Pun Salad

About eight years ago, I started a "reread Heinlein" reading project. This winds it up. I wisely left his last few books for the end. This one was ©1987; RAH passed away in May 1988.

And (humph) apparently it's out of print! Amazon doesn't sell new copies anyway. I was unaware, and somewhat surprised, that could possibly happen.

And (as far as I know) this is the only one of his books to have a racy Boris Vallejo cover of a nekkid lady (with strategically flowing hair).

That's Maureen Johnson, and this is mostly her autobiography, told in the first person. It's interspersed with her "current" predicament, where she wakes up (naked, of course) next to a dead man and a live cat named Pixel. This puts her in a bit of legal peril, and escaping from that simply seems to land her in illegal peril, and…

But it's mostly her autobiography, and she leads an interesting life, as one of the early participants in the "Howard Foundation" effort to breed long-lived people. Which is spectacularly successful in her case, as she's the mother of Lazarus Long. The story is full of what I think of as Heinleinian dialog and monologue, and if you've read many of his books you will know what I mean by that. The book is also very risqué, bawdy, ribald, racy, and a bunch of other synonyms. Maureen is very fond of having good clean fun in, and out of, the sack.

And it's also iconoclastic, because there's a lot, a lot, of taboo-breaking, mostly involving every possible kind of incest.

So (consumer note) you might want to read a number of Heinlein's books before you tackle this one, as characters from them show up here. To find out which, skip to the back of the book where "Associated Stories" are listed, and use your judgment. Or, if you don't mind spoilers, see the Wikipedia page.

Making the rounds:

Yes, I'm pretty tired of argument-by-cliché, especially the one that says that Trump's tariffs are meant to "level the playing field". We wouldn't like it if that happened.

Also of note:

• Fingers crossed that Betteridge's Law of Headlines doesn't apply… to Jesse Walker's headline query: Are public broadcasters about to lose their subsidies?

  Will the federal government cut off its subsidies to public broadcasters this year? The New York Post reports that the White House's "rescissions" plan will include a request that Congress withdraw $1.1 billion already appropriated for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). That wouldn't be absolutely everything Washington spends on public media—The New York Times notes that the administration doesn't plan to claw back some money being spent on emergency communications—but it's close.

  If you've been following the politics of public broadcasting for a while, this will sound familiar. There is a long history of Republicans calling for an end to such subsidies, but they have never actually done the deed. They often don't even reduce the money that goes to NPR, PBS, and the rest—and when they do, it's just a short time before the broadcasters' budget is higher than it was before. Instead, the usual effect of these standoffs is for the networks to appease the GOP by hiring some conservatives and/or getting rid of some programming conservatives don't like. That pattern is so well-established that I've come to see those hirings and firings as the point: Republican leaders use the threat of cutting the broadcasters loose as a way to keep them in line. President Donald Trump certainly hasn't been shy about using federal purse strings to bend institutions to his will, so it's not hard to assume that he's doing the same thing here that he's been doing with, say, universities.

  But the dynamics may be different this time. There is a chance—a chance—that this year the CPB's subsidies will actually stop.

  CPB's "Emergency Services" role is described here. Sounds like a decent use of taxpayer cash, but I'm not sure it couldn't be moved elsewhere in the bureaucracy, like Homeland Security.

  If you need it: Betteridge's law of headlines.

• 

  They are supposed to be into education, so why do they never learn? I'm currently reading Abigail Shrier's latest book, Bad Therapy, Amazon link at your right. She argues, pretty convincingly, that schools' increasing focus on their students' mental health is misguided, and making things worse. One feature: intrusive "surveys" of the kiddos asking personal and troubling questions about sex, self-harm, parental abuse, and the like. Which would be bad enough, but Abigail also details the woeful lack of security with which the resulting data is handled.

  So you might think schools might take such criticism to heart, and hasten and chasten to lock down sensitive data. Well, the memo doesn't seem to have reached Seattle, according to Emma Camp: Seattle schools botched privacy on a mental health survey.

  A mental health survey administered to Seattle-area middle and high schoolers is putting their sensitive personal information at risk, according to a February investigation from The Seattle Times and the education-focused outlet The 74. While parents and schools were sold on the survey as a tool to identify struggling
students, a public records request showed just how invasive many survey questions are.

  The survey, called Check Yourself, takes around 12 minutes to complete and asks students about general demographic features, along with questions about their mental health. For example, it asks students, "During the past year, did you ever seriously think about ending your life?" According to The 74, King County, which includes Seattle, has spent more than $21 million on the survey and related mental health supports since 2018.

  With Pun Son and Pun Daughter safely out of school, I guess we dodged that bullet. But Pun Daughter works in a public school, so I'll probably ask her about it.

• Delusion caused by exposure to compost fumes, I assume. John Tierney is an expert on the follies of recycling, so it's only a short hop to his latest exposé: New York City’s Composting Delusion.

  After forcing New Yorkers to spend billions of dollars for the privilege of sorting their garbage into recycling bins, municipal officials have found an even costlier—and grubbier—way for residents to spend their time in the kitchen. They must now separate food waste into compost bins or face new fines imposed by the city’s garbage police, who will be digging through trash looking for verboten coffee grounds and onion peels.

  Composting is the most nonsensical form of municipal recycling: it delivers little, if any, environmental benefit at the highest cost. In addition to wasting people’s time, it attracts rats to compost facilities, puts more fuel-burning trucks on the road, and diverts tax dollars from what was once a core priority of the Department of Sanitation—keeping the streets clean. Whatever its appeal to suburbanites with yards and gardens, composting is absurdly impractical in a city—especially one facing a massive budget deficit.

  I have half-hearted composting piles out back. I haven't taken out any "finished" compost for a long time, though. Might try again this year.

• Appears to be 1A-problematic. Back last September we saw a ham-handed effort by the Bow NH schools to punish parents protesting the inclusion of a biological boy on a team opposing their daughters' on the soccer field. Their crime was wearing pink armbands emblazoned with XX; they were hit with a police-enforced "no trespassing" order.

  The latest act in this drama is covered by NHJournal, which says (yes) we might make a Federal case out of it: AG Bondi Says Feds Are Looking Into Bow High School 'XX' Wristband Case.

  U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi announced Tuesday night her department is looking into the Bow High School free speech case in the wake of Monday’s controversial ruling by a federal judge.

  United States District Court Judge Steven McAuliffe ruled Bow High School has the right to ban parents from wearing pink XX wristbands to girls’ soccer games to show their opposition to allowing biological males to compete against females. The judge said the protests weren’t protected speech, and he accused the parents of “harassing” individual trans-identifying athletes.

  The Trump administration has issued executive orders instructing schools to protect women’s sports and spaces from biological males, and Bondi is clearly not happy with the judge’s decision.

  As previously noted, New Hampshire is fertile ground for First Amendment cases.

• (Blue) Spam in a can. Dave Barry has comments on Blue Origin's latest stunt mission:

  I know I speak for all of us when I say that we will never forget exactly where we were this past Monday at 9:31 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time. It is a memory that we will keep forever, a memory that is imprinted on our brains as indelibly as the guacamole stain on our pillowcase from the time we attempted to eat a Burrito Supreme in bed. That is how unforgettable this memory is.

  In case you've forgotten, I am referring to the launch of the historic Blue Origin space mission, which had us all literally riveted to our TV screens with literal rivets as we watched a historic astronaut crew consisting of Katy Perry, Jeff Bezos's fiancé, Oprah Winfrey's close personal friend Gayle King and several other historic women embark on a historic journey that lasted for nearly 11 historic minutes, during which they traveled, via space, from west Texas to a slightly different part of west Texas.

  Blue Origin will happily accept your application for a future flight, and even more happily will accept an accompanying $150,000 deposit.

  I think that even with Disney's insane pricing, a bunch of rides on Space Mountain would be less than that.

  "Spam in a can" is how Chuck Yeager described the Mercury program astronauts, who didn't have much control over their capsules, other than firing attitude thrusters and retrorockets.