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2012-03-04

Randomness in these closing minutes

Recently I have acquired some older sci-fi books and have been reading them.  Today I finished Starship Troopers, which was enjoyable.  Now, I still love the movie just for its sheer campiness, much how I like Natural Born Killers for being a dark comedy.

Next to read is an Asimov book, then two others I found.  Kills time in the evening when everything is closed and there is no place to go.



Got to thinking about Robert Anton Wilson earlier today, and found a PDF of Prometheus Rising, which is a great book.  Personally I think Bob was one of the most prolific writers of the 20th century.  He had a way of bouncing between history, quantum physics, alegory, and humor in such a way that sometimes your brain cannot help but twitch a bit.

I always found it an interesting way to gauge people too.  Hand them a R.A.Wilson book and you usually will get one of two reactions.  They absolutely love it (and it takes forever to get said book back), or they say that they did not get past the first chapter because it was too complex.

One quote of his is definitely at the top of my list for best of all times, his 'Belief is the death of intelligence':

My own opinion is that belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence. The more certitude one assumes, the less there is left to think about, and a person sure of everything would never have any need to think about anything and might be considered clinically dead under current medical standards, where absence of brain activity is taken to mean that life has ended.
   --Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger Vol. 1
 Hard to find his books now, but they should all be on Amazon.com.

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