Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

29 Aug 2003, 10:20 a.m.

"Make the Heat Wave Pay!"

Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2003 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.

Are you aware that StarTrek.com hosts a Ferengi and a Klingon advice columnist? Klingon concepts of honor and strength, sort of a Worfian view, suit the advice-column format well. The Ferengi stuff is just funny.

The current trend has fictional nonhuman characters dispensing advice. What next? Compulsive meta-ness would demand an advice column that gives advice to advice columnists, and actually the advice-giver is the newspaper itself or "an advice column". Or part of a debate among gubernatorial candidates could be an advice-column-writing contest.