Challenge 700

Rules of Resistance

In Dave Wisker’s “Blood Group”:
1. What are the stone structures that Miri remembers? What is the significance of the blood mark on the doorpost?
2. In one day, Miri acts as both an angel of life and an “angel of death.” Is her behavior inconsistent? Why or why not?
3. Three rules of resistance date from the Nazi era:
  1. Consider every poisonous word a threat.
  2. Hold the threateners accountable.
  3. Never agree that the unacceptable is “normal.”
  Does Miri follow these rules? How might they be applied today?
4. Would a faithful adherent of a different religion have done the same thing as Miri in similar circumstances?
In Sam Buckley’s “Majoring in Semtex”:
1. Who or what operates the Commas, Tetrises and Moneyfishes? Are the machines operated live or by remote control?
2. How do the machines act as an occupation army?
3. Are the balloon weapons implausible? Are they the equivalent of today’s IED’s (improvised explosive devices)?
4. What emotional conflict does Keyte experience?
In Boghos L. Artinian’s “WETE: Wait for Extraterrestrial Echoes”
1. If space aliens were running away from Earth at one-sixth of the speed of light, perhaps understandably, would they bother to try to establish contact?
2. Bird songs and dolphins’ sounds are mentioned as real-life attempts to decipher vocalizations in non-human species. By what means do elephants and giraffes communicate? What beings use “quorum sensing” for communication?
3. The essay is accurate in all its calculations and its hypotheses are, at least, not impossible. And yet it is quite humorous. What does the humor consist of?

Responses welcome!