Central irony of our age?

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The central irony of our age: a powerful totalitarian drift promising individual empowerment. (Epigrams’R’Us, eh?)

Individually and collectively, we blithely speed towards a precipice. Or so it seems, of this jet-lagged morning, just back from a computer-, Internet-, and phone-less island sojourn.

Are we modern folk evolving as mere arms & legs for our smartphones? The reality of current tendencies may be even more sinister than that. I’m too sleepy to develop that notion any further just now. Here’s just … Read more

*Bangkok Noir* in French

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A darker view of Bangkok.

Photo by Steve Gatto

The French edition of Bangkok Noir is on the shelves. 

Les auteurs de Bangkok Noir

John Burdett

Stephen Leather

Pico Iyer

Colin Cotterill

Christopher G. Moore

Tew Bunnag

Timothy Hallinan

Alex Kerr

Dean Barrett

Vasit Dejkunjorn

Eric Stone

And me too:

Collin Piprell

 

For another, darkly comic view:

Kindle

Amazon (print)

Smashwords

… Read more

Autonomous smartphones: Is your gadget evolving?

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So I’m sending an SMS on my iPhone, and I’m using “jesus christly” as a compound adjective, when this phone, even though it’s only a 2G model, takes the liberty of capitalizing “Jesus”. What’s next? It’ll probably start offering prayers to Him on my behalf. Maybe even promising I’ll do a 20-year tour of duty as a missionary in Africa if only the babe over there at that other table, here in Starbucks (which I never frequent), gives … Read more

Free e-book from C.G. Moore

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Christopher Moore’s *Waiting for the Lady* should see a jump in sales.

Burma’s pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi is leaving Burma for the first time in 24 years. Her first foreign visit will be to Bangkok, where she will attend the World Economic Forum. She is expected to arrive in Bangkok on 30th May. Then she will travel to Europe to address the International Labour Conference in Geneva and to finally accept her Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo … Read more

Getting away from it all: Now & then

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Sometimes, e.g. when I look around a Skytrain car and see people’s faces lit in the unholy glow of iPad screens (see “Digital bedlam”)—when I notice the wires dangling from people’s heads, the animated conversations with invisible presences on the part of people sporting no visible gadgetry at all, the poke-poking and thumbing of games and messages and searches for the meaning of life—it seems to me that these changes in our behavior have been sudden. Just last … Read more

Dinomynas, flying lizards, other local wildlife

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Following my post regarding Nigel’s attempts to kill me, I remembered another myna story, a magazine piece I’d written years ago. How did mynas come to figure so large in my life?

I’m lying there by the pool with last night’s wine pouring out of me, dozing and reading Roddy Doyle by turns, my own Muse stirring within, a touch of the Irish in her voice, rousing me, from time to time, to sit up and drip ink and … Read more

Mysterious Bangkok deaths solved?

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Bangkokians fall to their deaths from high-rise apartments with some regularity. These incidents are often ascribed to suicidal impulses, the next most popular hypothesis being accident, as in, “Wow! Look at that moon—it’s almost like you could reach out and touch…”

But read on, because I have a new, improved theory. Recently, in fact, I myself almost fell victim to an especially devious homicide attempt.

A couple of myna birds have taken to nesting in a cozy niche outside my … Read more

Digital civility rools, or doesn’t

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Vertically walleyed: A new affliction, an occupational hazard for the digitally connected and cool, a neologism of sorts coined right here and right now.

“My students tell me about an important new skill: it involves maintaining eye contact with someone while you text someone else; it’s hard, but it can be done.”

That’s from a great NY Times article by Sherry Turkle, “The Flight from Conversation.” And this advice has expanded my notion of what’s fittin’ and … Read more

Lexical entropy: Will meaning prevail? (Hopefully)

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Only a year ago the forces of tradition prevailed (click on image):

 

 

Now the AP Stylebook has reversed its position. And in the streets there is much wailing and gnashing of teeth as right-thinking editors everywhere protest the onslaught of lexical entropy to the point, some fear, we’ll be left to describe human experience with nothing but “whatever” and “huh!”

In breaking news, Shakespeare has been disinterred by a team of archaeologists and mediums in search of … Read more