On Nov 30, 2004, at 19:00, Lynn Weasenforth wrote:
[...] the geezer said, "You're right. We didn't have those things when we were young; so we invented them! What the hell are you doing for the next generation??"
An excellent joke, from a geezerly point of view, but...
Quite apart from the un-likelihood of the geezer inventing anything other than new pick-up lines when *he* was a student, the same question, if posed to him 40+ yrs ago, would not have brought the same answer that it will today: "not as much as I'd like to; I'm being hamstrung"...
According to today's paper:
The funds for the National Science Foundation (which dispenses them for research of things like those miracles mentioned above) have been *trimmed*, despite the promise to *double* them by '07... In favour of projects like "Rock and Roll Hall of Fame", if you please... Only in Bush's America, can something so bizzare happen. I suspect the cut's a retribution for the scientists-at-large urging an anti-Bush vote (they knew what was coming, and, by golly, they were right).
And, a lot of those who'd done the inventing had been the bright foreigners, who came here to study and stayed... Fewer of them are coming now, because it's not worth the hassle; they go to European universities instead, depriving us/US of both the income and the potential brain power.
One's entitled to take credit for what our generation has achieved - it was a lot. One's not entitled to gloat while one's kicking an "opponent", bound hand and foot, who's on the ground already. IM - very "blue" (we called it "red" in communist Poland <g>) - O
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Tamara P Duvall http://lorien.emufarm.org/~tpd
Lexington, Virginia, USA (Formerly of Warsaw, Poland)
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