Month: February 2010

Thailand: A Short History (2nd Edition) by David K. Wyatt

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History is not just a procession of Great Men, kings and generals and high priests. We all know this, we insist upon it. Yet it is difficult to tell the story of history without discussing these figures, not only because we know so much more about them than we do about the commoners for so much of history, but also because of the degree to which their decisions, agendas, and problems influenced, shaped, and determined the lives of those around them. When we want to know something of a particular historical period, history becomes a Shakespearean play, complete with clowns, …

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Rilke

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Oops! Wow, I can’t believe I forgot to include the two books of Rilke in translation that I read on my list of books read from 2009. This is a serious omission, since 2009 was the year that I finally really discovered Rilke. If you’re interested in what I have to say about those books, I’ve added my thoughts to the post, and you can click through to see what I had to say. But for here, I’ll just say that I came to Rilke because of a conversation I had recalling a few lines from one of the letters …

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Can’t Get No by Rick Veitch

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Warning: if you’re one of those people who hates spoilers, and you haven’t read this comic, then I don’t know what to tell you. Seek out a spoiler-free review, I guess, or read it. I don’t give away the whole store, but I do discuss the plot somewhat, as I need to do to say anything coherent about this book. This is one of those comics where I could just say, “I’m not sure I understood what this was about,” because I want to avoid the fact that I sort of understood, but had problems with the book, and yet …

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An End to Passwords?

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Yeah, the French government apparently wants to do away with Internet passwords. They’ve teamed up with a bunch of companies. The idea seems to be that you could use a digital certificate instead. Which sounds curiously like a system thought up by people who are scared of and vaguely uncomfortable with the Internet. Hey, wait, that’s exactly how Korean Internet Banking works! (Except with outdated ActiveX controllers which I hope the French government isn’t foolilsh enough to get tied up with.) Mind you, the 공인인증서 — the Korean equivalent of this kind of certificate that is basically a domestic online …

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A Robot Dream

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Last night I dreamed of robots; big, huge, slightly abstract impressionist robots made out of lattices of material; huge, primary-colored lattices of stuff. They were fighting. Laser blasts. Projectiles — more of this primary colored lattice-stuff. They were shouting at one another in weird, digitizal-static voices that sounded like a parody of the voices of human beings. I took cover, but while I was safe from the laser blasts and projectiles, those voices were inescapable. I listened, trying to figure out what they were saying, but it was no use. It soon became apparent that they were exchanging way more …

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