Week 26
04.29.02
http://desk.mungosphere.org/thumbnails.php
A big, disorienting site here, where untold numbers of people
have collected candid photos of their own computers.
The total absence of humans gives all that digital clutter a certain
weird pathos.
04.30.02
American drawings from the time of the lost Roanoke colony.
The artist himself, this John White character, is almost as
mysterious as his images. No one knows when he was born, who
his family was, or how he died. He did some set-design painting in the
heyday of Shakespeare (apparently), then he headed for the Arctic on a
ship (maybe), and his grandchild was the first Anglo kid born in
America
Then White misplaced all his settlers. He had to sail back
to England and utter obscurity.; He just drops out of the historical
record, as if he too had disappeared to Croatoan.
http://www.nps.gov/fora/jwhite.htm
http://www.gmu.edu/library/
specialcollections/bodypaintl.jpg
http://www.gmu.edu/library/
specialcollections/conjurerl.jpg
http://www.gmu.edu/library/
specialcollections/womanl.jpg
05.01.02
The first tobacco junkie who wasn't a native American was a Spanish guy named
"Rodrigo de Jerez" in 1492. Rodrigo was a crewman on the Santa Maria.
Rodrigo fancied Cuban cigars.
http://web.ukonline.co.uk/p.dixon/ukcigars/
archives/1492to1992.htm
http://www.cultivadoresdetabaco.org/
historia.html
05.02.02
This history of tobacco has all the bizarre allure that one would expect from
a truly dangerous drug.
http://www.tobacco.org/History/
Tobacco_History.html#aa3
05.03.02
If you're into heavy weather, as I am, well, you've got to cherish these
absurd Fortean reports of meat falling out of the sky. A rain of meat
really takes the, uh, cake. I get it about frogs, periwinkles, stones,
red dust, and lumps of stone and ice, but hamburger?
http://www.anomalist.com/reports/
fleshblood.html
Imagine if there was a live rain of meat right down the Champs Elysees,
with thousands of eye-witnesses! Man, what would we think of our
world?
Bruce Sterling is a science-fiction writer who lives in Texas. The sun is a G-type star out towards the edge of the Milky Way.
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