To one and all:
‘Cuz it’s coming.
I’ll avoid the top 10 lists and retrospectives for now and instead leave folks with the one elixer to get us through it:
Combine ingredients in a shaker with ice. Strain into a chilled martini glass. (Discard the ice.) Float the raspberry on top. We call it “the French martini”.
Enjoy ‘06 folks!
As the “Mozilla vs. Apple” debate continues here at F_D, Gruber and a few others in my RSS feeds point out: [tag]Camino[/tag] goes to 1.0 beta 2.
Great.
A Cocoa-based browser with the [tag]Gecko[/tag] engine underneath. Before I know it, I’ll have all 83 browsers loaded up…
It’s been a while since I’ve commented on books that have gone through the eye-hole. And given my recent in-take, I’d say it’s about time to make with the commentary…
[tag]David Foster Wallace[/tag]’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again - - a worthy read on more levels than we have fingers and toes to offer. I’ve been a tremendous fan of Wallace’s fiction (”found drama” duh!) now for about five years and was more or less commanded by a good friend to check out this collection of essays. Several of them floored me. A few others I was “eh” about. His humor shines through in damn near all of these essays and in ways that are both easy to appreciate if you’re literate. “Getting Away from Already Pretty Much Away from It All” (for example) shows us his rare gift of being able to take a group of people and totally illuminate their follies and flaws without going about it in a way that is insulting or degrading; he saves that for his self deprecating remarks re: rich desserts. Then there’s “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” which is probably the first and only time I’ve seen him use footnotes in a way that I “expected”; oh, and this is pretty much required follow-up reading for anyone who just finished Infinite Jest. “Greatly Exaggerated” is a true gem - - a subtle jab at how literature/critical theory is so often so far up its own ass - - and making that jab as only an insider looking in as an outsider can do. But it’s the essay whose title is shared with the collection that makes it all worthwhile.
Huntington’s The [tag]H.G. Wells[/tag] Reader - - got this one as a birthday gift. And what a gift it was. Modern sci-fi owes a lot to Wells. His substance and style (while indicative of his time period) set an important tone for the genre as a whole. His thoughtful prose illuminates how humanity is wrapped up in science and how science can’t escape its legacy of humanity. These excerpts and short stories are brilliant, plain and simple. (Only criticism is on their typesetter - - lines are too long with typefaces too small there, pal!)
[tag]Emmanuel Carrere[/tag]’s biography of [tag]Philip K. Dick[/tag]: I Am Alive And You Are Dead - - a scintillating, fun and yet twisted take on the life, times, and writings of the author that many consider to be the most important name in American sci-fi. Carrere’s take on Dick’s life has a sensitivity born of curiosity and a skepticism born of professional respect. I felt like this biography illuminated the most important events and foci in Dick’s life and (all things considered) explained a lot of his writings’ themes. That said, it’s made me glad to hold Ubik in such high esteem but made me a bit irritated with myself that I had yet to pick up and read The Man In The High Castle.
(Finally?) [tag]William Gibson[/tag]’s latest: Pattern Recognition - - an interesting slant out of his usual sci-fi w/o losing that distinct Gibsonian sci-fi edge. (The future is now?) I just finished this one and it’s definitely going to take some time to wrap my mind around all that happened in between those covers. Maybe a missed a crucial moment or else something subtle slipped by me the first time around. That said, I was amused and intrigued by the Case/Cayce reprisal and the return(?) of the Russians. I have a sneaking suspicion that Gibson shares my sick Cold War nostalgia…Psycho Dave over at kuro5hin.org presents us with the 2005 Asshole of the Year Awards.
The anti-war left [...] I will once again remind all of you that THE SIXTIES ARE OVER. A protest isn’t performance art, so keep the lesbian poets doing odes to their clitoris away from the podium. And if the Che-shirt wearing hippie waving a “Free Saddam” sign doesn’t get the irony of what he’s doing, then I’m not inclined to explain it to them.
There are too many choice bits. I’ll just stick with that one for now.
Via TUAW: James DuBois gets into a quad-core G5 and shares the images with us all.
And while I’m at it… Can I get a “WTF?” for the [tag]TSA[/tag]?
Highlights on my trip down and back…:
And what’s with the additional “TSA tax” on all my airline tickets? Weren’t we paying for security before all this nonsense? I feel safer every day, don’t you?
currently playing: Nitzer Ebb “In Decline”
As promised, the post-holiday personal update…
Our trip to B’more was a shining success. A nice holiday reprieve from the assorted malaise of what constitutes the day-to-day. It was sure nice to be in the same place at the same time for a solid five days for change. (Even if two of those days were spent traveling.)
we ate sushi
impromptu Trueschler 3 reunion
old friends are good as new
WATCH OUT FOR SNAKES!
I tried to stay out of trouble but it didn’t work
Short version? We had a great time. Thanks to the friends and family that put up with us for those couple of days and made us feel at home again down there. Even if the many sirens didn’t.
currently playing: Bernard Leon Howard III feat. 80 “Marscarter (Debo & Porter’s Deported vocal mix)”
Matthew Thomas on how to tell the difference between Web 1.0 and [tag]Web 2.0[/tag]. Good for a chuckle.
I’m in this huge stadium-like space. This gigantic, sodium lamp-lit, Lego-built [tag]American Gladiators[/tag] arena from hell. Each end has teams of people that are forced out into this tremendous playing field that is littered with these obstacles (tightly packed in some places, sparse in others) that appear to be fashioned from Legos the size of of a [tag]Buick[/tag] [tag]LeSabre[/tag]. It’s this elaborate game of capture the flag, a bit on the [tag]Unreal[/tag] side of things with [tag]futuristic[/tag] weapons, body armor, and other, similar accoutrements. I can’t really tell if there’s an audience or a crowd but the walls around us seem to curve upward into infinity and it’s loud-loud-loud. Crowd-noise loud. This competition frightens me out of my wits. In addition to the combat between each other and the obstacles, fucking DINOSAURS are unleashed into this pit. Velociraptors and T-rexes and dromiceiomimuses rampaging through those Lego-like snap-together obstacles of American sedan proportions. Narrowly, I escape getting eaten. Once in a while I manage to save myself by burning a descending reptile with my plasma gun. But ammo gets more and more scarce and it isn’t long before the dinosaurs have reduced the playing field to me and (maybe) a handful of other contestants. A little luck is on our side, however - - we’ve managed to reduce the dinosaurs to one last resistor - - a giant Tyrannosaurus rex. But all the ammo for every weapon is gone. Even the chainsaw is out of gas. So I grab the only item left that I think will do any good - - I grab a length of [tag]monowire[/tag] and start wrapping it around the obstacles, creating as dense a weaving web as I can. Maybe I can catch the [tag]T-rex[/tag] in that web. Snare him. Capture him. Escape. But he just kept coming.
[tags]dinosaurs[/tags]
