quote:Originally posted by El JT de Spang: Hmm. The saddest book I've ever read was Where the Red Fern Grows.
Is there anything more southern than a grown man crying about a fictional boy losing his dogs?
That was definitely the saddest book I ever read.
=======SOTH AND SOTG SPOILERS!!!!=======
However, I did cry a bit during SotH when Carlotta dies and at the end of SotG, when it talks about Petra reading the Hegemon.
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quote:Originally posted by El JT de Spang: Hmm. The saddest book I've ever read was Where the Red Fern Grows.
Is there anything more southern than a grown man crying about a fictional boy losing his dogs?
That was definitely the saddest book I ever read.
=======SOTH AND SOTG SPOILERS!!!!=======
However, I did cry a bit during SotH when Carlotta dies and at the end of SotG, when it talks about Petra reading the Hegemon.
I cried during those and also during the Women of Genesis. In the Bible, those women were only mentioned, but there was no real character development. I felt so sad knowing that the women OSC portrayed them as have been dead for at least 4k years...
Posts: 3389 | Registered: Apr 2004
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Lost Boys had tears streaming down my cheeks first time I read it (47 yr old male, sitting at Honolulu Airport with my wife and kids waiting for our plane home!You can imagine what my teenagers were thinking). The only other book that made me cry was The Boy With No Shoes, by William Horwood.
And isn't nuclear FISSION the explosive one? I thought nuclear fusion was safe, and we haven't been able to do it yet...
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I thought We Were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates was a very sad book, although it has kind of a happy ending.
Where the Red Fern Grows made me cry. I remember sitting there on the couch reading it and crying. I can't remember how old I was when I read it, but old enough not to cry at the drop of a hat. It was a sad book.
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Am I the only one who laughed and laughed at Where the Red Fern Grows?
Maybe I was too old when I read it, but I found the story to be a cheap set of tricks designed to manipulate you emotionally. It was so blatant to me that I was put off, until I decided that the author must have done it on purpose to entertain, so I laughed instead.
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BOTH OF THE DOGS HAD TO DIE! Then the mother and father, who were already irratating as it is because the father would have taken the boy's hard earned money and bought a MULE with it. With his money! At least his grandfather was cool, giving him candy and stuff and telling the boy that he'd help him out. But the parents were all like, well, it was God's will because we couldn't move to the city (and the city sucked by the way, beating up that boy and picking on his dogs) with a pair of country dogs. That really is not comforting by any stretch of the imagination as he loved those dogs and it sucked to lose both of them because of some stupid mountain lion. Grr, that was annoying... That poor kid Posts: 9942 | Registered: Mar 2003
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quote:Originally posted by Cashew: And isn't nuclear FISSION the explosive one? I thought nuclear fusion was safe, and we haven't been able to do it yet...
First off, where in the world did that come from, lol?
Secondly, they both produce energy, and if there is enough mass, an explosion. The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were fission bombs, while the more-powerful hydrogen bomb, or H-bomb uses a fission reaction as a trigger to create the necessary pressures and temperatures for fusion to take place, causing deuterium and I think tridium to fuse into elemental He (please correct me if I am wrong on the isotopes).
Finally, there are reactors that use both fission and fusion (separately of course, i.e., different reactors) to produce energy. These have the potential to be "explosive" but are contained within strong magnetic fields, and are surrounded by giant vats of water that insulate the extremely high temeperatures needed to cause the reactions. As of now, we have just surpassed the barrier in fusion technology so that we now get more energy out of fusion than we put into it. However, we are still far from the point at which the net energy produced is enough that it has any useful value whatsoever. The reactors that currently provide power for populations are all fission reactors.
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It came from the first post: "Yet it gets some things so wrong--the assumption that we will allow fusion reactors to be commonly built into spacecraft for propulsion. Sure, that might work, if we could guarantee that they wouldn't be used as bombs by some fanatic. Imagine 9/11, but with Nuclear Fusion Reactors on ships dropping from orbit."
And thanks for the explanation.
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I have seen a laser launch system that could work very well with a ground based dedicated fussion source, using the ground laser to turn a ramjet filled chamber into a plasma spewing rocket, or you could use anything, water, sewage, whatever you could keep coming as the laser vaporizes it.
In fact the Book Footfall which harkens back to the same era and makes many of the same points has aliens setting up such a system here on Earth as well as other space based weapons. It also discusses the Orion, a massive space station, essentially a giant iron mushroom cap that is launched by means of nuclear fission bombs. Nasty on the environment but a quick and dirty way to put a lot of mass into space.
Still I think that we have a cusp at hand where it will no longer require government interest to start the move into space, the cost benefit will soon mean large investment groups will start us in the right direction and the government will have to play catch up!
posted
They have both been mentioned on here already but i think the two saddest books are definantly,
1. Bridge to Taribithia. This one actually made me tear up.
2. Where the Red Fern Grows. Our teacher read this too us in my fourth grade class. I didn't cry with all my peers arround me but I got the biggest lump in my throught.(I spelled that wrong)
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