HOME
*





Chronic Offender
"Chronic Offender" is a science fiction short story by Spider Robinson. It was written as an homage to Damon Runyon, to whom it is dedicated. The style echoes Runyon's, especially in its use of present and future tenses only throughout. It was first published in 1981 in ''Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone Magazine''. Plot A former small time criminal in Manhattan, now an old man living in 1980 in a low-rent apartment, finds a "ghost" burgling his home. The man is "Harry the Horse", a ruthless thug and general criminal who died decades before. Harry recognizes his old friend, declares that he will not "guzzle his joint" (i.e. not rob his home) and tells him how he got there. Back in 1930 during the Depression, Harry and his two cronies were caught passing counterfeit bills and bailed out by "Judge" Goldfobber, a shady lawyer. Goldfobber told them to pay him back by "chilling" a man up in Harlem and taking a box the size of a phone box from his apartment to Goldfobber's Long Island ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Spider Robinson
Spider Robinson (born November 24, 1948) is an American-born Canadian list of science fiction authors, science fiction author. He has won a number of awards for his hard science fiction and humorous stories, including the Hugo Award 1977 and 1983, and another Hugo with his co-author and wife Jeanne Robinson in 1978. Early life and education Robinson was born in the Bronx, New York City; his father was a salesman. He was an avid reader of science fiction, and it was his early childhood exposure to the Heinlein juveniles, juvenile novels of Robert Heinlein that later influenced him to become a writer. He attended a Catholic high school, spending his junior year in a seminary; this was followed by two years in a Catholic college, and five years at the Stony Brook University, State University of New York at Stony Brook in the 1960s, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in English. While at Stony Brook, Spider entertained at campus coffeehouses and gatherings, strumming his guitar and ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Damon Runyon
Alfred Damon Runyon (October 4, 1880 – December 10, 1946) was an American newspaperman and short-story writer. He was best known for his short stories celebrating the world of Broadway in New York City that grew out of the Prohibition era. To New Yorkers of his generation, a "Damon Runyon character" evoked a distinctive social type from Brooklyn or Midtown Manhattan. The adjective "Runyonesque" refers to this type of character and the type of situations and dialog that Runyon depicts. He spun humorous and sentimental tales of gamblers, hustlers, actors, and gangsters, few of whom go by "square" names, preferring instead colorful monikers such as "Nathan Detroit", "Benny Southstreet", "Big Jule", "Harry the Horse", "Good Time Charley", "Dave the Dude", or "The Seldom Seen Kid". His distinctive vernacular style is known as "Runyonese": a mixture of formal speech and colorful slang, almost always in the present tense, and always devoid of contractions. He is credited with co ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

Rowan %26 Martin's Laugh-In
''Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In'' (often simply referred to as ''Laugh-In'') is an American sketch comedy television program that ran for 140 episodes from January 22, 1968, to March 12, 1973, on the NBC television network, hosted by comedians Dan Rowan and Dick Martin. It originally aired as a one-time special on September 9, 1967, and was such a success that it was brought back as a series, replacing '' The Man from U.N.C.L.E.'' on Mondays at 8 pm (ET). It quickly became the most popular television show in the United States. The title of the show was a play on the 1960s hippie culture "love-ins" or the counterculture " be-ins", terms derived from the " sit-ins" common in protests associated with civil rights and antiwar demonstrations of the time. In 2002, ''Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In'' was ranked number 42 on ''TV Guide's'' 50 Greatest TV Shows of All Time. ''Laugh-In'' had its roots in the humor of vaudeville and burlesque, but its most direct influences were Olsen and Jo ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


Paradox
A paradox is a logically self-contradictory statement or a statement that runs contrary to one's expectation. It is a statement that, despite apparently valid reasoning from true premises, leads to a seemingly self-contradictory or a logically unacceptable conclusion. A paradox usually involves contradictory-yet-interrelated elements that exist simultaneously and persist over time. They result in "persistent contradiction between interdependent elements" leading to a lasting "unity of opposites". In logic, many paradoxes exist that are known to be invalid arguments, yet are nevertheless valuable in promoting critical thinking, while other paradoxes have revealed errors in definitions that were assumed to be rigorous, and have caused axioms of mathematics and logic to be re-examined. One example is Russell's paradox, which questions whether a "list of all lists that do not contain themselves" would include itself, and showed that attempts to found set theory on the identification ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


SF Site
SF may refer to: Locations * San Francisco, California, United States * Sidi Fredj, Algeria * South Florida, an urban region in the United States * Suomi Finland, former vehicular country code for Finland In arts and entertainment Genres * Speculative fiction (usually ''sf'') ** Science fiction or sci-fi (usually ''SF'') In film and television * , the Swedish film industry ** SF Film Finland, a Finnish film distributor * SF Channel (Australia) * , a German-language television network in Switzerland * , a Finnish film production company In music * Sforzando (musical direction) or sf, a musical accent * ''Subito forte'', a musical notation for dynamics (music) * Switchfoot, a band * Sasha Fierce, on-stage alter ego of American entertainer Beyoncé, and namesake of her album '' I Am... Sasha Fierce'' Other media * Saikoro Fiction, a Japanese role-playing game system * ''Street Fighter'', a series of fighting video games by Capcom Businesses and organizations ...
[...More Info...]      
[...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]  


picture info

University Of Manitoba
The University of Manitoba (U of M, UManitoba, or UM) is a Canadian public research university in the province of Manitoba.''University of Manitoba Act'', C.C.S.M. c. U60.
Retrieved on July 15, 2008
Founded in 1877, it is the first of . Both by total student enrolment and campus area, the U of M is the largest university in the province of Manitoba and the 17th-largest in all of Canada. Its main campus is located in the