Week 79

05.12.03

Swell Thomas Pynchon essay here. Great to see the guy coming out from his treehouse, or wherever it is that he hides from cameras.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/
story/0,12084,948203,00.html

05.13.03

Check out this cool, animated, European Union logo:

http://www.ue2003.gr/en/cat/67/

And then check out this pathetic NAFTA pastiche:

http://www.nafta-sec-alena.org/

"Europe is a boutique, and America is a farm," as the Japanese like to say.

05.14.03

I don't know which is worse: that Iranians drink this stuff, or that they feel so thrilled to get their shaky hands on it.

http://www.iranian.com/Anyway/2003/
April/booze.html

http://www.iranian.com/Anyway/2003/
April/Images/booze2.jpg

Nice bottlecap. Imagine some stricken guy in Teheran secretly unscrewing that in his prohibitionist closet of vice: "Just one sip to get me through the day... aaarghh..."

http://www.iranian.com/Anyway/2003/
April/Images/booze3.jpg

05.15.03

This was probably a great opportunity to really irritate the authorities without doing anything that is illegal yet.

http://littlesister2003.org/

This is one of those "second-generation Canadian Sandinista" gigs where people like to sit around counting the RCMP informants.

http://littlesister2003.org/about/endorsers.html

05.16.03

Oh brother. What a sign of the times. Well, I'll be sticking this baby onto my favorites list.

http://www.mit-kmi.com/index.cfm

Nice article on the President's telecom hardware here. "We don't have the luxury of 'oh well.'" Right.

http://www.mit-kmi.com/articles.cfm?DocID=22

"Roadrunner vans"? What's a roadrunner van? Oh.

http://shook-usa.com/a-11eng.html

Look at ol' Cisco jumping right onto that network-centric warfare marketing opportunity. "We are lining our resources up so that we can completely understand the goals and missions of the defense and space communities."

Okay, so it's not the dot-com Bubble. But a hundred million here, a hundred million there, that adds up.

http://www.mit-kmi.com/articles.cfm?DocID=43

When the US military talks about "paradigm shifts," they actually mean it. This piece is complete Pentagon gobbledygook, and yet, after finishing my new technothriller, I understand exactly what this man is saying, and who he is saying it to, and why. It may take me years to get over this experience, but that's the price one pays in that hard, no-holds-barred, combative world of novel-writing. "He jests at scars who never felt a wound."

http://www.mit-kmi.com/articles.cfm?DocID=25

Bruce Sterling writes books like Darwin watched animals. Find out more about him, and read tattered electronic copies of Cheap Truth, at the Bruce Sterling Online Index. He lives with his wife Nancy and their two daughters in Austin, Texas.