Pity poor Joe, who just wants to work hard enough to support his wife, if he could just talk Clarice into marrying him; not only is Clarice not inclined to hand out even tepid physical favours outside the boundaries of marriage, she's not keen on marrying a man as uncultured as working class Joe [1].
Happily for Joe, there's a scientist who needs a human subject to test his instant education machine and Joe's secretary Flora is the sort of observant woman who would notice an ad such a scientist might place in a paper looking for a volunteer for such a machine. In sort order, Joe has had "culchah" (which seems to be art and art history) poured into his head, enough to impress both Clarice and his weaselly rival.
Everything seems fine and then Joe finds out the effect is strictly temporary and worse, the professor has dismantled the machine so he can have it moved. No knowledge implants for at least a month and now Joe has to figure out a way to stall for time.
I'm pretty sure Joe's scheme is going to blow up in his face big time. Maybe he can gain enough time to learn the stuff for real. Maybe Clarice will forgive him....
Instant education machines used to be a thing in SF. Not sure why they went away.
The high points of this were the pride the professor took in knowing he had managed during animal trials to create a dog who knows "the Einstein theory" and his sadness at realizing there was no longer a dog that understood relativity. Although the conversation between the professor and his assistant as they suddenly wonder if it was a good idea to eject out into the street a guy who just had a million volts run through his brain had its moments.
I wonder if back in 1950 Clarice's cultural ambitions were meant to be seen as hilariously inappropriate for her class.
1: Although Joe's clearly management, I expect he got there the hard way.
Also posted at Dreamwidth, where there are
2012-12-29 04:41 am (UTC)
2012-12-29 04:42 am (UTC)
2012-12-29 05:09 am (UTC)
2012-12-30 12:02 am (UTC)
2012-12-29 05:00 am (UTC)
Still in Lee and Miller's Liaden universe. Which, admittedly, is pretty pulpy. (Not as pulpy as Doyle and MacDonald's, though, which I don't think has them.)
2012-12-29 05:02 am (UTC)
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2012-12-30 04:21 am (UTC)
--Dave
2012-12-30 05:03 am (UTC)
Is RadioArchive.cc a legal source?
2012-12-30 05:08 am (UTC)
2012-12-29 01:03 pm (UTC)
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2012-12-29 06:59 pm (UTC)
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2012-12-30 12:01 am (UTC)
The "I must marry this person so I can have sex with them!" plot device is pretty vestigial now, though it does survive in the surprisingly large field of Amish romance (novels written by women of other Protestant denominations about women of other Protestant denominations meeting and falling in love with Amish men, I should hasten to add---Amish women are strongly discouraged from reading or writing novels of any kind in most Amish groups).
2012-12-30 01:38 am (UTC)
2012-12-31 01:57 am (UTC)
2012-12-29 02:55 pm (UTC)
Was that supposed to be "volts"?
2012-12-29 03:46 pm (UTC)
2012-12-29 10:05 pm (UTC)
Nah, I think that was one of the stock female character traits of the period, lots of generic working or lower-middle class social climbing female characters and wives were prone to wanting to go to The Opera or The Theatre or elsewhere to get some Culture while their poor and much put upon husbands without discernible positive personality traits would grumble and grudgingly go or come up with a way to avoid spending any personal time with their wife rather than continue the deeply homoerotic extra-marital platonic relationships with other men in boring suits that they carried on in public.
Whole legions of sitcoms and newspaper strips were built around the dynamic, but afaik only Hagar The Horrible maintained it to the present day.
2012-12-29 10:15 pm (UTC)
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2012-12-30 01:18 am (UTC)
They were replaced by instantaneous internet access?