Date: Wed, 09 May 2007 18:30:07 -0400 From: "Mike B." <omni at omniphile.com> Subject: [WSFA] Re: William Gibson comes to DC To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net> Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net> At 5/9/2007 02:23 PM, Michael Walsh wrote: > > omni at omniphile.com 05/09/07 1:00 PM >>> > >At 5/9/2007 09:47 AM, Michael Walsh wrote: > >>17 August (a 3rd Friday) at Politics & Prose. > >> > >>Once again, SF as prediction fails. The opening sentence of > >>Neuromancer: "The sky above the port was the color of television, > >tuned > >>to a dead channel." > > > >It looked like The Golf Channel?? > >No ... silly human. The Exteme Curling Channel ... I think I'd rather watch Extreme Curling than Golf. Golf watching is sitting while people walk around, people stand around, people stand over a ball and look a lot at a hole in the ground, then someone swings a club (the "exciting" part), and you either get to look at a blue sky for a while before the camera swings down to show you grass and a bouncing white dot, or you just get a rolling white dot on grass, depending on how far from the hole this all started. As a cure for insomnia it might have some merit, but otherwise? Now a few changes, suggested by comedians such as Gallagher, could change this substantially. One suggestion is to count seconds, not strokes...that would speed the game up considerably, and also make it a useful form of exercise for the participants. Another was to add a shotgun to the bag of clubs. If you hook or slice, you can grab the shotgun and shoot the ball out of the air, in which case the stroke wouldn't count. This is known as "skeet-golfing". The last suggestion I remember was to make it a team sport, and get rid of all that hushed silence, replacing it with cheerleaders on the edge of the green shouting, "Block that putt! Block that putt!" Anyone from ESPN on this list? -- Mike B. -- "The extremes define the middle. Be extreme." -- Karl Kleinpaste