September 6, 2008
Adventures in Real Life
Today I went to the library. The real library. With actual paper. It was my first time to any San Francisco library. I went to the main branch downtown in the big fancy building. It’s pretty awesome as far as libraries go. But then it should be seeing as how…
The Main Library is the resource center for the entire San Francisco Public Library system and the libraries of Northern California.
Cool, huh? So they have a lot of books. Today was just an overview though so I started out on the 1st floor and wandered through the Fiction/Mystery/Sci-Fi stacks. There’s something about looking at physical copies of books by my favorite authors. Perhaps it validates them in my mind as “good” authors. As if there are no books written by bad authors. When I got to the aisle where I expected to find all of Neal Stephenson’s books, I found some guy, maybe 65-75 years old, who engaged me in probably the most thought-provoking conversation I’ve had so far today. Maybe even this week.
We talked authors and sci-fi, and how it’s often a misunderstood genre, while I was pointing out that exactly one of Neal Stephenson’s books had made it to those shelves (there were a few more in plain-old fiction and perhaps others in even more generic or specific stacks). Then we talked real science and politics and technology and space. Hard to say where these things come from. I suppose many sci-fi fans share some interests in at least a couple of these topics. Sci-fi tends to be about the future. Whenever a story takes place, you can usually place it in your own timeline as something to seek or avoid. Many works can be found in the sci-fi stacks about cloning, space elevators, interplanetary travel and more general topics like morality, politics and religion. Orson Scott Card’s series that began with “Ender’s Game” starts out quite simple but by “Xenocide” and “Children of the Mind” becomes very philosophical. I’m curious to see where Neal Stephenson’s next book “Anathem” will be shelved.
So back to the conversation I was having. This guy wants to put floating habitats up in space, which is the topic of many sci-fi books, but he really wants to do it. He’s starting a political party with very forward-thinking ideas. IE: Set up organizations to measure the carbon effect of everything, make people and companies responsible and carbon-neutral, build houses in space, etc. Cool ideas, for sure, but that an everyday voter would even understand what he’s trying to do is quite far fetched. Take Sarah Palin, for instance. She’ll teach our children that the world is 6000 years old and that fact is not enough to stop her from getting into the White House. Either people don’t care enough about science, or they do, and they call it God.
Enough about that. Time to eat this delicious $5 footlong from Subway. Mmm. Toasty! It’s too bad I’m not popular enough to get it for free just for mentioning them in my blog. They also might not want me to use slogans from the competition. But I do what I want! If I want to say Subway is Mmm Toasty there’s no stopping me! If I want to say it’s 15 minutes can save you 15% or more then that’s just what I’ll do! For the record… the sandwich was actually $6.50. But then, I didn’t wait 15 minutes.
