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Week 7

12.17.01

I love it when devices coin new forms of language. I don't even mind when the guys who are compiling the glossary seem to be making up a lot of it out of whole cloth.

http://www.cellmanners.com/forum/
slang.htm

 

12.18.01

OhmiGod it's the *cutest thing I've ever seen!* It's a *baby* H. P. Lovecraft!

http://www.gizmology.net/lovecraft/graphics
/parents.jpg

You wanna read a good H. P. Lovecraft story? This one about the guy with the mind-shattering electrical Virtual Reality circus, the one HPL wrote in 1920, man, that one is tops.

http://www.gizmology.net/lovecraft/bio/
index.htm

 

12.19.01

While ECHELON watches you, why not join the fun and watch ECHELON? You know that scene in RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK when they nail the Ark of the Covenant into a pine crate and lose it inside a giant warehouse? You get the impression that the NSA does that with whole banks of Cray supercomputers.

http://www.fas.org/irp/program/process/
echelon.htm

They used to hate James Bamford for writing his tell-all NSA book, and then they figured out that Bamford knew more about the NSA than the guys and gals who are working there. Now he's kinda like their poet laureate.

http://www.randomhouse.com/features/
bamford/home.html

It kills me that all this ECHELON hardware has been sitting around in embassies and on weird islands and such for nigh on forty years. Whatever the hell they've been up to, they've been doing it for decades on end.

http://www.aclu.org/echelonwatch/
networks.html

 

12.20.01

You see, vato, I'm doing a kind of Woodie Guthrie Grapes of Wrath thing with my acoustic guitar, only it's all about gun-toting Mexican dope smugglers.

http://www.elijahwald.com/corrido.html

Here in Sinaloa, us narco-corrida guys are like the People's Poets, compadre. Or, as Google Translator would put it, "Putting itself to work hard, Chalino horro enough money to record, dedicating it to it to its brother, who had killed it in a hotel of Tijuana. After to him to have recorded to its brother its running, Chalino began to compose in excess for several narcotics traffickers, alphabets receiving to them up to $2000." And then he got shot dead after a gig.

http://www.chalino.com/artistas/chalino/

 

12.21.01

These classy Jules Verne illos must be in the public domain by now. Thank goodness he's even older than Mickey Mouse.

http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/abstracts/
Verne-illus1.htm

I especially like this one. Lads out for a stroll, a little manly hunting and fishing... actually it's hunting that *is* fishing.

http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/images/
2-ocean.jpg

Jules LIVES! You can't keep a good man down!

http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/images/
tomb.jpg

 


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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