Joel's humanistic blog

When Stephen Fischler and Joel Sucher's pair of 1980s documentaries Anarchism in America and Free Voice of Labor: The Jewish Anarchists were released onto DVD last year, the home video availability, much like Bird and Shaffer's The Wobblies doc , led to a resurgence of interest in both movies. Some time afterwards, I noticed that while the former had an entry on the comprehensive Internet Movie Database , the latter did not. So about a week ago, I finally decided to try to make my way through the IMDB update process and submit it for inclusion in the database ... and it's paid off: Free Voice of Labor has a brand-new page on the IMDB ! (And yes, I should eventually post some thoughts on the actual content of both of Fischler and Sucher's movies ... there was a flurry of posts shortly after the DVD's release, and I felt like I was coming late to the party at the time. But yeah, they're recommended, and I wanted to get out this announcement now rather t

I can't believe this. Last night, I stumbled upon the archive of the webzine Sci Fiction on the Sci Fi channel website for the first time — and saw that it was going to be taken down by the 15th! (The magazine ran from 2000 to 2005, but even when it stopped publishing, the archives were left up ... until now.) It's really too bad, as it has an impressive lineup of both new fiction, and classic reprints. The latter, with its truly old-school lineup of authors — Robert Bloch, Zenna Henderson, Theodore Sturgeon, William Tenn, Manly Wade Wellman — brings back a lot of memories of hunting this stuff down in musty paperbacks, including one tale (Fredric Brown's "Mouse") where I was left hanging because the ending page was actually ripped out of the book! How did this never get on my radar? Note to self: how did I never, say, Google "Allamagoosa" ? The news has been picked up by bOING bOING after I submitted the link, where Cory is understandably upset

Guess who wrote the following: For the better part of a decade, I taught dozens of students ... the basics of Georgist economics, drawn for the most part from his classic Progress and Poverty .... As George explains, most taxes are fundamentally unfair, yet the least objectionable is the LVT . Taxes are problematic, as they are a burden on production, increasing its costs. The answer. (inspired by this )

Since I've mentioned on this blog the Sagan Gathering that was scheduled to happen in Ithaca, NY this past weekend, I think I ought to give a somewhat disappointing update. Through personal communication with organizer Patrick Fish, I found out that due to having to recover from an unexpected health emergency earlier last week, he was unable to participate in most of the planned events, and therefore (since as of this time, it's a one-man operation) had to call off most of the events. And as it happened, the Festival got rained out anyway. On the bright side: the preparations for the Gathering have unearthed a lot of goodwill towards Sagan's legacy in the Ithaca area, and have laid the groundwork for a bigger, better Gathering next year. Frankly, it's reinvigorated my Sagan-ania. And some Sagan fans did show up to participate in the Festival and tour Sagan-related locations in Ithaca on their own, including one all the way from Indiana.