You're wrong. I'm right.
And that won't change, not even if we fight!
—Mary Prankster, "Tell Your Friends (Part Deux)"
Anville
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In his short story "Entropy", Thomas Pynchon uses the phrase grippe espagnole to refer to a sort of spiritual malaise, a weariness of war and world. He got the term out of some liner notes he'd read, specifically, for a recording of Igor Stravinsky's L'Histoire du Soldat. Later, he found out that the term actually means what the words say, Spanish flu. "The lesson here," he wrote, "obvious but now and then overlooked, is just to corroborate one's data, in particular those acquired casually, such as through hearsay or off the backs of record albums." And in case this doesn't sound germane, he goes on, "We have, after all, recently moved into an era when, at least in principle, everybody can share an inconceivably enormous amount of information, just by stroking a few keys on a terminal. There are no longer any excuses for small stupid mistakes, and I hope this also leads to much more inhibition about stealing data on the chance that no one will catch it" (introduction to Slow Learner, 1984).
Now we have learned that the senders have to be just as careful as the receivers. Who would ever have figured that?
I had some fun working on the following topics.
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