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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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