The obvious solution
Recently-arrested Megaupload king Kim Dotcom and the various copyright holders claiming losses of half a billion dollars have more in common than they realise. And they should meet in the middle to solve the internet war. Dotcom’s assets are valued at $175 000 000, according to news stories describing the luxury cars, the sprawling mansion, [...]
A time of war
Blackout and All Clear by Connie Willis I love Connie Willis! She writes intricate stories, meticulously researched, her characters come alive on the page, their environment is present in more than words and she does it all with gentle humour and romance. She writes a book about the Middle Ages – you are there. Simple [...]
Futures past
Your Flying Car Awaits: Robot Butlers, Lunar Vacations, and Other Dead-Wrong Predictions of the Twentieth Century by Paul Milo I’ve always been a bit of a science fiction nut. Gadgets fascinate me. I drive a car filled with buttons and screens. GPS, climate control, sound system, cruise control, iphone, bluetooth, remote controls… “We’re living in [...]
Sausalito, open your golden gate!
San Francisco! One of those places, like Paris or Texas, where I’ve always got a happy grin cemented onto my face. It might be just airport code SFO, but I’m still bouncing along pushing a luggage trolley, leading a party of five off to the hire care precinct, smiling at random travellers and humming songs [...]
Legends of the Fall
The Pentagon was attacked on the same day, and a fourth airliner was hijacked and crashed at the same time, but it was the attacks on the twin towers of the World Trade Centre which dominated the television and print media. It’s what we were looking at on CNN, and the other two planes were [...]
The dark side of the road
Sydney cabbie Adrian Neylan’s Cablog is always worth reading. Sometimes his experiences parallel my own, sometimes he just makes me extraglad I’m driving in Canberra, rather than Sydney. But he’s always readable. He talks about cyclists ignoring the road rules and he struck a chord with me. After kangaroos, cyclists are what I fear most [...]
O. M. G.
You remember, a few months back, I narrowly missed attending an Amanda Palmer ninja concert at the Carillon in the middle of a savage thunderstorm? Well, I guess if the same thing happened now, I’d happily go get soaked. It was somewhere in Illinois when the subject came up. “Oh, hang on,” said Discoverylover, “I’ve [...]
Killing your own
What a pinup boy this fellow is. The elite special forces hunter. The kind of guy you want your government to have on hand to deal with the terrorists. The recruiter’s wet dream. And yet. This fellow slaughtered a hundred of his own people, sending a peaceful nation into shock and millions around the world [...]
Witness Number Five?
The Fifth Witness by Michael Connelly I love a good legal thriller, and Michael Connelly has produced a ripper with this one. We meet Mickey Haller, the Lincoln Lawyer, again as he ploughs through a new world of legal practice, the humdrum but topical world of mortgage foreclosures. Happily we don’t spend the book rummaging [...]
A Route 66 icon
We cruised our way out of Oklahoma, through museums and hokey little towns, capturing a border sign at Texola and the leaning water tower in Groom, but we were really aiming for Amarillo. In fact, we were aiming for Albuquerque, but we were doing so much lollygagging and having so much fun just poking our [...]