Has discovery.ca broken their video library?

Could someone do me a favour and try to access the video library with javascript on and with it off? Does it do anything noteworthy that might impede viewing?

Imagine the time keeping version of anti-vaccine fanatics

What sort of carnage could one expect if the idea of keeping standard time was tossed out the window, let's say because it's too Big Government, and everyone went back to independent clocks, set by solar time, say.

Hugo trivia

When was the last time someone under 30 won a Hugo? What about if we narrow it to the written fiction categories?

I imagine the cops looked into this

What if the reason the Zodiac Killer stopped is because the serial killing was just a distraction from the murder of one specific victim whose death the killer didn't want the cops looking too closely at?

Mindwebs: Computers Don't Argue and Paxtons World

Computers Don't Argue

Some of the jargon may have aged badly and it's a very mid-1960s Analog story but still, I'm not 100% sure stupider things have not happened than what happens to the protagonist in this. The synergy between a faulty database, shitty customer service, the collection industry, the legal system and no-wiggle-room laws doesn't seem that out of the question. Spoilers below the cut, which is below the next story.

I am absolutely certain the book company mentioned in this is utterly unlike any I have ever freelanced for.

PaxtonsWorld

This is by Bill Pronzini, better known for his Nameless Detective novels. This is from another Elwood anthology. Oh, Bill, you can do better than Elwood. This particular anthology actually has some decent names in it, though.

I'd feel sorry for the natives in this, except they decided to listen to this luddite doofus unto the death. Points for determination, points off for being stock characters from a nasty stereotype about primitive people.

( Read more... )

Something I forgot

[Harrison's] seriousness was manifest in more intensely felt novels such as Captive Universe (1969 – a Book of the Month Club choice in the US), Skyfall (1976), Stonehenge (1983 – written with the academic Leon Stover) and the Eden series of books, starting with West of Eden (1984). One of his last projects was to write his autobiography.

That would be the same Leon Stover who coedited Apeman, Spaceman with Harrison fifteen years earlier. I wonder if I own that? I have vague memories of reading it; did it turn out the savages of the north were the beneficiaries of cultural - well, technological - diffusion?