Since when do pagans have religious freedoms?

Via Ed Brayton comes this charming little story out of Virginia. It seems that the school system there has an open forum policy on teacher-parent communication folders (we get these from Yamaraashi-chan's class every week; Kouryou-chan's school just uses email), which basically says that any parent who has a child in the school may put non-commercial public notes into the communications folder. This has mostly been exploited by the local churches to advertise upcoming church events.

Last week, however, a local pagan group wanted their own flier put into the backpacks. The uproar was predictable, and loud. One parent wrote to the school board: "They [the school officials] aren't endorsing or sponsoring this? Then it shouldn't have been included in the Friday folders. The Friday folders have never been used for any thing other than school work and school board and/or County sanctioned/sponsored programs... A 'pagan ritual' is an educational experience my children don't need." A local minister said that this was clearly "another sign that Christians ought to leave the public schools."

Here's the punchline: the policy was put in place by Jerry Falwell's legal group. It seems that a church wanted to advertise their "vacation bible school" in the communications folders, and the school board was refusing to let them until Falwell's Liberty Counsel stepped in and threatened a lawsuit.

Second punchline: this happened only two months ago, and was a big deal at the time.

How amazingly short the memories, and narrow the minds.

Handwavery and the Economics of Pendor

In a recent conversation on my favorite MMORPG, Usenet, in the group rec.arts.sf.written, I wrote that "I've often tossed a book on the simple grounds that the writer's grasp of economic reality is so flawed it makes an unreconstructed Marxist look like John Maynard Keynes." The truth of the matter is that handwave my own economics a lot in my SF (I'm trying to be much more careful in my fantasy) precisely because we don't know just how weird the universe is going to be.

But the Journal Entries do have some basics: between the Pendorian years 1500 and 9000 (I haven't decided about after that), human beings have two standards of exchange: the Liu (Light Industrial Unit) and the Lau (Light Agricultural Unit). The Lau is like coinage, and is used mostly to buy short-term consumables like food; the Liu is large bills and is used to pay rent or buy larger items. AIs (and some humans) trade in other categories: there's the Heavy Industrial Unit, light and heavy computational units. There are a few others, but think of them all as components of a stock market with exchange rates fluctuating depending upon supply and demand.

At one point, I wanted Dove to have money. In handwavy style I gave her some, but I was trying to figure out how much. The Twins explain to her that the townhouse they've rented costs them 4 LIU a month, and the current exchange rate between LIU and LAU is 1:300, and you can pretty much buy an average meal for a singe LAU. Which would mean that renting a two-bedroom townhouse in the Capitol City of the Galatic Empire costs about $6000 a month. Except that on the Corridor's civilized worlds, acquiring a few LIU is really easy. Acquiring a lot is harder: there are just too damned many distractions (and the AIs like it that way).

Anyway, remember the 1000 words I wrote yesteday for Polestar? Threw 'em out: total fishhead. Wrote 500 today of Dove & the Twins' conversation (hence my exegetic discussion of the economics implied by their conversation) and 400 in Polestar where Mava meets Aderyn and tells her the impossible: "I'm from Earth."

Lesiure and the Fractured Moment

As an unconverted datavore, I come across all sorts of fascinating things on a daily basis. And one of the most interesting I've seen this week is the following observation: If lesiure time is fractured into discrete increments, our experience of it becomes fractured as well. If you choose to microwave your meal instead of cook it, you get 90 seconds between putting it into the microwave and taking it out when you didn't have to do anything. Did that 90 seconds feel like lesiure time?

It's odd: I always perceive cooking as lesiure time. It might not be the lesiure I want to do right then, anymore than I want to read a book right then or take a bath. But it's never "work".

Frazzled.

I'm way frazzled today. I don't know why. I just can't think straight. I desperately need a nap.

Hit the gym and upped my weights by five pounds, so I'm now doing 30lb curls, 50lb shrugs, and so forth. Felt totally beat up by the time I was done, but in a good way. What little fat I have seems to be fading, but slowly, and the muscles I'm building underneath aren't manifesting as much as I'd like. Still, for 30 minutes three times a week, it's good progress.

My gym is all fortysomethings like me, most of them probably terribly het, trying desperately to build their muscle mass before that capability fades away. It's not cruisy at all. I find that disappointing, especially on days like today when I forget my MP3 player and I'm subjected to the relentlessly cheerful Muzak for the Queer Eye Guy soundtrack that seems to be the owner's own choice.