I’m reading Cory Doctorow’s novel Little Brother, which has been nominated for a Prometheus Award. In another tab I’m reading an autobiographical comic-strip by a boy of the same age as the novel’s narrator; switching between them is sometimes surreal.

Though he has lived in San Francisco, Doctorow makes occasional errors.

Even if you’ve never been to San Francisco, chances are you know what the Golden Gate looks like: it’s that big orange suspension bridge that swoops dramatically from the old military base called the Presidio to Sausalito, where all the cutesy wine-country towns are with their scented candle shops and art galleries.

Sausalito is indeed the nearest town north of the bridge, but it is only one of the cutesy towns in Marin County (which isn’t usually called part of “wine country”).

“He was going to take the BART over.”
“Don’t you know about the BART?”

Only a tourist says “the BART”.

“. . . But it used to be impossible to fly or go to the moon or get a hard-drive with more than a few kilobytes of storage. . . .”

Hm, given the narrator’s youth I guess I can believe he has the impression that the first HDs were so small.

… one of her favorite Brazilian tecno-brega bands, Carioca Proibidão — the forbidden guy from Rio.

That ‘ã’ looks out of place. Andre, shouldn’t it be –ido?

Mom’s a freelance relocation specialist who helps British people get settled in in San Francisco. The UK High Commission pays her . . . .

Most of the members of the (British) Commonwealth have the same head of state, so they don’t send each other Ambassadors; they have High Commissioners instead. Doctorow, being Canadian, may have forgotten that the UK has an embassy to the US.

Ocean Beach is way out past Golden Gate park, a stark cliff lined with expensive, doomed houses . . . .

The clifftop houses are at China Beach, further north. The area of Ocean Beach (where I lived, 1988–92) is mostly flat.

“Mr Governor” sounds alien. I never thought of that before: why do “President” and (usually) “Mayor” get the prefix, but not “Governor” or “Senator”?

Qaeda is misspelled Quaeda two times out of five.

Around noon the other day, I saw a steady stream of moths flying north along the BART track: not dense enough to call them a flock, let alone a swarm, but enough that I always had a few of them in view. (Maybe they do that every day; I wouldn’t know.) When I came back a few hours later they were gone.

In the dawn’s early light, Pillow (a cat) often sits at the one window that’s near a tree, seeming to watch the birds. He sometimes makes a queer choking noise, like kekekekek; Dad says his cat sometimes makes the same noise. I conjecture that they’re trying to sound like a bird, though I wouldn’t have thought their little brains could conceive of such a trick.

meme goes meta

When I decided I wanted a domain, about ten years ago, .nu was the cheapest registry. It’s now €60 to renew for two years; I suspect I can do better than that. So don’t be surprised if my address changes on March 28.

My computer killed itself to protect you from more cat pictures.

Later it occurs to me to mention the symptoms. It comes alive long enough to show a gray Apple screen, the spinner spins for a bit, and then it shuts itself off.

The domain ogre.nu expires next month, and I’m wondering how many people will notice if I let it go.

I got yet another wacky idea for a Martian calendar. Start with 24 months of 28 days each. Drop one day from every seventh month (so that a given month is short in one year out of seven), and add one day every 48 years. The result is longer than the mean tropical year by one day in 6176 years.

An analogous calendar for Earth: start with 12 months of 30 days, add 3 days to every 7 months (so the cycle is 30 30 31 30 31 30 31), and add one day every ten years; this is long by one day in 219130 years.

Does Professor Carr, for example, realize, when he asserts that “we can no longer find much meaning in the distinction familiar to nineteenth-century thought between ‘society’ and ‘state,’” that this is precisely the doctrine of Professor Carl Schmitt, the leading Nazi theoretician of totalitarianism and, in fact, the essence of the definition of totalitarianism which that author has given to that term which he himself had introduced?

F. A. Hayek: The Road to Serfdom (1944), chapter XIII: “The Totalitarians in Our Midst”

You cannot say you love your country and hate your government.

Bill Clinton, 1995 (possibly misquoted)