Sunday Night, Not Too Serious

I’m just closing some tabs here as I’m watching the adaptation of Choke. It’s actually a pretty good adaptation. Or maybe it’s just Sam Rockwell and Anjelica Huston carrying it.

Anyway, on to the tabs–nothing too deep tonight:

• I am shocked, shocked I tell you, to hear that Sarah Palin’s daughter and her hockey player fiancee have broken up. I was so sure that it was love, and not political theatre.
• The universe is constantly taunting us with the old “law of unexpected consequences” business–something we find more constantly with computers than almost anything. It’s amusing to have Karl Schroeder point out a pretty awesome unintended consequence of the space elevator idea.
• Someone who knows about my abiding John D. Macdonald fondness, recently pointed me to a very nice piece that the Washington Post did on him quite a while ago.
• When you think about smuggling, and illict cargo, and the bribing of inspectors and customs folk; when you think of massive fraud and the cheating of people around the world; when you think of the kinds of organized crime that particularly plague Italy… do you think of olive oil? While at my local high-end market for European imports–waiting for some stuff to be assembled at the deli–I had a chance to read a print-out of the lengthy, but strangely compelling New Yorker piece on corruption and crime in the olive oil business that the owner had tacked up to the wall. Read it, but plan to spend some time, because it will suck you in.
• You absolutely have to read the post at Pink Tentacles about the monster mummies of Japan. And check out the pictures. It’s crazy. I got this link from Jeff Ford, who is apparently starting the libretto for a Broadway show about the phenomenon.
• I find it more amusing than it probably deserves that Saskatchewan has apparently felt the need to ban boar farming. And to find out that there are more than 2000 feral boars running around out there.
• I have kind of accepted that when I read some SF from the 50s or 60s that some of the ideas that are meant to be shocking would no longer seem so to contemporary folks. Not the sexual mores business, but the social satire in things like The Space Merchants. However, I’m less ready to understand this has already happened in my lifetime. Walter Jon Williams though, on rereading his own book, notes that it really has.
• It’s never a good sign when a manuscript’s first sentence is “’Are luck’s run out,’ said the Princess, ‘there unicorns are to fast!’”
• Using the power of the Internet to understand things at a very local level is really cool. However, surely this is some kind of joke. Right? Right?!?!
• Is it just me, or is it actually anatomically impossible to throw the reverse satan?