Affable Linky

Some reasons to make your Friday a little bit hyperlinked:
This chart from a 1949 issue of Life magazine explains how you tell apart the High-Brow from the Low-Brow (and Brow levels in between) using everyday tastes.
Whoa. Use a slider to zoom in from a grain of rice to an atom. This gives me vertigo like crazy. Wildly cool.
I’ll quickly do some of my work for the illuminati by spreading some climate change linky: Climate Progress reviews Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade To Deny Global Warming. Great review of what sounds like a fascinating book. The PR activity here is endlessly fascinating. (Also covered at Hot Topic.) A good source for the science of climate change, based on the authorities I trust, is Sceptical Science. And how about the EU offering to cut carbon emissions by 95% over the next 40 years? Conversation is getting sharper out there.
40 seconds of genius at work: Herge draws Tintin and Snowy. The amount of control the man has is glorious to watch, not a single movement of the pen is wasted.

Jon Hodgson knocks out “Fantasy Art For Beginners” from IMPACT! Books. Looks great if you’re an arty sort, or want to be! He posts about it here and here.
Incredible Making Light post looking into deaths at a new-age sweat lodge ceremony – the dodgy guy behind it, his Oprah-boosted profile, the concerns of the Native Americans about their traditions being misused and mishandled… What great investigative journalism looks like when it’s conducted with Google.
Disney Princesses, deconstructed.
Dungeons & Dragons Online is now free to play.
And finally… a 1962 U.S. high school textbook on love, dating, babies and more. Take the time to go through it page by page. It’s by turns shocking, hilarious, and… well, you’ll see.

Urban Driftwood Reviewed


I’ve posted a couple times about Urban Driftwood, the prose/poetry collection with my work in it – when it was published a year ago and when it was released for free download.
I’m mentioning it again because we’ve just had our first review, by Tim Jones, who blogs over at Books in the Trees. Tim’s one of these ghost presences in my life, someone I’ve known of rather than known for way too many years – we share lots of people and interests (writing and climate change, to name two biggies). It’s almost spooky, actually, because NZ is so hyper-networked due to its small size that you almost need to actively avoid someone to not meet them for as long as I’ve not met Tim. (I first saw him across the room at Forrycon, back in 1991, as the fan guest of honour sharing the stage with the venerable and delightful Forrest J Ackerman. Most recently I missed him by not making it to the Writing Speculative Fiction seminar with Jenni and Sally – I’m sure another opportunity will come along soon!)
The review is here. I think its very fair and positive, and does credit to Dan’s efforts to finally get this writing out in front of readers. That’s a great thing. Thanks Tim for the review; thanks Dan for your dogged pursuit of this project for so long!
So, yeah, Urban Driftwood. You can buy it hardcopy on Lulu or FREE DOWNLOAD! via Dan’s website.

That Ol’ Jet Lag

Man, taking a while to get back to normal rhythms here. Lotsa sleeping trouble in this house. Crashing out early or wide awake too late or waking up in middle of night and being stuck that way – all variations on the theme present and correct.
Plus, what feels like a low-level allergic reaction, like all the pollens changed while we were away and my system can’t handle all the new information coming at once.
Not used to this. Idea was to spring back into action at speed. Dear mother said, on seeing me, that I looked younger (and something about bein’ all chubby faced), which I guess means that the “get some rest” goal was achieved, probably for the first time in years. Shouldn’t feel too bad about the slow start then, I guess – all for the greater good.
Anywise. Gonna keep taking it relatively easy this week I guess, try and get myself set right. Yup.
Reading: 100 Years of Solitude. Highly entertaining. Started on last day of honeymoon, only about half-way through. Looking forward to the solitude to start, figure any moment now one of these dudes will get stuck on a desert island with no-one to talk to by his anthropomorphised volleyball! Now that’s what I’m here for, great literature, why you beating around the bush?
Wikipedia says that I can cure my jet lag with viagra. At least, that seems to work for hamsters. Why are hamsters out jetsetting anyway? Some people really spend too much money on their pets, man. Just leave the hamsters at home.

350: Day of Action


Saturday was the global day of action for the 350 movement, which aims to pressure decision-makers at Copenhagen to agree on a limit for atmospheric carbon (350 parts per million – we are currently at around 390).
It was a big day, globally. The front of 350.org is cycling through images from all around the world of citizen-initiated actions, often from places that seem wildly distant to me – three mongolian guys on horseback holding up a banner, for instance. The 350 blog featured a lot of photos with short explanations as they came in from around the world across the day.
Movement originator Bill McKibben guest-blogged over at Climate Progress, pointing out “here’s the thing that impresses us. There wasn’t a rock star or a movie star or a charismatic politician in sight. It was ordinary citizens and scientists coming together around a scientific data point.” (emphasis in original)
350 was a big thing in NZ, and particularly in Wellington. Building on Bill’s local appearance (which I blogged about here) and driven by a group of activist youth who sprung out of the local university environmental group, we had a full day of local events including the event that launched the day globally, a sunrise celebration/demonstration on Brooklyn Hill at the wind turbine (picture above). I made it along to the tail end of the public event, lots of people dancing and signing petitions and generally showing up and being counted. It was pretty neat.
Just around the corner was a big display of cars, all parked up outside our national museum, with a lot of people checking them out. Some motorsport club, clearly. As I walked past them on my way to the 350 events, I couldn’t help thinking that these guys were part of the problem. But I caught myself – because no, really, they’re not. They are the people who need to become allies in working to resolve climate change. The real sign of the opposition that was set against the local events was the stock ticker on the building alongside, remorselessly sliding gains and losses and signifying the restricted valuation system that constrains decision-making around the world. I really wanted the thing to blow a fuse for the day. That woulda been cool.

Nobel Obama

I know everyone and their brother has done this to death but I’ve been away, indulge me.
Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The entire right wing commentariat in the U.S. spat on their pancakes. The reality-based community wasn’t exactly delighted, though.
e.g. my buddy R at Judge & Jury raised his eyebrows at the Nobel committee’s decision to offer the big prize to Obama. He is cynical for the same reasons as a lot of folk: too soon! What has Obama even actually done?
See also this neato cartoon by some guy who drew a cover for a Pearl Jam record
Counterpoint: a worthwhile discussion at the ever-sensible Making Light, with Abi Sutherland noting in the original post that while it does seem early, it will serve as incentive as well as award, and Charlie Stross saying “I think it’s premature unless the incentive thing is taken into account — but it’s not wholly inappropriate…”
Obama accepted (but for “the movement”). GMS was one of many hoping he’d turn it down, but he was given pause by an Andrew Sullivan reader who saw it as an endorsement of optimism in and about the US. Something to that, maybe.
Me? I think it’s cool. I think Obama deserves it about as much as many of the Nobel’s other awardees, which doesn’t say terribly much I know. It makes a lot of sense to me that he receive this award now, when he still embodies the hopes and dreams of progressives and peace-lovers around the world – before he disappoints us all utterly. Which, of course, he will. In a sense, the award is about a moment of change-potential that has arrived – something definitely to be celebrated and honoured. And, at the same time it lays down a narrative of how that potential will be squandered.
I mean, I’m still up with Obama. He’s better than the alternatives, seems clear to me. The way he’s doing foreign policy has changed the international ground incredibly in a very short time, profoundly for the better. I still have big hopes he’s gonna do more good than harm, and will step up to the plate on climate change. But he’s not going be Superman, or even Spider-Man. Foolish to expect it. Maybe the reason everyone’s reacted so badly here is because the award just forces us to acknowledge how much we expects of Obama, and how secretly we all know he isn’t going to live up to those expectations.
But anyway. Gotta give the man some respect. Win a Nobel Peace Prize at the same time as you’re fighting two wars? That takes 18 charisma. No doubt.

[Phuket, Thailand] A Bestiary

(sent out to the morgueatlarge list)
Numerous water buffalo
Two elephants on the hill road
A baby elephant the next day
A hand-sized spider in a web the size of a tablecloth
A critter that looked kinda like a grey squirrel only it had a long
long coloured tail
A small family of rogue pigs (warthogs?) in the backroads of Karon
Lotsa skittery lizards
Two sloths, who have mostly hung out by the pool or on the beach,
sipping juices and cocktails and reading books and generally wondering
how they swung this particular sweet deal
Love,
A Sloth In An Internet Cafe In Phuket Town

I’m Outta Here Linky

Off to Thailand in a couple days hurrah!
SO HAVE SOME LINKY ALREADY OKAY

Amusing graphs on index cards – I’ve seen this before and might have linkied before but a search can’t find it so HERE IT IS FOR THE FIRST TIME OR PERHAPS THE SECOND TIME
A great article about cities, architecture and futurism from the occasionally-genius culture mag io9: A City Is A Battlesuit For Surviving The Future. An article is doing something right when it references the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the city in Warren Ellis/Darick Robertson’sTransmetropolitan, and the extraordinarily sharp urban thinker Jane Jacobs.
Crank.net – the hub for finding out about the weird and wonderful variety of cranks on the internet!
Related: gamer icon Monte Cook talks about his weird experiences writing a mass-market book about conspiracy theories.
Related 2: audio from the NZ Sceptics Conference – “Our Approach To Paranormal Investigation” and other talks.
Beasts of New York – a children’s book for grown-ups
The only existing film images of Anne Frank
My Parents Were Awesome Photos of parents before they were parents. I love this.
And finally… Kill Bill In One Minute In One Take

(more from these guys)

What to read on the beach?

So we’re off to Phuket on Sunday. Need to pack some books to read on the beach. But what? Cal and I combed our shelves for unread tomes, and pulled down a big stack. We need to whittle it down some. But what to choose?
I don’t know that some of these are entirely appropriate for the beach, either. Pooh to that.
Here’s the shortlist, subject to amendments. To help us decide I’m including excerpts from the most negative Amazon reviews!
Madame du Pompadour (Nancy Mitford) – “If Madame De Pompadour was this boring, why did Louis put up with her?” (one star)
The Impressionist (Hari Kunzru) – “I tried very hard to find something redeeming in this book, a reason to continue reading. Finally, I thought I had, but it was only a spider crawling across the page.” (one star)
Catherine de Medici (Leonie Frieda) – “superficial and shallow” (two stars)
A Guide for the Perplexed (Jonathan Levi) – “The tanscendent power of a story” (five stars – there were only three reviews! But I’m eager to get some tanscendent power going on. Awesome.)
To the Lighthouse (Virginia Woolf) – “To the Lighthouse” is a rambling monotony, a lifeless droning. No matter how loudly the literary lemmings scream, that will always be so. (one star)
One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez) – “It make “Tess of the D’Urburvilles” look like a fast-paced romp.” (one star)
Neuromancer (William Gibson) “Absolutely unreadable; I couldn’t force myself farther than 100 pages into this morass.” (one star) (this one’s a re-read, but I haven’t cracked the cover for 15 or 16 years)
The Best of Katherine Mansfield’s Short Stories (Katherine Mansfield) “Reading these stories was a deeply enriching literary experience.” (five stars, clean sweep of the seven customer reviews)
Letter from America 1946-2004 (Alistair Cooke) – “a remarkable collection of essays” (five stars in every review, another clean sweep)
Good News, Bad News (David Wolstencroft) – “The good news is, I finished reading this book. The bad news is, I can’t believe I paid $8 for it.” (one star) (I don’t even know where this book came from, it seems to be a thriller of some kind, but it’s on the shelves and could be the most beach-appropriate book of the lot)
Advice and opinions welcome. Thanks to other advice I’ve already cut Peake’s Titus Groan and Thackeray’s The Virginians from the list. Utter foolishness.

#outrageous

Local TV warhorse Outrageous Fortune ran its season 5 finale last night, and it was a corker. After some traditional end-of-season antics it delivered a change-up in literally the last few seconds, going out on a serious game-changer of a cliffhanger, hands-over-mouth stuff that smartly built on everything we’d seen before. Outstanding work – Outrageous was wheelspinning in the first third of this season but really got moving after that, and this was a great capper.
Interesting too to see #outrageous as a trending topic on Twitter, which means that it was one of the most tweeted-about subjects globally. (It helped that America was asleep.) In Twitters self-devouring world, the moment it showed up in the “trending topics” list it started getting noticed and grabbed up. It continues to trend as I write, now as a general tag for writers to talk about what outrages them. What the heck, it’s another Kiwi contribution to the global pop culture conversation – like those lets-make-a-pop-band shows. Er.
Ahhh, gotta go catch a bus.