Good day all,
----- Original Message ----- From: "Sally Manton" smanton@hotmail.com To: blakes7@lists.lysator.liu.se Sent: Saturday, December 01, 2001 10:56 AM Subject: Re: [B7L] beachwear
Walter wrote: <Okay, beachwear for our heros and favourite villains, I can't resist.>
;-) You know, of course, we can't assume that in their day and age they
wear
anything *at all* to swim in (we can about sleeping, Dayna says something
to
the effect).
The more interesting question for those with bored, devious minds, >;-), given the state of the art in gravity control and life support we see in the series, let alone what you simply need merely to survive in space, is why any body actually bothers to wear clothes aboard a ship under way. One would only bother to wear clothing down to those horrible nasty places like planets where there are things like weather to worry about.
Maybe that's *why* Avon doesn't go in for watersports.
Speaking of which, what sort of watersports are there for people are
living
spartan and very dull lives in Domes? If there are public baths, I doubt that they're more than basic, and going to the beach on Bank Holidays is hardly an realistic idea if [a] going out anywhere is an offence and [b] holidays per se are probably an offence as well :-)
No doubt the elite levels of the Federation's Alphas had thier own strictly policed leisure areas, which no doubt included the facilities for water sports, either outdoors or indoors, if you take as a given that they would find water as fun to play in as we do now. The Federations control over the masses of Earth smacks to me more of political repression, rather than any real enviromental concern, though it is hinted that Earth's environment had been severely damaged in the past, and may have been the original reason for the constuction of the domes in the first place. So for those plebs with the interest or the talent, sport swimming in various forms would probably have been available as privilege in the manner of the old Soviet system, and trips to the leisure planets held out as rewards to those particularly worthy or just wealthy. By comparison, the ant like citizens of the endomed Earth and Trantor in Issac Asimov's Robots and Foundation books tended to freak out at the mere sight of sky, something that I doubt the Federation would have wanted to encourage. What is the point of exporting people as forced colonists if they are unable to cope and die as soon as they get there? I can see the Federation being prepared to terrorise people into thinking that forced emmigration is terrible, so obey the rules, but not so terrible that people would rather die ( or worse, kill ) to avoid it.
On another hand, like the Soviets and the Nazis of our world, the Federation would likely use sporting events to help build loyalty for the various dome cities and I suppose that a couple of scantily clad, muscular athletes splashing up and down a pool would help fill the hours on the Tri-V.
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Catch you later,
Walter Minne