Here’s another little snippet, this time from Telegraph Expat, on how privacy is being chopped off and fed to the big terror-eating monster. You know, there’s a wager being bet on right now, and it’s this: that the biggest threat to freedom today isn’t, oh, the governments who are legislating immense powers for themselves, but some guys far away who hide in caves when the American military comes half-heartedly looking for them. What you think about that wager has everything to do with what you think is the more immediate threat, but that’s unfortunate. After all, if you think of …
Month: October 2006
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Well, I got a chair from these guys and it turned out to be a great investment. You can glomp around on their website and see the way it works, but basically, it adjusts to your pelvis, and lets your pelvic bones adjust so that there’s less pressure on the area. It’s not only turned out to be good for the lower body, but also for the back… my posture’s a little better, and my back is loosening up, despite my still spending somewhat too much time in the chair. Worth it, if you’re spending a lot of time writing. …
Currently Reading…
I forgot to mention, I’m taking a little break from Jared Diamond’s The Third Chimpanzee… great book, but sometimes I stop in the middle of such books to process. In the meantime, I’ve been tearing through Bruce Sterling’s Visionary In Residence (and catching up on the bits of Crystal Express I hadn’t read until now), and I also had a go at some of the early stories in Rudy Rucker’s collection Gnarl!. I have a couple of stories left unread in Ted Chiang’s Stories of Your Life, though I look forward to getting back to that book, and tonight, I …
Okay, okay, I’m a bad person…
Yesterday, I didn’t just get T-shirts. I also got two Chuseok presents, one from Lime and one from the University. (The one from Lime was a set of high-capacity rechargeable batteries for my camera, which is a great present and which I’m charging up at the moment.) The present from the University is the one that made me think of myself as a bad person. You see, it was a gift-pack of Bertolli Olive Oil, with three bottles of the stuff — two bottles of “Original”, and one bottle of “Gentile”. Now, in Korea these days, people are thinking about …
Write about what scares you…
I just replied to an email from a classmate from this past summer. Where he lives, the ecology is having a hell of a shock, it’s just drying up — the main river system in his country is drying up — and people still go out and hose down their driveways and farmers are irrigating, and no more rains this year, and forest fires like mad. And my scattered advice was, as it turned out, to write about it. I don’t know if I believe, not just how much, but also whether I believe it at all, this idea that …