Todd Seavey will argue yes and Michel “The Brain” Evanchik will argue no, while Richard Ryan moderates.
That’ll be the Jinx Athenaeum’s debate next Wednesday, August 3 (8pm), downstairs at Lolita bar on the northeast corner of Broome and Allen on Manhattan’s Lower East Side (one block south, three west of the Delancey Street F J M Z subway stop — free admission, cash bar).
And on a more personal note:
Later that night in the same spot, celebrate thirty-six years of Jinx Rational Agent Todd Seavey’s life at the first-ever Jinx book-giveaway (with possible birthday karaoke afterwards, depending on interest level). The giveaway (instead of gift-getting) may make it an unbirthday of sorts but not by any means an “Unhappy Birthday” in the Smiths mode. (Think of me as a compassionate capitalist, or a guy with too much stuff cluttering his apartment. And I trust that likely Jinx attendees are too philosophical and have too much intellectual integrity to risk being bribed in favor of one debater or the other — none of my friends have shown a reluctance to disagree with me in the past.)
One other thing worth celebrating is that my Star Wars essay from Metaphilm.com was plugged on BoingBoing and is excerpted in the July Wired (p. 93), which completists may still be able to find on newsstands (the issue with Gorillaz, Quentin Tarantino, Neil Gaiman, William Gibson, and me in it) — though, of course, you could just read the whole piece online. On a similar note, you could watch this videotaped conversation between Hayden Christensen and George Lucas about fans’ unanswered questions:
http://movies.channel.aol.com/feature/starwars/unscripted.adp
And for those too far away to party/debate or too unhip for Wired, here’s something else to keep you entertained — the 50s-sci-fi-like sound of radio emissions from Saturn’s poles, courtesy of NASA:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/multimedia/pia07966.html
Feel free to volunteer to debate a topic for one of our future gatherings.
(NOTE: The above was sent as a mass e-mail in the days prior to the debate and was posted on this blog retroactively in April 2007 here. Click for other Debates at Lolita Bar.)
