Tedium

1.  Emma graduated from High School on Saturday.  I had planned to review the graduation ceremony here in much the same manner as I reviewed the recent MHC graduation, but, alas, I am afraid that the High School graduation did not hold my attention enough to make the speeches contained within the ceremony memorable enough to allow for a considered critique.  Suffice it to say:

a) the student speeches all seemed like the sort of thing a graduating high school seniors would be expected to give;

b) the speech by the teacher was a disaster—an extended and thoroughly mangled attempt to turn The Wizard of Oz into an allegory of life and graduation, but the comparison was incoherent when it wasn’t clear who the students were in this allegory or whether they were in Kansas or Oz or the Emerald City or where they should even want to live or what they were supposed to be doing or even what was the point of the whole extended exercise in wrapping platitudes into allegory in a futile attempt to sound deep—a surprising speech in that the students selected this teacher of all teachers to give an address, so surely said teacher knows how to talk to high school students—perhaps the pressure of having to give The Speech caused said teacher to forget that the first mandate of a speech is to engage the audience;

c) the band was good, quite good in fact;

d) the process of handing out diplomas was about as inefficient as possible—the economist in me was incredibly annoyed—I wanted to go up on stage and tell them they could really speed things up with a bit more efficiency.

But, Emma graduated, so all was good.

2.  And, while on the subject of things that were just there—neither particularly good nor particularly bad—I give you Isaac Asimov’s trilogy of Galactic Empire Novels:  The Stars, Like Dust, The Currents of Space, and Pebble in the Sky.  The hook is that these books are all set in the Universe of the Foundation Trilogy (which shall always be a Trilogy—yes, I know there were two books after the original trilogy, but those two books were so wretched and so destroying of everything that made The Foundation Trilogy a landmark in Science Fiction, that it would be better if we could all just forget they were ever written) before the events of that trilogy took place.  That, by the way, is all the unites these novels—and it isn’t much of a unifying theme, since the novels are not confined to any particular time or location of the Universe.  So, calling them Galactic Empire novels is really just a ruse to convince people that maybe they will be as good as The Foundation Trilogy.  They weren’t—not even close.  But, they were tolerable quick reads if you like science fiction.  The second one was the best—it had some political intrigue.  The third one had a nice scientific puzzle at its heart.  The first one was completely forgettable.  All in all, they are the sort of books that one picks up at a library book sale and throws on a shelf for when one wants to read some lightweight science fiction and then after reading, drops off on the free bookshelf in the MHC library so some poor undergrad stranded on campus all summer has something to read to pass the time.

3. I am not sure why I keep reading Asimov.  The Foundation Trilogy is fantastic.  At least I remember it as being fantastic; I am afraid to reread it after reading so much silly stuff by Asimov since I read it.  The Robot stories are a mixed bag, but some of them are extremely good—and there is no doubt that Asimov’s Robot stories are historically important.  You can’t talk about robots without knowing Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics.  But, after that?  I have never read any of his other books which I really enjoyed—the rest ranged from tolerable to painful.