Quote of the Day
I recently saw a rather fun little web page which took various passages from books and replaced all works describing colour with a small block of the colour itself; the object was to try to work out the hue described. You could click on the swatch to see if you were right. (Alas, I can't find the link. Sorry.)
Mostly, though, I was pleased to see that the source of one of the quotes was Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson, [part of] one of my all-time favourite novels.
Shortly afterwards, I decided to re-read last year's Stan Robinson epic, the Science in the Capital trilogy. Monday and Tuesday it was Forty Signs of Rain, a much-appreciated birthday gift from fishlifter last year; yesterday and today, it's Fifty Degrees Below.
(Aside: I understand that to make the title work, he has to use Fahrenheit in the title at least, but I wish there was a conversion chart or footnotes or something giving Celsius. He did in the Mars books. Fahrenheit means absolutely nothing to me; it was obsolete before I knew what "temperature" meant, the most useless and dated of the not-at-all-missed Imperial units. I must make a chart, print it and pop it in the book as a bookmark.)
But anyway. This all leads me to one of the many passages in the book I enjoyed...
Walking back to take posession of his new bedroom, he and the salesman passed a line of parked SUV - tall fat station wagons, in effect, called Expedition or Explorer, absurdities for the generations to come to shake their heads at in the way that they once marveled at the finned cars of the fifties. 'Do people still buy these?' Frank asked despite himself.
'Sure, what do you mean? Although now you mention it, there is some surplus here at the end of the year.' It was May. 'Long story short, gas is getting too expensive. I drive one of these,' tapping a Lincoln Navigator. 'They're great. They've got a couple of TVs in the back.'
But they're stupid, Frank didn't say. In prisoner's dilemma terms, they were always-defect. They were America saying Fuck Off to the rest of the world. Deliberate waste, in a kind of ritual desecration. Not just denial but defiance, a Götterdämmerung gesture that said: If we're going down we're going to take the whole world with us. And the roads were full of them. And the Gulf Stream had stopped.
'Amazing,' Frank said.
As tamaranth used to say, all the time: "Oh good, it's not just me."
It amuses me that lilitheve tells me that gas costs $4 a gallon in the USA now and this is causing people to bitch and whine about how expensive it is. A gallon is 4½ litres; $4 is £2 (close approximations). So they're paying about 56p a litre; the average UK price is currently about £1.16.
In other words, US petrol is less than half the price it is in the next biggest English-speaking developed Western nation.
To quote the Hitchikers' Guide, "I've no bloody sympathy at all." Let's see US prices rise to parity with, say, EU averages and then we might see the disappearance of their energy-hogging leviathan automobiles. Better late than never.
P. S. Yes, I know it's a vastly bigger country. Yes, I know they have a very poor public transport infrastructure compared to us in most places. Tough. Whose fault is this? The current situation has been visible as it approached for, conservatively, decades - pretty much all my life.
Mostly, though, I was pleased to see that the source of one of the quotes was Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson, [part of] one of my all-time favourite novels.
Shortly afterwards, I decided to re-read last year's Stan Robinson epic, the Science in the Capital trilogy. Monday and Tuesday it was Forty Signs of Rain, a much-appreciated birthday gift from fishlifter last year; yesterday and today, it's Fifty Degrees Below.
(Aside: I understand that to make the title work, he has to use Fahrenheit in the title at least, but I wish there was a conversion chart or footnotes or something giving Celsius. He did in the Mars books. Fahrenheit means absolutely nothing to me; it was obsolete before I knew what "temperature" meant, the most useless and dated of the not-at-all-missed Imperial units. I must make a chart, print it and pop it in the book as a bookmark.)
But anyway. This all leads me to one of the many passages in the book I enjoyed...
Walking back to take posession of his new bedroom, he and the salesman passed a line of parked SUV - tall fat station wagons, in effect, called Expedition or Explorer, absurdities for the generations to come to shake their heads at in the way that they once marveled at the finned cars of the fifties. 'Do people still buy these?' Frank asked despite himself.
'Sure, what do you mean? Although now you mention it, there is some surplus here at the end of the year.' It was May. 'Long story short, gas is getting too expensive. I drive one of these,' tapping a Lincoln Navigator. 'They're great. They've got a couple of TVs in the back.'
But they're stupid, Frank didn't say. In prisoner's dilemma terms, they were always-defect. They were America saying Fuck Off to the rest of the world. Deliberate waste, in a kind of ritual desecration. Not just denial but defiance, a Götterdämmerung gesture that said: If we're going down we're going to take the whole world with us. And the roads were full of them. And the Gulf Stream had stopped.
'Amazing,' Frank said.
As tamaranth used to say, all the time: "Oh good, it's not just me."
It amuses me that lilitheve tells me that gas costs $4 a gallon in the USA now and this is causing people to bitch and whine about how expensive it is. A gallon is 4½ litres; $4 is £2 (close approximations). So they're paying about 56p a litre; the average UK price is currently about £1.16.
In other words, US petrol is less than half the price it is in the next biggest English-speaking developed Western nation.
To quote the Hitchikers' Guide, "I've no bloody sympathy at all." Let's see US prices rise to parity with, say, EU averages and then we might see the disappearance of their energy-hogging leviathan automobiles. Better late than never.
P. S. Yes, I know it's a vastly bigger country. Yes, I know they have a very poor public transport infrastructure compared to us in most places. Tough. Whose fault is this? The current situation has been visible as it approached for, conservatively, decades - pretty much all my life.