Just beyond the edge of the usual

 kw: book reviews, science fiction, short stories, ekumen series, space travel, anthologies, collections

I read some of the stories collected in The Birthday of the World and Other Stories, by Ursula K. Le Guin, when they were first published in the middle 1990's. It was a rare pleasure to re-read them, and to get to know their companion pieces, with the perspective offered by thirty years of personal experience and the dramatic social and political changes that have occurred in that time. These stories represent Ms Le Guin twenty years into her prolific career. This collection was published in 2003.

Seven of the stories (maybe only six, by her assessment in the Preface) take place in her speculative universe, the Ekumen, in which all "alien" races are descended from the Hainish on the planet Hain, from which numerous planetary societies have been founded. Sufficient time has passed that quite different, even extreme, societal and physiological variations have arisen. This affords the author a way to explore societal evolution among beings that are at least quasi-human. It removes the difficulty of dealing with totally alien species.

The story I remember best is the opening piece, "Coming of Age in Karhide." Although the Ekumen is mentioned and a few Hainish dwell on the planet, the story focuses on the experiences of a young person approaching "first kemmer", a span of a few days or weeks in which the sexless body transforms into either a male or female body, the newly-sexed man or woman has promiscuous sex in the kemmerhouse, and may become a parent; it can take a few kemmers (which I translate internally as "coming into heat" the way cats, dogs and most animals do) for a female to become pregnant the first time. During each kemmer, a man may remain a man or change to a woman, and vice versa.

The author passed away in 2018, just as "trans ideology" was garnering political power, primarily in "blue" states. I wonder what she thought of it. Thankfully, the ideology is fracturing and I hope it will soon be consigned to the dustbin of history. At present, roughly a quarter of American adults appear to genuinely believe that complete transition is possible. It isn't, "sex reassignment" is cosmetic only. It is only for the rich, of course; transition hormones cost thousands, and the full suite of surgeries costs around a million dollars. The amount of genetic engineering needed to produce a quasi-human with sex-changing "kemmer", should any society be foolish enough to attempt it, would cost trillions.

Other stories in Birthday explore other sexual variations, and the societal mores that must accompany them. These are interesting as exploratory projects. They were written shortly after the death of Christine Jorgensen. Ms Jorgensen was the first American man (but not the first worldwide) to undergo complete sexual reassignment surgery, in the early 1950's. Subjects such as the surgical transformation of the penis into the lining of a manufactured vagina, without disrupting blood vessels and nerves, were actually published in formerly staid newspapers! 

To my mind, in America at least, Ms Jorgensen is the only "transitioner" to whom I accord female pronouns. She transitioned as completely as medical science of the time allowed (and very little progress has been made since). She became an actress and an activist for transsexual rights (she later preferred the term "transgender". I think she learned a thing or two). She even planned to marry a man, but was legally blocked. She intended to enjoy sex as a woman would. Maybe she did.

The last piece in the volume, "Paradises Lost", takes place on a generation spaceship. Population 4,000, strictly regulated to match the supplies sent on a journey that was intended to require more than 200 years. The religious politics that threaten to derail the enterprise don't interest me much. Of much more interest: the mindset of residents in the fifth generation after launch, after all the "Zeroes" and "Ones" have passed away, expecting the sixth generation to be the one to set foot on the new planet; and the way the "Fives" react to their experiences on that planet after an early arrival (sorry for the spoiler).

We are only in part a product of our ancestors' genetics. Much more, we are a product of the environment in which we grew up—which is only in part a product of our ancestors—, in which we had those formative experiences that hone our personalities. While all the stories in this volume explore these issues, "Paradises Lost" does so most keenly.

The work of Ursula K. Le Guin stands as a monument to speculative thinking in areas that few authors of her early years could carry off.

How to not be seen

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, science, optics, visibility, invisibility

In a video you may have seen (watch it here before continuing; spoiler below),

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…titled "Selective Attention Test", you are asked to keep careful watch on certain people throwing basketballs.

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…Several seconds in, someone wearing a gorilla suit walks into the middle of the action, turns to the camera, beats its chest, then walks back out of the scene. When this is shown to people who've never heard of it, about half report seeing the "gorilla", and half didn't see it. 

This is called Inattentional Blindness. It is used by stage magicians, whose actions and talk in the early part of a performance direct the audience's attention away from what is happening right in front of them. A magician can't be content with misdirecting half of the audience; the goal is 100%. This is often achieved!

But what if someone wants to vanish from plain sight, without benefit of a flash of fire or smoke (the usual prop for a vanishing act)? Optical science researcher Gregory J. Gbur might have something to say about that in his book Invisibility: The History and Science of How Not to be Seen.

Much of the history Dr. Gbur draws upon is found in science fiction. It seems that every scientific discovery about optics and related fields was fodder for science fiction writers to imagine how someone could be made invisible. This cover image from a February 1921 issue of Science and Invention (edited and mostly written by Hugo Gernsback, later to write lots of science fiction and edit Amazing Stories) shows the rays from something similar to an X-ray machine making part of this woman invisible.

I looked for this cover image online and found an archive of S&I issues. However, the issues were apparently produced with various covers for different regions, and the version in the archive had a cover touting a different application of X-rays. However, the article on page 1074, referred to in the cover shown above, does discuss whether X-rays or something like them can be used to provide invisibility, and also shows another way that structures inside the body may be seen.

Here the "transparascope" makes certain tissues transparent, allowing the viewing of others. IRL, the development of CT scanning and MRI scanning, fifty-odd years later, were required to achieve such views. The invisibility beam of the cover image has so far proved elusive.

Invisibility sits in the broader realm of "how not to be seen." The book shows in detail that the technologies that have been developed to hide or cloak objects can only work perfectly over very narrow ranges of light wavelength (and by analogy, waves in water and other media), and usually a narrow range of viewing angle. Is perfection needed? That depends…

In the late 1960's I worked for a defense contracting company, mainly as an optical technician. I was loaned to a related project as an experimental subject. The team was gathering data on the limits of human vision, detecting the contrast between a lighted object in the sky (an aircraft) and the sky. This was the Vietnam War era. 

The experimental setup was a room with one wall covered with a screen on which versions of "sky blue" were projected. At the center was a hole and various targets were set in this hole. They simulated the look of a dark or darkish object in the sky, and each target had several lighted spots, little lamps. The lamps' color and brightness could be adjusted. I was instructed to tell what I could see. The first day I was there, the background target was black, and the lamps were small and bright. The targets had differing numbers of lamps and their brightness would be adjusted to reduce the visibility of the overall target. This tested acuteness of vision; how many lamps on a certain size target would "fuzz together" and seem to illuminate its entire area? 

For most people, the "fuzz" angle is 1/60th of a degree. When you look up at a Boeing 737 at 30,000 ft elevation, its length of about 130 feet means it subtends and angle of about 1/4 degree. It would take two rows of 25 lamps along the fuselage, and at least 10 lamps, or 10 pairs of lamps, along each wing, to counter-illuminate it and reduce its visibility. That's a lot. A B-52 bomber is 20 feet longer and its engines are huge, like misplaced chucks of fuselage.

On another day, the target's background color was a blue color somewhat darker than the "sky". The target had the optimum size and spacing of lamps to seem of more-or-less uniform brightness, and the brightness and color of the lamps were varied. This tested our color acuity; how far could the colorimetry of the target-lamp combination vary to remain invisible or minimally visible?

This image simulates the second kind of target-lamp combination If you look at this image from a sufficient distance, the simulated target will nearly disappear, or for you it may vanish completely. This works best if you either take off your glasses or look through reading lenses, to defocus the image.

The average color and brightness of the simulated target are a close match to the surrounding sky-blue color. Thus, if an aircraft's belly is painted a medium blue, and a sufficient number of lamps are mounted on it and controlled by an upward-looking system, it can seem to vanish against the sky as long as it is high enough that the angular distances between the lamps is smaller than the circle of confusion (1/60th degree) of the eyes of an observer below.

This set of letter-targets is similar to a different test. Each letter has a little different color and brightness than the "sky". The 5 letters here make up the word "ROAST", but are not in order. For this test the sky color would be adjusted to see which letters were least and most visible. In both panels you will probably see three or four letters, but one or two that are not seen in one panel will be seen in the other.

In the end, it was all for nought. The sky is too variable, and human vision is also variable. There are three kinds of color blindness, and six kinds of "anomalous color vision"; any of these renders visible a target that "normal" eyes cannot see. It's kind of the opposite of those color-blindness tests with pastel "bubbles" that show the letter K to "normies" but the letter G to most color blind people. Also, wearing polarized glasses changes the perceived color of the sky, and tilting your head makes a dramatic difference in the color. Anyone with shades on would see the aircraft easily.

A further drawback of these tests was that no Asians' eyes were tested. In my regular job at the time, we were developing an infrared light source that Asians could not see. The near-infrared lamps used for night vision goggles and SniperScopes were invisible to Anglos, but quite visible to the Vietnamese. Several American snipers lost their lives when they turned on their SniperScope and a bullet came back instantly. What eventually worked was not a different light source but hypersensitive image amplification, the "starlight scope".

My wife is Asian. Certain items that look green to me she tells me are blue. Away from the green-blue boundary, she and I agree on the colors of objects.

The later chapters of Invisibility describe experiments and simulations that could lead to effective cloaking. There is even an appendix that shows a home tinkerer how to make a couple of kinds of visual cloaks that work in at least one direction. Full-surround cloaking is still out of reach, but who knows?

This book earns my "fun book of the year" award. Well written and very informative.

Nails in the coffin of dark energy?

 kw: science, cosmology, dark energy, supernovae, supernovas, type ia supernova, metallicity

INTRODUCTION

The ΛCDM model of the Universe was proposed after two research groups (led by Adam G. Reiss and Saul Perlmutter) studied certain supernovae. "Λ" (Greek lambda) refers to the cosmological constant, first proposed by Einstein, that describes the expansion of spacetime. The research teams concluded that spacetime was not just expanding, but expanding at an increasing rate. This is called "cosmic acceleration." Their key observation was that distant Type Ia supernovae are fainter than expected. This soon led to the hypothesis that 75% of the energy content of the Universe is "dark energy", which is driving and accelerating the expansion.

When I first read about "dark energy" more than 25 years ago I thought, "How can they be sure that these supernovae are truly 'standard candles' over the full range of ages represented, more than ten billion years?" I soon considered, "Is the brightness of a Type Ia supernova affected by the metallicity of the exploding star?" and "Is it worth positing a huge increase in the energy of the Universe?" From that day until now I have considered dark energy to be the second-silliest hypothesis in cosmology (I may deal with the silliest one on another occasion).

On December 10, 2025, an article appeared that has me very excited: "99.9999999% Certainty: Astronomers Confirm a Discovery with Far-Reaching Consequences for the Universe’s Fate", written by Arezki Amiri. In the article, this figure demonstrates that I was on the right track. The caption reads, "Correlation between SN Ia Hubble residuals and host-galaxy population age using updated age measurements. Both the low-redshift R19 sample and the broader G11 sample show a consistent trend: older hosts produce brighter SNe Ia after standardization, confirming the universality of the age bias. Credit: Chung et al. 2025"

It reveals a correlation between the brightness of a Type Ia supernova and the age of its host galaxy. Galactic age is related to the average metallicity of the stars that make it up. Thus, more distant Type Ia supernovae can be expected to be fainter than closer ones, because more distant galaxies are seen when they were younger, and consequently had lower metallicity. This all requires a bit of explanation.

WHAT IS METALLICITY?

Eighty percent of the naturally-occurring chemical elements are metals. That means they conduct electricity. Astronomers, for convenience, call all elements other than hydrogen (H) and helium (He) "metals". The very early Universe consisted almost entirely of H and He, with a tiny bit of lithium (Li), element #3, the lightest metal. The first stars to form were not like any of the stars we see in our sky. They were composed of 3/4 hydrogen by weight, and 1/4 helium. The spectral emission lines of H and He are sparse and not strong. Thus, the primary way for such a star to shine is almost strictly thermal radiation from a "surface" that has low emissivity.

[Insert Fig2 and add a caption] By contrast, a star like the Sun, which contains 1.39% "metals", has many, many spectral lines emitted by these elements, even as the same elements in the outer photosphere absorb the same wavelengths. On balance, this increases the effective emissivity of the Sun's "surface" and allows it to radiate light more efficiently. The figure below shows the spectra of several stars. Note in particular the lower three spectra. These are metal-poor stars, and few elemental absorption lines are visible (The M4.5 star's spectrum shows mainly molecular absorption lines and bands). However, even such metal-poor stars, with less than 1/10th or 1/100th as much metals content as the Sun, are very metal-rich compared to the very first stars, which were metal-free.

Spectra of stars of different spectral types. The Sun is a G2 star, with a spectrum similar to the line labeled "G0".

One consequence of this is that a metal-poor star of the same size and temperature as the Sun isn't as bright. It produces less energy. Another consequence, for the first stars, is that they had to be very massive, more than 50-100 times as massive as the Sun, because it was difficult for smaller gas clouds to shed radiant heat and collapse into stars. Such primordial supergiant stars burned out fast and either exploded as supernovae of Type II or collapsed directly into black holes.

THE TWO MAIN TYPES OF SUPERNOVAE

1) Type I, little or no H in the spectrum

A star similar to the Sun cannot become a supernova. It fuses hydrogen into helium until about half of its hydrogen is gone. Then its core shrinks and heats up until helium begins to fuse to carbon. While doing so, it grows to be a red giant and gradually sheds the remaining hydrogen as "red giant stellar wind". When the helium runs out, the fusion engine shuts off and the star shrinks to a white dwarf composed mainly of carbon, a sphere about 1% of the star's original size, containing about half the original mass. For an isolated star like the Sun, that is that.

However, most stars have one or more co-orbital companion stars. For any pair of co-orbiting stars, at some point the heavier star becomes a red giant and then a white dwarf. If the orbit is close enough some of the material shed by the red giant will be added to the companion star, which will increase its mass and shorten its life. When it becomes a red giant in turn, its red giant stellar wind will add material to the white dwarf. The figure shows what this might look like.

White dwarfs are very dense, but are prevented from collapsing further by electron degeneracy pressure. This pressure is capable of resisting collapse for a white dwarf with less than 1.44 solar masses (1.44 Ms). That is almost three times as massive a the white dwarf that our Sun is expected to produce in about six billion more years. It takes a much larger star to produce a white dwarf with a mass greater than 1.4 Ms, one that began with about 8 Ms. Such a star can produce more elements before fusion ceases: C fuses to O (oxygen), O fuses to neon (Ne), and so on through Na (sodium) to Mg (magnesium). The white dwarf thus formed will be composed primarily of oxygen, with significant amounts of Ne and Mg. Such a stellar remnant is called an ONeMg white dwarf. Naturally it has more metals present than the original star did when it was formed, but less than a white dwarf formed from a higher-metallicity star.

Now consider a white dwarf with a mass a little greater than 1.4 Ms, with a companion star that is shedding mass, much of which spirals to the white dwarf, as the figure illustrates. When the white dwarf grows to 1.44 Ms, which is called the Chandrasekhar Limit, it will collapse as a powerful Type Ia supernova.

There are two other subtypes, Ib and Ic, that form by different mechanisms. While they are also no-H supernovae, there are differences in their spectra and light curve that distinguish them from Type Ia, so we don't need to consider them further.

2) Type II, strong H in the spectrum

Type II supernovae are important because they provide most of the metals in the Universe. They occur when a star greater than 10 Ms runs out of fusion fuel. It takes a star with 10 Ms to produce elements beyond Mg, from Si (silicon) to Fe (iron). Fe is the heaviest element that can be produced by fusion. These heavy stars experience direct core collapse to a neutron star, with most of the star rebounding from the core as a Type II supernova. During this blast, the extreme environment produces elements heavier than Fe also. (Stars that are much heavier can collapse directly to become a black hole.)

EVOLUTION OF UNIVERSAL METALLICITY

At the time the first stars formed, the Universe was metal-free. It took a few hundred million years for a few generations of supernovae to add newly-formed metals, such that the first galaxies were formed from very-low-metal stars and low metal stars. Even with very-low to low metallicity, smaller stars could form. Since that time, most stars have been Sun-size and smaller, though stars can still form with masses up to about 50 Ms.

Stars of these early generations smaller than about 0.75 Ms are still with us, having a "main sequence lifetime" exceeding 15 million years. I can't get into the topic of the main sequence here. We're going in a different direction.

Stars of the Sun's mass and heavier have progressively shorter lifetimes. Over time, the metallicity of the Universe has steadily increased. That means that the "young" galaxies discussed in the Daily Galaxy article (and the journal article it references) are more distant, were formed at earlier times in the Universe, and thus tend to have lower metallicity.

LOWER METALLICITY MEANS LOWER BRIGHTNESS

This leads directly to my conclusion. A Type Ia supernova erupts when a white dwarf, whatever its composition, exceeds the Chandrasekhar Limit of 1.44 Ms. This has made them attractive as "standard candles" for probing the distant Universe. However, they are not so "standard" as we have been led to believe.

Consider two white dwarfs that have the same mass, say 1.439 Ms, but different compositions. One is composed of C or C+O, with very low amounts of metallic elements. The other has a composition more like stars in the solar neighborhood, with 1% metals or more. As seen with stars, more metals lead to more brightness, for a star of a given mass. Similarly, when these two white dwarfs reach 1.44 Ms and explode, the one with more metals will be brighter than the other.

The final question to be answered: Is this effect sufficient to eliminate all of the faint-early-supernova trend that led to the hypothesis of dark energy in the first place? The headline to the article indicates that the answer is Yes. A resounding yes, with a probability of 99.9999999%. That's seven nines after the decimal. That corresponds to a 6.5-sigma result, where 5 sigma or larger is termed "near certainty".

The article notes that plans are in the works to use a much larger sample of 20,000 supernovae to test this result. I expect it to confirm it. The author also suggests that perhaps Λ is variable and decreasing. My conclusion is that dark energy does not exist at all. Gravity has free reign in the Universe, and is gradually slowing down the expansion that began with the Big Bang (or perhaps Inflation if that actually occurred).

That's my take. No Dark Energy. Not now, not ever.

How top down spelling revision didn't work

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, language, writing, spelling, spelling reform, history

The cover is too good not to show: enough is enuf: our failed attempts to make English eezier to spell by Gabe Henry takes us on a rollicking journey through the stories of numerous persons, societies and clubs that have tried and tried to revise the spelling of English. Just since the founding of the USA, national figures including Benjamin Franklin and Theodore Roosevelt have involved themselves in the pursuit of "logical" spelling. "Simplified spelling" organizations persist to this day.

English is the only language for which spelling bees are held. Nearly all other languages with alphabetic writing are more consistently phonetic. However, I would exempt French from that proviso. I discovered during three years of French classes that the grammar of French verbs is, to quote a Romanian linguist friend, "endless." Putting together all possibilities of conjugation, tense and mood, French has four times as many varieties of verb usage and inflected endings as English does, and then each variety is multiplied by inflections that denote number, person and gender. However, inflections ranging from -ais and -ait to -aient all have the same pronunciation, "-ay" as in "way". Other multi-sonic instances abound. Perhaps French has stalled on its way to being like Chinese, for which the written language is never spoken and the spoken languages aren't written.

But we're talking about English here. The author states several times that there are eight ways of pronouncing "-ough" in English. Long ago a friend loaned me a book, published in 1987, a collection of items from the 1920's and 1930's by Theodor S. Geisel, before he became Dr. Seuss: The Tough Coughs as he Ploughs the Dough. Geisel's essays on English spelling seen from a Romanian perspective (tongue-in-cheek, as usual; he was from Massachusetts, of German origin) dwell on the funnier aspects of our unique written language. The peculiarities of -ough occupy one of the chapters.

Being intrigued by the "8 ways" claim, I compiled this list using words extracted from an online dictionary:

1. "-ow" in Bough (an old word for branch) and Plough (usually spelled "plow" in the US)
2. "-off" in Cough and Trough
3. "-uff" in Enough and Tough and Rough
4. "-oo" in Through and Slough (but see below)
5. "-oh" in Though and Furlough
6. "-aw" in Bought and Sought
7. "-ə" (the schwa) in Thoroughly ("thu-rə-ly")

And…I could not find an eighth pronunciation for it. Maybe someone will know and leave a comment.

"Slough" is actually a pair of words. Firstly, a slough is a watery swamp. Secondly, slough refers to a large amount of something, and in modern American English it is usually spelled "slew", as, "I bought a whole slew of bedsheets at the linens sale." However, "slew" is also the past tense of the verb "slay": "The knight slew the dragon," which is the only way most folks use that word.

Numerous schemes have been proposed over time. Sum peepl hav sujestid leeving out sum letrz and dubling long vowls (e.g., "cute"→"kuut"). A dozen or more attempts at this are mentioned in the book. Others have invented new alphabets, or added letters to the 26 "usual" ones, so that the 44 phonemes could each have a unique representation. An appendix in many dictionaries introduces IPA, the International Phonetic Alphabet (which includes the schwa for the unaccented "uh" sound). Public apathy and pushback have doomed every scheme.

The only top-down change to American spelling that came into general use was carried out by Noah Webster in his Dictionary. He took what we now call the English U out of many words such as color and favor; the Brits still use colour and favour. And he removed the final K from a number of words, including music and public (I think the Brits have mostly followed suit); pulled the second L from traveler and the second G from wagon; and introduced "plow" and other words that didn't quite make it to present-day usage. His later attempts at further simplification didn't "take".

I could go on and on. It's an entertaining pastime to review so many attempts. However, something has happened in the past generation, really two things. Firstly, advertising pushed the inventers of trademark names to simplify them, particularly in the face of regulations that forbade the use of many common words in product brands. Thus, we have "Top Flite" golf balls, "Shop Rite" and "Rite Aid" retailers, and new uses for numbers, such as "Food4Less" for a midwestern market chain and "2-Qt" for a stuffed toy brand. Secondly, the advent of ubiquitous cell phones motivated kids everywhere to develop "txtspk". Single-letter "words" such as R and U plus substituting W for the long O leads to "R U HWM?" Number-words abound: 2 for "to" and "too", 4 for "for", 8 in "GR8", and even 9 in "SN9" ("asinine", for kids who have that word in their working vocabulary). Acronyms multiply: LOL, ROFL (rolling on floor laughing), TTYS (talk to you soon)…a still-growing list. Even though most of us now have smart phones with a full keyboard (but it's tiny), txtspk saves time and now even X-Gen and Boomers (such as me) use it.

Social change works from the bottom up. Top-down just won't hack it. Unless, of course, you are dictator and can force it through, as Mao did when he simplified Chinese writing the year after taking power in 1949. Many of my Chinese friends cannot read traditional Chinese script. Fortunately, Google Lens can handle both, so Chinese-to-Chinese translation is possible!

We have yet to see any major literature moving to txtspk, let alone technical and scientific journals. If that were to happen, the next generation would need Google Lens or an equivalent to read what I am writing now, and all English publications prior.

It will be a while. Meantime, let this book remind us of the many times our forbears dodged the bullet and declined to shed our traditional written language. The legacy firstly of several long-term invasions (Saxon and Norman in particular), and then the rise of the British Empire, and finally in "melting-pot" America, our language is a mash-up of three giant linguistic traditions and a couple of smaller ones, plus borrowings, complete with original spelling if it existed, from dozens or hundreds of languages. Thus, one more thing found primarily in English: the idea of etymology, the knowledge of a word's origin. I haven't checked; do dictionaries for other languages include the etymologies of the words? My wife has several Japanese dictionaries of various sizes; none mentions the source of words except for noting which are non-Japanese because they have to be spelled with a special syllabary called Katakana.

English is unique. Harder to learn than some languages, but not all, it is still the most-spoken language on Earth. It is probably also the most-written, in spite of all the craziness.

MPFC – If you know, you know

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, humor, satire, lampoons, parodies

Well, folks, this is a step up from Kindergarten: Everything I Ever Wanted to Know About ____* I Learned From Monty Python by Brian Cogan, PhD and Jeff Massey, PhD. Hmm. If one ignores the learned asides and references, the visual humor of Monty Python in its various incarnations is Kindergarten all the way. The bottom of the book cover has the footnote, "* History, Art, Poetry, Communism, Philosophy, The Media, Birth, Death, Religion, Literature, Latin, Transvestites, Botany, The French, Class Systems, Mythology, Fish Slapping, and Many More!" Various portions of the book do indeed treat of these items, and many more.

The authors make much of the educational background of the six Python members. No doubt, having been steeped in British culture about as much as one is able to steep, Python was eminently qualified to send-up nearly every aspect thereof. Even the "American Python" Terry Gilliam was a naturalized Brit after 1968.

The book is no parody of Monty Python; that's not possible. It is a series of riffs on their treatment of the various and sundry subjects. I have seen only one of the TV shows from Monty Python's Flying Circus, "Spanish Inquisition". The TV show ran on BBC from late 1969 to the end of 1974 and many episodes were re-run in later years on PBS. I've seen scattered bits that made their way to YouTube, and during the period that I could stomach watching PBS, I saw The Life of Brian and Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The book's authors have apparently binge-watched the entire MPFC corpus several times.

I enjoyed the book. I can't write more than this, so I'll leave it to you, dear reader, to delve into it yourself.