I’m writing the last chapter of Mathematicians In Love now; I just wrote a scene were the government starts to fall. Today’s illos are Golden Oldies.

[Picture from the Fall, 2004, Barney's catalog.]

The TV news was wonderful. All the networks were airing special reports on a nation in crisis. At long last the news media had turned on their puppet-masters. Evidently they’d been peering into some Gobubbles to see the real future that the Heritagists had in store.

Over and over the TV showed the video of our President’s helicopter rescuing the terrorist Osama from our troops. Violent street demonstrations against the Heritagists were in progress all across the nation. The White House was under siege, surrounded by a crowd of demonstrators estimated at a hundred thousand, and growing by the minute. Police cars were being overturned and set on fire. The President had scheduled a special address — and here he came.

[Lego sculpture in the Frankfurt airport.]

It was a classic performance. Doakes was like a wounded shark snapping at his own dangling guts. The Gobubbles were Satanist; the Common Grounders were traitors; Van Veeter was a criminal; the demonstrators were terrorists; war was peace; freedom was slavery; ignorance was strength, and more than ever we needed a hundred-percent Heritagist victory in November. Incredibly, the news station we were watching had the nerve to post a hip, mocking caption across the bottom of the screen while Doakes was still ranting.

100% A-Hole?

Paul and I stood up and cheered, with Mabel smiling at us, not quite sure what was going on. And that’s when we heard the knock on the door.

[My oil painting of La Hampa, as imagined before I went there.]

The other day in SF my old friend R. U. Sirius interviewed me for his Neofiles “radio” show on the Mondoglobo network. To hear the forty-minute show as an mp3, you can dig around on the site under “Neofiles”, or you can click this direct link. We talked mostly about Frek and the Elixir.

The studio was in a party-pad near Eddy street in the Tenderloin, just a few short blocks from Union Square, but complete with neighborhood guys passed out in doorways. R. U. had a young assistant who lives there, Jeff. It was good to see R. U., good to use my voice. Afterwards we had lunch at the Mason Cafe nearby, an upscale diner with a loud jukebox playing crappy oldies, and every song that played, R. U. and Jeff would insist it wasn't actually the “real” band playing it. “That's not the Monkees. That's not Creedence Clearwater. I don't think that's really Sinatra.” Like, why? But the food was good and R. U. paid. A generous guy; he gave 80 cents to a very forceful crackhead on the street as well.

[Ceiling in the Mondoglobo studio]

I worked a bit on the magazine Mondo 2000 in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and helped R. U. Sirius and Queen Mu put together a “Best Of” book called The Mondo 2000 User’s Guide To The New Edge.

Those were exciting times. We even made the Feb 8, 1993, cover of Time magazine for our West-Coast version of cyberpunk.

I was reminiscing with R. U.

“We really were riding a new wave of the future, the whole computer thing was just coming together,” I said.

“That’s what we said back then,” he pointed out. “We always said we were the big new thing.”

“Yeah, but I thought we were lying.”

Check out this Japanese TV ad!

Even though Arnold's a Republican, I kind of like the guy for being so weird. And, as I always say, at least he knows what science fiction is!

***

That video of Arnold is actually from the 90s; it's one of many to be found on the cool site Japander which collects Japanese TV ads made by Western stars — as in the Bill Murray/Scarlett Johanssen vehicle “Lost In Translation.”

Looking at a few of these, I realize I'm working too hard trying to imagine outre alien cultures; all I need to do is go on the road.

Still on Arnold's behalf, I'll say that his video is the best of all the ones I've watched at Japander. The thing he's promotign is a stimulant drink generically known as a “genki,” filled with caffeine, ginseng, like that. Keeps the salarymen going.

***

I was just reading an article about a kind of fire ant in the July 2, 2005, Science News. There's something peculiar about their reproduction, leading to this quote, by Denis Fournier of the Free Univeristy of Brussels in Belgium:

“We could think of the males as a separate, parasitic species that uses host eggs for its own reproduction.”

This kind of dovetails with this image I've gotten from thinking about my wife giving birth to my daughter and my daughter giving birth to my granddaughter. The women are connected by a single chain of umbilical cords back through history, all the way to Edenville, with the men just branches off the long vine.

“Hi, I'm your host.” “And I'm your parasite.”

I'm getting a wave of Russian bots posting links in the comment sections. I've edited the blog code so you can't post full web addresses anymore. If you're a non-bot and want to share a web address, you'll need to use a bit of circumlocution or your comment will bounce.

[Riled cow shakes off pesky bots!]

This reminds me somehow of this great new Charlie Stross book I started reading today, Accelerando. I bought it at Borders for $25 yesterday. The clerk was surprised I wasn't getting Harry Potter And The Large Royalty Check instead! Stross is also (with his editors' blessing) giving the book away on line, like Cory Doctorow likes to do with his books.

Has anyone out there ever read a whole book in electronic form? If you comment, remember not to put full web addresses in your answer.