2008. In many ways a very positive year. In many ways a year I’m glad to see the back of. (I might be even more positive if this weren’t day three of Vacation Days That Are Ruined By The Annoying Head/Throat Cold, and were a blizzard not currently threatening my ability to leave the house tomorrow and my chances of… Read more →
Month: December 2008
The Cold Ruling Class
Some recent research (here’s the researcher, by the way) might shed some light on a lot of what happens both inside modern capitalist societies and between the West and the rest of the world–or at least on how some things are allowed to happen. Not coincidentally, the same light is shed on intra-organizational behaviours, which means this is probably something… Read more →
Way To Go America, Part 2
While I’m at it, here’s a little something Will clued me in to. There are other human rights that the UN is trying to craft declarations of, as part of its continuing efforts to establish some baselines for civilized national behaviours. These are two quotes from what are essentially meeting minutes from a committee meeting wherein 8 such new resolutions… Read more →
Way To Go America
Did you read where earlier this month, as part of the celebration of the anniversary of the U.N.’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, France and the Netherlands sponsored a new non-binding UN declaration extending the rights guaranteed in the UDHR to homosexual and transgender people? Out of the 192 countries in the UN, only 66 signed. This is perhaps… Read more →
Because it’s still on my mind
’nuff said. Read more →
The final meme of 2008
Saw this at Margo Lanagan’s blog, and felt like doing it. Things you’ve already done: bold. Things you want to do: italicise. Things you haven’t done and don’t want to—leave plain. Started your own blog – you are reading it, running strong for more than a couple of years Slept under the stars – in a Roman ruin outside Ouchy… Read more →
Artist & Savvy Businessman
As I write this I’m downloading five new tracks by my oft-mentioned-here pal Danny Michel. It appears that just before Christmas Danny made a deal to get digital rights to his back catalogue back from the label in exchange for giving them the rights to retail physical copies of his new indie CD. At least that’s what I get out… Read more →
Aside
A Pacifica Madagascar Spice candle makes a room smell exactly like I think a Malay opium den would smell. Actually, it doesn’t smell at all like such a place would really smell, but whenever I walk into a room where it’s burning that’s still what pops into my mind–I feel like I’m about to rescue some Victorian adventurer from his own failings. The Pacifica Tibetan Mountain Temple soap, on the other hand, is like a big ol’ block of pure, concentrated, Old Spice.
With A Bit Of History
I had a friend ask me a few days back for recommendations of works of historical fiction by more-or-less modern authors. I happen to be quite ready for this question, since I enjoy knowing things, and I find well-written historical fiction one of the easiest ways to absorb the details of history. Fiction, by definition, is made up, but fiction… Read more →
Merry Christmas
I hope you all have a good holiday, get to spend some time with your loved ones, to look back on the good parts of the year that’s ending, and find yourself filled with pleasant hopes for the one about to unfold. (I’ll go back to cynical and grumpy in a day or two, don’t worry.) Read more →
I’ll call her Slim, if she calls me Steve
I’m not sure who the five most smoldering women in cinema history are, but I’m sure that Bacall in To Have And Have Not is one of them. Read more →
Utterly random points
So, I thought the barbecue sauce guy was weird, but he has possibly been surpassed by the eggbeater bandit. New Walter Jon Williams books are automatic buys in this house (as you know if you’ve been reading for a while), and now he’s not just selling me his books, he’s putting anime on my Ziplist. I may have mentioned that… Read more →
…as long as it catches the mouse
If you look at every one of these [derivative] products, they make sense. But in aggregate, they are bullshit. They are crap. They serve to cheat people. I have to say it: you have to do something about pay in the financial system. People in this field have way too much money. And this is not right. It hurts to… Read more →
Winter Storms
Just got power back after the first outage of this storm. Winter power outages make me unreasonably angry. I think this partly because I lived the first 20-some years of my life somewhere that winter brought a lot more snow and ice than we get here, and it wasn’t just taken for granted that any storm would result in power… Read more →
The natural reward of taking time to do anything well
“Demanding a significant investment of time and energy on the part of the consumer, it [the book] has always fit somewhat awkwardly into the world of mass entertainment.” You know, it seems like every one of these “end of publishing” articles has a couple of nuggets in it. Like Englehart’s noticing that the book is a much less easily consumed… Read more →
