Avram's journal

Bruce Sterling, in Viridian Note #450: Rude Calamity:

How the ironies multiply. We've got historically high oil prices at the moment that America's most storm-vulnerable large city takes a direct hit from a Category 5. Katrina's core is the equivalent of a thirty-mile wide F2 tornado. It's heading with devilish precision for a large, fragile, moldering city that's mostly situated below sea level. I'm sitting here watching Singaporian hotel TV, which includes CNN, BBC, a Portuguese channel, a Spanish channel, a French channel, a German channel, a whole crowd of wacky, nondenominational Chinese channels, Bollywood dance videos, Channel News Asia, Discovery channel, and a lot of sports. Austria flooded this season. Portugal is on fire. The fires that were ravaging Indonesia and choking Malaysia are in abeyance for the moment, which allows me to breathe relatively freely here in Singapore. My hotel TV just showed me a flood-drenched building, unfit for habitation, collapsing onto its inhabitants in Bombay. And now Katrina. Wow, eh? Welcome to life on the Greenhouse Planet. Someday, this is gonna be all that people talk about.

And while I’m on the subject of the Viridian Notes, you’ve got to read Note #404: Car Ergonomics, a Car and Driver review of the Nissan Quest’s dashboard ergonomics that starts out by quoting from Apocalypse Now. It’s the best car-dashboard-ergonomics review I’ve ever read. It’s the Citizen Kane of car-dashboard-ergonomics reviews.

I’m currently almost done with Sterling’s recent non-fiction book, Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next 50 Years. Most of it’s not really anything you couldn’t pick up yourself by reading the right blogs, but the chapter on warfare — three multi-page biographies of Eastern European or Middle-Eastern terrorist warlords, including a description of the nightmarish fighting in Grozny during the Chechen Wars — is gripping, far and away the best part of the book. (Wikipedia tells me that grozny means “terrible” in Russian.)

Just before this I read Sterling’s latest fiction book, The Zenith Angle, which finally came out in paperback. I enjoyed it — I realized ten pages into it that I’d had more fun in ten pages of Bruce Sterling than I’d had in a hundred pages of the latest Harry Potter book — it’s got the traditional Bruce Sterling virtues, the wide-ranging array of current-events bits and pieces all bouncing off each other in witty ways, but it’s not quite up there with Zeitgeist, my favorite of his books.

Bruce Sterling lists Ten Technologies That Deserve to Die. I especially like what has to say about prisons:

Lose your American internal visa (formerly known as a “driver’s license”) and you soon find that merchants won’t take your credit, that aircraft won’t transport you, that for all your sunny smiles and good behavior, you are under heavy constraints. American airports have become incarceration centers in all but name, plus you can get a drink there and listen to Muzak. So why do we go through these same ritual gestures with the iron bars, uniforms, and transport trucks? Technically, it’s redundant.