Author Topic: EP278: Written on the Wind  (Read 33485 times)

Wilson Fowlie

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Reply #25 on: February 08, 2011, 09:00:04 PM
I well remember a similar discussion for "The Moment" which somehow didn't strike me as too much of a "we're human and we're the special-est of all" trope -- but strangely, this one did.

It's funny how a story can strike you differently when you're the narrator rather than the listener.

"People commonly use the word 'procrastination' to describe what they do on the Internet. It seems to me too mild to describe what's happening as merely not-doing-work. We don't call it procrastination when someone gets drunk instead of working." - Paul Graham


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Reply #26 on: February 09, 2011, 01:34:33 AM
I well remember a similar discussion for "The Moment" which somehow didn't strike me as too much of a "we're human and we're the special-est of all" trope -- but strangely, this one did.

It's funny how a story can strike you differently when you're the narrator rather than the listener.

Heh. That did cross my mind... as did the fact that I might not even have had those thoughts about this story, were it not for that previous discussion.


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Reply #27 on: February 09, 2011, 02:30:21 PM
I am surprised that i am the first one to mention this but i dont quite see how this is related to Wind from a Dying Star, that story featured humans billions of years into the future that had transformed themselves into energy creatures and was trying to survive in an aging universe, i am struggling to make that work with the message we hear towards the end of this story.



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Reply #28 on: February 09, 2011, 02:51:01 PM
I am surprised that i am the first one to mention this but i dont quite see how this is related to Wind from a Dying Star, that story featured humans billions of years into the future that had transformed themselves into energy creatures and was trying to survive in an aging universe, i am struggling to make that work with the message we hear towards the end of this story.

I was wondering about that throughout the whole story, to the extent that I think it was out of place in the intro.

My best guess is that the post-humans of Wind From a Dying Star were those who collapsed the universe and sent the message to the newly created universe.  In that one interstellar distances were their biggest obstacle, and as a race the worst crime was to leave someone alone.  That seems to match the style of the message.  Although I'm not sure that those blobby things from that story would refer to themselves as Homo Sapiens as only the old soldier bore any resemblence to our current body configuration and he was old and outdated even at the beginning of that story.  So thinking of that story makes the "Homo Sapiens" in this message stick out even more.




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Reply #29 on: February 09, 2011, 04:43:18 PM
The "Home Sapiens" (why isn't that in my spellchecker?) part of the message didn't bother me at all, and having seen it brought up here multiple times I still don't see the problem.
When conversing with someone who does not speak your language you (should) generally refrain from using slang and other figures of speech since it just adds to the confusion. Someone translating your language would do it literally, and saying something like "raining cats and dogs" would cause much alarm and confusion. Therefore, one should always try to use the correct terminology when discussions cross the language barrier. Thus I only see it fitting that in a final message from Humanity as a species to its progeny they would use the proper scientific term for our species.
True the proper and correct term is Homo Sapiens Sapiens, but that's even more confusing.
Remember that a lot of thought and care went into the message, teaching the language as it went. So to suddenly throw in a nickname, as it were, would totally throw them off.

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Reply #30 on: February 09, 2011, 05:00:32 PM
When conversing with someone who does not speak your language you (should) generally refrain from using slang and other figures of speech since it just adds to the confusion.

My department is approximately 80% Chinese, so I run into this fairly often. When talking about staring at computer screens, I accidentally taught one co-worker the phrase "going cross-eyed". On the other hand, one day I was watching my protein gel run (slightly more interesting than paint drying) and another co-worker told me "a watched pot never boils." So, you never know. :P



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Reply #31 on: February 09, 2011, 05:45:23 PM
The "Home Sapiens" (why isn't that in my spellchecker?) part of the message didn't bother me at all, and having seen it brought up here multiple times I still don't see the problem.
When conversing with someone who does not speak your language you (should) generally refrain from using slang and other figures of speech since it just adds to the confusion. Someone translating your language would do it literally, and saying something like "raining cats and dogs" would cause much alarm and confusion. Therefore, one should always try to use the correct terminology when discussions cross the language barrier. Thus I only see it fitting that in a final message from Humanity as a species to its progeny they would use the proper scientific term for our species.
True the proper and correct term is Homo Sapiens Sapiens, but that's even more confusing.
Remember that a lot of thought and care went into the message, teaching the language as it went. So to suddenly throw in a nickname, as it were, would totally throw them off.

Some reasons why it bothered me (though I can understand if they didn't bother you):

1.  This has been translated into her language, and the term "Homo Sapiens" may not be pronouncable in her language and certainly has 0 meaning.  Using this phrase that is meaningless in the translated message that has no fundamental meaning to them is a way to send a message to the reader about the species' true identity without tipping off the character, which makes it seem much more like authorial intrusion.  I can see the author's hand manipulating the puppets of their manufactured world.  It's hard to  unsee the man behind the curtain.

2.  She doesn't know how to pronounce the words, as they are pictogram based and she has no example to follow or even an idea of the structure of the beings who could pronounce the original language.  When I hear the rest of the words I assume they have been translated from the language the narrator understands to English, to give them similar meaning, but that doesn't really make sense for me if it's a word that is meaningless to them.  The odds of them guessing the sounds from the pictograms that sound like we'd recognize as "homo sapiens" doesn't really make sense to me.

3.  If these are truly the creatures from Wind From a Dying Star, I doubt they'd consider themselves homo sapiens anyway.

3. 



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Reply #32 on: February 09, 2011, 07:52:45 PM
snipped

Some reasons why it bothered me (though I can understand if they didn't bother you):

1.  This has been translated into her language, and the term "Homo Sapiens" may not be pronouncable in her language and certainly has 0 meaning.  Using this phrase that is meaningless in the translated message that has no fundamental meaning to them is a way to send a message to the reader about the species' true identity without tipping off the character, which makes it seem much more like authorial intrusion.  I can see the author's hand manipulating the puppets of their manufactured world.  It's hard to  unsee the man behind the curtain.
This reason I could understand, although I'm not sure if I wholly agree with it.
In my opinion, the man behind the curtain is always there, and you always see him. A story changes based on who is telling it, and catching a glimpse of him can add or subtract from one's enjoyment of the story. Sometimes the curtain is thicker than others, but this shouldn't ruin a story.

2.  She doesn't know how to pronounce the words, as they are pictogram based and she has no example to follow or even an idea of the structure of the beings who could pronounce the original language.  When I hear the rest of the words I assume they have been translated from the language the narrator understands to English, to give them similar meaning, but that doesn't really make sense for me if it's a word that is meaningless to them.  The odds of them guessing the sounds from the pictograms that sound like we'd recognize as "homo sapiens" doesn't really make sense to me.
There could have been a pictorgram for "we who wrote this message". Luulianni translated it into whatever language she understands. So the message wouldn't actually read "Homo Sapiens" but "we who have written this message". The narrator translated it back into a language we understand. But again, the story changes based on who is telling it, and so the narrator, who knows his audience, simply said Homo Sapiens.
In fact, let's take this one step further.
Brace for suspension of disbelief.
Suppose this story exists on every civilized planet. But in each retelling of the story, it is the planet's dominant species who sent the message.
There, don't feel so special now, do you?

3.  If these are truly the creatures from Wind From a Dying Star, I doubt they'd consider themselves homo sapiens anyway.
I actually started listening to EP from episode 239(wow, almost a whole year!), but I will go back and listen to 238. From what I could piece together, no, those beings would not call themselves Homo Sapiens. But you could see number 2 again.
Or, there is no evidence that this story is, well, I would say in the same universe...
There is no evidence that this story is in the same multiverse as Wind From a Dying Star, similar titles and the same author not withstanding.

I went and checked the message again. It reads:
"Greetings from the species once known as Homo Sapiens. You who read this are, in a way, our children..."
So it could have been those same beings.
« Last Edit: February 09, 2011, 08:03:35 PM by Max e^{i pi} »

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Wilson Fowlie

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Reply #33 on: February 09, 2011, 08:44:48 PM
Actually, the Homo Sapiens reference is even more problematic than that: it names our species, but as we use it in English, it doesn't define our species*.  Nor, I would argue, is the term definable, any more than the names "John" or "Mur" are.

Going back and reading the final message, the term Homo Sapiens is the only one I can find that couldn't - at least in theory - be defined in terms of basic concepts that the Language 8 pictures might give.  (Disclaimer: I'm not a linguist, so please add an implied "as far as I can tell" to statements like that.)

The message could have read Greetings from the species once known as Ooma-loompas and still had as much impact to its ultimate readers as any other name.  The name Homo Sapiens is a sop to the story's readers.

(Hmm, now I wonder if the author maybe didn't put that into the story originally, but was made to do so by an editor. Heinlein, Asimov and others told tales of editors making changes to their stories before (or even after!) they would buy them.)



*Actually, it could be argued that the literal translation, "wise man", doesn't define us very well either.

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Reply #34 on: February 09, 2011, 10:10:25 PM
Homo Sapiens is not definable, but, assuming the information given in the primer was sufficient to actually teach the English alphabet, then it could be writable. And the aliens could be taught how to pronounce the letters -we tend to think of sounds as acoustic instructions (i.e., make a "t" by causing a air obstruction in the mouth by touching the tip of the tongue to the alveolar ridge"), and that's clearly not transferrable to an arbitrary alien race whose physiology would not be known at the time of message writing, but there's no reason not to express the letters in acoustic terms (i.e., the syllable "ho" creates sound waves that look roughly like....) - the aliens clearly had the technology to decode that. Of course, they would have needed more resources than would have been available to the heroine whose name I can't spell during the events of the story, but there would have been plenty of time to correct the name between the main story and the epilogue.

However, whether future humans would choose to call the species "homo sapiens" - rather than "human", for example - is a rather different question.



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Reply #35 on: February 09, 2011, 10:25:29 PM
However, whether future humans would choose to call the species "homo sapiens" - rather than "human", for example - is a rather different question.

It seems to me that in the transhuman future, we might see the term "human" come to be used rather loosely. The homo sapiens sapiens are human, but so is homo sapiens machina and homo sapiens irritus. Perhaps the message was specifically intended to evoke humanity's biological origins, rather than all the things we could have refashioned ourselves into?

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tinygaia

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Reply #36 on: February 09, 2011, 11:55:08 PM
I liked this story! I studied to be a linguist before I became a librarian (I earned half the linguistics degree before the university cut the program, and taught ESL at a language school for several years), so I took a little something extra from this story. I saw the eight languages as a sort of Rosetta Stone, made more difficult because the alien linguists were unfamiliar with any of the original languages, something the reader doesn’t fully understand until the message is revealed in the epilogue.

More about linguistics for interested parties:
Homo Sapiens is not definable, but, assuming the information given in the primer was sufficient to actually teach the English alphabet, then it could be writable. And the aliens could be taught how to pronounce the letters -we tend to think of sounds as acoustic instructions (i.e., make a "t" by causing a air obstruction in the mouth by touching the tip of the tongue to the alveolar ridge"), and that's clearly not transferrable to an arbitrary alien race whose physiology would not be known at the time of message writing, but there's no reason not to express the letters in acoustic terms (i.e., the syllable "ho" creates sound waves that look roughly like....) - the aliens clearly had the technology to decode that. Of course, they would have needed more resources than would have been available to the heroine whose name I can't spell during the events of the story, but there would have been plenty of time to correct the name between the main story and the epilogue.
Eytanz is spot on, here. Linguists use the International Phonetic Alphabet to share notes on pronunciation between languages with dissimilar alphabets. If you google it, you'll see that the symbols used to represent sounds are organized by where the sound is made in the mouth or throat and how the sound is voiced. (If you want to see something somewhat creepy, google the Sagittal Head while you're at it, which is often used to display the parts of the mouth and throat relevant to linguistic discussion.)

In my first linguistics class, I learned about the structure of the English language and then applied that structure to other languages. Once you start learning morphemes (the smallest unit of language with meaning), it’s amazing how much you’re able to pick up. (For example, In English, “-ed” is the morpheme for past tense, “s” is the morpheme for plural.) After a few months of learning about various sentence structures, the professor would assign phrases in foreign languages, telling us “That there is the morpheme for present-perfect tense. Translate this phrase,” and I was able to, even though I’d never studied that other language in my life, as were all my classmates. If I was able to do that within my first semester, I have no doubt that an intergalactic team of top linguists would be able to puzzle out Homo Sapiens.



tinygaia

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Reply #37 on: February 09, 2011, 11:57:35 PM
I wanted to add that I had a whole set of those Disney books with tapes as a kid.  :)Love :)



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Reply #38 on: February 10, 2011, 01:46:39 AM
@tinygaia

The thing to remember, though, is that they *don't have* morphemes to work from here.  They're working with the language the way we work with, say, Egyptian or Aztec hieroglyphics.  We can work out the meanings based on the context (here, the pictorial representations) but it's vastly harder to have any idea what possible sounds are represented.  They might be able to work out that "homo sapiens" as a series of symbols refers to "the name of this species," but they wouldn't know that it was "homo sapiens."



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Reply #39 on: February 10, 2011, 03:22:08 PM
Homo Sapiens is not definable, but, assuming the information given in the primer was sufficient to actually teach the English alphabet, then it could be writable. And the aliens could be taught how to pronounce the letters -we tend to think of sounds as acoustic instructions (i.e., make a "t" by causing a air obstruction in the mouth by touching the tip of the tongue to the alveolar ridge"), and that's clearly not transferrable to an arbitrary alien race whose physiology would not be known at the time of message writing, but there's no reason not to express the letters in acoustic terms (i.e., the syllable "ho" creates sound waves that look roughly like....) - the aliens clearly had the technology to decode that. Of course, they would have needed more resources than would have been available to the heroine whose name I can't spell during the events of the story, but there would have been plenty of time to correct the name between the main story and the epilogue.

However, whether future humans would choose to call the species "homo sapiens" - rather than "human", for example - is a rather different question.

Sure, they COULD have made a language that described how sounds were made.  It would be of dubious utility to an unknown kind of species, though, as there'd have to be assumptions about the capability of vocal cords and tongues and etc...  Or there could be descriptions of sound waves, as you say, but again there's lots of assumptions that are being made there--remember the transmission is not an audible transmission, so there's no guarantee that the species who detect it use air compression for communication, so such a language would've been no more useful for decoding "Homo Sapiens" than the language actually described here.

But the language as described didn't give descriptions of the sounds (and again, if it were to be a generally useful message, could not have been dependent on this).  And, I'm pretty sure that Lulianni said specifically that, though the language meaning could be translated, there was no way to create a pronunciation guide.  She imagined that she could imagine how it sounded but this was:
1.  Wishful thinking, probably a part of her feeling so close and fulfilled by her great work.
2.  A segue from the author to allow a literal quotation of the translation.

 



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Reply #40 on: February 10, 2011, 03:30:43 PM
This reason I could understand, although I'm not sure if I wholly agree with it.
In my opinion, the man behind the curtain is always there, and you always see him. A story changes based on who is telling it, and catching a glimpse of him can add or subtract from one's enjoyment of the story. Sometimes the curtain is thicker than others, but this shouldn't ruin a story.

There's always a man behind the curtain, of course, since I know I am choosing to experience an illusion for entertainment.  But while I'm listening to or reading a story, the best stories are the ones that immerse me so well that I never think about the man nor the curtain during the story.  To me, the Homo Sapiens detail was the man throwing aside the curtain and blowing a trumpet. 

Mike Resnick is a very good example of this.  I love some of his stories greatly (like Barnaby in Exile), but am completely indifferent to others (like Bride of Frankenstein).  All of his stories are emotionally manipulative--I mean this in a good way, as a good story makes me feel what the character is feeling to some extent.  The ones that I like are the ones where he effectively conceals himself behind the curtain, and I genuinely feel what the character is feeling.  The ones that I dislike are the ones where I can see the man pulling levers back there, and I can note exactly what I am INTENDED to feel at any given time.  It's sometimes a fine line, and is certainly a very subjective line, different for every person, but to me it is a very very big difference in my enjoyment.

There could have been a pictorgram for "we who wrote this message". Luulianni translated it into whatever language she understands. So the message wouldn't actually read "Homo Sapiens" but "we who have written this message". The narrator translated it back into a language we understand. But again, the story changes based on who is telling it, and so the narrator, who knows his audience, simply said Homo Sapiens.
In fact, let's take this one step further.
Brace for suspension of disbelief.
Suppose this story exists on every civilized planet. But in each retelling of the story, it is the planet's dominant species who sent the message.
There, don't feel so special now, do you?

IMO the ending would have been an order of magnitude better if it HAD said "we who wrote this message" because that is a phrase tied to an actual meaning.  And, as you said, could allow each reader to draw their own conclusion about whether these were humans who sent the message or not, which would have encouraged me to speculate further (which to me is always a good thing).  By using "Homo Sapiens" specifically, the story was forced to be very human-centric, and curtailed any speculations I might have had about whether the past species were human or not.



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Reply #41 on: February 10, 2011, 06:12:30 PM
I enjoyed this story, which I found a bit surprising since I have a very low opinion of "Wind from a Dying Star".

And Mur is incorrect... it's most definitely not "the same universe" as in that story,as is made explicit in the message at the end  :P

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Reply #42 on: February 10, 2011, 08:59:23 PM
And Mur is incorrect... it's most definitely not "the same universe" as in that story,as is made explicit in the message at the end  :P

Maybe she did that deliberately, so we wouldn't see the end coming... ;)

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Reply #43 on: February 11, 2011, 03:33:10 AM
I really enjoyed the level of detail the writer went into when explaining the process Luliani when through to make her discovery.  I also liked the setting and situation of having an interplanetary task force to decode an ancient language.  Overall I did enjoy the story.  But I found the characters and central plot a little on the cliche side.  In reality stubborn, bureaucratic authority figures are most likely doing their job the best way they know how.  They're following the rules.  There are sometimes factors that they have to take into account that the scrappy, young idealist doesn't know about.  Or maybe they're on a power trip.  But when we come across this character type in a story it's a red flag that this person is involved in a criminal enterprise.  I actually found Luliani to be willful and selfish in the beginning, and was secretly pulling for the villain, knowing that I wasn't supposed to. 

I absolutely hated the message.  It's at once too arrogant and too humble.  It was entirely self-serving from the human's point of view.  Why should they remember us?  Why should they forgive us?  We didn't destroy their universe.  It made homo sapiens look like a bunch of winy emo kids.

I'm no physicist, but is is correct to say that we "break" the rules of the universe?  We can study them further and find ways to do things that were once thought impossible, but do we actually break the rules?  Now that I'm writing this it occurs to me that maybe this is supposed to echo Luliani's rule breaking, though with dire consequences.



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Reply #44 on: February 13, 2011, 09:04:32 AM
Hmmmm, was I the only that that felt the story was written with the intent that the Consortium had already deciphered the 8th language, and the entire linguistic department bureaucracy was a make work project - a tool to hold on to power and to ensure no one else figured out the language?  The insistence from the Consortium that the protagonist NOT work on the eighth language even in her spare time gave me that impression from the very beginning.

Working from this premise, I found the plot predictable, from the cliche under utilized & bitter protagonist fighting 'the man' (or primate-like species) right to the end of her 'revealing the big secret' to the universe.

The message at the end had me groaning as well.  The thought that the human race evolves to be so advanced they can collapse a universe and re-create it with rules of physics of their making is so humancentric.  It's like believing the entire universe is revolving around the earth - it's a very limited point of view.

I will say that the details in the story were great.  I was drawn into the story despite the predictability of it, and felt there was enough detail and well thought out back story that showed the author's skill at story telling.  I think the linguistic elements were well thought out.  I do not really willing to dive into that debate, but I can forgive a lot of the linguistic criticisms it has received so far.

in a nutshell - it stood up well as a story, but not one of my favorites for predictability reasons.

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tpi

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Reply #45 on: February 15, 2011, 10:18:33 AM

Alien names bother me. I'm not sure why they have to be so difficult to pronounce,

Why the "difficult to pronounce" names are so bad?
If understand that in audio they present a challenge for the reader, but when you are just reading it for yourself why should you care how a word is pronounced?
« Last Edit: February 15, 2011, 11:03:22 AM by tpi »



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Reply #46 on: February 15, 2011, 04:06:15 PM

Alien names bother me. I'm not sure why they have to be so difficult to pronounce,

Why the "difficult to pronounce" names are so bad?
If understand that in audio they present a challenge for the reader, but when you are just reading it for yourself why should you care how a word is pronounced?

  This never bothers me, but maybe that's because I have to deal with human names on a daily basis that are nearly impossible to pronounce based on how they are written due either to being names from another culture or names possibly arrived at by pulling Scrabble tiles from a bag, and throwing in a few apostrophes for aesthetic value.

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Reply #47 on: February 15, 2011, 05:22:00 PM
This never bothers me, but maybe that's because I have to deal with human names on a daily basis that are nearly impossible to pronounce based on how they are written due either to being names from another culture or names possibly arrived at by pulling Scrabble tiles from a bag, and throwing in a few apostrophes for aesthetic value.

This from a guy with 'ii' at the end of his name.  ;)

(Yes, I know it's Japanese, and heck, I can even pronounce it.  It still struck me as mildly ironic.)

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Reply #48 on: February 15, 2011, 10:39:20 PM

Alien names bother me. I'm not sure why they have to be so difficult to pronounce,

Why the "difficult to pronounce" names are so bad?
If understand that in audio they present a challenge for the reader, but when you are just reading it for yourself why should you care how a word is pronounced?

Not alien names per se, just the ones that shriek 'alien' by being made up of bizarre vowel/consonant arrangements. It bothers me because podcast narrators often trip over them or pause to kind of take a run at them. Sometimes they even change the pronunciation during the reading because the construction suggests a different set of sounds each time they come up against it. The same thing happens when I read for myself; and all of these interrupt the flow of the story. That's why it bothers me. And because the names are generally arbitrary and not underpinned by a developed language (excluding Klingon, which is), and as a communication device (hey look, this is an alien name, chaps!) it feels cheap. Finally, with a bit of thought, it's avoidable; you don't have to do it and you can still flag up the non-human space person thing.

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Reply #49 on: February 16, 2011, 01:18:58 AM

This from a guy with 'ii' at the end of his name.  ;)

(Yes, I know it's Japanese, and heck, I can even pronounce it.  It still struck me as mildly ironic.)

  They were having a 2-for-1 sale on "i"s at the time. I would have been a fool to pass it up.

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