{"id":254,"date":"2007-12-06T14:01:31","date_gmt":"2007-12-06T18:01:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/?p=254"},"modified":"2007-12-06T14:01:31","modified_gmt":"2007-12-06T18:01:31","slug":"kornbluth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/archives\/254","title":{"rendered":"Kornbluth"},"content":{"rendered":"

I sometimes wonder if Cyril Kornbluth<\/a> will be the next Philip K. Dick<\/a> movie\/screenplay-wise. Actually, he may already be – my ties to to the motion picture industry consist of being able to look up titles on IMDB<\/a>. Two Kornbluth\/Pohl collaborations I read ages ago have stuck with me to this day: Gladiator-At-Law<\/a> and The Space Merchants<\/a>. Gladiator-At-Law seems especially apposite nowadays, what with the housing finance mess (aka Big Shitpile) – revolving as it does around housing and arcane financial arrangements to obscure who controls what. I wonder whether Pohl or Kornbluth read Gangs of New York<\/a>; one of the gangs in Belly Rave (a slum housing development originally named Belle Reve) is the Wabbits – surprisingly close to NYC’s Dead Rabbits. Wa-wa-wabbit twacks!<\/em> Also – struldbrugs<\/a>! The Space Merchant’s Chicken Little (a huge blob of chicken tissue that’s fed chorella algae -IIRC- and has hunks sliced off that become people food) resonates today as well – here’s a class<\/a> on animal tissue culture and tissue engineering. I can’t wait for Ron Popeil to get involved – “Makes beef jerky for around $3 a pound, and you know what went in it, because you made it yourself!<\/a>”<\/p>\n

Kornbluth hit the silver screen at least once – The Marching Morons<\/a> fathered Mike Judge’s Idiocracy<\/a>. I loved the Marching Morons when I first read it – in my defense, I was fourteen – since then, well… It’s great fun, but when you’ve finished there’s a strange odor in the air. I smell eugenics. We’ll ignore the statistical cold water as well – tons of dopes, tiny elite – what are your chances of rolling lucky seven in the can’t-choose-your-parents crapshoot. That’s right – in all likelihood, you’d be one of the pinheads. The Marching Morons does give me an excuse to introduce a great new word: tlonian<\/a> – adjective applying to a product that has metastisized off the screen and into the real world (see: Holiday Inn<\/a>) and post a video of an AWESOME new tlonian product from Idiocracy, Brawndo: The Thirst Mutilator. I love Borges.<\/p>\n

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I sometimes wonder if Cyril Kornbluth will be the next Philip K. Dick movie\/screenplay-wise. Actually, he may already be – my ties to to the motion picture industry consist of being able to look up titles on IMDB. Two Kornbluth\/Pohl … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5,19,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-254","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-politics","category-scifi"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pdqxx-46","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=254"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=254"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=254"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/hawkdog.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=254"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}