movie--especially in light of the resurgence of live-action book adaptations of late, such as Bridge to Terabithia and How to Eat Fried Worms. To my surprise, it has apparently already been filmed as a 60 minute TV movie from 1968. The special effects sound like they make Land of the Lost look cutting edge, and I have a difficult time seeing any of the political commentary from the book making it to the screen considering the time period. But I think the time is right for Hollywood to revisit the material, and it could be great fun. In any event, it's amazing what fun treasures you can find hidden in the pages of half-forgotten books from childhood.