Unfolds like origami in reverse
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Ironic Sans continues to shine. Every time I solve the daily Gisnep puzzle, I learn of another interesting person by way of a link to Wikipedia, this time the brother of the man who invented the concept–and word–of ROBOT, more than a hundred years ago now. Though the brother himself is the subject …. Lol, just trying not to drop too many clues.
I met William J H Boetcker today, by way of my daily Gisnep Puzzle.
Best known for the “Ten Cannots” apparently. As I read them, I saw several that fly in the face of present day public domain discourse.
Example … “You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.”
Aren’t we all wishing the rich would pay more tax, and if they continue to stay recalcitrant on that score, I’ve read that we should just take some of their billions. And, how much good we’d be able to do with XYZ donate just one of his several billions. And, how much can one person spend in a lifetime?
“And you cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they can and should do for themselves.
“You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.
“You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.
“You cannot help little men by tearing down big men.
“You cannot lift the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer.
“You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.
“You cannot establish sound security on borrowed money.
“You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.
“You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than you earn.
“You cannot build character and courage by destroying men’s initiative and independence.
Mind you, I do like his seven crimes …
These are the curse of the times and I’ve been guilty myself of a few. I’ve been too busy. I have left well enough alone when I had no more energy to argue an alternative. I have had no time to read and find out when it’s been a thing that didn’t affect me.
But I would like once or twice in my life to be able to say “I am not interested.” I am, what sometimes feels, as though I am cursed with the curiosity of the proverbial cat. I can usually generate enough interest to explore any arcane, cryptic and/or mind-bending field of study. I used to call it all grist for my writing mill and may it grind finely, but since time is narrowing, I have started to limit my explorations.
Any of these “can-nots” that grab you? [Lol, I put the hyphen in because I kept reading “carrots”!]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_J._H._Boetcker
My interest in time travel began when my birth-family arrived in Australia as immigrants from the Netherlands. The first place where we lived was a migrant hostel outside Sydney. We children mostly noticed differences. The English language of course. The food. What the hell is this orange stuff? Pumpkin? But that’s cattle food. And what is vegemite? it’s horrible. Nothing like apple butter.
And the bush. Walking along the dirt road to our house block at midday, there was no shade. The thin vegetation let the sunlight burnish right through it. The only living creature we saw that day was a snake sunning itself on a sandstone slab protruding above the road’s surface. A venomous brown, in suburbia. My father said to stamp on the ground to scare it away. The landscape seemed very alien.
Adults noticed the seeming backwardness of the new country. There was not a decent cup of coffee to be had, for instance. Schooling was 30 years behind European education, many parents thought when they took their kids to the migrant hostel’s school. Most of the breadwinners, having their European qualifications downgraded, could only get laboring work.
A common complaint was that we had traveled back in time.
But the primitive building code enabled a lot of families to live on a house block and build their own accommodation. Many children saved shoe leather by going to school on bare feet. And if you lived in the outer suburbs, it was cheaper to buy a week’s supply of fruit and vegetables at Paddy’s Produce Markets in central Sydney and carry them home in a hessian sack, than getting stuff piecemeal at the local shops.
The existence of tropes as a category of themes tells you there’s nothing new in fiction. But I’m cruisy about using a conventional theme, if I can do something new with it, time travel as an immigrant having prepped me.
Though I’ll tell you right now that I won’t be sitting through the 700+ movies that apparently use time travel as their theme. Wikipedia has a nice page on Time Travel in Fiction listing the main sub-tropes of time travel generating a manageable list of things to read/watch.
From all the above, and without having to watch anything, I gather that what I’ve been writing into is the time-slip sub-trope.
Rita de Heer 