August 20, 2004

By Sheila Lennon / The Providence (R.I.) Journal

6:05 p.m. Friday (Blogroll)

Weekend! Books, game ...

Peasant's Quest is a text adventure game like the old Infocom games (Zork), with simple (and, to some, unnecessary) graphics.

You remember the drill: Look at everything, talk to everybody, try to pick up anything you find. There's actually a trailer for it.

Spoiler heaven: People looking for help in this forum give all sorts of things away.

Lists to take to the library: From Lists of Bests, two sci-fi books lists. (More book lists there)

Phobos Books's "100 Science Fiction Books You Just Have to Read." The top 10:

1 Childhood's End, Arthur C. Clarke
2 Foundation, Isaac Asimov
3 Dune, Frank Herbert
4 The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
5 Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
6 Valis, Philip K. Dick
7 Frankenstein, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
8 Gateway, Frederik Pohl
9 Space Merchants, Frederik Pohl
10 Earth Abides, George R. Stewart
11 Cuckoo's Egg, C.J. Cherryh
12 Star Surgeon, James White

The SF Book Club's "The Most Significant SF & Fantasy Books of the Last 50 Years (1953-2002)"
Put together by the Science Fiction Book Club.

1 The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien
2 The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov 
3 Dune, Frank Herbert
4 Stranger in a Strange Land Robert A. Heinlein
5 A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin
6 Neuromancer, William Gibson 
7 Childhood's End, Arthur C. Clarke
8 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Philip K. Dick 
9 The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
10 Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury 
11 The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
12 A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller Jr.

Is Science Fiction About to Go Blind? at Popular Science:

Awed at the pace of technological advances, a faction of geeky writers believes our world is about to change so radically that envisioning what comes next is nearly impossible.

His worst recent read is my best: MIT prof Philip Greenspun writes in his blog that William Gibson's Pattern Recognition is "The worst book that I've read during this trip around Japan."

I loved it when I read it back in May, and said so again in his comments.

Portrait of a monkey as a sentient being: Blogger Darren Barefoot writes

Jill Greenberg is an accomplished celebrity photographer. Recently, though, she's turned her attention to another biped: monkeys. She discovered her affection for monkey portraits on a commercial, and started renting various species of trained primates and taking their photos as if they were A-list celebrities. I originally read about this in Walrus magazine.

Halftime for Gonzo: The WaPo's Jonathan Yardley reviews Hunter S. Thompson's Hey Rube, admitting he didn't know HST has been writing columns at ESPN.com for four years. (The book is a collection of columns.)

Kevin Cowherd of the Baltimore Sun reviews it, too, and doesn't like it but does quote from it. I'm throwing up an old photo of HST, to show what he looked like when he had hair:

On the White House and the Iraq war: "That gang of born-again geeks wouldn't know a Message from a poison meat whistle, judging by the sum of all the ignorant, wrong-headed evidence seen thus far in this dismal conflict."

On his plan to speed up baseball by eliminating the pitcher: "Pitchers, as a group, are pampered little swine with too much money and no real effect on the game except to drag it out and interrupt the action."

On the Baltimore Ravens: "Watching the Baltimore Ravens play football is like watching scum freeze on the eyeballs of a jackass, or being stuck for six hours in an elevator with Dick Cheney on speed. The Ravens will pounce on you and gnaw you to death, which can take eight or nine days."

There is also a sweet, elegant tribute to an old friend, the late George Plimpton, with lines that only Thompson could summon: "George Plimpton kicked. ... He was a champion in everything he did. He was the finest advertisement for Harvard University since LSD-25, and he loved Calla Lilies, along with beautiful women and Bob Dylan and the finest Afghani hashish."

Hurricane: Riders on the storm. Tom Matrullo:

High intensity events arrive with the force of dreams. You drive up a road to higher ground, hoping your home will be there when you return. After the hurricane, you drive back down the same road, but it is not the same. It is a vector of indices of power. The broken power and light poles, the crushed hardware store, the truck flung into the liquor store tell of something that has come this way and this way will never be the same.

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The most annoying element of this has been the headlines. Every day, newspapers tell us, in bold letters, there has been a RAMPAGE. we are BATTERED. We are COMING OUT OF OUR HOLE. We are starting THE PUSH FORWARD. BETTER DAYS ARE AHEAD. WE. WE. WE. The headline is an outmoded, fascist imposition of Order erected upon a lie about a fiction of disorder.

The first moment after a disaster, we do not need news anchors unchained to any news, no shred of useful information, but plenty of unctuous sympathy. We do not need roads filled with NBC-2 vehicles containing anchorites powdering their noses in rear view mirrors. These we have, in droves....

As you might fear, FEMA wasn't much help either:

Finding the office was not a simple matter. Once there, I found several FEMA people milling about, avoiding eye contact with us, and 15 or so phones, some of which worked. The FEMA agents did not try to take questions or offer information. They simply told us to dial an 800 number. It was 7:30 a.m., and the room was already filling with people who had somehow found out where the FEMA center was located. Apparently in George W. Bush’s Washington, disasters may only occur after 8 a.m. and prior to 6 p.m. We waited for the emergency experts to arrive at their desks, then we got busy signals for more than an hour, as they handled the first calls, one plodding 25-minute interview at a time. It also seems to be federal policy that victims of disasters come equipped with everything necessary to bureaucracy. There was no water, no porta potties, no pens or paper, although the FEMA interview requires that you be able to take down important information like your case number, etc. After an hour I got through to a FEMA agent, a nice-sounding but somberly legalistic woman who tried to make clear the federal intricacies and limitations of FEMA obligation while taking my info.

Buzz Bruggeman has his power back now, but here are his Thoughts on the Charley a couple days later...

Tom's Summer of Soul: Management guru Tom Peters turned his life around, and doesn't care who knows it, or what they think of his method.

via David Weinberger

The Real Deal: How a Philosophy Professor With a Checkered Past Became the Most Influential Catholic Layman in George W. Bush's Washington. Good reporting and a thorough, well-documented story by Joe Feuerherd in National Catholic Reporter.

Bugmenot is back.