I recently rented The Lord of the Rings in audiobook format, on CD, from Recorded Books. They make, sell, and rent audiobooks. When you rent, they send you the books in a box-within-a-box. The inner box is for sending it back, so there is very little hassle.
Don’t tell them, but I am ripping the whole set into MP3 format, so that I can listen on my iPod. I am not doing it to steal the books, or put them up on Limewire, I just want to put the data in my own bucket, as it were.
I was thinking about Close Encounters of the Third Kind the other day. I was pretty young, so take this with a grain of salt, but here’s what I was thinking. At the beginning, a mood of chaos is set when as-yet-unintroduced high-ranking officials meet in a remote location where a World War II plane (boat?) has been found. They arrive in a helicopter, and part of the fun and tension of the scene is the landing of this loud helicopter.
There is a lot of buzz about a book called The Cluetrain Manifesto. I can’t tell if it’s about dotcoms, or about social forces in the Internet Age. But, they provided the whole book online, so I ciphoned it onto my Palm and I’m going to read it. I’ll keep you posted.
Speaking of books, here is my reading list for the coming months:
1984, by George Orwell The Future Does Not Compute: Overcoming the Machines in our Midst, by Steve Talbott. (See also the FAQ for his excellent ongoing email newsletter “Netfuture.” The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert Heinlein Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness, by Roger Penrose To Say Nothing of the Dog, by Connie Willis
Alison came up with an interesting quote in her dissertation research on 12th century France:
As I hear more and more about this time period from Alison, I see why she studies history. It sheds light forward onto our own time. Would you describe our current ways of thinking as “eschewing univocal interpretations,” because I wouldn’t. I forget who said the following but I agree and I guess so would the scholars of 1100: the older I get, the more I learn that not only is it okay to hold contradictory beliefs, but the deepest, most important elements of life are bound up in such opposing truths.
I was really looking forward to the opening ceremonies of the Winter Olympics tonight, but over the last few days I’ve been growing increasingly uneasy about what I might see there. As it turned out, after the initial voice-overs by Messrs. McKay (co-alum of my high school!) and Costas, I turned off the television. I’m only going to tune in when events I want to see are on.
My problem is nationalism, and the two forms it has taken since September 11th.
Note, this was written before I had a blog. I recovered it from the Internet Archive. Back in graduate school I had a “musings” section of my site and those essays are in the same spirit as this blog so I’ve added them with retroactive datestamps.
The three constants in the universe, so I’m told, are the speed of light, death, and taxes. I can’t really do anything about the speed of light, and I feel quite powerless to affect taxes, as I live in a city that charges almost as much in income tax as the state it’s in (Hint: this state is the most populous on the east coast and charges a buttload in both income and sales tax, and the city shares its name).
Note, this was written before I had a blog. I recovered it from the Internet Archive. Back in graduate school I had a “musings” section of my site and those essays are in the same spirit as this blog so I’ve added them with retroactive datestamps.
I recently saw the movie Titanic, directed by James Cameron. It provoked thoughts of many kinds, and I’m not entirely sure why. Part of it had to do with the moviemaking itself, which I’ll get to last.