Blaze helped out on the mind-numbing
Kansas leg of the drive back from Colorado.
Reading a book of shorts by Isaac Asimov and mourning the lack of similar scientists in our day and age. The short story, “It’s A Job”, gets very tongue-in-cheeky about the toils of being a housewife and how its tasks are self-effacing. I’ve picked up a few tricks and toys from Asimov, among them:
To be called “an idle wastrel”.
To summon one’s two-centimeter alien who goes by the name Azazel and is forced to visit Earth whenever the call should come, usually in a foul mood.
To have, like some on Azazel’s planet, a “klastron”, which must be performed by persons of lower social status in spite of their objections and against their will.
To be called the “Unpuzzler of the Pulsars”.
Like Azazel, to have originally been drafted as a demon only to be transformed by the editorial discretions of the science fiction genre into an extra terrestrial, a brother from another planetary mother. Likewise, to have replaced magical spells with time warps as a means of summoning Azazel.
To understand that fiction is as stretchy as spandex, allowing you to reinvent your characters or tweak them to fit a specified time and place of your choosing.
To “knock plastic”, placating invisible dryads who tend to be pissed having lost their original homes in oak forests and consigned to factory life and swarming around in industrial vats.
To compare superstition to “Security Beliefs”, the talismans of modern minds, with the understanding that every society believes in magic, or “spirit manipulation”, and that our culture has drafted scientists into the new priesthood, the ones who can manipulate the Cosmos and game the outcomes we prefer.
To understand, with Asimov, why a scientist is no better suited for such a task than a voodoo priest.
To imagine the unintended consequences of such interventions in dynamical systems or what we’ve learned from the study of ecology and ecosystems.
