Spotted on Jonathan Carroll’s blog today: “The secret of life,” said sculptor Henry Moore to poet Donald Hall, “is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for your whole life. And the most important thing is—it must be something you cannot possibly do.” Yes, I quite… Read more →
Author: Mr. McLaren
Things I Have Learned Today
1) The best tool for cutting carpet is actually the “sheepsfoot” serrated blade on a Leatherman Charge xTi. No need to buy a special blade. 2) A quite good tool for getting tackstrip off the floor is actually a decent quality butterknife. The flexibility and thin edge of the blade make it easier to get the blade under the strip… Read more →
Rae’s Open Letter To Harper
And now, from the This-Is-The-Best-Thing-I’ve-Read-All-Week department, an open letter sent by Bob Rae to Stephen Harper. Just let me quote two little bits, which should be enough to get you to go read it. First, from the beginning: I am writing you in my former role as Deficit Poster Boy and Punching Bag. This title was bequeathed to me by… Read more →
It has come
After more than 18 months of contemplation, I have finally broken down and tracked down a copy of the Codex Seraphinianus for myself. The cover surprised me a bit–I was expecting something in dark colours, more like an old school leatherbound Bible, not something that looks like this: The insides, though, are exactly what I was expecting, except that the… Read more →
Aside
I think it’s both funny and sad that there is apparently a need for this not-safe-for-work site that explains the differences between porn world and the real world. And it makes me think of that bit in A Big Boy Did It And Ran Away.
Aside
Despite making a pretty decent living these days, some things still regularly flash me back to my less-well-off upbringing and set me off on a class warrior rant. One of these is conspicuous consumption in the form of ridiculously expensive items which have no intrinsic worth, but are made pricey for no purpose other than to display wealth ostentatiously. Like diamond-studded memory sticks. (Christ, if you’re going to consume conspicuously, buy something that is expensive for a reason, not just made expensive as a way to show off your score, he said with a straight face.)
Aside
What does it say about me that when I read a piece on scientists attempting to create human/animal hybrids in order to harvest stem cells from animal eggs, that my immediate reaction is “Oh noes, they’re going to make the cat girls and some skeevy people will be way too excited about it”?
A Punishing Beverage
You know those people who only read one book at a time? I’m not one of them. At the moment I have two novels (one noir detective, one hard SF) on the go in my reading room, a collection of short stories (“M. R. James by way of Lovecraft”) in the bedroom, two books of poetry and political tract in… Read more →
The Child Of A Full Eclipse
I was not previously aware that Guy Gavriel Kay had “made his mark” as a poet before becoming a novelist. I can perhaps be excused for this, since my awareness of Kay started when I read his first novel (at age 11 or 12). To me, therefore, he’s a novelist, and one that I tend to automatically buy when he… Read more →
I Should Enjoy This While It Lasts, Right?
Sarah’s “big” Christmas present this year was her own iPod Nano, and a little clock/radio/dock that she could use to play it in her room. We had been having a lot of fun listening to songs in the car, taking turns picking songs, and she liked both being able to pick songs, and looking at the “pictures” (i.e. the album… Read more →
Reality Shock
It’s pretty common these days for me to read something and react with “Wow, that’s like something from a science fiction story I read X years ago”. In addition to this being common, I’ve also noticed that X is decreasing. Some examples, just of things I read in the last day or two: Teleportation. OK, admittedly, it’s a very low… Read more →
The Black Cab Sessions
Once again, along comes one of these things where my immediate reaction is “I can’t believe I hadn’t heard of this already.” I’m talking this time about The Black Cab Sessions: musicians record a single track, in a single take, in the back of a black cab, and the results are then webcast to the world. As they put it… Read more →
A few of someone else’s photos
One of the ways that I can lose time on the Internet–one of the myriad, myriad ways–is browsing through the contents of Flickr. Sometimes I just search on strange keywords, or lyrics, or the names of perfomers, just to see what comes up, and spent way more time than I intended flicking through the results. For example, this isn’t what… Read more →
Let Us Talk Of Webcomics: Part 1, Dresden Codak.
I read a fair number of comics–you know the old school printed kind that one buys at speciality stores these days (admittedly some of them can be purchased at the larger bookstores as well, particularly the Asian imports, but most of what I read is speciality shop only). The “direct market” has been in some trouble for a while now,… Read more →
Worth 2000 Words
A recent cleaning and reorganization process resulted in our more-or-less reclaiming the upstairs family room from our daughter. Not that we’ve kicked her out of there, but we’ve removed a bunch of her stuff from the room, making it seem less exclusively hers. A consequence of this is that we had room to add a new chair. So we went… Read more →
