{
  "export": {
    "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/505",
    "note": "Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it.  Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.",
    "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'"
  },
  "archive": "urth",
  "thread": {
    "id": 505,
    "subject": "Peace's Nailed Desk",
    "messages": 1,
    "voices": 1,
    "first": "1998-04-22T16:00:00+00:00",
    "last": "1998-04-22T16:00:00+00:00"
  },
  "messages": [
    {
      "message_id": "<urth-v0009-0762@digest.urth.net>",
      "from": {
        "name": "m.driussi",
        "address": "m.driussi at genie.geis.com"
      },
      "date": "1998-04-22T16:00:00+00:00",
      "subject": "(urth) Peace's Nailed Desk",
      "in_reply_to": null,
      "reply_link": null,
      "blocks": [
        {
          "kind": "text",
          "depth": 0,
          "text": "Paul and John,\n\nNot that this means anything (file under \"Free Association\"), but\nthis detail of a desk reminded me  at first reading of a similar\nscene in an early Heinlein novel--I think it was HAVE SPACESUIT, WILL\nTRAVEL.  The boyish hero (Kip?  Tip?  The spacesuit's name was Oscar)\nwakes up after a near-death medical crisis and is comforted by the\nsight of his old room; but then when he tries to get his slipstick\noff the desk, it won't budge (causing some anti-comforting anxiety\nand confusion).  Enter the friendly medical aliens, who explain that\nthey were able to construct the room from a snapshot-like memory in\nhis brain, but they didn't know that the artifacts upon the desk were\nmeant to be separate from the desk.\n\nGranted in hindsight, Heinlein was often toying with eschatological\nand angelic matters; this scene could amount to an \"X-Filization\" of\nsomething from one \"Book of the Dead\" or another.  It certainly rings\ntrue with notion that low level ghosts (those that lack physical\npresence) cannot pick things up.  (Obviously not poltergeists.)\n\n=mantis="
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}