Generating worlds, exploring them, losing the thread.
Leary here. It seems our Jack is going native.
Appearances rool, OK! What Ellie likes to call the Cosmetic Imperative. For example, the women construction workers in Thailand who wear long-sleeved shirts buttoned up and balaclava masks under broad-brimmed bamboo hats — better all sweated up than turned “black” in the sun. Not that you’d ever find Jack working construction, with or without a mask. But it’s same-same if you’re expecting a bit of street violence. You see these things … Read more
Yeah, you and Che. Neat grooming über alles. Make life easier for undertaker and T-shirt makers alike.
Things have hotted up since you went for you haircut (when did barbers become hairdressers?). No surprise there, of course. Probably looking at a curfew later tonight. (Breaking news on thaivisa.com.)… Read more
This is Khun Kik, my hairdresser, who is a Vidal Sassoon graduate and way beyond the means of your average freelance writer, starving variety. She is also quite lovely, as is Miss Da, her assistant, on the left. These ladies are the first Heroines of This Revolution we’re teetering on the brink of here in Bangkok. But the wounds on Kik’s face are not from rumbling with the Red Shirts. No, she was walking up some stairs hand in hand … Read more
Live life to the hilt? Or set your course by the actuarial stars.
Whoa. I’m a fount of wisdom, an epigrammatic mixed-metaphor sausage machine.… Read more
Leary here.
Adventure tourism? Gosh. It isn’t adventure if you know where you’re going to sleep that night. Or even if you’re going to get to sleep somewhere. When you think about it, though, none us knows for sure where we’re going to sleep tonight, or if we’ll still be alive to do this sleeping. Life itself is an adventure, forget about your diving holidays. It’s all in the mind. Darn it. Life is life, and it’s always what you … Read more
This is Jack Shackaway. I’ve been invited on another junket, a liveaboard dive trip in the Andaman Sea. We’re setting out from Phuket. I don’t make a lot of money but, hey, I’m a freelance writer, eh? I don’t need a lot of money.
I’m a writer and freelance journalist. Sometimes I’m a hack. A two-bit panderer to any passing proposition. But in my own head I’m a full-fledged author, never mind I never have time to write anything. Not … Read more
“Thinking about boredom,” Jack tells me, “and the subjective time dilation effect, and thinking I may then live forever, I’ve decided to move to Ontario.”
Other advice on stretching time.
Website dedicated to diversions for the bored.
More fun with boredom; visit Noteable Quotes.… Read more
Haven’t signed up for Steve Van Beek’s canoeing trip to Laos and then Bhutan. Too much to do. Also not planning to go to Rome or Antarctica. Or Azilda, Ontario, come to that.… Read more
Word “Canadian” So “Reviled in Some Places” that Visiting Canucks Say They’re Americans (read the story).
Canada’s imperialistic ways are no longer secret, and people are out to get us, eh? Just the other day, a Canadian friend of mine, not partial to sporting the Stars & Stripes, sewed a New Zealand flag to his backpack and was badly beaten by a gang of mid-level multinational corporation executives. This world is a perilous place, and it gets … Read more
I’m going to add yet one more wrap-up list to the long end-of-first-decade of the New Millennium lists. (To the surprise of some, our world has survived to read these lists.) I invite visitors to offer their own notions of what the most significant developments have been—those with the greatest potential to transform our lives.
As a starter, but not necessarily in the following order, I’d propose these:
– advances in nanotechnology
– digital social networking, wikis, etc.
– research … Read more