Kabuki is not for everyone. It’s a dark, vaguely SFnal epic about, well, sort of about the intricate connections between crime, empire, sexuality, and power in an imagined Japan which, unlike many inmagined futures, is definitely, clearly, and intelligently linked to real history. It’s dark. Dark, dark, dark. But it’s also beautifully drawn; it’s insightful, and it reminds me in a way of how, in SF, sometimes the technology that is being discussed takes on the status of a character unto itself. In Kabuki, the art is like this: it takes on the status of a character, and in some …
Month: January 2006
Just WEIRD
This is plain weird: The mummified body of a woman who didn’t want to be buried was found in a chair in front of her television set 2 1/2 years after her death, authorities said. She said she was planning to come back.
For Those On the Road A Lot
For those of you forced to be on the road, especially driving, who wish they could spend the time reading, you might find useful the wonderful site of Librivox. LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain, and then we release the audio files back onto the net (podcast and catalog). Our objective is to make all books in the public domain available, for free, in audio format on the internet. We are a totally volunteer, open source, free content, public domain project. It’s a very cool project. I am enjoying it and planning to download a novel …
Healthy Didgeridoo?
Via Alex Halavais, here’s a news report stressing the health benefits of playing the Australian didgeridoo.
The Living Wage on a Dying Planet
Over at TomPaine.com, I was reading through some letters on the subject of “The Dying Wage”, and ran across an interesting one: The problem with the wage ethic article is that when foreign-made goods can be produced with a lower wage then they will not be produced here. We have only three choices: 1. Let the American worker work for the same wages they do in China or India and suffer a similar deprived lifestyle because the imports are cheaper. Real American wages have been declining since 1977. 2. Keep the minimum wage in place, let untaxed cheap imports flood …