So. Someone who shall go unnamed informed me that my key lime pie is not
actually key lime pie — I was using regular limes, but apparently you have to
use actual limes from Key West in order to have Official Key
Lime Pie. Otherwise it’s just a crummy old Lime Pie. (Like my old math
teacher Mr. Holland used to say, “You don’t have a function
anymore… you just have a crummy old relation.”)

Not that I care about this too much — after all, I have bigger key
lime issues. The main problem is that I can never get the pie to jell
properly… basically I always end up with thick key lime soup instead of key
lime pie. It tastes fine, but the presentation leaves something to be desired.

Anyway, I asked Mom, who is a native Floridian, for the real scoop. When
she heard about this, she guffawed. Then she patiently explained that the
reason key lime pie was invented was because, back in the day. the people
who lived on Key West didn’t have much to bake with. “They had chickens,
and limes… and condensed milk for sweetening — and that was about it,” she
said. “Ah,” I replied. “So this nattering about Key West limes is
kind of like talking about gourmet grits.” “Exactly,” she said. “Or like
Niman Ranch pork rinds.”

In other news, I’ve just finished reading (and re-reading)
Snow
Crash, by Neal Stephenson. This is the first cyberpunk book I’ve ever
read that I’ve actually liked.

Actually, M’ris says that some people call Snow Crash
post-cyberpunk. At first I didn’t understand… I mean,
Stephenson has cybernetics, the Net, economic and environmental collapse,
corporate control of everything, drugs, ultra-violence, the Japanese, … you
name it. What’s “post” about it?

But now I think I understand. Most cyberpunk novels are satirizing
us — urban society, suburban society, corporations, and
so on. But Stephenson goes one step further and also satirizes
his fellow cyberpunkers. Take the opening scene with the “Deliverator” —
the ultimate pizza delivery man:

…The Deliverator stands tall, your pie in thirty minutes or you can have it
free, shoot the driver, take his car, file a class-action suit. The Deliverator
has been working this job for six months, a rich and lengthy tenure by his
standards, and has never delivered a pizza in less than twenty-one minutes.

It took me a couple of reads to realize what Stephenson was doing, but after
that I just rolled with it. All that breathless speed and post-apocalyptic
deadly seriousness… applied to pizza delivery. Just fabulous. By the time
the Deliverator gets handed a twenty-minute old pizza at the
end of the first chapter (as I’m sure you could predict) it was just too much.
Stop, Neal! You had me at “shoot the driver”!

It’s all good from there on in, from little jokes (the main bad guy has “Poor
Impulse Control” tattooed on his forehead) to the plot (ancient Sumerian
neurolinguistic hackers!) to the larger stylistic issues, like the
way Stephenson can string
adjectives together and somehow make it work (“Hiro watches the large,
radioactive, spear-throwing killer drug lord ride his motorcycle into
Chinatown.”) I’m a bit jealous of Stephenson — once you decide to satirize
cyberpunk, you are permitted all sorts of stylistic excesses. The only project
that would be more fun would be a “post-postmodern” novel. But would
anyone get the joke?