S-P-A-M #8 - Lord of Light, US hostage crisis and US gambling
A spectacular case of sci-fi and real-life intersecting 🦊
Hello once again from gloomy London1 👋⛅😅
I’ve finally* gotten some good momentum on reading Roger Zelazny’s fantastic Lord of Light and wanted to share this part of one dialogue which I really liked:
‘Ah, but it makes a great deal of difference, you see. It is the difference between the unknown and the unknowable, between science and fantasy – it is a matter of essence. The four points of the compass be logic, knowledge, wisdom and the unknown. Some do bow in that final direction. Others advance upon it. To bow before the one is to lose sight of the three. I may submit to the unknown, but never to the unknowable. The man who bows in in that final direction is either a saint or a fool. I have no use for either.’ — Yama-Dharma
(*) - I notice I’m saying “finally” for a lot of things recently… This statement could’ve been a footnote, but I wanted to hear from you... Who else feels like there’s always more to do/read/watch/play/etc. and when you then [finally] start one thing, from the myriad long lists of things you’d like to do, it feels quite momentous?
📚 Literature
What do the Lord of Light and the Iran Hostage Crisis of ‘79 / the movie Argo have to do with each other?
(Yeah it’s not called the “US hostage crisis” but I wanted it to fit in with the title.)
Lord of Light, winner of the 1968 Hugo Award for Best Novel, is a masterpiece in blending Science Fiction and (High) Fantasy - when technological advancements are so fantastical that they appear magical2. 🤖✨
In fact, the bit of speech I wrote above directly points to this.
There are so many fascinating ideas that make this book worth reading - from Accelerationism to futuristic Hindu/Buddhist dieties3 - but here I want to tell you about how it ties in with a serious bit of modern history.
In the mid-70s, Barry Ira Gellar bought the movie rights to Lord of Light and wrote a complete screenplay based on it. His plan was to use the movie sets as permanent structures for a SF-themed park in Colorado called Science Fiction Land. This project included many notable people such as John Chambers, Ray Bradbury, Buckminster Fuller and the legendary Jack Kirby, who created the illustrations for all the characters, the locations and an overall visual world for the film. Unfortunately the project was abandoned after all kinds of legal tangles and charges of fraud and embezzlement.
In 1979 when some Iranian activists bastards stormed the US embassy in Tehran and took the staff hostage (lasting 444 days), six of them escaped to the home of the Canadian ambassador. When CIA agent Tony Mendez contacted John Chambers to identify a movie script they could use as cover (positioning themselves as location scouts), Chambers directed him to a project he’d worked on earlier - Lord of Light!4
🕳 Not-so-random* Rabbit Hole
How a Cheater and the State of New Jersey Got US Gambling Where It Is Today
The story of modern gambling laws begins with two famous athletes.
First is Pete Rose, one of the greatest and most controversial baseball players in history. A Major League Baseball superstar from 1963 to 1986, he remains the most prolific hitter ever in the sport, with a record 4,256 hits to his name.
He was also a gambler, and a deeply unethical one at that. Rose bet on his own teams, leading the MLB to ban him for life and bar him from the Hall of Fame. The scandal, which broke in 1989 and dominated headlines, set the stage for a crackdown on sports gambling by highlighting the notion that mixing sports and betting can lead to corruption. Another athlete, as it happens, led the crackdown.
That was Bill Bradley, a former New York Knicks player who used his influence after retiring in 1977 to win a United States Senate seat in New Jersey. Bradley would go on to become the driving force behind the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992 (PASPA), which banned sports gambling in the US.5
With the backing of major pro sports leagues and the NCAA – and Bradley publicly charging games could be tainted by shady money and Tony Soprano types – PASPA received overwhelming support, passing the Senate in an 88-5 vote. “It was very non-controversial,” then-US Rep. Tom McMillen, another former NBA player, told ESPN. “It was right in the Pete Rose aftermath.”
Because of PASPA, legal sports betting in the US was confined to only a handful of places that were exempt from the law: sports lotteries in Oregon, Delaware, Montana and licensed sportsbooks in Nevada. Until 2018, that is.
Ironically, it was the state that Bradley once represented, New Jersey, that challenged PASPA in court. State officials pressed for the right to legalize sports betting at casinos and racetracks and the case ultimately made its way to the US Supreme Court, which struck down PASPA in a May 2018 ruling. That paved the way for individual US states to legalize and regulate sports gambling.
* It’s not so random as I work in the gaming (i.e. gambling) industry and looked for this article I’d read (in The Daily Upside) about two years ago, when the topic of how strange it is that gambling was illegal in America (“land of the free”6 lol) came up yet again.
😈 Devil’s Word of the Week
Buddhism, n. – A preposterous form of religious error perversely preferred by about three-fourths of the human race. According to the Rev. Dr. Stebbins it is infinitely superior to the religion which he has the honor to expound. Therefore it is.
As always, let me know what you found interesting today, or other things you’d like me to write about.
Till next week!
Prince 🦊
If this wasn’t your cup of tea but know a friend who likes this kind of, erm, tea, please consider sharing :)
England gets a bad rep - most of Europe is shit right now
Arthur C. Clarke’s third law: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
The clear inspiration for Neil Gaiman’s American Gods
Why that dumb Affleck movie doesn’t mention any of this is beyond me.
NOT including horse racing, presumably due to the pari-mutuel (pool) betting system whereby the ‘house’ takes a fixed % and so has no reason to try and influence the outcome.
great minds… major lolz
