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True Confessions of a Ricochetti
On another thread, one of our members admitted something:
I always confuse Horace Greeley with William Jennings Bryan.
I’ve seen a few other comments like this over the years I have been here. When Ricochetti go wild and make their true confessions, it usually isn’t the sort of thing you would see on Facebook or Jeff Bezos’ diary. How many people on your Facebook feed even know who Horace Greeley and William Jennings Bryant are? This is a high-class joint with high-class true confessions.
My true confession: the older I get, the more trouble I have with homonyms. I tend to write out loud. I once found an error in one of my books where I had used the word “clamber” instead of “clamor,” for instance.
What’s your most Ricochet-style true confession?
Published in Humor
Yes. I found the protag creepy, with a pedo vibe.
Post, or you don’t believe it.
You know that I hate you, right? That’s not true. I pity you. You are a man of poor moral character and limited intelligence.
Yeah, I thought that one was a little on the creepy side, myself.
I’ll go ya one better: I ain’t never read no Heinlen!
I think Heinlein sort of slid into creepihood starting with Stranger, though I see that Door into Summer was published four years before Stranger.
If you want the best Heinlein, stick with the juveniles. (No pun intended.)
They are mutually comprehensible to the point that they can talk to each other without switching languages with some conscious “tolerance” added to their aural comprehension. Now with the written forms it is more difficult. And don’t ever try to tell either of them that they are just speaking dialects of the same language unless you want a really loud argument…
Yes. On the third try. I have not even looked at it since.
I like his poetry a lot, what I’ve read of it. The problem with his philosophical writings is that he packages wholesale irrational evil in soaring rhetoric. This goes a long way to explaining the success of some of his followers….
There is a Julian Fellowes movie, From Time to Time. The movie is enjoyable and based on a children’s book. After watching the movie several times, I had to check out the book. I was less than impressed. Now, the book did have a few things the film did not. Certainly it had more characters. But the overall story was not nearly as good as what Julian Fellowes had created out of it.
A very Ricochet comment. :-)
The “y” should be pronounced like the “ee” in “tee” or the “ie” in “piece” or the “ea” in “pea”. The puzzle here is the “sch”which looks like a relict from an earlier perhaps non-standardized orthography or an imported name from German. Maybe Dutch.
I do too.
Before marriage, I found doing so also tended to attract the nicer girls over to talk to the dog, and then to me. Made a nice ice-breaker to have a cute subject to talk about.
Given what I’ve read from @bossmongo about subduing others, I assume Boss Mongo is the one on top.
Nah. Read also the early future history material, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Starship Troopers and the first half of Stranger in a Strange Land. Then stop. Read absolutely nothing he wrote after Stranger. Especially avoid anything in the Lazarus Long material from later. Your opinion of him will remain high.
I agree. But I was going for the funny.
I sorta liked Podkayne and Glory Road, though you can tell that the latter was post-Stranger.
If you don’t like creepy Heinlein, I’d really advise against reading I Will Fear No Evil.
As a few others have said, don’t bother with anything after (I would say including) Stranger in a strange land. But I’ve been re-reading most of the juveniles the last couple years and they hold up surprisingly well. Assuming you can get over Nazi rocket bases on the moon, swamp farms on the surface of Venus, and Ice skating on the canals of Mars.
Yeah, there are the same problems with Doc Smith’s books from the same era. But there were analogous problems with the science textbooks on astronomy and the planets written well into the 1960s, e.g. “Scientists have detected high levels of carbon dioxide in Venus’s atmosphere. Since its size and axial tilt are similar to Earths, they expect the planet must be covered in thick vegetation, like in rain forests on Earth, obscured by the thick and near perpetual cloud cover.”
One of my favorites by Heinlein is Job: A Comedy of Justice, which I’ve never heard anyone anywhere even mention. I suspect some on Ricochet would consider it blasphemous, but I liked it enough to read it twice (years ago). I might read it a third time at some point, just to see what my adult self thinks of it.
I like that one quite a bit.
I guess I fell for it, then. 🤬
I’m just saying, the juveniles hold up really well as works of storytelling, even if the “science” is wildly inaccurate.
I’d particularly recommend Tunnel In The Sky, Time For the Stars and Double Star. I haven’t re-read Puppet Masters in decades, but recall it being fun. Sixth Column too.
I thought the science in Sixth Column was really interesting. Parallel electro-gravitronic and gravito-magnetic spectra in the nature of the electro-magnetic spectrum, with wild new capabilities as a result.
While we’re being jerks about it, Herriot used a similar verse (in the poetic sense, still not in the biblical sense.)
“All things wise and wonderful
All creatures great and small
All things bright and beautiful
The Lord God made them all
I’ve considered it, and put it down, on the basis of it’d probably be more blasphemous than I’m comfortable with. Haven’t read Time Enough for Love either.
Now that I’m thinking about it I think I might have reversed lines one and three. Actually I’m cetain of it, but the only reference I can find off hand is a pinterest needlework version of that bit of poetry.
Yes, really.
Check Church of England hymnals.