Re: Runk! Honk!

[Darick Chamberlin <drogue@eskimo.com>]

RE Turok, Son of Stone


   I was manic for this comic when I was a child as well.

   Thinking of it reminds me again of the stress we all put on facticity 
and hard science as the means by which we all best 'know' or 'learn' from 
a discipline or section of what we study. Embedded in this Western 
Science on-ramp are stumbling blocks for those not initiated or capable 
of being initiated (just so) into the rigorous, refs-producing 'polity' 
of 'real scholars' of dinosaurs. Or something.

   The manic and avid love for dinosaurs exhibited by kids is not 
antiscience, it is itself a thing we could notice with empirical eyes 
ourselves, as adults. Doubtless many of us who work in Museums or who 
have children learn to refamiliarize ourselves with our own native and 
pre-educated center of Dino-Gravity. And it's, at its best, always wonder.

    I am fairly certain that the new, 'improved' Turok is worse than 
before. From the standpoint of being sloppier, more cynical, more filled 
with inaccuracies and racisms, full to the edge of belief with total 
crap; what newer thing is not? A newer hospital, a newer University, an 
FAO Schwartz or movie or Congressional body: all seemingly continually 
worsening, along this line of evaluation.

   Yet the image of (for our purposes here) Dinosaurs these days - the ways
they are depicted, 'posed' and simulated - are more vivid and keen 
than they were. 

   Again  I am asking: is accuracy and facticity and 'how it actually 
was' really the aspect of our studies that even we find most valuable? 
Neccessary and demanded, yes, and fascinating. And yet... can it be 
possible that some meaning or articulation can be sleuthed out from 
evidences we have in abundance?

   Prior, just slightly perhaps, to other extinctions, closer to home?

   Lastly, I am clearly sounding cranky about this but it is not as if it 
has nothing to do with our topic and point of study. Q: Do not the 
means, ways, whys and wherefores of our discipline require some of the 
rigorous interrogation we direct toward the fossilized bones, fragments 
of stone-trapped fern, weird remains and gene-level data which we take as 
our daily bread and butter in all this?

   Can I get a witness?