blinkit

Gibson at home

WMD: After seeing him appear half a dozen times in recent years haunting the neighbourhood around my office like an apparition of post-hippie art geek coolness, I finally got a chance to sit down and interview William Gibson last week. He was back in Vancouver on the final leg of his book tour for Spook Country, his latest novel. He was 20 minutes late, for which he apologized, but he noted that after weeks of touring he was reaching the end of his ability to keep up with one interview after another. He was also unfailingly polite, thoughtful and intelligently entertaining. Apart from the fact that I dig his writing (although what's up with all the happy endings ...), it was one of the most enjoyable interviews I've had in awhile, largely because he listened, thought and answered in real time, as opposed to spinning off rote answers. That's probably a bonus of interviewing writers.

My latest Courier column, available here, came out of that conversation, although it necessarily contains only a little of what was an hour's worth of Q&A. I've reproduced the text below. We talked largely about Vancouver, where he's lived since 1971. Aside from a short story or two, his adopted home city, for which he has great fondness, has never appeared in his fiction before. I wanted to know why:

Futurist fiction writer never imagined Vancouver in 2007

Barry Link, Special to Vancouver Courier

Published: Wednesday, October 10, 2007

William Gibson's fiction has been set in San Francisco, Tokyo, London, Los Angeles and the eastern seaboard of the U.S. Most of it is a vibrantly imagined vision of the near future which, when it first appeared in the 1980s, anticipated the wired and increasingly virtual world of 2007.

It's a future alive in technology, with computer interfaces that rival the Matrix movies, buildings that "grow" into being, and people deliberately replacing parts of their bodies with machines. But it's also a harsh world, with lethal violence on the streets, corporate brawn usurping representative government, and a yawning chasm between rich and poor right out of the Fraser Institute's wettest fantasies.

It's also why, having lived here since 1971, the South Carolina-born Gibson never included Vancouver in his novels. He didn't want to do to his adopted hometown what his imagination had done so skillfully to other cities of the world: make them disturbing.

That reluctance ended with his latest novel, Spook Country, a contemporary tale in which Vancouver plays a prominent role in the final third of the book. But while the novel is a fascinating and often funny meditation on how the U.S. has been thrown dangerously off balance in the wake of 9-11, Vancouver comes across as anything but disturbing. We look pretty good.

Gibson didn't set out to include Vancouver in the story, he told me during an interview last week at a favoured Granville Street cafe. He doesn't like to predestine his narratives. On a good day, he said, "I'm not making executive decisions over the life of my characters."

But as the story developed, and the search by competing and shadowy agencies for a shipping container and its mystery cargo seemingly adrift at sea unfolded, his cast of spooks, criminals and former rock stars landed in our town. Gibson said as soon as he knew they were coming, he was nervous for weeks.

It turned out they liked it here, or at least found little that put them off, as they focused on international intrigue. Vancouver in their eyes is freshly scrubbed and clean smelling. Dollar coins baffle them, and they are surprised to be stuck in horrendous rush hour traffic. But the North Shore mountains amaze them. The green and blue glass condo towers of Yaletown and Coal Harbour look like they were built last week. The locals--with the exception of a Downtown Eastside drug dealer--are friendly, and downtown commuters going to work in the morning have, in the charmingly trippy mind of one key character, a low "f--kedness quotient."

Gibson found it "totally cool" to be a tourist in his own city while writing the book, and the experience his characters went through mirror what he's seen in countless other visitors. Cory Doctorow, a Toronto-born science fiction writer and blogger whose intellectual horsepower rivals Gibson's, once told him Toronto is a place that's easy to live in but hard to visit. Gibson says Vancouver, by contrast, is a city newcomers adore. "I've seen people from Paris fall tragically in love with Vancouver," he said. "And they dread having to return to Paris." Who would have thought Robson Street could beat out the Champs-Elysees.

Yet for a science fiction writer, Gibson never expected the Vancouver we have now. He remembers not only when neighbourhoods like Coal Harbour didn't exist, but also when no one ever imagined Coal Harbour was even a remote possibility. He also never thought Vancouver would become so dense, or that real estate would morph into a gambler's vocation. The rapid change in so short a period concerns him, and he worries about the city's sustainability.

Will he stay? He doesn't know, but only because he says he never knows what the future holds. But it's clear he'd like to remain here. Vancouver gave him a fresh start. The city wasn't as interesting or as big as Toronto, where he spent part of the hippie era after leaving an America convulsed by Vietnam. But it also had no baggage for him when he arrived 36 years ago. His wife is from here, his children were raised here, and he learned to write fiction here, eventually producing some of the most influential novels to come out of Lotusland.

He's grateful to Vancouver for that fresh start, and it shows.

- Gibson appears as part of the Vancouver International Writers and Readers Festival, which runs Oct. 16 to 21. For more information, see www.writersfest.bc.ca/.

blink@vancourier.com

Today's bLINKit: The Courier's award-winning historical writer, Lisa Smedman, writes about the coming of the Swede-Finns to B.C., as seen through the eyes of her grandmother.

Don't write this down

WMD: And catching up with my weekly column from last week, I interviewed William Crossman, an American philosopher who believes writing will die out in the advanced West by 2050. Part of his argument, which I did not get into in my piece, for the always persistent problem of lack of space, is that I suspect Crossman is advancing his argument partly because he wants text to die because he believes an oral world supported by appropriate technology will be a much fairer one. All the same, I believe he believes in his thesis, and it's a compelling one to chew over. I heard Crossman interviewed over the summer on the SETI Institute's weekly radio show and gave him a call. You can hear the radio interview here.

The link for the original column, still tenuous, is here. I've reproduced the text below:

***

Three Rs down to one by year 2050

U.S. philosopher predicts digital age spells end of written word

Barry Link, Vancouver Courier

Published: Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Fifty years from now, no one will be able to read the words printed on this page. Or any of the other pages in this edition of the paper, should it survive until then.

That's the argument advanced by American philosopher William Crossman, who believes hardly anyone in North America in 2057 will know how to read or write. And he believes it will be a good thing.

Crossman, director of the San Francisco-based Institute for the Study of Talking Computers and Oral Cultures, has spent more than a decade examining trends in computer technology and demography and their effect on how we communicate. His conclusion is that the written word is disappearing and will be replaced by talking computers that will make possible an oral and democratic global culture.

That's right. Text is dying, so much so that Crossman believes it will be gone from schools, business, work, leisure and even the sciences by 2050 in the developed West. We won't need to know how to read or write, because computers will provide us--through Star Trek-like sound and graphics, the likes of which we can only imagine now--with all the information we need to do everything we do now. Even your dayplanner and grocery lists will have gone super-digital. Within a century, the rest of the world will follow.

Few agree with Crossman. And anyone who's struggled with the horror of wordless Ikea construction manuals will place a technologically girded oral world in the same category as the mythical flying cars and robot maids predicted half a century ago.

But talk with Crossman and he becomes persuasive. Speaking by phone Monday, he said his argument is based on four main trends. The first is that by nature we are oral creatures. Humans are born with the hardwiring to speak. Even babies form their own languages. But we are not born with the ability to read and write, skills which must be taught, with a fair amount of blood and sweat, in schools. As computers learn to talk and to show us things visually, we'll go the easy route and talk with our machines.

That's the second trend--that humans are constantly replacing old technologies with new and better tools. First developed roughly 6,000 years ago, writing is merely a tool, like the plow or the PDA. As computers become like vast libraries we can access through regular conversation, the need for writing will wither away like an unused limb. "People simply won't use it," Crossman told me. "We don't cut our lawns with scythes anymore."

Crossman believes young people are already leading the way through their widespread rejection of text. That's the third trend. My generation, born in the '60s, developed a non-text beachhead by gluing ourselves to televisions. Today's kids are charging inland by throwing themselves into video games, computers and iPods, and doing it all at once through an ability to multitask that astounds their elders. Text, says Crossman, constrains us to the narrow sense of vision. Kids today are learning to learn by relying on the innate human desire to use all our senses.

As evidence, Crossman points to the infamous "how r u" speak of the text messaging world, popular among anyone born after 1975. It's a sign, he says, that writing is devolving to its bare necessities.

Finally, Crossman points out that writing was created and is maintained by social and economic elites. It took five millennia for writing to expand beyond a tiny segment of the population, and books were not widespread until a few hundred years ago. Even today, 80 per cent of the world's population, most of them in developing countries, are functionally illiterate.

But should information become widely accessible and cheap through computers based on orality, the poorer nations are likely to skip the huge expense of teaching their populations how to write and go immediately to digital, just as hundreds of millions in the Third World have skipped landline phones and gone right to cellphones. As they do, the world will become a fairer and more democratic place, Crossman says, as the poor plug into the global grid.

I'm still mulling over Crossman's thesis, the surface of which I've hardly scratched here. And I'm obviously romantic about writing, since I make my living from it. But last week, I bought the latest William Gibson novel--not in print form, but a spoken version downloaded from Audible.com. And truth be told, I'm really enjoying it that way. Oh, oh.

You can read about Crossman (while anyone can still read) and his ideas at www.compspeak2050.org.

24 Watch: Friend of Islam/A website for Dr. Evil

WMD: Hour seven features more family hassles for Jack, who at least is back in form in borrowing stuff. In this episode, one cellphone, one gun, one van and one more bad guy added to the bodycount. Plus, 24, accused for several years of anti-Muslim sentiment, stands up with a stirring Coles Notes defence of habeas corpus and the rights of religious minorities. Even the all-important torture scene turns out not quite right. Has 24 reformed? Wait until the next nuke goes off ...

Today's bLINKit: A website to use, courtesy of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, for anonymous surfing, in case Jack Bauer is watching you. Plus, I have no idea where I got this, since I don't recognize it, but it's some kind of world update map alive with pulsing coloured icons plotting and listing the latest disasters, from floods to human-made. As I write this, there's a hailstorm in Missouri, a flood in Burundi, another in Indonesia, extreme weather in Florida, and floods in Peru, Mozambique and Bolivia. It's like looking at Dr. Evil's screensaver.

Latest reading: Finished Max Hasting's Overlord: highly recommended. Now on to C.J. Cherryh's Foreigner. No one captures the feel of being in space, in a fragile flying tin can full of ingenius but breakable mechanics and electronics, run by ingenuius but breakable human beings, as does Cherryh. She takes you into the heart of the engine room and the heart of the engineer.

Writing I admire: More Max Hastings

Recommended reads: I'm now into Max Hastings' Overlord, his great account of the Normandy campaign in the Second World War. So far, it's just as good as Armageddon (although so far he's relatively weak or at least not very detailed, but also frank, on the Canadian involvement), and the reason I like his writing can be illustrated by a quote from one of the anecdotes he uses to flesh out the greater historical drama. Here, he describes the preparations of Fayette Richardson, an American paratrooper preparing for the invasion:

"Now, in his hut in Nottinghamshire, he stood among the rest of the men joking self-consciously with each other as they struggled to stow a mountain of personal equipment about their bodies. A 32-pound radar set was strapped below the reserve parachute on his stomach; fragmentation grenades were hooked on his harness; gammon bombs and a phosphorous grenade, chocolate D rations, fighting knife, waterbottle, anti-mine, a morphia syrette and an armed forces paperback edition of Oliver Twist were stowed about his body. Richardson, as platoon guinea pig for a morphia demonstration a few weeks earlier, had plunged the tiny needle into his leg and fallen promptly asleep, to dream in brilliant colours of sailing boats against a sunset sky, green tropical islands, flowers and rainbows.

Today's bLINKit: A guide to eating the 100-Mile diet north of the 49th parallel. The advice, from two people in Vancouver who did it: "Preserving and storing food is the key to local eating in the Canadian climate."

Or perhaps not enough support for the troops?

WMD: I just finished Carol Off's The Ghosts of Medak Pocket, and the overwhelming message of the book is that the soldiers who experienced the hell of Croatia in 1993 did not get the kind of help and support they needed when they returned. The significance of their work, which won them a rare UN citation, and the fact that they were the first Canadian infantry to be in a land battle in 40 years, was never acknowledged, and probably covered up by both the government and the military brass, who were trying to protect themselves from the Somalia affair and cover-up that occurred that same year. That lack of social support and recognition, coupled with the horrors they saw in the ethnic cleansing around them, cost the soldiers big time: severe depression, alcoholism, divorce, homelessness, suicide attempts (and successes). It's an inexcusable mistake we must not make for the soldiers in Afghanistan now, and by all accounts, we're not, if the volume of generally positive media coverage is any indication. Whether we'll keep it going for the years ahead remains to be seen.

As to why support and social validation is important for returning soldiers, or workers in any stressful and dangerous environment returning to "normal" civilian life, here are two quotes from Off's book as illustrations. Both concern stories when the soldiers returned home from the mission:

Tony Speiss carried on to Vancouver with the other Seaforth Highlanders and found himself rattled and edgy. "I just wanted to get the fuck out of the airport. I didn't want to be around it. Got in the car. Started driving home and I was like, holy, you know, things have changed, a lot of things have changed. Look at this place. The whole world has changed and ... nothing had changed, it was me." Speiss had a nagging feeling that he was missing something. He didn't feel all there. He finally realized what was absent was his gun.

And this:

Mike Spellen has heard stories of soldiers from Operation Harmony who have isolated themselves in remote parts of the country. One sergeant major reported discovering one of his former soldiers panhandling in downtown Ottawa. Spellen found one of the Medak soldiers living among the homeless in Winnipeg, and moved him into his own house. For three weeks, Spellen tried to help him get back on his feet, but one day he found him gone. "There was a note on my desk saying, 'Thanks for everything, Mike. Just too big a city for me.'" True to his military training, the man had neatly made his bed before he left.

Supporting the troops -- too much?

WMD: Today's Globe had yet more coverage of Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan. It included Christie Blatchford's latest love letter to men in uniform (she really likes real men) and letters from individual soldiers themselves describing their jobs and what it's like to spend Christmas in a combat zone. On the whole, it's reasonable stuff, if you think any coverage is good coverage since it provides information about what our soldiers are facing in a situation we, through two successive governments of two different political parties, have put them in. But ultimately I don't trust the coverage. Reporters working with the blessing of the Canadian Forces, which is probably the only way to adequately cover the Canadian troops with any access, face rigorous military censorship. Some is absolutely understandable, such as locations of troop movements or installations and advance notice of offensives (although NATO seems to like handing out press releases about these anyway). Other censorship seems more politically motivated and inspired by the way the American military has neutered coverage by U.S. journalists of its wars: casualties cannot be shown, nor can damaged vehicles. Isn't that what war is about? We also have, perhaps for very good reasons, precious little coverage of the enemy, the guys on the other side. Who are they? What do they want? Why are they blowing up our soldiers? How about letters from them in the Globe explaining themselves? I have no problem with our soldiers shooting Taliban for a good reason. But I want to understand why.

The other reason I'm skeptical about coverage is that, as Geoff Olson has observed, Canadian journalists seem to have fallen in love with anything in a uniform. The first major shooting war for Canadians in half a century is a damn exciting story, so journalists are flocking to it, but the coverage so far suggests our troops can do no wrong and that it's all a big adventure. The choreographed and respectful scenes of funeral services of those who have died only seems to reinforce this feeling.
It's almost as if journalists are afraid of the charge that they "don't support the troops," a spurious phrase as useful and as honest as asking "have you been beating your wife lately."

I don't want dirt, I don't want sensationalism. By all accounts, and those accounts are all we've got to go on, our troops are indeed being professional and brave in a difficult situation. But I suspect we're not getting the whole story, the whole truth of what it's like for our soldiers and their mission, and we won't get that for years after.

It's why I've turned to Carol Off's book The Ghosts of Medak Pocket for some insight into the Canadian military and how it operates in the field. An account of one of the lesser known, but also most dangerous and violent episodes of Canadian "peacekeeping" in the Balkans in the 1990s, it's a reasonable read (and you can read about what some readers, including soldiers who participated in the events Off's describes, here), but timelines, locations (maps would have helped) and characters tend to be a bit confusing at times. And the high point of the events, when Canadians squared off against Croat troops in an intense firefight over 15 hours, is passed over almost too quickly. But it's still gripping:

Speiss had been watching the shooting match between the Serbs and Croats when all of a sudden the first bullets whipped past the heads of his own section. Speiss at first didn't notice that the trajectory of the firefight had shifted. He was standing on the carrier when he saw a fellow peacekeeper with his rifle on his shoulder. "And I asked, 'What are doing, man? You're going to draw some fire' And he goes, 'We're being fucking shot at.' And that's when it kicked in." Speiss got behind the mounted gun as the air around him split with noise. "It was deafening. I can't explain it to you. And then we got the order to fire back. I'm beside the carrier and behind the gun. And I opened up and we just started knocking some guys down in the hedgerow that was in front of us, about two hundred metres away."

The book is quite strong on the background politics and diplomacy, which put the Canadians -- who were about the only UN troops in that area of the Balkans with the courage, training and willingness to do anything difficult -- into what was essentially a failed UN mission. It notes how much of the movement and financing to create and arm an independent Croatia as Yugoslavia fell apart came from the Croat diaspora in Canada, a certain irony for the Canadian soldiers who ended up in combat against Croats on the ground. The Canadian soldiers on the ground were mostly reservists, untested, and cobbled together from a military reeling from cutbacks and troop level reductions and the strain of overcommitment to foreign peacekeeping efforts. They were also jerked around by international politics. Off has obvious respect for the soldiers she talks to-- it's the reason she wrote the book -- but she doesn't flinch from noting their problems, such as antiquated equipment, the uselessness of UN troops from other countries (eg the Kenyans in the Balkans willingly allowed themselves to be disarmed by the Serbs and sold their gasoline rations on the black market), disputes between officers, a bizarre near-mutiny in which soldiers tried to poison their officers and the emotional toll of a mission -- to protect civilian lives -- that was falling apart around them. That the Canadians did as well as they did, and were regarded for it, is a testament to their bravery and skill. But at least with Off, and other accounts of Medak, we're getting a fuller picture of what those Canadians went through. A decade after it all happened ...

Today's bLINKit: Americans love to shop online. Canadians don't.

The station that loved me; jungle fever

Today's bLINKit: Since finally installing iTunes a few months back, I've become a fan of Internet radio. First off were classical and ambient stations. Now I'm exploring SomaFM, in particular the Secret Agent channel. Funky, retro and lounge stuff separated by voice excerpts from spy and espionage movies. Now I can be a mysterious while washing the dishes.

WMD: And for some reason, a few weeks back my mind wandered to memories of watching the 1960s TV version of Tarzan with Ron Ely. Ely was famous for doing his own stunts in the show, despite numerous injuries. According to Wikipedia, there was no harm done: he's alive even today. In my part of the world, we watched it in reruns a few years after it first aired, but it was hugely popular at my elementary school. The famous Tarzan cry echoed across the schoolyard for months, and it made me want a chimpanzee as a pet. And I wanted to swing on vines, except that the Ponderosa pines and firs in the mountains around me had none. The show also led me to reading the original Edgar Rice Burroughs novels, which were far grittier and violent than the show or almost any of the movies. There are also far too many of them (two dozen by my count), as Burroughs swung on the vine of his original apeman/nature boy idea one too many times. The original Tarzan of the Apes novel is kind of interesting, and I liked the later novel about the lost outpost of the Roman Empire, but it goes downhill from there, with Tarzan meeting little people, lion people, leopard people, people from the centre of the earth, and more lost cities and empires than you'd think would fit even in the dark recesses of Edwardian Africa. It seemed the only person Tarzan didn't meet in the jungle was Jane Goodall. But give credit to Burroughs: he apparently was the first multi-media cross platform guy, spinning his fiction into a lucrative empire of comics, movies and merchandise. This decades before Harry Potter. What's more, Tarzan wasn't even his only fiction. He wrote tons more books about Mars, science fiction, Westerns and history. Me writer, you market.

TV is messing with my head

WMD: The headline is true, at least as far as the first six weeks or so of the fall TV season. Or maybe it's merely the shows I watch. But they all want to mess with viewers heads, which seems to be a theme this year.

Leading the pack is Battlestar Galactica. Last season, it messed with heads by ending on a stunning narrative shift. This season, it messed with American heads by making the good guys into Iraqi-style insurgents as they fought off a Cylon (ie Coalition) occupation and attempt to "civilize" them. Got to admire that, and it made critics swoon. Now the humans are off their temporary planetary stopover and back in the search for Earth, but heads are being messed up with each episode as the characters struggle to come to terms with how they met the Cylon occupation: resistance, collaboration or mere acquiescence?  Meanwhile poor Baltar, whose head has been messed up from the beginning by the blonde is in head, is with the Cylons and their uber sparse '60s style decor. Predictably, he's becoming even more unhinged.

Next up is Lost, a show about a bunch of pretty and improbable plane crash survivors marooned on a weird isolated Pacific island which may or may not be run by a group of leftovers from a '70s social and psychic experiment gone wrong. The characters themselves are supremely messed up: both Lost geographically and adrift in the circumstances of their separate lives. After two seasons, the show is finally getting around to explaining some of the weird stuff going on. But what's with the smoke monster and why is it so cranky?

Then there's Jericho, a ripoff of Lost about a bunch of pretty and improbable people marooned in a small town after what may or may not have been a nuclear attack has wiped out major American cities. The characters themselves are supremely messed up, but more so by hamfisted writing and characterization, especially of the female characters. After a half dozen episodes, the show is barely getting around to explaining some of the weird stuff going on. But for every 30 minutes of contrived action and character conflict, there come compelling scenes, such as the original mushroom cloud to the west, the flight of intercontinental ballistic missiles overhead, or the Guy With a Secret pushing pins into a map of the U.S. indicating which cities have been destroyed. Not a good show, but I find it oddly entertaining to watch how civil folks cope when the only world they've known has been messed up big time.

Other viewing: Veronica Mars, still going strong, with this season's theme being the hunt for a serial campus rapist, and how that, of course, messes with poor Veronica's head. And The Wire, best thing ever on any tube. In its fourth season, it goes into inner city schools and big city politics--the race for the mayor's chair is as compelling as any depiction of politics I've seen. I've recently read the creators see the show as a way to explore how American society is breaking down, how things are coming apart in the urban centre. If meditating on that angle doesn't mess you up ...

Recent reading: On the final pages of Armageddon, or how Europe was a big messed up place by 1945. The Allied bombing campaign killed more people in the final stages of the war, and did more damage to German cities, than the previous four years put together, all of this at a stage when Germany was clearly collapsing. At one point, Hastings believes, the Allies bombed targets simply for the sake of bombing them, even if the military value was negligible. It's worth noting the Allied bombing of targets in the occupied countries also killed more French, Dutch and other civilians than the Germans killed Britons during the Blitz. Ouch. Hastings also notes that as the Allies plodded their way toward the Rhine, hundreds of thousands of captives in the Reich died, as the Germans continued killing Jews and others right to the end of the war, and Holland starved.
 

Remembering Lister Sinclair

WMD: We heard that Lister Sinclair died today at 85. For some time in the 1980s, Sinclair was to the evenings with Ideas what Peter Gzowski was to the mornings with Morningside. I knew Sinclair only through the Ideas radio program, a broadcast which was like getting a second education in the evenings after a day of classes at university. But apparently that gig came relatively late in life, after a full career of writing, performance, scholarship and broadcasting. He's missed.

SL Neighbourhood update: A big seven-storey apartment complex is going up to the south of me. Looks like high-end condos or lofts. It's got a gazebo on the roof with an extended helicopter landing pad--and a helicopter parked there, too. Meantime, a small little cabin has popped up where the casino once stood, so maybe that land is selling in little patches. And while wandering around the hood, I found a small-scale 9-11 memorial, pictured above. I understand there were some major memorial efforts elsewhere in the world during the five-year anniversary.

Meantime, Reuters has opened up a news bureau in SL, complete with a reporter, covering SL largely from a business point of view. The Reuters in-world HQ is quite nice. It also offers a free newsreader you can add to your HUD to get latest Reuter news while in-world. Its first scoop: the U.S. Congress is going to investigate virtual economies, essentially for their taxation value. There goes the neighbourhood. And if you want to spread the bad news about the American government regulating the cyber freescape, you can now call your virtual friends: a new in-world phone service is being offered by a U.S. telco. SL has no live voice feature, and considering some of the activity that goes on, and the anonymity which many people vigorously guard, I don't know how popular it might be. Telus is also apparently going to be selling virtual phones in SL. There really goes the neighbourhood.

Latest reading: Finished Max Hasting's section in Armageddon on the Russians overrunning East Prussia in late 1944, early 1945. The awful waste of humanity, on both sides, makes you want to weep.

Next post: RL news, nothing virtual.

Courier column catchup; latest reading

Today's bLINKit: Hmm, haven't caught up with my day job writing. Here's a column I wrote based on the talk I gave at Randy's memorial. (Thanks to all who emailed or called about what happened: it was much appreciated.) Here's a column catching up with the latest goings on with my property in Second Life. The latest on the latter is the casino development is largely gone: scaled way back, the wall gone, the property reverted to greenspace yet again. I'm not surprised, since I never say anyone actually patronize the place. Then again, it could be a respite during a redesign. The pic is of my Flying Twinkie, my household in the sky. I bought some furniture for it. Now I seriously have to figure out what to do next in this world. I'm not big on the party scene. I keep hearing about salons, lectures and classes, so will begin searching out those. I did attend a live music concert, but ended up getting bugged by a seriously crazy woman. Meantime, a lot of the people I met in the early days of SL habitation have moved on or gone dark; I take it the burnout rate is fairly high when folks overdose too much in the virtual realm. My own participation has been sporadic in the past month, despite the domestic projects. My problem is that I have nothing to sell and have bought just about anything I need, and buying and selling are at the heart of most people's Second life.

WMD: Reading -- still deep in Max Hasting's Armageddon, about the final year of the war in Europe. His ability to jump from the big picture of the movements of armies and supplies to individual stories, of soldiers and civilians, is breathtaking. And he's no Allied war booster. He notes the wide gap in ability and morale among the elite infantry formations in the U.S. Army, basically the airborne divisions, and the regular divisions, which some American commanders regarded as terrible and tended to be the dregs of the draft. Most soldiers in most of the armies involved simply didn't fight. Many never fired a shot. Most sensibly just tried to survive. Western Allied generals were, in the main, not very good or imaginative. Some were unfit to command, highly professional ones like Montgomery had huge egos which got the better of them, (and Monty made a complete hash of Market Garden, which Hastings goes to great pains to show was a badly planned and executed operation) and none were as good as their Russian counterparts, who were far more ruthless and working under a regime as terrible, if not more so, than the Nazis the Allies strove to defeat. Patton was highly imaginative in big envelopment assaults, and a bit of a dud when it came to static assaults, such as the Hurtgen Forest, one of the worst episodes the U.S. faced in the European war. The Western generals also had to contend with civilian soldiers, most volunteers, who were less and less committed to the fight as the war dragged on, which it did largely because of key strategic blunders made by the Allied leadership following D-Day. The civilians in the West also marched in armies controlled by democracies and carried democratic values with them. It's one reason, Hastings argued, that the Germans and Western allies were infinitely more humane to one another compared to the murderous ferocity with which the Germans and Russians squared off against one another on the Eastern front. That didn't stop both sides from occasionally killing prisoners in the West. Usually they just wouldn't let the opposing soldiers surrender, or prisoners sent to the rear would often mysteriously never arrive, with no questions asked. Captured snipers were shot on the spot, since regular infantry hated them. The SS were also seldom allowed to surrender, especially after the SS massacred American prisoners in the Bulge. (They also murdered Canadian prisoners in Normandy, and while there was a big row up here some years ago about a documentary suggesting Canadians responded in kind, the suggestion by Hastings is that all armies participated in it, if only informally on the battlefield, to some degree. It's war.)