Generating worlds, exploring them, losing the thread.
One writer, however much tongue in cheek, has actually expressed admiration for addicts:
I admire addicts. In a world where everybody is waiting for some blind, random disaster, or some sudden disease, the addict has the comfort of knowing what will most likely wait for him down the road. He’s taken some control over his ultimate fate, and his addiction keeps the cause of death from being a total surprise. ~ Chuck Palahniuk
Overall, though, even Palahniuk would probably concede … Read more
How’s the new year going for you guys? I had a piece of exercise equipment, in a somewhat inauspicious vein, try to crush my skull about 7am on the morning of January the first. Ever since, I’ve been reflecting on the fact that, just when you least expect it, irony can leap out and mash you. I hope, despite appearances, that incident wasn’t a harbinger of things to come in 2011.
Given the fact I was almost bitten to death … Read more
In my last post, I discussed the mindful appreciation of a novel tequila experience, one that might even be good for you. Who knows? Our test subjects felt better after taking it, at least, and they were all still alive the next morning.
My earlier “Magic potion revealed!” had for months been a leading magnet for visitors to this site; “T. Mockingbird” promises to be an even bigger draw, which leads one to wonder whether the therapeutic … Read more
The secret potion I revealed several months ago has proven a great success, in terms of interested visitors from around the world. And the world should rejoice, for yet another formula has recently come to me in a vision. Preliminary testing is complete. 
Tequila Mockingbird (serves 4-6)
Tequila 500ml
Dried & roasted hot chili peppers 4-5 or to taste
Chaser/antidote
Lime juice 500ml
Sugar 4 tblsps or to taste
Salt 2 tspns to mix in
Coarse salt enough to rime … Read more
This week I’ve been reading On Dialogue, by the late, great physicist-philosopher-neuropsychologist David Bohm. In this book, he presents, among other things, a useful notion he describes as the “proprioception of thought.” I now see that, once again, I’ve reinvented the wheel, though my scuba-wisdom version is pretty primitive compared to Bohm’s.
Never mind that Bill the Mathematician had already asked me how my stop-breathe-think fix differed from counting to ten, an idea that has been around awhile. So here … Read more
Consider the following.
Terrestrial umbilicals. Scuba divers, e.g., carry bottled atmosphere underwater, taking a bit of our terrestrial environment with us.
Marine umbilicals. Whether on land or under the sea, meanwhile, we always bring along some of the marine environment from which, about 375 million years ago, we vertebrate land-dwellers first emerged. That’s right. We veteran fish-out-of-water types have internalized the seawater that gave us life in the first place. Our blood now comprises part of what is essentially a … Read more
Sara and I are having breakfast at Starbucks. Being a kee niaow species of curmudgeon, I’m complaining about everything from the prices to the clonish docking of people and their digital devices. Discerning impatience in her manner, I eventually desist.
“Give me a break,” she says, going on to explain that Starbucks doesn’t sell coffee; it sells a lifestyle experience, and I should dummy up about it, she’s trying to relax.
Ah, I reply. So we’re banking some sort of … Read more
The future of the book
“Meet Nelson, Coupland, and Alice — the faces of tomorrow’s book. Watch global design and innovation consultancy IDEO’s vision for the future of the book. What new experiences might be created by linking diverse discussions, what additional value could be created by connected readers to one another, and what innovative ways we might use to tell our favorite stories and build community around books?”
1. Alice. To say I resemble a Ludditic old fart is … Read more
I sit in my office sweating.
The 27-inch iMac gazes blankly at me from inside its raincoat, the pair of us waiting for the air-conditioner repairmen to arrive. It all started when my old PC laptop clapped out, exposing me to attack by the consumerist virus waiting in ambush. Next thing I knew, I was the proudish owner of a nearly-new iMac super doodah. And now look. The world is disintegrating.
Long-slumbering volcano erupts in Sumatra. Floods in Pakistan, India … Read more
We really are all getting wired together. I let this one out into the wild a week ago, just to a couple of friends, and copies keep coming back to me by e-mail from increasingly unlikely sources. It’s a little scary. I guess it’s too late to decide my mining background should be a deep, dark secret (as mining-day secrets should be).
The photo was taken quite some time ago, if I may be coy about it (as hardrock miners … Read more