Rainbows End and Gravity's Rainbow

I am relieved that other people have also spent ages confusing Rainbows End and Gravity's Rainbow. I think the confusion only went away some time after I read Rainbows End, and began to consistently remember the remarks in it about the lack of apostrophe in the name.

Other things with you will be very very confused if you muddle up include: "Left Behind" and "Blown Away"; "Martin Luther" and "Martin Luther King".

Although honestly, although I understand no adult should be ignorant that the ML and MLK were at least different people, I do not think it unreasonable that a non-american pre-adolescent only knows the names as vague historical figures. That's how most people learn names: they hear them in some other conversation, are young enough not to stop the conversation every time to ask "who", have enough context to guess "in the past" but not enough to guess the century. Obviously many people DO know at least a little about the protest reformation and the civil rights movement in America, but obviously many people unfortunately DON'T. And given that they don't, it's hardly surprising that they may never have had their initial, understandable, woefully wrong, assumption that the names were the same challenged.

There is a vast amount that I would happily say a well-educated person SHOULD know, but honestly, I doubt ANY of my friends, even the most well-rounded, actually do know even half of it. Someone who can integrate might not know anything at all about the ontological argument. Someone who knows nothing at all about the European parliament might be the only person there who can recognise yarrow by sight. Etc.

"Liberals vs Conservatives"

http://www.ireport.com/docs/DOC-341825

I happened to see an old link, from America, but that so enraged me, I had to rant about it immediately.

A sample from the link:

Anyway, if you are liberal [terms used in the American sense], are you offended by the comparison below? Do you see any truth in it?

If a conservative doesn’t like guns, he doesn’t buy one.
If a liberal doesn't like guns, he wants all guns outlawed.
...
If a conservative is homosexual, he quietly leads his life.
If a liberal is homosexual, he demands legislated respect.

I honestly don't understand it. It's supposed to be funny, which means humorously exaggerating people's views. Not just listing them and going "ha ha". You appear to, in general, be attempting to promulgate the argument that "because so-called liberals supposedly want to legislate more things than so-called conservatives, they want to legislate everything AN INFINITE AMOUNT which is stupid stupid stupid"

But then you go and spoil it all by doing something stupid and offensive like picking something that YOU want to ban and so-called liberals DON'T and sticking it in the middle of the list as if it supports your point. What the fuck?

Many intelligent (if in my opinion misguided) people support less gun control and more discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation. But they have the good sense to find some argument which is more convincing than "the things you want to bad are stupid, the things we want to ban are a-ok" or AT LEAST not to list them right next to each other to draw attention to them!

I also particularly hate the way the list is introduced with a superficial veneer of impartiality, "so, so-called liberals, are you offended by this characterisation of you?" Obviously, people accused of a random list of slurs are disproportionately likely to be "offended" by them, but it is in fact possible to see whether there is very much humour in the characterisation. You could ask someone on neither side if they thought it was funny. You could look for characteristic hallmarks of humour, such as wit, or subtlety, or high-level insights presented in ingeniously simple ways, etc. All of which are noticeably lacking.

If you passionately hate so-called liberals, then it serves the purpose of validating your ill-thought-out negative stereotypes by demonstrating that other people naughtily share them. But I think that you can say that it is, objectively, stupid as well as offensive, unfunny to anyone else and boring[1].

[1] OK, OK, maybe cheap humour is sometimes funny and sometimes I do it myself. Possibly in this post. But I still think it's artistically lacking.