Southernfried appears in SC university lecture!

I managed to sneak a SF reference into my lecture for Death & Dying on Thursday. The topic was on the philosophy of "virtual death," an interpretation of death that is strongly influenced by the permeation of technology that distances human beings from each other.

Here's the transcript, since I use very detailed lecture notes it ended up being almost verbatim:

"Okay, off the philosophical high horse. Let me tell you a story: I have a friend named Brent Burke. He and I, along with a couple of other friends, run a small website/message board community, where friend scattered across the country can meet, check in, and keep in touch. On this website, we run them months sometimes, like 'Rap Music Appreciation Month' or 'Video Game Month,' etc. One month, another site moderator and I decided to run 'Brent Burke Memorial Month,' known unofficially to us as 'Brent Burke is Dead Month,' although we never officially named it that. All throughout the month, we were going to run an appreciation of Brent and his life, while never discussing the point that he died. It was instead a memorial; we'd post up pictures of Brent, poems about his life, old writings or artwork that he had uploaded or added to the internet. Whenever someone would post, 'Hey guys, Brent's not dead, I saw him in the mall,' we'd treat it like an 'Elvis sighting.' When Brent would eventually catch wind of what we were doing and post, the plan was to jump on him as 'an imposter,' trying to make fun of a very serious undertaking, pardon the pun.
The one thing that stopped us from going through with this was, 'What if Brent really died during this?' We technically already virtually killed him; people would have posted their denials, their memorials, their copings. Had he truly passed away while this was going on, what would have happened? What confusion would have ensued? People would have already mourned the passing of someone who then would have passed away for real. Put yourself in those shoes for just a second.
Kastenbaum makes a profound statement: 'The more we become accustomed to remote interactions, the less our senses and feelings are guided by the breath and presence of real people, who really live and can truly die.'"

Congratulations Southernfried, you're famous ... well, for a day anyway.

(Incidentally, I'm going to be posting more often in the next few weeks. I'm almost out from behind the 8-ball at work, and I've got a huge backlog of online projects that I want to get to.)