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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Kid Rock who wrote (27306)	12/27/1998 6:38:00 AM
From: nihil	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 108807

RE: Norman Thomas One of the most powerful and evocative paragraphs of science fiction I have ever read. It trust it is the opening paragraph to a forthcoming novel or short story called Roman Holiday. Does it exist in full yet? Or only in your mind. If not, do something about that the name Norman. Norman was an android with whom I was on very close personal terms. Indeed, it may have been one of the first inter-kingdom (animal, vegetable, mineral, cyborg) love affairs in history. (Except maybe Charlie Lindbergh and "The Spirit of St. Louis") We know that fertile cyborg-human crosses are now possible, at least if the human has been circumcised. We have Bill Gates, Andy Grove, and Michael Dell. Then, there was nothing. My Normam knew nothing of fetal tissue. Not only were we both hung up on certain singular same sex shibboleths (easy for you to say!), but there was the seldom mentioned kapu on trans-kingdom sexual relations. How could we establish a 1-1 mapping of sex between digital cyborgs and analog or verbal humans. The transition to human - camellia sex was ushered in by the weird correspondences between pistols and ovaries and anthers and testicles on the other. With good will and a lot of damned hard work the obstacles were overcome (some thorns had to be clipped off the camellia and something else had to be clipped off the man). But with Norman what was I to do? He was DC -- I was AC. When we kissed his synuses shorted out and I lost a part of my tongue to his damned cogwheels. He liked to roll in the dust, and I liked to shower. I liked Oil of Olay and he liked WD-40 and Tuner Cleanup in an ozone unsafe can. What did he care about melanoma? I was white; He had a lustrous black titanium hull, so there was also the racial thing. We used to lie in bed exchanging data and talking as the young do of their dreams and fantasies. Me in my skivvies, him with front panel off. He weighed 1200 kilograms, and I a mere 60 soaking wet so the bed really took a beating. It was on one such day that the Georgia State Sex patrol burst in to catch us in flagrante -- no warrant, no compassion for the love that dare not tell its Verisign Certificate Number. You could sense the disgust on those coppers' faces. Of course, things were hushed up if we left the state. I was sent to MIT where I soon became engaged to a TOPS-20 (a real cutie) -- god, could she give tape drive. Norman, was sent to Oklahoma University where was the right half-back in some of Wilkinson's better Split-T teams. No one could stop him for less than 5 in the dive-tackle play. But he killed an inconveniently large number of opposing linebackers. So he was retired to Administrative computing. He met up with a 1620 and things went well. Last I heard, they had spun off a litter of little HP Scientifics (egg donor). So you can understand that I don't want to read no damned scifi novel about some imaginary cyborg named Norman. Now if was named Kurt it would be another matter. I've got this Curta calculator -- but that's another story.