Conversation #32: Exploding the Logic of the Market (February 18, 2018)

Grace and I are celebrating a special anniversary: one year ago, we moved into our new house in Ypsilanti, with no furniture, and ate dinner sitting on the dining room floor. We ate a meal sitting on the floor to commemmorate that day. Our taxes are done! But not paid for yet. Paul’s not opposed to paying taxes, but he’s not happy about a system that forces us to get professional assistance to file the paperwork, and results in unexpectedly high bills. As Grace puts it, every citizen has to take some of the bureaucracy home!

We have listener feedback! We talk about comments from our friends Ken and Leela. Ken suggests some science fiction, which leads Paul into a long, rambling chat about military science fiction and genre fiction in general. Leela has some comments on Josh and Lolly Weed and that leads us to talk about how the process of having a family leads people to grow up, not the other way around, and how it’s never too late to fill in some of the parts of your childhood that may have been missing. We also talk about how the romance of a true long-term relationship is not all about the drama.

There was no walk this week. In this week’s reading and watching, we read part of the original Peter Pan, which is far darker, stranger, and more adult than we expected. (Note: you should never, ever say that you don’t believe in fairies). We watched two more fan edits of old Doctor Who serials: The Ice Warriors and The Mind Robber. Will the toy TARDIS survive its encounter with terrifying waves of soap suds? Will Jamie get his face back? Will there ever be a superhero movie about Karkus?

We have two articles to discuss this week. The first is a piece from Politico, about a modest proposal to allow ordinary citizens to sponsor immigrants, and pay them less than minimum wage. Then we turn to an article from Slate, a rebuttal of sorts, that explains how there already is a program like this, the au pair program, and it doesn’t really work as advertised.

How to Listen

You can find the MP3 file here.

The Podcast feed is here.

The Podcast channel on YouTube is here.

More Information

Here is Wikipedia’s article about Peter Pan (the 1911 novel we’re reading was adapted from the 1904 play, and originally published under the title Peter and Wendy).

The “Whoflix” Doctor Who fan edits site is here

Here is the fan edit of The Ice Warriors.

Here is the fan edit of The Mind Robber.

Paul mentions K. W. Jeter’s 1998 novel Noir and the Richard K. Morgan’s 2002 novel Altered Carbon, which has been adapted into a new Netflix show.

The Politico piece we discuss can be found here.

The Slate piece on the au pair program, “Actually, Owning and Immigrant is Bad,” can be found here.

Here is the clip of comedian Aamer Rahman talking about the “amazing moment in comedy history,” in which Richard Spencer was “trying to explain a meme, and then out of nowhere, a hero came along, and punched him in the face, instantly turning him into a meme—-it was like casting a spell.”

This Week’s Music

Paul recorded these guitar tracks a few years ago using a Godin nylon-string guitar. The guitar parts are for an unfinished cover of Jonathon Coulton’s original a capella song “When You Go.” Coulton’s original song is available on his online store either as part of the album, Thing a Week Three, or as an individual track.