I just discovered Tim Minchin:
“Isn’t this enough? Just this world? Just this? Beautiful, complex, wonderfully unfathomable natural world? How does it so fail to hold our attention that we have to diminish it with the invention of cheap manmade myths and monsters? If you’re so into your Shakespeare, lend me your ear: to gild refined gold, to paint the lilly, to throw perfume on the violet, is just fucking silly.”
Or at least not looking too good.
And there’s such a retreat to steampunk (which I despise):
Why are the innovative and rigorously extrapolated visions of the future so thin on the ground and so comprehensively ignored?
I’d put it down to us mistaking Sense of Wonder for Innovation. We used to read SF to get the heady high of a big vision, the “eyeball kick” as Rudy Rucker describes it, of seeing something brain-warpingly different and new for the first time. But today you don’t need to read SF to get a sense of wonder high: you can just browse “New Scientist”. We’re living in the frickin’ 21st century. Killer robot drones are assassinating people in the hills of Afghanistan. Our civilisation has been invaded and conquered by the hive intelligences of multinational corporations, directed by the new aristocracy of the 0.1%. There are space probes in orbit around Saturn and en route to Pluto. Surgeons are carrying out face transplants. I have more computing power and data storage in my office than probably the entire world had in 1980. (Definitely than in 1970.) We’re carrying out this Mind Meld via the internet, and if that isn’t a 1980s cyberpunk vision that’s imploded into the present, warts and all, I don’t know what is.
[…]
We people of the SF-reading ghetto have stumbled blinking into the future, and our dirty little secret is that we don’t much like it. And so we retreat into the comfort zones of brass goggles and zeppelins[…]
That’s why so much modern mainstream literary fiction (from Vonnegut on to DFW, Chabon, Lethem, etc.) is essentially what would have been SF earlier. And no one even blinks. Is it just a phase, and will it fade out as the technological future changes in ways we can’t imagine? Or have we imagined them all?
I got yelled at this morning for not getting out of the way on my bike. Never mind that it was a one-lane construction zone with workers everywhere, speed limit 15 MPH signs, and that I was right on the tail of the car in front of me, when we got to the red light, the guy behind me still rolled down his window to tell me to get out of the way. He was angry, even though I didn’t slow him down for even one second.
Best part? The worst thing he could think to call me was “fucking liberal, go vote for Obama.”
Sad thing is, I’ll probably have to.
Video TK. How do I go about starting a Vimeo channel for this?
Hard to believe you could write for the NYT and write this uncritically without thinking of Judy Miller. Though I guess she’s turned that into a good gig on Fox.
Mr. Brennan, a son of Irish immigrants, is a grizzled 25-year veteran of the C.I.A. […] a top agency official during the brutal interrogations of the Bush administration[…]
“If John Brennan is the last guy in the room with the president, I’m comfortable, because Brennan is a person of genuine moral rectitude,” Mr. Koh said. “It’s as though you had a priest with extremely strong moral values who was suddenly charged with leading a war.”
If you, at some point in your past, had not only known of, but been in charge of, black prisons in remote counties unfettered by any law or moral, torture, rendition (a nice word for kidnapping), and murder, it’s hard for me to credit “genuine moral rectitude.” But then I was always suspicious of that Saul character and late Damascan conversions.
ObXKCD (a meme I’d like to revive). Hover for the punchline.
TIL that if I take a car called a ‘service’ to the airport for a work trip, it’s not fully covered, but if I take a car called a ‘taxi’, it is, even though the ‘taxi’ costs more and is less reliable and it doesn’t say anything like that in the rules.
The price of this lesson? $30.
“If you were a frequent traveler, you’d know this.” Unspoken subtext: you’re not, so eat it.
Yay, work travel, where the employee loans the employer thousands of dollars, interest-free, for months at a time, and has to jump through hoops to get part of it back.
Tagged TIL
ToC 2012, Stage 7, breakaway
Those dogs are tight!
I just finished reading the New Yorker article about The Clock [1].
Serendipity. Someone was just commenting to me about how serendipity was hard to come by these days, since no one goes to the library, or reads newspapers, or looks at microfiche. One could argue that serendipity just hasn’t been around that long. Aside from noting that public libraries and newspapers are at best only a few centuries old (Ben Franklin invented the lending library and the American version of the newspaper), the only thing that’s happened with the demise of newspapers and research libraries, and with the advent of the net is that only the nature of serendipity has changed.
On a Wednesday in late August, I was bored and checked plane fares to CDG on a lark, and saw that I could fly to Paris next Thursday for less than $1k. I emailed dogsitters, my eight bosses, and didn’t book a room until the next Tuesday. I got off the plane in Paris on Friday, stayed as long as I wanted, then booked a train to Venice. I booked a hotel on the train on the way to Venice.
In Venice, I found out that both the Venice Film Festival and the Biennale were going on. I met an Austrian film distributor in Harry’s Bar, who gave me her ticket to the “Ides of March” afterparty because she couldn’t go. I didn’t meet George or Ryan, but I did strike up a conversation with a nice German art curator, who invited me to come see the exhibit she had curated. And, as I got an ice-cream after I got off the last boat back from Lido, the nice ice-cream vendor offered to show me around Venice the next day.
Serendipity.
As we were wandering around the hot Biennale, we stopped to rest shanks mare in the cool room where there were several white couches and a film playing. I am not normally a fan of video art [2], but I ended up sitting for hours watching this mesmerizing spectacle. I don’t like to read about art in advance, and I don’t like to read the plaques – I just want to let the art hit me without someone else’s preconceptions influencing what I see. So, not knowing the first thing about it, it took me minutes to figure out what was going on, and more to realize that I was watching it in “real time.”
Eventually I got up and wandered around the rest of the Biennale, but ended up coming back and watching even more of “The Clock.” It was only much later that I found out that it won awards, and had become famous, and that Venice was one of the first places it was shown.
So, serendipity. Yeah, it’s different than it was. And it’ll be different again when petroleum shortages don’t allow anyone not in the 1% to hop on a plane and go overseas. More like it was before the concept of serendipity was invented. I’ve got this feeling that the net, and a couple hundred RSS feeds keep the serendipity occurrence high, if not as focussed as it was in the past, when we found it in libraries, or newspapers, and not on Boing Boing or Gizmodo, or because someone in the 20% could afford to hop on a plane at a moment’s notice.
[1] Yeah, I run a little behind. I caught up about six months on my month-long trip to Hungover^WHannover. But I’m still only up to March.
[2] In my experience, I find that mostly it’s just shocking for shock’s sake, or if it’s not, it’s boring.
Tom Petty’s “Running Down a Dream” is the perfect pace for a good fast run.
That is all.
The issue here is not class envy but class entrenchment. The fact that they were born rich is irrelevant. They had no choice in the matter. But the fact that they appear to want to give even more to those who already have a great deal while denying much to those who have little is unforgiveable.
Gary Younge, the Guardian, 6 May 2012
Tagged buzzword bingo
- Better cross functional coordination and more effective lateral processes
- Performed with minimal disruption
The telephone and visitors are the work destroyers.
E. Hemingway, as told to G. Plimpton, Spring 1958, the Paris Review
Coyote
Late of an evening, one of the last runs of the summer for the dogs, though not for me. I like summer evenings. Cool, but I’m warm from the day, and old injuries stay old.
Fading light, heading down into the arroyo, no one else to be seen for the entire distance. A coyote stands across the middle of the trail. Milo pulls, not like he would if it was a dog. Hunting; not greeting. The coyote looks at us, steps off the trail. Calm. We run past, without breaking stride. I look back. Coyote is in the middle of the trail, watching us go.
Half an hour later, almost dark, he’s nowhere to be seen. Milo casts, tracking scent.
Mornings are still cool now, but it’s too warm for snow dogs to pull long distances. Next run for Alex will be in the fall. Milo is young, he’ll get to start again sooner.
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