BillSaysThis

[Blog Action Day]

I am only a good, not a great, thinker so you’ll not be getting any massive new insights into bettering our world in this post. Still, your indulgence is begged for the time to read on.

Everything is connected, right? Not just the hypothetical butterfly flapping its wings somewhere over Asia eventually blowing up into a tornado over Kansas nor the small world theory, better known as the Kevin Bacon Game, which says that anyone–even you!–can reach anyone else in the country in no more than six social steps. For instance, Robert Scoble will take my phone call, Steve Ballmer (or another top level MSFT exec) will take Robert’s call, Sen. Maria Cantwell (D, Washington, and a former exec at Microsoft) will take Ballmer’s call and Al Gore will take Cantwell’s call; that’s only four degrees from me to Gore.

More to the point, all the choices we make have consequences and what connects them is that they are our choices and we are all in this together. Every gallon of gas I burn is one less gallon available somewhere down the line. Every consumer electronics device I buy and use up is a collection of paper, metals and plastics that is gone. Every cup of coffee I drink… well, my body returns almost all of the coffee to the system where it eventually becomes available for use again, eh?

What I want to leave you thinking about is that consumption consumes. Over the last 50 years our society has transformed its values about material things, from prioritizing quality, craftsmanship and durability to looking for the lowest prices and commodity, disposable products. Everything we think of as antiques, after all, were built at least 50 years ago but how many items made in 2007 will be of other than museum interest in 2057?

To some extent this post covers much of the thesis of my Aug. 7 post, Graham’s Stuff, in which I focused on one quote from Paul Graham’s essay Stuff: “I have too much stuff.” As you begin buying presents for the upcoming holiday season, consider the gifts you select and how they correspond to your values on the environment, not just in themselves but the follow on effects as well.

Will the gift last more than one season? Will it consume much electricity or gas? Will the recipient need or want to buy other things to use with it (e.g., a Wii or XBox needs games)? What will happen when the recipient disposes of it–can and will it be recycled? Is the gift really the best choice for your loved one or friend or just something that brings short term happiness?

Does your thinking, your gift selection, reflect simplistic membership in the American Consumer Society or can you stretch beyond that mentality and find presents that offer quality and lasting value? Remember that your choices are also teaching the people receiving your gifts, the influence is one more way in which everything is connected.

I’ve enjoyed Kage Baker’s series of novels and stories about the immortal cyborg servants of Dr. Zeus Incorporated; I’m even a bit sad that I’ll soon be reading the concluding volume Sons of Heaven (I’m next on the hold list at MVPL). So getting these two books was a treat, though none of the stories in them have an obvious impact on the connecting story line of those servants preparing many separate revolts for when recorded history ends (as far as they know) in the year 2355.

Gods and Pawns collects seven Company short stories while Rude Mechanicals is a special limited edition chapbook published by Subterranean Press taking its title from the novella which is its sole content. Five of the eight tales have varying combinations of Literary Preservation Specialist Lewis, Botany Specialist Mendoza, Facilitator Joseph as the main characters; the other three look in on one-off characters that offer amusing or informative perspectives on the Company.

My favorites are:

• The Angel in the Darkness – Kage considers how an immortal might handle affairs if allowed to maintain contact with his mortal family over several centuries.
• A Night on the Barbary Coast – Mendoza and Joseph travel to San Francisco in 1850 to track down a Gold Rush miner who found a particularly valuable vein of gold, though the value is not the gold itself nor is the Company interested in stealing his claim.
• Welcome to Olympus, Mr. Hearst – In 1933, Joseph and Lewis finagle an invitation for a weekend at Hearst Castle in order to engage the great media baron’s assistance in preserving a special movie script, but Joseph has underestimated Hearst’s ability to grasp the new. Joseph is also unaware of some very pertinent information about his host.

recommended

I’m writing today to explain why diplomacy and war are doomed to fail everywhere around the world. I mean every conflict from the War on Drugs to the War on Terror to the Arab/Israeli conflict. In short, human nature.

Consider the Turks and Armenians. Technically this dispute ended nearly a century ago when nearly 1.5 million Armenians as well as a large number of Turks were killed; in fact it’s still going on as evidenced by the effort of the Armenian diaspora to have various national legislatures declare that the Turks committed genocide on their forebears (the Turkish position is that “large numbers of Turks and Armenians were killed in the chaos surrounding World War I and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire when Armenians rose up.”

France has already done so and a resolution is making headway in the US House of Representative, though President Bush and Secretary of State have publicly lobbied for its defeat. Why should Bush care? His Administration claims passage would disrupt crucial Turkish support for the Iraqi Misadventure.

ETA freedom fighters and the Spanish government seemed to be close to a breakthrough until the recent arrest of more than 20 Basque political leaders, which was quickly followed by a bomb in Bilbao that wounded the off-duty bodyguard of a Cabinet member. There are plenty of other countries where insurgencies rage as well including Kashmir, Chechnya, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, the Sudan, Peru, Colombia and Nepal, where the Communists recently captured control and overthrew the monarchy.

Negotiations are taking place as I write over a comprehensive plan to end the Arab/Israeli conflict. My opinions on this topic are controlled by my feelings as a Jew so I’ll leave them out of this essay. However, the idea that any negotiated solution arrived at in 2007 or 2008 has a chance of getting wide enough acceptance to be meaningful is so farfetched that Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul have a better chance of winning the presidential election next November.

Too many people are too heavily invested in the conflict to accept the comprises required to get the major players to sign off on a settlement. Hamas and Hezbollah, backed by the Iranians, and Al Qaeda and its various affiliates will doom the peace even if the governments of Israel, Lebanon, Syria, the Palestinian Authority, Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabi, Turkey, Iraq and America all agree.

Underlying and perpetuating nearly all these conflicts is a rarely-mentioned yet vital layer of interested parties, the companies who manufacture and sell the arms and munitions used by the combatants. During the Cold War a good deal of this trade was reasonably visible because it was arranged by the American, Russian and Chinese governments but now the traffic has largely disappeared from the public eye, movies like Lord of War, Casino Royale (the 2006 version) and Blood Diamond aside. Proof is of course impossible to come by but I expect quite a few of these companies engage in spy novel-esque operations disguised to appear as caused by one belligerent or another any time the quarterly results need a helping hand.

What about the War on Drugs? We’ve been fighting officially since the early ’70s when Tricky Dick Nixon made his declaration and various Drug Czars down the years have pushed many programs including massive Public Service Announcement campaigns, financial support for crop eradication programs anywhere substantial farming takes place and, of course, ever harsher sentences that have exploded the US prison population.

35 years, then, and the country is demonstrably no better off despite spending tens or hundreds of billions of dollars. According to a 2001 report from
the Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education (Informing America’s Policy on Illegal Drugs: What We Don’t Know Keeps Hurting Us), “defenders of strong prohibitions and severe penalties argue that these laws are needed to express, symbolize, and undergird social norms against drug use.” Well not really our norms, at least they aren’t mine; you want to take a toke or shoot up, no skin off my back, or at least no more so than cigarettes ad booze.

Excuse me, “express, symbolize, and undergird social norms against drug use?” Look at the huge expense we incur to support these social norms. If drugs were legal but regulated in the way tobacco and alcohol are, at least 95% of the users jailed would not be in prison but rather a smaller percentage similar to what we see with DUI and vehicular manslaughter punishments. The huge number of violent crimes committed to support an illegal habit as well as murders and assaults committed among rival drug suppliers and suppliers and customers as well as innocent bystanders would mostly evaporate, or at least transform into the sort of white collar crime committed by corporate executives.

The years of the War on Drugs have also seen the rise of huge international gangs to capture the huge profits of the drug trade. 70 years ago America mainly had to deal with the Mafia and Irish mobs and assorted smaller local criminal groups but today there’s hardly a nationality without a mob: Jamaican, Russian, Vietnamese, Mexican, Columbian, Chinese (the Triads), Japanese (the Yakuza), MS-13, to list a few. Makes me wonder about the way the results of these particular social norms fit with others we Americans allegedly hold, such as family, safety and compassion–and fiscal conservatism.

How many prison cells would be emptied by changing the legal status, at a minimum of $40,000 per inmate? How many fewer police officers would we need, at a minimum average cost (salary, benefits and other overhead) of $100,000, and prison guards at perhaps a slightly lower amount? Plus billions spent on eradication and interdiction efforts outside our borders.

Legal products, of course, would produce significant new tax revenue both on corporate profits and income not currently reported. Dedicating even half the new revenue to treatment and education programs would still produce a large net gain for Federal and State treasuries aside from the humongous cost reductions mentioned.

Finally, in the last decade the narcotics trade and terrorist outfits around the globe have found it mutually beneficial to work together despite the distaste each has for the other. Al Qaeda and the Taliban, which for all the bad they did otherwise, had nearly eradicated poppy cultivation during the time they controlled Afghanistan but now provide protection and transportation for the resurgent crop; FARC, Shining Path and the rightwing militias which fight them have all made similar arrangements with South American drug cartels.

Everything is connected, eh?

We look back at ages long gone to dust
With wonder at the many myths
Those people swallowed so easily
Taking colorful tales as passed down truth.

Fanciful words sung to the tune of
Sweet lute pluckings by a stranger
Newly come over the high mountains
Taken as true as the color of a mother’s eyes.

A boy comes down from a Summer
Herding sheep in the far pastures
His wild stories born of months’ loneliness
Take illegitimate place next to mother’s truth.

Stories first crafted to gender delight
Generations before eventually morph
With only the magic and power of time
Taken as forefathers’ delivered, preserved truth.

Still today, beyond all science and ken,
Such illogical stories, tales and fancies–
Only for their age and none else–are
Taken by the masses as gospel truth.

Cormac McCarthy is one of the most highly regarded American fiction writers today with such novels as All the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men (soon to be a major motion picture starring Tommy Lee Jones) and Child of God. So when his first science fiction novel came out, got terrific reviews and even won the Pulitzer Prize I scooped it up from the library. Sad to say I was neither moved nor terribly impressed.

The Road is the story of a father and son in post-apocalypse America, trying to reach the coast on foot before the full brunt of Winter arrives. This is several years, maybe seven or eight, after the event; the boy was born a few months after the unspecified nastiness killed off most people as well as plants and other animals. Along their hike they rarely encounter other people though to be fair they try hard to avoid contact since most people left have adopted a kill or be killed strategy. There’s little food left, certainly nothing edible growing, just what cans or packages left after years of scrounging.

McCarthy is a literary writer who uses genres for effect rather than inspiration, so the only real science fictional aspect of this book is the setting. Otherwise it could be any other bleak road tale set in some isolated desert or jungle. He bugs me by avoiding normal writing tools such as capitalization, setting off dialog with quote marks and never, even at the end when the boy talks with another man, gives either the father or son names. Nor is the cause of this predicament ever explained, though I can see why McCarthy felt this might be an unnecessary complication and that doing so might distract readers.

Worse, though, the situation the two are in is so relentlessly dire and dark that by the halfway point–which is not much since the book is only 241 pages–I felt inured to the horror and tragedy. The whole time is spent walking, attempting to avoid other people and searching for food and each of these elements is repeated many times. McCarthy would have gotten better marks from me if he’d drastically streamlined the story to a longish short story.

not recommended

Bruce Springsteen will continue his TV promo tour Sunday night on 60 Minutes. I believe this means we are now officially old. Bruce hammers critics of his political activity: “When people think of the Unites States … they don’t think of torture. They don’t think of illegal wiretapping. They don’t think of voter suppression,” Springsteen says on the show.

The Rolling Stones Bigger Bang world tour which just ended grossed over $500 million, the biggest box office total in the concert business history. Nearly 5 million tickets for 144 concerts over a two year stretch, far surpassing U2’s Vertigo tour total of $389 million. Just goes to prove that senior citizens have far more disposable income than any other age group, no matter what the economists say.

Landon Donovan won his fourth US Soccer Player of the Year award in a landslide today with 413 points, nearly 300 ahead of runner-up Tim Howard. While Donovan did lead the American national team in scoring this season and Howard had to split net time with Kasey Keller, Howard’s club results with Everton in the Premier League are light years ahead. The Toffees finished sixth in a far tougher league and qualified for the UEFA Cup while the Galaxy will not even make the playoffs in the MLS.

Fellow Liverpool FC fans, you can now have some fun at the expense of our manager with Fantasy Rafa, a free fantasy sports game where you try to predict what squad Benitez will turn out on any given day. Remember, this is a manager who named different starting XIs for his first 99 matches in charge. Bonus TV alert: The Reds match Sunday v. Tottenham is the only English game being shown live on Fox Soccer this weekend, with an early start at 7:00 a.m. PST.

FootieMap is a really neat use of maps and JavaScript to show the locations of teams in a few dozen of the top dozen pro leagues around the globe. If I have one quibble it would be the default size of the map, which is far larger than my browser window and difficult to navigate.

HBO launched a mini-series this week called Five Days, which tracks what happens when a mother and two young children go missing in the middle of the day. This is a British police procedural, co-produced with the BBC, that seems from the first episode to be in the ranks with or even above such personal favorites as Wire in the Blood and Waking the Dead. New episodes are the next four Tuesday nights but also through HBO On Demand or online, where you can catch the first now.

Sci Fi is everywhere after the success of Heroes. So far I’ve seen two episodes of Chuck and Journeyman and one of Bionic Woman (with the second on the DVR for tonight) and my preference is Chuck followed by Journeyman; BW seems to be going for the same tough modernization that worked so well for Battlestar Galactica which shouldn’t be surprising since the shows are both run by the same man, David Eick. Need to check out Pushing Daisies, which should be easy since ABC put it On Demand.

Please join me and nearly 200,000 patriotic Americans in telling your Senators and Representative that you want them to vote to overturn the veto on the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. Your voice is especially important if any of your three elected representatives are Republicans since winning this battle requires quite a few GOP members to go against their President. If you prefer not to use the Democratic Party’s service which I linked, just go to their official pages and email or fax them directly–just be sure you do it!

Here’s what I wrote to Anna Eshoo, Barbara Boxer and Diane Feinstein (in this matter, shorter is very much better):

When this legislation is taken up I urge you to vote to overturn President Bush’s ill-considered, thoughtless veto of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program and stand up for children who otherwise won’t have health care.

If we can spend hundreds of billions on military actions in the Mideast that have little hope of providing longterm security, surely we can ensure the welfare of our most precious resource, the children.

I recognize my tendency to frequently blame the officiating when my team’s not doing well but there are games when its justified and today’s near-disaster at Washington is one of them. The Trojans didn’t play terribly well either but the refs made far too many bad penalty calls against us. In the end the SC defense stood up and covered for mistakes by the offense and (especially) special teams for the 27-24 squeaker.

The only thing I can say is this has been a weird weekend in college football all over, with five of the Top 10 losing. Sadly that includes Rutgers, potentially stopping a run at a BCS bowl game; I didn’t see the game but the Scarlet Knights were better on paper. The losses will get Cal up to #3, their highest spot in 55 years, and give even more meaning to USC’s matchups against the Bears and Oregon, who barely lost to Cal 31-24 on the last play of the game.

An LSU move to the top spot wouldn’t shock me. The Tigers haven’t made too many statements aside from the Va Tech thrashing but they’ve never been in serious trouble either. Here’s my Top 5:

1. LSU
2. USC
3. Cal
4. Ohio State
5. Wisconsin

The Pac-10 is one tough conference this year since even with the loss to Cal Oregon could conceivably move up from #11, Arizona State should move up to at least #20, a 4-1 UCLA is knocking on the door and certainly going to a bowl (even with losses to Oregon and USC at the end of the season).

The remaining Trojan schedule is pretty tough: road games at Notre Dame (0-5 only means that beating us at home would make their whole season), Oregon, Cal and Arizona State and finishing with a ‘home’ game to UCLA. LSU’s is much easier with Florida, Kentucky, Auburn, Alabama, Arkansas and (presumably) the SEC championship game. Cal actually has the easiest of the three, if only they can beat USC.

We got us a football season!

Tuesday: Sure enough, LSU hopped to the top spot in the AP poll, though USC remained first in the USA Today/Coaches list. Slim margin of difference so with a few solid wins and perhaps a close game for the Tigers this Saturday versus Florida we’ll jump back.

An amusing book set in the same FictoVerse as American Gods, though featuring none of the same main characters, Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys tells the story of Fat Charlie and Spider the twin (sort of) sons of Anansi, the Spider God.

If you recall the trials of Shadow from the first novel, the tribulations Fat Charlie suffers here will feel similar. This boy did know his dad growing up, but if you asked he’d probably say whether this was a good thing would be an extremely close thing. Nanometer separation; certainly he was terribly embarrassed and moved across the Atlantic to get far enough away.

Then again, Anansi never explained he was a god or that Charlie had a brother (sort of). He dies, bringing Charlie back to south Florida just in time to sweat through his suit shoveling dirt to close up dad’s grave. Four aged neighbor women are the only mourners and afterwards they try to tell him who his father really was, then send him on a trippy visit to a different reality where the other animal gods, who Anansi tricked out of their powers and stories, live and wait.

The women also tell him about Spider. He calls for his brother and soon enough finds he isn’t a long last pal. In an ill-advised attempt to be rid of a guest who never learned that fish and visits both spoil after a few days, Charlie asks for help from a very wrong quarter. Spider also, in innocent incompetence, triggers Charlie’s boss’s escape plan–the man’s been skimming from clients for decades–which brings the police down on our hapless hero.

Gaiman does something very well that few other authors even consider trying. He’s found a way to mix traditional lighthearted folktales with post-modern anti-heroes. Both Fat Charlie and Shadow are living lost lives, no direction, no family warmth, beaten down enough so that the avoidance of the negative is enough to make them happy. Then they learn their true heritage and things get really bad. Wonderfully entertaining, light on its feet and fast-paced.

recommended

Well, Thursday turned out to be just a sneak peek of the nastiness that was Thursday night. Uggh. Of course TS1 got sick too, though with a different bug, and we had to nurse each other. So much for today’s plans to see Transformers in IMAX up in the City.

Then again I did get to watch plenty of football, of the English, Spanish, NCAA and NFL varieties (I’m still peeved at losing Australian Rules games when FoxSportsWorld converted to FoxSoccerChannel). ABC ought to consider renaming Saturday Night Football to The USC Football Show since the Trojans are featured if they’re playing.

Liverpool was not available but since they had another 0-0 draw to a team they ought to have demolished I’m not so upset; I did see their Champions League this past Tuesday and remain convinced that Rafa Benitez is mistaken about Jermaine Pennant’s value. Arsenal was entertaining with a 5-0 drubbing of Derby, not quite up to the 6-0 thrash Liverpool gave the bottomdwellers a couple of weeks ago. I was rooting for Fullham, or Team America as they’re also known with four American players and an American owner, but they were unable to make a 2-1 lead stand up and had to settle for a 3-3 draw with a surprising Man City.

Even better was today’s ManUtd-Chelsea clash, the first game of the post-Mourinho era. I probably should have been rooting for a draw or for the Blues since the new man is Israeli but just couldn’t get myself behind them because of their style of play; when Mikel was dismissed, Tevez got the header off a sweet Giggs cross and Saha put the penalty past Cech I was happy. Frankly, I thought Cech was the only man on his team who put out the extra effort needed to get a result in this tough situation.

I also caught the last 30 minutes of Barcelona-Sevilla. Ronaldinho wasn’t on the field but Lionel Messi made sure that the hosts took all three points with a lovely blast and a PK and I saw some of the spark and speed that has many people raving over 18 year old Mexico national teamer Giovanni Dos Santos. I also saw one of the funniest kits, the road outfits worn by Sevilla:

Trust me, they looked even sillier on TV. Though the uniforms worn by the Philadelphia Eagles today were pretty darn strange too!

USC really showed up last night. Last week at Nebraska was a good result but, mainly due to the defense not finishing the game, I wasn’t as impressed as what I read and heard in the media; if I was less subjective LSU might have gotten my vote as the top team, especially given their domination of Virginia Tech.

But I watched the LSU game yesterday as well and now my view is not divided. The Tigers seem much more dependent offensively on Pat Flynn–he was the holder who made the sweet no look toss to kicker Colt David for the gadget play TD–and when the O line couldn’t keep the rushers out on passing plays, his injury-limited mobility caused poor results. I’m not saying LSU are not deserving of the #2 ranking, not at all, just that I think USC quality is deeper at most positions. Mario Sanchez may not be the running threat Ryan Perrilloux is but he’s a much more complete QB and there’s just no comparison with the running back and receiving corps.

Notre Dame, 0-4. What can I say?

Niners never really got going against the first quality opposition of the season so far, Raiders were of course blacked out at home but across the league results were strange with many 0-2 teams getting their first W and many 2-0 teams their first L. Winning were the Giants, Jets, Raiders, the Chiefs and the aforementioned Eagles, and losing were the Niners, Broncos, Redskins, Lions and Texans. The Patriots, Colts, Steelers, Packers remained undefeated while the Bills, Dolphins, Cardinals, Rams and Falcons are winless (Saints and Cowboys have their respective zeros still on the line ;).

Oy vey, for sure. Yesterday I wasn’t feeling great though I went to Lunch 2.0 at RockYou anyway–hopefully I didn’t infect anyone else–and by the time I finally got home just before 4 I was done. Collapsed on the couch, watched the recording of Manchester United’s narrow Champions League win at Sporting Clube de Portugal and later most of the Gary Cooper/Patricia O’Neil version of The Fountainhead.

TS1, as always, was a great and attentive nurse.

This morning the symptoms were out in force, runny nose, sneezing, coughing, sore throat. Of course I was supposed to give the PSR team pitch at ProMatch but fortunately one of my mates stepped in. Why I’m still sitting at the computer can only be attributed to a serious electronics addiction but after this the TV goes on.

Everyone hates feeling sick, including me. Your empathy is appreciated.

With this novel Ken Macleod turns his authorial eye to our own days for the first time but there’s no let up in quality. While his previous books have been set hundreds or more years in the future this takes place sometime in the next decade; with it he hopes to “kick-start … the hitherto non-existent genre of New Cosy Catastrophe.”

The Execution Channel has a tagline of “The War on Terror is over. Terror won.” You won’t be surprised, of course, that a socialist from way back such as Macleod turns that sentiment on its head from what an American reader might expect and the characters whose behavior is most despicable are employees of the UK and American governments. The story starts, literally, with a big bang: some pro-peace activists monitoring an American air base in Scotland photograph the mysterious arrival of a plane, the strange large thing it unloads in an out of the way hanger and the immediate detonation of same.

Initially thought to be an atomic bomb smuggled in by Al Qaeada, with the government avoiding, even clamping down, on any mention of that strange large device and spreading various disinformation memes, the powers that be are not happy those activists smuggled out photos. Fortunately between the many public cameras and satellite coverage the counter-terrorism staff identify almost all the packages posted and the shutterbugs.

Which also puts them on the trail of James, one of the activist’s dads, an IT consultant and French spy, who happens to possibly be responsible for one or both of two additional infrastructure attacks. His son, ironically, is serving in the British army in the never ending Middle East conflict, which he actively blogs about.

The titular channel transmits exactly what the name says: 24 hours a day video of people dying. No one (whose talking) knows just who controls it or how some of the footage makes it online but Macleod’s future includes a post-crash, ultra-religious America and a China fighting to control its western territory (John Robb’s 4GW seems an influence). The climax is set off when a key character dies at the hands of his, er, interrogators, distributed globally on the Execution Channel.

Macleod’s future is scarily possible and not just the horrific level of military action, which I’ve barely touched on here. I also like the way he includes blogs. Besides Travis fil, another major character (who otherwise has no explicit interaction with any other character) writes a popular government conspiracy blog and another set who contract to the US Department of Homeland Security to write fake blogs and undertake other astroturfing activity.

What really happened and why was not easy for me to see until Macleod did the big reveal. I really enjoy books that do this.

recommended

For years I’ve been looking for Consider Phlebas, the first science fiction novel by Iain M. Banks, and was happy to find a copy at the used book stores on Castro Street a few weeks ago. Of course, as soon as I finished reading it I found it on the Big Guy’s bookshelf, grrr! After all, since my copy was used Banks didn’t get any dosh either way but what can you do?

Consider Phlebas (1987) is also the first of Banks’ Culture novels. In an excellent twist, though, the story is told through the eyes of an outsider, a shapeshifter called Bora Horza Gobuchel. Horza is an agent of the Idirans and the Idirans are locked in a galaxy-spanning war with the Culture; the latter have realized that the formers’ religious beliefs in combination with their military technology mean war is an unfortunate necessity.

Horza works for the very large lizard-like aliens not because he agrees with the religion but because he believes the Culture is an evolutionary dead end strong enough to ultimately starve out all competition. As the novel begins he’s captive and nearly dead after being caught out impersonating a government minister on a backwards planet, exposed by Perosteck Balveda, an operative of the Culture’s Special Circumstances group.

Special Circumstances is the iron fist within the Culture’s velvet glove, intelligence agency and, when need be, military force. While battling the Idirans from system to system as their weapon manufactories spin up, they work intrigues to win in other ways. Yet the opposition doesn’t always lose; in one battle a Mind (an ultra-advanced artificial intelligence) fashions an escape from the warship body it normally wears and hides in the tunnels of a Planet of the Dead, a world protected by a sentient race evolved far beyond either of our combatants.

Horza escapes when his masters storm the castle in which he’s imprisoned, capturing Balveda in the process, only to have the Idiran ship detected and destroyed by her allies. Horza takes an escape capsule getaway, stranded in space and rescued by a mercenary company more interested in his high tech spacesuit than him, though he cons the captain out of jettisoning him.

Eventually Horza turns the tables, taking command of the mercenaries to complete the mission assigned to him and his Idiran commander, to retrieve or at least destroy that stranded Mind. Balveda and a small Culture machine intelligence are along for the ride, as it got launched a bit precipitously. To say the least. Doing the deed, if he can, is an even more massive.

Though the Idiran War is a seminal event through most of the Culture novels and stories he wrote afterwards, Banks does something few other authors would and essentially puts it in the background of Phlebas. He’s such a masterful storyteller that this works. I think anyone reading this who aspires to write fiction, science or otherwise, owes it to themselves to not only read this novel but to study it for character development, scene coloration and ways to twist reader expectations.

absolutely recommended

I have been reading, I just haven’t had the inspiration to put down my thoughts on them. Not because they haven’t entertained me, most have, but, well, whatever, you don’t want to read my excuses.

The Engines of God came highly recommended from the Big Guy. It’s the first in the Academy sequence, or the Priscilla “Hutch” Hutchins Novels as author Jack McDevitt sometimes calls them, though I didn’t realize there were five more with the last a couple of months away. To some extent I was surprised to see McDevitt refer to them as the Hutchins novels since she’s a major character in Engines but hardly more than the one who shows up in each of the three main segments.

Hutchins is a freelance interstellar pilot and in each of the voyages in this volume she drives the bus for a mission sponsored by the World Academy For Science And Technology. 190 years from now a somewhat faster than light star drive (much slower than, say, those used in Star Trek or Star Wars) has allowed humanity to explore a few dozen nearby star systems but the ROI is such that mass travel hasn’t developed. Only one other sentient race has been found still living, though several other planets clearly held intelligent beings until relatively recently.

What explorers have found are monuments, one per system, wherever such life has existed, different in size and what’s depicted but clearly all left by the same unknown starfarers. In our own solar system on a moon of Saturn is a three meter tall female, which we read about in the prologue, a brief trip for which Hutch pilots renown archaeologist Richard Wald. Those who left their creations are called the Monument Makers.

Several years later Hutch and Wald fly to Quraqua, a world whose intelligent inhabitants died off (to the last Quraquan) just a few centuries ago. An Academy team has been studying the planet for nearly three decades but their mission is almost over–global warming has continued and severely damaged Earth and a private company is days away from unleashing a terraforming Armageddon with the hopes of creating a new home for us in just 50 years. Wald’s trip is motivated by the discovery of that system’s monument, a huge, seamless Potemkin city on Quraqua’s moon.

The mission ends in tragedy and the survivors retreat to Earth, scattering to new posts in academia and government, but work continues on the mystery of the monuments. A breakthrough inspires the last voyage, to Beta Pacifica III, where Hutch and a small team find further mystery and more questions despite learning the answers they thought were the point. And more trouble too, of course.

Knowing now that there are five more novels to the story I’m a bit less put off by the climax which, after all, doesn’t really solve anything. Heck, it leaves not just the astronauts in jeopardy but humanity’s entire existence. I was, still, a bit miffed at the lack of closure and payoff after a very well-written book. The questions McDevitt raises are intriguing and he has decent skills, and drew me in to these characters and their troubles. Will I read the rest? Not sure.

recommended, just

I gave a one hour brown bag tutorial at ProMatch this afternoon on using a blog to assist one’s job search. Having promised to post the slide deck online, I decide to try out SlideShare. This is a startup run by Jon Boutelle and Rashmi Sinha, partners in life and business and friends of mine, and I’ve been looking for an opportunity to use the service since they told me about it.

Don’t expect a fantasmagoric, wunderbar preso 😉 Just a few high-level introductory slides that I used before diving into the demo, which was the real meat of the hour.

TS1 and I shut off our landline last week. The last real use which required it was TiVo (we had a Series 1) and that went away at the beginning of the year when the HDTV arrived, so we reached out to as many service providers and contacts as we remembered, and friends and family of course, and made sure each had the appropriate cell number, waited a week or so just in case and called ATT to disconnect.

Since we have ATT Wireless, and are new customers to that branch, I didn’t get any push back or even difficult questions after giving this reason in response to why. Maybe the trend is so prevalent there wouldn’t have been a hard sell to try and retain us no matter the wireless carrier we use. When we switched from Verizon after getting his and hers iPhones that company made a few attempts to retain our business but, of course, there was no chance of that happening.

After having a home phone number for as long as I remember. From when I was born until I was about eight or so our number was 201.992.4583, then that number was transferred to my mom’s women’s clothing boutique and our number was 201.992.7323 until I moved out of my folks’ house permanently after grad school.

My parents got a second line at the house for my sister and me when we were teenagers but oddly I can’t remember its number, despite it being the first that was “mine.” Then between school and moving houses and states and such I had a bunch that passed too quickly to get lodged permanently in my mind, including the couple I had in California before moving to Mountain View a bit more than 10 years ago. Since then, though, I only had the one home number that just got turned off and my cell, which stayed the same through two or three carrier changes and is what I have now.

Unlike Mr. Scoble, putting that number on this blog is probably not the right choice for me. In case you were wondering.

You might laugh but it feels weird, like leaving my backpack at a hotel and saying forget about it rather than going back. As if something’s missing from my jeans pocket that I can’t quite put a finger on. Still, better to have the $32/month in my bank account, eh?

I called Apple Support this morning. The guy I spoke with was very considerate and friendly, nonetheless we still went 0 for 3 and I didn’t even mention the fourth item. For each one the support rep said he simply had no answer but put support incidents into the system to create a record and get me an answer down the line if new information comes out:

1. After listening to music for a few hours the phone simply shut off. On first try even the holding down the combination of the power and sleep/wake buttons had no effect. After 10 minutes I tried it again and the phone powered up.
2. Events created on the phone’s calendar app are not pushed back to iCal on my MacBook.
3. For a POP3 email account–the server doesn’t have IMAP–I want to create a new folder on the phone for archives. Currently this does not seem to be possible.
4. After any one of a number of events, the music player loses its place in a playlist and further, there is no way I can see to choose the first song for shuffle mode play even though iTunes on OS X has this capability. (This is the one I didn’t mention to the rep.)

Lazy/Intarweb, can you help?

Well, you can grab the first single off the upcoming Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band release Magic from iTunes as a freebie for the next week. The song, Radio Nowhere, is an uptempo rocker that (perhaps not surprisingly) reminds me of his 57 Channels with a bit more buzzy guitar.

The band’s tour was also announced today. There are 32 dates from October 2, the day the CD comes out, through the end of November and the stops are most of the major American cities and then over to Western Europe. The only Northern California concert will be October 26 at the Oracle Arena in Oakland and while I loves me my Bruce I doubt we’ll be going. Friday after-work rush hour from here to Oakland is literally insane.