Say what you like about Earth Day — there’s someone I know out there is snarking about it right now, if he even knows about it — but if you ask me, it’s a holiday about celebrating and embracing something that is here, visible, tangible, and unarguably real. People survived and thrived for hundreds of thousands of years without holding major festivals for specific deities, without holding big annual parties for imaginary constructions like nation-states. Nation states are all well and good, but the Earth is here, tangible, and absolutely necessary for our survival. It’s as close to sacred as …
Month: April 2009
Found! Daily Pillbox
A while ago when I first started using hypertension meds, I went shopping for a “daily pillbox” — you know, those plastic thingies with a compartment for each day of the week, into which you can put the day’s pills so you don’t forget to take them. I searched for the damned thing, but the three or four pharmacies I tried all had the same answer: “Nope, never heard of that.” Finally, I just figured it was not something I could buy in Korea, and I’d have to just wait until I got to North America to buy one. (Or, …
Ohrwurm: Capsule
Yeah, Japanese pop music. (“Shibuya-kei,” to be precise. Bsides its association with the district in Tokyo, I have no idea what this refers to…) Most of the songs on the album are a fair bit more ironic than the one below, or, well, maybe I’m mistaking earnestness in a foreign language for an arch tone and ironic sensibility? Anyway, this isn’t the best song on the album, but the only one I found and liked enough to post. This is today’s background music as I work on my most recent installment of my column for Cahoots: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVBUwmq0yz0 Here’s another video, …
Ideas Worth Pushing: Post-Snark Era?
Jetse de Vries linked a recent post by Matt Staggs which hails an idea I really hope catches on: that we don’t need no more snark. I don’t know to what degree I’m guilty of it on my own website–maybe a little more than I imagine, but less than so many websites I’ve seen–but I do know I’ve reached the point where snarkiness for snarkiness’ sake is simply no longer a novelty. It’s a very tired, boring, useless exercise, and, finally, I think what can be said is that it’s become a self-indulgence. A tiresome self-indulgence, and one that gets …
Apex Book of World SF
Lavie Tidhar has done those of us interested in Global SF a favour. Coming this September: The Apex Book of World SF. I’m not yet preordering it since I’m not sure I’ll be using the same shipping company from the US to Korea by that time, but I will be getting that book this fall! (via ShineAnthology’s Blog)