Subject: (none) ---possibly twin peaks
From: plambeck@Neon.Stanford.EDU (Thane E. Plambeck)
Date: 1990-10-09, 23:26
To: plambeck@neon.Stanford.EDU
Newsgroups: alt.tv.twin-peaks,rec.arts.tv

Some analysis of the recent twin peaks:

It's risky to introduce the supernatural and UFO-ial because these
are essentially proletarian concepts that when explored to any
depth are revealed to be very stupid.  I once read a book called
by stan lem called ``his masters voice'' which the sf-heads amongst us
may have also read and let me be perfectly clear, I HATE science fiction,
but the point was this:  a man, selling extra-T transmissions as
random numbers, is confronted by a customer who points out that these
bits, put forward as random, in fact repeat themselves after some
large number of gigabytes.  a los-alamos-type effort is struck up
to determine what the hell these bits are and the mathematician-narrator
and indeed none of the most-qualified scientific personnel described
in the book are ever able to figure out what the bits mean, although
they are able to interpret some homomorphism of the bits as chemical
formulas and they synthesize some sort of slime out of it that has
odd properties.  now ones interest in this story may indicate
nerd tendencies but I for one found it at least mildly compelling
particularly because the right note---that of never really figuring
out what the bits mean---is struck.
These outerspace phenomena, if explained, lose much of their force
so that the narrative motive force eventually causes them to become,
as I have already said, very stupid.