Friday 4 February 2000

Screenshot

Pic of the day: Men are from Mars, and some have chosen to stay there... (Screenshot from Civ 2, the Mars Now scenario. Terraforming in progress!)

Two separate worlds

Listening to "Sacrifice" with Elton John. Shouldn't that be "no sacrifice"? That's the refrain, at least. -I played it three times in a row as soon as I came to work. (The CD player there worked quite fine all time. Ahem. I guess I forgot to mention that yesterday.) Anyway, this song followed me from the morning. Not sure if it was there from I got up or just from I read an incoming e-mail. It played in my head on the commuter bus, and reading Scientific American did not exactly help, where in a perfectly innocent article I found a throwaway reference to "men are from Mars, women from Venus".

You know, that makes sense. Mars is icy cold, almost completely lacking atmosphere, and quite distant. And Venus ... well, with a surface temperature hot enough to start melting metals, with a crushing pressure and the air raining sulphuric acid under the dim red glow of day ... well, Venus is hell, as depicted by disturbed medieval artists.

I have mentioned before how the torture place in afterlife for the Vikings was not the sulphurus fires of Muspellheim, but the icy plains of Niflheim, a place filled with cold fog and sharp iron and a constant freezing cold that numbs the spirit and bites the body. "There they go that die from Hel." So, in conclusion: Men are from hell, and women are from hell. No wonder people no longer regard their wedding as the defining point of their life, but divorce. Insert "happily ever after" as needed.

***

Needless to say, perhaps, since I am me ... but I also spared a thought to what our (well, your) descendants in the year 2100 will think about the "men are from Mars" ... particularly those of them who live and work there. Will they read much literature from 2000 at all? How relevant will it feel? But I guess that is a question for another entry ... an open letter to the year 2100.

But it would be fascinating to get a glimpse of how life on a very different planet forms the minds of those who live there; and in particular, those children who grow up there. Will there be special trends in Martian arts? (Or is that Arean arts?) Will children learn geography at school, or only areography? Exactly how distant will the tales of Earth history be, with its thousands of years of bloody wars, ignorance and superstition? Will spirituality take new forms on a new world under a new sky? Will young people from Mars meet and fall in love with Earthlings, or will the two rapidly become ... two seperate worlds?

***

In other news ... While I was out buying earphones ... You know how those always break, right? I once bought some quite expensive, high quality earphones. They broke too. They stop working on one of the ears after a while. That's just the nature of those things, so now I buy only cheap ones.

What I meant to say is, while I was out in the lunch break looking for earphones and such, I heard the ceiling play a familiar melody. I'm sad to say that I don't have it at home: "To all the girls we've loved before" with Julio Iglesias and that other guy. Heh. SuperWoman hates that song with a vengeance. Then again she hates Julio Iglesias. She does roughly share my view of self-proclaimed superstuds, and Julio is famously so. While I would not necessarily go to confession if I happened to walk on his grave (especially as he is not there yet, as far as I know), I still like the song. I just don't put the same meaning into "love" as Iglesias. And while I don't fall in love, or make love, I still do love. And all the girls I've loved before (and, in the rare case, the other way around) stay within my heart. And I hope I'll always be a part of all the girls I loved ... before.

Mild day, snow is melting, roads are good.


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