Chris Wren

One of my creative heroes, David Lynch on watching movies on your iPhone. Reading books is one thing, although it’s going to be a crime against civilization if we end up losing book covers, which is why I’ll never completely switch to reading ebooks. Movies are another matter completely. There’s a certain obligation on behalf of the viewer to watch a movie in a form at least approximating the manner that the artist intended.

I’ve been reading Greg Bear’s 1997 novel Slant again. After 11 years it hasn’t aged well at all. It was one of those novels written in the heady early days of the internets, when everyone thought that ideas were going to be the NEW CURRENCY, the “information economy” was going to like, totally change everything and that technology was the only aspect worth considering in the contemplation of cultural evolution.

Bear’s such a fabulous writer though that his books are worth re-reading whether his techno-totalist prophecies are on target or not and to be fair, we all got a little caught up in the promise that technology was the holy water that would send war, poverty, nationalism, bigotry and superstition running for cover and bring political history at least, to an end.  It wasn’t naivete so much as optimism, something of a dirty word these days.

Anyway, Slant is a perfect time capsule of ideas that dominated science fiction from the mid-80s to as late as a couple of years ago, although this time around I find myself sympathizing with Slant’s villains - stubborn individualists who refuse to be involuntarily swept along with the currents of progress or participate in a society where ethics are entirely driven by technological evolution. That’s kind of an interesting reversal in my values and attitudes that I wasn’t completely aware of - at least, I wasn’t aware of that reversal having gone quite so far. That in itself is a good enough reason to re-read favorite novels every now and then.

No one has the right to give offense, but everyone has the right – indeed, the obligation – to be offended by something.

James Lileks

I’ve done my own share of Lileks-bashing on my various blogs over the years, but somehow Lileks has managed to stay on my reading list along with a core group of favorites. And the more catty left wing bloggers try to convince me that he’s a Mean Horrible Person Who Will Destroy America Lest We Snark At Him, the more inclined I am in my stubborn contrarian way, to continue reading him.

I paid ten bucks to upgrade my iPod touch software to 2.0, which now gives me access to the newly launched app store on iTunes. I don’t really like Apple that much. I don’t like how you can’t just buy a product from them without having to at least partly buy into  Steve Jobs’ weird urban hipster-supremacist no-one-reads-books-anymore control-freak philosophy. So I kind of wanted to hate the new app store, but really, it’s just amazing. It really unleashes the true potential of the iPhone and iPod touch and makes other hand-held devices and imitators pretty much obsolete, where “pretty much” means “completely and irrecoverably”.

Of course, the first thing I got was a free book reader app, because I know it gives Steve Jobs a toothache to have someone reading books on his device. Naturally, book readers and novels are to be found in the Entertainment section, along with games - Jobs’ final petulant fuck you to the consumers of the despised arcane media. I also got the free New York Times app because it makes right wing bloggers cry. As I was browsing through the complete online edition of the Times, I kept expecting to have a “Would you like to read more?” bubble pop up, but no, it really is all free. But even for people who vomit spontaneously all over their black turtlenecks at the sight of print, or think that keeping up with world events means scanning the headlines on Digg, there are already hundreds of useful Apps posted, most for $9.99 or under, as well as a ton of free webapps that have been available for some time now. I also bought the absolutely amazing Ultralingua Spanish-English translator app for $24.99 and it’s worth at least ten times that.

Anyway, the best thing about the App Store is that it turns my iPod touch into the useful device I hoped it would be when I bought it. It’d be awesome if the next version includes a camera, but no matter, as I’ll probably upgrade to the iPhone next anyway. The telecom companies carrying the iPhone here in Mexico seem to be offering pretty good packages, and the cell coverage down here is pretty amazing to begin with. Of course, you can always just go to any taco stand to get your iPhone unlocked, but I don’t know if I really care about that.

And it’s all Costco’s fault.

Seriously, I would honestly love to know what it would take to make people like Catherine Deveny happy. Mass starvation? A rolling back of living standards to pre-industrial levels, along with high infant mortality, chronic diseases and permanent malnutrition for the masses? If you think that modern living is killing your soul, you can always roll back your own standard of living and lead by example. There isn’t actually a law against choosing to be poor.

When I was about five or so, all the kids in our townhouse complex would meet up  on Saturday mornings and go tobogganing down a decent sized hill at the edge of the development. There were never any fights and no need for adult supervision. The only wrinkle was that in the corner unit, closest to the tobogganing hill, there lived this spiteful old bastard who’d intermittently lean out his back door and curse at us - purple-faced and screaming hysterically at the top of his lungs. We weren’t anywhere near his property - he was just the kind of evil, mean-spirited old fart who had been born without a soul and who had spent a lifetime filling the hole where one should have been with vinegar and arsenic - taking great care not to spill a drop.

We all ignored him of course, but being five, I always thought of that corner unit as vaguely haunted - the house where the bad old people lived. The old fart would call the police, but after showing up the first time, they got annoyed at him and stopped coming. One day we showed up with our toboggans to find the hill covered with fresh snow - and glittering with shards of broken glass. The police came that day, and we watched as they took him and his wife away. I’ll never forget the look on his face as he glared at us before disappearing into the back of the cop car. Not crazy. Just bad.

Anyway, by the next weekend the city had sent a crew to clean the hill, and they’d even shown up with some dump trucks to recover the hill with snow. “The City” did things like that back then. Today, they’d probably show up with “DANGER! Hill Closed” signs, and that mean old bastard would be holding a cease and desist order in a white-knuckled death grip, along with half the neighbors and an army of lawyers behind him. Think I’m exaggerating? Read this, and wonder as I do, how the people with holes where their souls should be have managed to become so numerous.

Gordon Brown has eight course dinner before food crisis talks

Nothing to add.

Although record prices boost the coffers of oil producers, they are also a danger for the long-term because they encourage conservation and investment in alternative sources of energy.

And we can’t have that now, can we?

OK, let’s assume that a supreme being exists in the limited anthropomorphized form that Christians conceptualize God and answers prayers as described in the promotional material. Isn’t it just possible that the prayers from, oh I don’t know, children with cancer, disaster victims, or people living in any number of political shitholes might take priority over the complaints of people in the richest nation in the world who think the cost of filling up their SUVs is too high? I mean, have these people ever even bothered to read their own bible?

If $100 a barrel wasn’t a magic number or an economic impossibility, then why are people throwing around $200 as the next “unthinkable” milestone? Look, it’s going to hit 200 a barrel sometime in the next 3-4 months and there’s really no theoretical reason why it can’t just keep going to 250, 300, 500, or even a thousand bucks a barrel. I don’t think those sorts of numbers are likely, but I don’t see what’s so impossible about 250-300. And I don’t think that oil prices are a bubble because I don’t think we’ll see a sudden crash in demand. Like food, very little of the global demand for oil is discretionary - even if all liesure driving and air travel were to suddenly stop, it wouldn’t make that big a dent in global consumption.

Ken and I moved down to Guadalajara just in the nick of time. Assuming there are still commercial airlines a year from now, just going back to Vancouver for a visit will be a pretty huge deal financially. Moving our stuff in storage down here, or moving back though - who knows if that’s even going to be possible. Probably not.

Not that I’m bothered by the prospect of being stranded here. When we made the decision to move, it already wasn’t hard to see the way things were going and that this might be a one way trip. One thing I’m not worried about us losing is the internet. It’s going to be the intercontinental railway of the 21st century. So there’ll still be information trade. But between who? Will geographic monster states like Canada and Mexico be able to survive $300 a barrel oiland the collapse of commerical shipping? Or will we revert to self-sufficient regional/city-states, island societies talking to each other across vast tracts of wilderness?