who succors the unsought?

Posted on Wednesday, 2002 August 21 by Anton

It’s ages since I got a spam of the form “For $39.99 we’ll submit your site to 273 top search engines . . . .” Remember them? I always wondered who the heck would buy that service.

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the cyberpunk age

Posted on Wednesday, 2002 August 21 by Anton

We’re living in the future: I just got spammed by Hamas.

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ceteris paribus, life is better than death

Posted on Wednesday, 2002 August 21 by Anton

Reason: Forever Young: The new scientific search for immortality. (Thanks to Paul Hsieh for the link.)

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can you say “backlash”?

Posted on Wednesday, 2002 August 21 by Anton

Oh dear oh dear oh dear.

School officials in California are warning parents that they cannot educate their children at home unless they obtain professional teaching credentials.

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remember the Beethoven beetle?

Posted on Monday, 2002 August 19 by Anton

Programming tool makes bugs sing. (Link from GirlHacker.) Interesting if it works. There’s a similar idea in Bruce Sterling’s early novel Schismatrix: the control panel of the ship Red Consensus makes a sonic pattern designed to fade from conscious perception until it changes.

2006: See also.

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tall buildings

Posted on Monday, 2002 August 19 by Anton

James Lileks says several right things about the WTC.

It’s not cowardice to suggest that there might be difficulty renting the upper floors of two 110 story towers; I can imagine myself as someone looking for office space, standing in the exact same spot in the sky the walls of the WTC enclosed before, feeling naked, and wondering whether this just wasn’t proving some point that didn’t need proving.

. . .

It’s not that people hated Modernism – they hated seeing good old buildings fall to the reaper’s scythe, replaced by ugly tall graceless slabs, again, and again, and again. Modernism wore out its welcome long ago. Modernism had no time for people. People returned the favor.

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alternate casting

Posted on Sunday, 2002 August 18 by Anton

In Time Bandits, in the scene introducing Agamemnon, the script read: Helmet comes off to reveal Sean Connery (or an actor of equal but cheaper stature).

Imagine, if you will, that the casting director hired Roger Moore.

Later: I learned last night from some website or other that Franz Liebkind, author of Springtime for Hitler, was almost played by Dustin Hoffman (who did The Graduate instead).

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