Magnificent Obsession # 1872
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Magnificent Obsessions, part 98
Magnificent Obsessions, part 98
11/11/2003 03:20 PM More Magnificent Obsessions -
14to42.net - "This site intends
to survey all of the signs in New York City from 14th Street to 42nd
Street." Great photos of
Ghost Signs,
signs painted on
buildings,
signs
attached to buildings,
window signs,
modern signs,
graffiti signs, and
even some
pretty creepy
signs, along with some surprisingly complete histories of the
businesses the signs were made to advertise.
London: The (Magnificent) Biography
London: The (Magnificent) Biography
04/22/2004 09:05 AMI've just finished Peter Ackroyd's magnificent
London: The
Biography, an 800-page history of London spanning 2,000 years of
history. I read it mostly on the tube, in London, while travelling to
one place or another, on airplanes, while flying into or out of the
city. The book is a triumph in that it manages to convey the
unknowable vastness of London's environs and dwellers and history
without ever having the hubris to imply that is has captured it or
contained it.
The prose is glorious and even drunken in places: clearly this is a
labour of love, years-long opus penned by someone who loves and is
intimate with London -- even if the city is, as he says, so large that
no person could hope to walk its every street in a lifetime. I can't
remember the last time I smiled so much while reading a book, nor when
I made so many notes of things to look up and do later.
The thing I liked best about Ackroyd's vision is the idea of
continuity, which speaks directly to an idea I've been having
lately: that books are a practice, not a product. Here's what I mean:
the Bible was a book even before it was bound between covers; the fact
that it was scroll-shaped didn't make it any less bookish. By the same
token, one of my novels, represented as a text-file, is also a book --
even if it doesn't look anything like a bound volume -- even if it
doesn't look like anything, period. A scroll, a bound volume,
a CD of audio, a text-file: they're all "books" even if they're all
different.
What a book is, is a collection of literary, manufacturing,
commercial, and technological practices. And what all these different
kinds of books have in common with one another is that their practices
are continuous with one another. A Torah in scroll is related
to a bound edition because the latter couldn't exist without the
former: the latter rises up from the former, perhaps inevitably. The
"book" is the continuous practice of writing, reading, marketing,
distributing and publishing that dates back thousands of years.
We're continuous, too. The "me" who wrote my most recent novel --
which I'm very happy with, indeed! -- is not the "me" who wrote the
one before that. The new one is informed with the lessons from the
last one, and the intervening living. The me who wrote the last book
could not have written the next one -- but the me I became
could. And those two mes are continuous with one another: one gave
rise to the next.
London is continuous. It's not a place -- its borders have shifted and
shifted again over thousands of years. It's not a race of people --
its inhabitants have changed in individual identity and culture so
many times that the culture and ethnicity of London 2004 is nearly
completely different from London 0000. It's not a collection of
architecture, or a map of roads, or a political system, for all of
these have changed and changed and changed. London isn't even its
name: London's had many names over the years.
London is a practice: London is what Londoners are doing
right now, which is informed by, midwifed by, descended from what
Londoners were doing yesterday. London is what Londoners do.
I'd suspected this, and Ackroyd nailed it up and down for me. He shows
how the currents of London are fraught with eddies, whirlpools of
continuity, so the 1960s movement to wipe London clean of its
Victorian fooforaw and build modern high-rises echoes the 1860s
destruction of 14 churches under the Union of Benefices Act, which, in
turn, echoes the 1760s demolition of the gates to the city walls
because they "obstructed the free current of air."
I've been buttonholing Londoners all month with intelligences gleaned
from Ackroyd's book -- a triumph nearly on the scale of Trafalgar
Square or the discovery of the physics of the arch or the rebuilding
after the Fire. I'll be chewing it over for years.
Peter's Hill and Upper Thames Street were laid out in the twelfth
century. Other street-surfaces and frontages have a similar history,
with property divisions remaining intact for many hundreds of years.
Even the devastation of the Great Fire could not erase the ancient
lanes and boundaries. In a similar pattern of continuity those streets
which were newly laid out after the Fire showed tenacity of purpose.
Ironmonger Lane, for instance, ahs had the same width for almost 355
years. That width was and is 14 feet, originally sufficient to allow
two carts to pass each other without hindrance or blockage. It is
another aspect of this continuous London history that its structure
can accommodate itself to quite different modes of transport.
Link3M: Money, Margins, Magnificent
3M: Money, Margins, Magnificent
04/19/2004 01:42 PMTrusty old 3M is no ordinary industrial conglomerate.
Microsoft releases Magnificent Seven
Patches
Microsoft releases Magnificent Seven
Patches
07/14/2004 08:26 AMSOFTWARE MAKER Microsoft has issued two critical and five important
software patches for Windows XP and 2000. The critical patches cover a
flaw in the task scheduler program and Microsoft's HTML Help function.
A spokesVole said that both critical vulnerabilities could be
exploited if hackers tricked Internet Explorer users into visiting a
specially designed Web site.
Stross's magnificent ACCELERANDO as a
free CC download
Stross's magnificent ACCELERANDO as a
free CC download
06/17/2005 03:35 PMCory Doctorow:
Charlie Stross's brilliant novel
Accelerando is available as a free Creative Commons download!
This novel collects and bridges all of his Hugo-nominated Manfred Macx
stories, published over the last several years in Asimov's Science
Fiction Magazine. Charlie is a wild talent, and he writes like the
love-child of Vernor Vinge, Neal Stephenson and Hunter S Thompson.
Once you start this book, you won't be able to stop.
Manfred's on the road again, making strangers rich.
It's a hot summer Tuesday, and he's standing in the plaza in front of
the Centraal Station with his eyeballs powered up and the sunlight
jangling off the canal, motor scooters and kamikaze cyclists whizzing
past and tourists chattering on every side. The square smells of water
and dirt and hot metal and the fart-laden exhaust fumes of cold
catalytic converters; the bells of trams ding in the background, and
birds flock overhead. He glances up and grabs a pigeon, crops the
shot, and squirts it at his weblog to show he's arrived. The bandwidth
is good here, he realizes; and it's not just the bandwidth, it's the
whole scene. Amsterdam is making him feel wanted already, even though
he's fresh off the train from Schiphol: He's infected with the dynamic
optimism of another time zone, another city. If the mood holds,
someone out there is going to become very rich indeed.
He wonders who it's going to be.
* * *
Manfred sits on a stool out in the car park at the Brouwerij 't IJ,
watching the articulated buses go by and drinking a third of a liter
of lip-curlingly sour gueuze. His channels are jabbering away in a
corner of his head-up display, throwing compressed infobursts of
filtered press releases at him. They compete for his attention,
bickering and rudely waving in front of the scenery. A couple of punks
– maybe local, but more likely drifters lured to Amsterdam by the
magnetic field of tolerance the Dutch beam across Europe like a pulsar
– are laughing and chatting by a couple of battered mopeds in the
far corner. A tourist boat putters by in the canal; the sails of the
huge windmill overhead cast long, cool shadows across the road. The
windmill is a machine for lifting water, turning wind power into dry
land: trading energy for space, sixteenth-century style. Manfred is
waiting for an invite to a party where he's going to meet a man he can
talk to about trading energy for space, twenty-first-century style,
and forget about his personal problems.
He's ignoring the instant messenger boxes, enjoying some
low-bandwidth, high-sensation time with his beer and the pigeons, when
a woman walks up to him, and says his name: "Manfred Macx?"
He glances up. The courier is an Effective Cyclist, all wind-burned
smooth-running muscles clad in a paean to polymer technology: electric
blue lycra and wasp yellow carbonate with a light speckling of anti
collision LEDs and tight-packed air bags. She holds out a box for him.
He pauses a moment, struck by the degree to which she resembles Pam,
his ex-fiance.
Link
(
Thanks, Charlie!)
Prime Obsession
Prime Obsession
12/24/2004 12:37 PMAn unhealthy obsession?
An unhealthy obsession?
12/25/2003 12:49 AM An unhealthy obsession?
The Internet is full of websites dedicated to a rabid fan's obsession
with a celebrity. These websites often reveal their owners' fantasies
of sexual encounters with said celebrity. But it's not often the
object of such sexual desire ends up being a well known public figure
from the Clinton administration.
Pay Phone Obsession
Pay Phone Obsession
05/13/2004 03:41 AMYou might remember pay phones. They're those public boxes on the
street with telephones in them that people used to make calls in the
age before mobile phones. Okay, so I'm only joking a bit, but even as
phone companies struggle to figure out what to do with pay phones,
(suggestion: turn them into WiFi hotspots!) there are some who are
obsessed with the idea of
calling random pay phones and talking to whoever picks up.
For almost a decade, one man has been putting together a huge database
of pay phone numbers. Of course, that database has actually turned
out to be quite useful. People trying to track down callers (the
article lists a mother finding her runaway daughter and a man tracking
down a stalker among other things) have used the website to identify
the location of a pay phone caller. Of course all this would be much
easier if the phone companies published a directory of pay phones -
but they don't see any reason to (despite the stories of people this
self-built directory has helped).
Obsession Continues In New Preview
Obsession Continues In New Preview
12/31/2004 01:51 AMDark Horse has posted a new 4-page preview of
Star Wars: Obsession #3, in which Durge
gets Anakin angry. You really shouldn't get Anakin angry...you won't
like him when he's angry.
Traffic, obsession and happiness
Traffic, obsession and happiness
01/08/2004 07:58 PMI
disagree somewhat with Adina. I think that traffic is similar to
attention. Attention is not the same as power or money, but it is
sought after in the same way and in some ways is something that money
can't buy and is actually more valuable and difficult to gain. Having
said that, it's not about the traffic. Just like it's not about money,
or attention. Money, attention and traffic do not, at the end of the
day, make you happy. It is associated with privilege and power. I've
met many people who have privilege and power (and money and attention
and traffic) who are not happy. One of the problems with happiness
through score cards is that it's like playing a video game. It's quite
an empty happiness that is similar to the empty happiness of
fulfilling a craving or an obsession. Most (not all) of the extremely
wealthy people I know are obsessed with money and think about it all
the time. If you're smart and you are obsessed with money, you can
usually become wealthy. Most of the happy people I know are not
obsessed with money. Most of them think about money just enough so
that they don't have to worry about money. But money's nice to have,
just like power is nice to have. But more than enough is often too
much. Once you have too much money, power or attention you become
obsessed and the fear of losing it alone can make you unhappy. Money,
power and attention are addictive and dangerous.
I don't talk about these things very often because speaking from a
position of privilege, it's not very convincing, but most of my power,
attention, money and other "assets" are a result of my obsessions.
These obsessions drive me to focus in excess. I am now exploring my
obsessions. I wonder what this is going to do to me. Obsession is a demon which can help you gain many things, but
has many corrosive side effects and in the end often leads you away
from happiness. I wonder what I would be like without my
obsessions?
Mountain Lion Obsession
Mountain Lion Obsession
06/17/2005 04:54 PM According to a briefing by Palo Alto city naturalist Deborah Bartens,
the one strange attractor for mountain lions is Obsession cologne by
Calvin Klein....
Star Wars: Obsession Details
Star Wars: Obsession Details
07/19/2004 07:52 PMStarting this December, Haden Blackman and Brian Ching will present
Star Wars: Obsession, a 5-issue limited series from Dark Horse
Comics. All the main characters from the
Clone Wars multimedia
adventure will appear in the series, including Anakin Skywalker,
Obi-Wan Kenobi, Mace Windu, Yoda, Padmé Amidala, General Greivous,
Durge, and Asajj Ventress. This crossover-in-a-crossover series will
also have ties to Cartoon Network's micro-series and Del Rey's
Labyrinth of Evil novel, as Anakin becomes a Jedi Knight and
the biggest bloody Bospor in the galaxy. Click
here<
/a> for the full report, including the covers for the first two
issues.
Kevin Kelly's obsession continues
Kevin Kelly's obsession continues
12/02/2003 06:30 AMKevin Kelly -- Cool Tools
kk.org/cooltools/index.php
track this
site | 6 links
Last Stop for Teen's Tram Obsession
(Reuters)
Last Stop for Teen's Tram Obsession
(Reuters)
04/18/2005 10:14 AMReuters - An Australian teen-ager described by
police as a good kid with an obsession for trams reached the
end of the line Monday when he faced charges over the theft of
two trolley cars in the southern city of Melbourne.
Last stop for Australian teen's tram
obsession (Reuters)
Last stop for Australian teen's tram
obsession (Reuters)
04/18/2005 12:12 AMReuters - An Australian teenager described by police as a good kid
with an obsession for trams reached the end of the line on Monday
when he faced charges over the theft of two trolley cars in the
southern city of Melbourne.
So-called Google arms race proves
media's anxious obsession
So-called Google arms race proves
media's anxious obsession
05/19/2004 04:17 PMThe story gets interesting when rumors of Google's response met and
fell in love with a programming bug in Gmail. Users starting reporting
yesterday that their 1GB of email quota was now adding up to 1
terabyte.
Mekanism Launches Integrated Campaign
for Sega - Offbeat Campaign Details
Boy’s Obsession with Game
Mekanism Launches Integrated Campaign
for Sega - Offbeat Campaign Details
Boy’s Obsession with Game
03/14/2005 05:55 PMMekanism today announced the launch of a quirky and unconventional new
advertising campaign for SEGA® of America, Inc. Designed to promote
the PlayStation®2 and Xbox® release of Super Monkey BallTM Deluxe, the
integrated campaign offers a peak into the trials and tribulations of
the life of a boy so obsessed with the game, he’s decided to live in a
large, inflatable ball. [PRWEB Feb 18, 2005]
Grok Description matches for Magnificent Obsession # 1872
GrokA matches for Magnificent Obsession # 1872
Magnificent Obsession # 1872
