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, the opulent lifestyle.

But hang on. How did he get all the money if he was, as the big movie companies insist, ripping them off and making the stuff available for free?

It turns out that the oh-so-sophisticated download model of the piracy barons is to break their downloaders into two sectors:

1. People who can download for free, but with restrictions imposed by artificial delays, slow download times, Captcha authentication and other limits.
2. People who pay around ten dollars per month to avoid the limitations and download as much as they want at normal speeds.

Those few dollars a month from millions of downloaders soon adds up.

To $175 million, apparently. Which is about a third of the half-billion dollars supposedly lost by the copyright holders.

Now, I’m always a bit leery of these claimed losses. Inflated to buggery, usually. A movie company points to fifty thousand downloads of a film costing $19.99 on DVD and bingo, that’s a million dollar loss right there. Add up all those sales lost to pirate downloaders, and you’re talking big, big money.

Assuming that all those computer geeks flying the Jolly Roger were going to fork over $19.99 for a DVD anyway. Most of these guys have terabyte hard drives stuffed with movies they’ll never watch if they live to be a thousand. If it wasn’t for pirate download networks, they’d buy only a fraction of the booty, but just as cruise passengers load up their plates at the all-you-can-eat buffets, if it’s all for free you might as well get as much as you can fit in.

In everyday life, people just don’t eat that much when they have to pay full price, nor do they buy as many videos at ten or twenty dollars a pop, nor shop iTunes for a hundred thousand dollars worth of albums.

But they will cheerfully pay ten bucks a month to download more movies than they can ever watch, more music than they can listen to, and more books than they can ever read. Ten dollars a month for “free” stuff.

So why on earth aren’t the copyright holders tapping into the same revenue stream that Kim Dotcom was enjoying and setting up their own subscription models?

All you can legitimately download for ten dollars a month. The thing sells itself. You could up it to twenty dollars or more a month, and if the product was high quality, compared to the often difficult or dodgy offerings of the pirate kings, you’d still get millions of people signing on.

Instead we get half-baked schemes like SOPA and PIPA, internet blackouts, and denial-of-service attacks by outlaw hackers. The internet is rapidly turning into a battleground, and that’s not good for anybody’s business.

—Skyring

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 as that.

And that’s how it works. In her writing world, time travel has been invented, about fifty years from now, and historians are lining up to go through to the past to study their favorite historical periods. It’s modern people going back in time.

The theme is a step forward from the often hokey time travel stories of classic SF, where a scientist goes back and alters history, or kills an ancestor, or in one nifty story, is his own mother and father. All the wrinkles in time were done to death long ago, but here is Connie breaking new ground and collecting all the science fiction writing awards going.

I knew I’d enjoy these two books. Together they are two halves of one big novel and the reader is well advised to read Blackout before All Clear, lest all the surprises of the complex plot be revealed before they are set up.

So I bought them both on Audible.com and listened to them in sequence.

The print edition of Blackout might have helped. In the beginning, there is confusion in both the story and the mind of the reader. So many characters, all leaping back and forwards in time, interacting in past and present. Some of the characters are really the same person with two or three different names, depending on their assignment. To make things worse, the careful schedules of the historians are being re-arranged or cancelled with no apparent explanation. The English researcher who has received an American accent implant for a Pearl Harbor trip is now being sent to the Dunkirk evacuation first, for example, and he has to come up with a plausible explanation.

It’s all chaos, but that’s fine. The time continuum is a chaotic system and small inputs at critical points can have major impacts later on. It’s all part of time travel theory.

But something’s going wrong with time. Historians are sent back to World War Two on assignment, but somehow become stranded as events conspire to make their return to the future difficult. Is the gun emplacement freshly built on the portal site a coincidence or is it the continuum trying to protect itself from fatal damage? If the researchers somehow alter events so that Hitler wins the war and time travel is not invented at Oxford a century later, then there will be hell to pay.

The sense of worry and despair builds up through the dark days of the war, as the British Army is kicked out of France and the bombs begin to fall on London. There’s a mirrored sequence around the time of the Normandy Invasion, when the Allies return to the Continent and more and more dreadful terror weapons are aimed at England.

Throughout the book(s), more and more characters are introduced, though thankfully there are only a handful of point of view protagonists. The settings are varied, from the wartime Oxford Street department stores, St Pauls Cathedral during the height of the Blitz, Dunkirk and Dover in the Evacuation, and Kent as the V-1 flying bombs are falling out of the sky.

We are taken to Trafalgar Square during the VE Day celebrations a number of times through the eyes of different characters, but the nagging fear builds: was the war really won or did the historians somehow accidentally intervene in history through their chance encounters with significant people?

I must confess that I was getting doubtful about the time travel theory until towards the end of the second book when Connie Willis revealed a magnificent twist that sorted everything out. Ironically – and yes, Agatha Christie and her mysteries make an appearance in these pages – the answer was there in plain sight all the time and in her narrated introduction the heroic author gives away a vital clue. Listen very carefully!

There’s an enormous number of loose ends to be tied up, but they are all squared away, and there are poignant moments along the way when we realise that things aren’t going to work out perfectly. But it’s an immensely satisfying ending all the same, all the better for the long and tangled path we’ve followed to get there.

In fact, it might be worthwhile keeping a notebook open to jot down names and places, just to keep it all straight in your head. The reader can always flip back and forth through the print edition, but the audiobook is pretty much a linear progress through a chaotic narrative.

Perhaps the best part of the book is the atmosphere. Connie Willis has done her research well, aided by a lucky afternoon with some of the people who lived through these times, and she brings wartime London to life beautifully. The sound of the bombs, the taste of the scarce food, the noise of the shelters, the scarcity of clothing, the dark of the blackout and the eventual joy as the lights are turned on again. We are there.

A few minor grumbles. In the audio version, although the accents are superbly done, I must take exception to the sheer number of long “a” sounds. It grates on my ear to hear “train parsengers”.

Nothing in wartime Britain cost 5p. Sixpence, if you please! And it’s day before month, when talking dates – the English would definitely not have been discussing dates in American format!

But these are minor niggles, and all in all, I must confess – I love Connie Willis!

–Skyring

An added bonus, if you are an Audible.com customer, is a free download of Connie Willis and Carrie Vaughn (author of the Kitty Norville series) discussing these two books (and the Kitty series), research, writing and just having a great time together.

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 a science fiction age,” I tell my passengers, as I change to a new tune on the sixstacker.

And we are. My car may not fly or drive itself, but it’s sleek and silver and a world in spacetime away from the car my father drove – which had fins, may I add.

I have a supercomputer in my pocket with instant global communications. I can chat in realtime video to someone in the Faeroes. It’s just mindblowing, when I think about how newspaper stories of my childhood came via cable from London and were days behind. And don’t even think of ringing overseas unless you want to spend a fortune on a short conversation with somebody you could barely hear.

My younghood was full of visions of the future. The Jetsons, HG Wells, Popular Mechanics, Stanley Kubrick…

Somehow it didn’t quite work out that way. Modern London may have a few shiney towers, but much of it would be familiar to Charles Dickens. Paris more so, given that it wasn’t half destroyed by aerial warfare in a nuclear war.

This book looks at what the future was going to be like. 1984 never had human clones or rocket holidays to Martian resorts, dirigible cruiseliners with dinner in pill form served by robot waiters, but it’s fun to read about all the things we were going to have, backed up by quotes from leading thinkers on how all this stuff was just round the corner.

Or the things that blindsided us. Who saw the internet coming? Blogs and tweeting and viral videos. Revolutions run by cellphone. Capitalist China.

Paul Milo has had far too much fun with this book. One can almost hear him chortling with glee each time he pulls out some ancient government report advising investment in zeppelin stations for popular locomotion, skimming through for the choicest quotes on bionic eyes and lunar highrise.

I guess my favorite invention that never happened is the atomic car. Prototypes were actually built showing how the reactor would sit in the rear end, a safe metre or so away from the kids in the back seat. You’d never need to refuel, you could power your house from it, you could probably go supersonic if you needed to overtake.

And yet the concept makes the children of this modern age laugh until they cry at the folly of the notion.

My only criticism of this book is that it would have been enhanced by some photographs. The city of airships and towering saucer pods. The robot butler. The happy family off for a weekend on Saturn, Dad smoking his pipe as he soars past the moon.

Nevertheless, a good read, something to make you think next time you hear a politician talk about our bold new future.

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 about golden gates, cable cars and sunny California.

We took the lift up a level and boarded one of those automated trains a couple of stops to the rental depot. “You can drive,” I told my son as we sprawled our baggage over the front of the carriage.

The van was booked through Netflights, home of amazing car rental deals in English pounds. Dollar Rentals had the best rate and here we were lining up to collect the keys. We pretended it was just Twinkles and I doing the driving, avoiding the $25 daily fee for younger drivers DD and DS. The Aussie dollar had hit parity with the greenback, but five weeks of twenty five bucks wasn’t to be contemplated.

I passed, with heavy sighs, a long line of Mustangs on the way to our silver Chrysler Town and Country. One day, I’ll drive Route 66 in a convertible, but that day wasn’t this one. We had five people and a stack of luggage and I was aiming for comfort over speed and style this time around.

We filled her up, I sat in the commander’s chair, contemplated the array of buttons and dials ahead of me, punched a few for luck, fired the ignition and rolled grandly down the ramp into America.

Not my first time at the helm of a Yank cruiser, so I had a certain amount of confidence. And a certain amount of worry that I’d forget and go the wrong way at an intersection. I didn’t, but I kept drifting right within my lane, a common failing amongst we Aussies, as we automatically found our comfort zone on the right side of the left lane. Sort of having a dollar each way.

The job of the co-driver in the front passenger seat was to nudge the driver back into position, screaming now and then if a streetlamp or bridge railing came too close.

The plan was to fill in the time before we could check in at our Fort Mason youth hostel with a drive over the Golden Gate Bridge to Sausalito for lunch, a drive around the Marin headlands to catch some of those postcard views of the bridge, bay and city, and then see how we felt. Maybe jetlag would see us hitting our bunkbeds early, maybe we’d be out of phase and partying until three AM.

I hadn’t felt like hiring a GPS for five weeks, so had bought a Tom Tom at home that came with a free international map download. I’d picked the North American map, and despite a little hassle with websites and software installs, had gotten it loaded up. They could make these things simpler.

It worked once it got a good look at the sky, and I set Sausalito as the destination and off we went. I’d expected to be directed straight up through downtown and over the bridge, but it sent us further west and we dived under Golden Gate Park and through chunks of suburbia. I think I might have made a wrong turn somewhere while it was searching searching searching for satellites.

Not to worry. We were just hanging out of the windows, having a ball, pointing out road signs and black and whites* and all the things you see in the movies. “Oooh!” Futurecat squeaked in delight, “California poppies!”

Soon enough, the towers of the bridge were rising up. I pulled off into the visitors centre, where I knew there was a parking area, a shop, and some fantastic views. Been this way before, you see.

Darling Daughter has somehow inherited the whimsy gene. The mention of flowers reminded her that here we were in San Francisco, and like the song I’d been singing to myself, we’d better get some flowers in our hair. And photographs taken. Here are Twinkles and DD, appropriately beflowered. There were also some shots taken of your humble narrator, but as this is my blog and my story, they will not be seen here.

We will, however, feast our eyes on FutureCat, a Newzealander who received her screen name from Americans puzzled as to how it was always a day ahead where she was and could she send them the lotto numbers, please?

We were all smiling. It was just fantastic to be there after all the planning and dreaming and have the day go so swimmingly.

I ducked into the visitors centre for some change to feed the meter during the picture frenzy. I had some US notes, but nothing in the way of shrapnel. I spotted an area with National Parks Service stamps and passports for sale and I was mildly interested, but I didn’t buy one. I’ve been kicking myself ever since – I missed out on dozens of stamps until I finally bought a book in Maryland. Have to go back to collect the whole set, I guess!

Finally we piled back into the van and I found my way out of the carpark onto the bridge. I probably went a few turns too far, and at one point we had gone under the approach ramp and were heading off to Seal Rocks. But I was dead scared of making some fatal error. You know those “Wrong Way” signs they put up? Well, they put them up for people like me.

Here we are on the Bridge. The image is tilted because everyone apart from me was hanging out of the right side of the van to take in the view. That little yellow thingamajig is a Ballycumber, the emblem of the BookCrossing.com community to which Futurecat and I belong. I’ll explain later, but it’s a lot of fun.

We whipped past the freewheeling cyclists on the way down to Sausalito, parked the van and went exploring. Palmtrees, sunshine, smiling faces, restaurants, souvenir shops and always the Bay in the background. The kids ducked into a toy shop and didn’t come out again until they had played with everything. I contemplated buying a bumper sticker.

A firetruck drove past, the back crowded with tourists and a couple of cheerful guides pointing things out. Just one of those quirky San Francisco sights. Apparently the guides sing and dance and just have a wonderful time showing the place off. I love this town!

A little further along the way was the fish and chip shop I’d found in 2010. This time I plumped for a table inside and we ordered up various meals – the first decent tucker we’d had in all of a 48 hour Friday, I guess. In what became a father-son bonding ritual, I asked for a couple of local beers, which of course were Anchor Steam. We clinked our glasses and posed for the camera. Fish and chips, a beer and the Golden Gate. Here is paradise!

I saved the bottle and soaked the label off later, to stick in my travel journal. Perhaps I’m a little nutty, but I have fat journals for most of my trips, full of tickets and maps and receipts and beer bottle lables and bumper stickers. One day, when I’ve spent a fortune on a lifetime of memories and have developed Alzheimer’s, I’ll be able to go back and do it all again.

In another of my nutty rituals, I pulled into a Starbucks, where I bought a super-ginormous coffee mug, the souvenir San Francisco edition. Towards the end of the trip, the van was fairly rattling and clinking along on groaning springs, and I had to subsidise the US Post Office to a breathtaking degree.

There were galleries and boutiques, restaurants and real estate agents. I could think of worse places to live. This guy was singing on the dock of the bay, just piling up the tips, selling homespun CDs and putting a bit of cool into the sunny day. We lingered, listening.

And then we bade farewell to fair Sausalito, heading off for the Pacific coast and the Marin headlands.

The Tom-Tom wasn’t much use here. It didn’t show hills, and what looked like a good direct route would often turn into something you’d be worried about hiking along, but we had a grand time amongst the green hills, old military installations, dusty lookouts and groves of trees. It was all ridiculously scenic.

We all know about Amelie and the kidnapped travelling garden gnome who gets photographed in various exotic locations? Well, meet Wolverine. DD’s boss has this plastic Wolverine figurine she keeps in her office, supervising affairs from a bookshelf. Wolverine got kidnapped, and we were forever finding new places to pose Wolverine and his razor claw hands along the way.

That was fine, and DD’s boss was doubtless charmed to receive emailed photographs of her plastic friend teetering on safety railings above iconic landmarks for the next few weeks, but what added a whole jar of spice to the adventure was the fact that the original internal rubber linkages allowing Wolverine to move his limbs or bend and turn his head had long since perished, and every now and then an arm or head or torso would fall off as he was being positioned for the photo.

We tried to keep him together with Blu-Tac, but that wasn’t as secure as it might have been, and a fair proportion of the trip was spent retrieving bits of Wolverine from the landscape.

Like this one. Just over the safety rail is a drop that plummets down to rocks on the shoreline via gullies and near vertical slopes. Wolverine’s arm plopped off onto the wrong side of the barrier and teetered, like a movie car, on the edge of the drop. DD scrambled over the fence to get the body bit back, Twinkles hanging onto her rainbow belt in case she slipped. I didn’t really need this level of excitement, but we got the limb back. And DD.

But, OMG, the view! This was like living in a postcard. Simply stunning. I’ll come back one day with a bigger camera.

Before we left Marin, I took a picture of the New Zealand flag I’d hoisted onto the van’s aerial and secured with a ball of chewing gum. I wanted to make FutureCat comfortable about being a lone New Zealander in a van full of Aussies. Besides, I figured people would think it was the Australian flag anyway. See how there’s a little nick in one corner? Over the next three weeks the threads gradually unravelled and by the time we got to Washington DC, we were British. Barely.

And then we entered Fisherman’s Wharf into the GPS and followed the voice back over the bridge. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve stayed at the Fort Mason youth hostel, but it was a welcome sight on the grounds of the old military base as we parked the van, pulled out our bags and checked in. There was a young lady on the desk and she handed us forms to fill in as she gently extracted money off my credit card.

“You know,” I said, “It’s really comforting to us Aussies that youse have got all these gum trees here.”

“Double You Tea Eff?”

“You know! Gum trees!” I pointed out the window at a nearby grove.

“Oh, those are Eu-cal-ypt-us trees!”

I rolled my eyes. “Geez, how pretentious can you get!”

“Pretentious? Moi?”

–Skyring

* Black and whites = cop cars. Just like in The Blues Brothers and Dukes of Hazzard except they weren’t leaping about so much.

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 just items on the ticker in comparison.

That’s because of the images. The photographs, the videos, the webcams. The planes endlessly looping into the towers, the smoke rising, the collapses, the dust clouds, the wreckage, the shocked faces and flowers and flags.

Compelling viewing. I know I watched with horror that night, as an episode of West Wing ended in tragedy and crisis and turned into real life. It was nearly dawn before I got to bed.

Along the way I had my own reality check – I went to the Empire State Building webcam, a favorite site of mine, aimed the thing downtown and there they were, on fire as I watched.

David Friend has told the story of the photographs, the videos, the webcams that awed, angered, horrified and inspired. Watching the World Change is 434 pages that not only tells the stories, but traces the way news gathering and reporting has evolved. The 9/11 attacks occurred just as digital cameras and cellphones were starting to become ubiquitous. Still pricey, but out there and involved. Nowadays, we watch news unfold on Twitter and Facebook and YouTube, but in 2001, they were still to come.

The book contains a colour photograph section, in which many of the images discussed in the text are shown. And striking they are. Everyone knows “The Falling Man”, in which a curiously calm man is caught in mid-fall between the two towers. Just a man in his last moments of life, the stark cladding of the doomed buildings a backdrop. Death in the modern age.

Many others are included, moving and curious and stark. I think the one that hits me hardest is a candid shot of a group of emergency workers hauling away the body of a chaplain. The dead man peaceful, apparently asleep, the faces of the five big men carrying him studies in grief and determination, the dust and smoke of the disaster everywhere.

The chance shots – the video camera pointed up at precisely the moment of impact. The photograph of a crowd gathered to watch, the cameraman turning his back on the blazing buildings unaware as he snapped the shutter that the first tower had just begun to collapse, the sound still three seconds away, but the sight hitting the onlookers like a hammer. The group of people almost casual picnickers on the banks of the East River while disaster unfolds behind them.

Some photographs became famous, their subjects following on fame’s path. I remember the photograph of fireman Mike Kehoe climbing the stairs to fight the fire far above. “Poor bloke,” I thought, “he must have died in the collapse, and been aware that he was doomed.”

But still he carried his equipment up past the line of evacuees. Happily he survived, and his story joins those of the photographers.

The last image is one that has become an icon. Like the famous flag-raising above Iwo Jima, this one happened by chance, even though the composition is similar. A tilted flagpole, a team of servicefolk raising the flag for morale, the flag’s symbols a contrast, here in colour against the dust and wreckage behind.

This is a remarkable book, in itself an examination of a moment in history, a look at how we see news, how we react, how the pictures flashed around the world have human stories. These images, these people, these stories, they are legends of our time.

–Skyring

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 of all.

Kangaroos just jump out into the road, and if they are moving fast, they can crash through a windscreen and thrash around in the front seat. Big powerful animals with claws. People die. I’m not keen on dying. Not just yet.

The thing is that I can’t control or deal with kangaroos. They just happen suddenly.

Likewise cyclists late at night. The ones who wear bright LED strobes and reflective gear and helmets and high visibility kit, they are fine. I can see them and avoid them.

What scares me are the ones riding on the road in dark clothing, no lights, no reflectors, nothing. On some suburban streets – Canberra’s older suburbs have streetlights aimed along the footpaths, not the roads, and the street trees cut out their light – such cyclists are almost impossible to see, and they often don’t worry too much about niceties such as right of way or STOP signs or even which side of the road to ride along.

Far too many times, I’ve turned a corner and discovered a cyclist jaunting along, all but invisible until the light from my headlights hits them at a range of about five metres. Last night I turned into Melba Street in Downer, and there was some galoot in a big black coat on a totally unlit bike. He was a black hole, and the only reason we knew he was there was that he was silhouetted against the lights on the roundabout beyond.

But he knew we were there, and he moved smartly out of our way. Onto the wrong side of the road.

If I hit a cyclist, I’ll be fine in my steel tank. Just a scratch on the paint and a dent in the flank. But unprotected flesh and blood stands little chance against a car. My injuries would be on the inside, knowing that I’ve killed or seriously injured someone, and having to live with this. Someone would get a call from a very unhappy policeman to tell them that their son or husband or father won’t be coming home tonight, and that’s something that would haunt me.

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 got her album on my ipod.”

And we plugged Amanda Palmer into the van’s sound as we headed into downtown Springfield, aiming for Lincoln’s home and another of those National Park Service passport stamps.

We didn’t make it by about five minutes. It had been a late start, we’d bumbled our happy way along Route 66, and by the time we realised that it was a long way to St Louis, the sun was going down.

But I didn’t care too much. Discoverylover was playing the songs, and I was particularly fascinated by one called Map of Tasmania. There were other songs, but the image of Amanda Palmer “walking down the street, showing off my map of Tasmania” just cracked me up. The refrain, “Oh. My. God!” was about all I could say for the next week and a half as a response to anything.

“Here’s your salad, sir.”

“Oh. My. God!”

Swatt! – sound of Pete being hit over the head with rolled up beer bottle by Discoverylover.

She had actually been to a couple of Amanda Palmer concerts in New Zealand. Dragged her mother along to one, as well. DL’s Mum is one cool lady, I must say, having met and hugged her once or twice, and they must have had a ball together. My mother would never have taken any of her children to a show where the lead act is introduced as “Amanda Fucking Palmer!”

We got a coffee and continued on into the dusk. The story of what happened when we stopped for dinner in Litchfield and asked for “a local beer, not any of those big national brands like Coors or Millers” will be told later. In the meantime, I was wobbling all over the road. If I wasn’t laughing, I was beating time to the music.

 There’s some wonderful songs on the album, including a new national anthem for New Zealand, which frankly I think would be an improvement on their current dirge, albeit overly focused on one particular person’s menstrual cycle. There would be smiles all round as the New Zealand flag was hoisted at the Olympics, the majestic ukelele playing, hands on hearts, stars in eyes etcetera.

I immediately went off to iTunes and bought the album. It’s a cracker!

There’s a new version of the old standard Makin’ Whoopee and a delightful ode aimed at Vegemite, which is apparently Australia’s national food. Her husband, Neil Gaiman, loves the spread. Amanda doesn’t.

I love you, and no matter what you eat,
I’ll always love you completely,
I might just always leave the room at meal times,
Or refuse to touch or kiss you for a week,
If you insist on putting that foul death paste in your mouth.

Magic stuff!

We found a fantastic hotel in St Louis, just a Tim Tam toss from that amazing arch, where next morning we squelched over wet grass to get the stamp. Would have taken the lift up, but we were late and had to be on the road. It was about noon by the time we got our Drewes Frozen Custards and headed west out past Shrewsbury along Route 66. Drewes Frozen Custard is the exact antithesis to Vegemite. There was a line about a mile long, and it was a very soggy workday, but Oh. My. God! it was so worth it!

We had moved on to a Neil Gaiman book by that time, just to keep it in the family. The Graveyard Book on audio, ghouls and ghosts and assassins making a charmingly offbeat children’s story.

That’s one thing about modern roadtrips. It’s more than the scratchy AM radio the original Route 66 voyagers would have seen as an effete luxury. It’s ipods and ipads, DVDs and audio books, computer games and mobile internet nowadays.

We were never bored.

And next time Amanda Palmer and I and Discoverylover and her mum occupy the same nation, we’ll be there in the mosh pit.

–Skyring

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 asking “Why?”

In one day he not only broke the macabre records of lone gunmen such as Martin Bryant, he made a grisly high score that topped the total tallies of the previous three leaders combined. And, like them, he did it without much serious opposition. Sure, the government square in Oslo is now cordoned off and crawling with police, likewise the hell island of Utoya, but when this fellow set off a car bomb and shot down 85 young people, the security forces were elsewhere.

Which is as it should be. The hallmark of a free and peaceful society is that it is not overpoliced and supersupervised. The citizens are trusted to go about their business, to elect their leaders, to build a better world. And, by all accounts, Norway is a model society, a shining example of harmony and happiness.

The “how” is no problem. The murderer surrendered, admitted his actions, his home is being scoured for evidence, and the pieces are being put together. What is puzzling is the “why” of this terror act.

Well, it’s not really a puzzle. Using a social networking site, the killer published a video, photographs and a long manifesto. He was targeting Marxists and Islamic immigrants.

So why, why, why were the people he killed none of the above? Those who were killed in the explosion and those he shot to death were people much like himself in everything but attitude. It makes no sense.

Well, let me sidetrack a little. Years ago, my grandfather died, and the family assembled to say farewell, do a little grieving and sharing and bonding. We took comfort in each other. One member was gone, but the family continued, toddlers running around the slow feet of the silverhairs.

My aunt and uncle and their three boys were there. Middle-aged boys like me. They had moved away from the family’s mild Christianity to embrace a more dogmatic sect. This never stopped us enjoying each others’ company, and some of the best memories of my childhood centre on my brother and I scamping around with our three cousins.

There was another cousin, a much younger daughter who had arrived unexpectedly, as so often happens, and had been adored and loved by all, especially her mother who must have sometimes despaired of her three rampaging boys.

Boys now grown into sober adulthood, with families of their own, and we chatted and caught up with the years as we remembered Pop, now lying stiff and formal in his coffin as he had never been in life.

But where was the darling young cousin? Nobody mentioned her, nobody explained her absence.

She had left the sect, and the sect had shunned her, closing the door and forgetting her existence. I felt like chastising my aunt, “I’m not a Christian, let alone a believer in your nutty religion, and yet here you are smiling and talking with me, when you won’t even mention the name of the daughter you loved so much.”

They saw her as a traitor, betraying the core values of their faith. I saw these petty points of dogma as ridiculous affectations, nonsense that no sane person could hold dear, and my sympathy lay entirely with my apostate cousin.

And that’s what is so hard to understand about this Norwegian massacre. How can anybody get their priorities so completely arse about? If family and folk are important, then where is the sense in turning against them? Is some stupid notion so vitally precious that you shun and shoot your own siblings?

And it is stupid. Norway might have centuries of proud history, but fjords and mountains and icey seas cannot keep out the world. They didn’t stop the Vikings from roaming the known world out to America and Constantinople, so how can they keep Indians and Turks away now that travel is a few hours in a comfortable seat, rather than weeks or months of salt fish in a longboat?

I have a Norwegian ancestor. A sailor who left his ship in the Victorian goldrush and never went home again. Maybe amongst the dead of Utoya lies a distant cousin. In fact, I would be astonished if I could not trace a long chain of kinship back and forth across the centuries to more than a few of the slain. The blood staining the water is my own.

I think the lesson here is that no matter how much we believe in ourselves, our family, our politics, our culture, our folk, we are not the One True Way. We are a part of the whole, and if others see things differently to us, maybe they have the right of it and we should examine our own views.

I hope that Norway does not become a more closed and security-conscious society from this. I hope that policemen armed with machineguns do not guard the streets and holiday islands, scowling at those who look different. Or the same.

I hope that the global outpouring of grief and support fills a few hard hearts with compassion and tolerance and understanding. For these sad days, and for ever, we are all Norwegian.

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 through deeds and banks and loans – there’s a murder case popped up, one which will grab our hero by the nuts and turn him right around.

Apart from Mickey, the book is full of unique characters, a real Los Angeles cast. The way they interact together keeps us entertained and guessing right to the end – there’s a twist or two, and not just Mickey’s testicles.

The courtroom drama itself had me gripped. Each side kept pulling rabbits out of the hat and it was touch and go at every chapter. Connelly has done his homework on this one, and we learn a bit about current legal trends along the rollercoaster ride.

Continuing development with Mickey Haller, reflecting Harry Bosch’s progress in the parallel novel stream. It’s a pleasure to see the wheels turn, not just on matters of law, but questions of ethics and philosophy. Looking forward to reading future instalments.

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 way along old 66 that there was no way we were going to make it all the way across Texas in daylight, and we ended up settling for “Tucumcari Tonite“.

But that’s another story. A whole other bunch of other stories. The big thing about Amarillo is that just outside is one of the most famous Route 66 icons – and it’s not even on Route 66!

The Cadillac Ranch lies a few hundred metres south of I-40, and Route 66 (as “Indian Hill Road”) is about the same distance north of the interstate. Not really visible from the old road unless you’ve got telescopic eyesight. We had to get onto I-40 and then onto the south frontage road before we even got to the parking area, which is just a wide spot on the verge.

Originally, we’d planned to have MissMarkey from Oxford with us, and she had wanted to see the Cadillac Ranch. We could have done it – I’d do just about anything for MissMarkey – but it would have involved a lot of hard driving to get from Washington DC to Amarillo in the five days available to her. As well as do all the other stuff we all wanted to do. Regretfully she sent us off and flew home to England, but before she left she gave me a Route 66 shirt, which I loved immediately. I’m not a flamboyant dresser, and my clothes advertise ancient database products, like as not, but this gaudy item sang to me.

I changed into it on the roadside, the evening air chilly on my freshly exposed skin, and thought about how much more fun it would have been to have her aboard. Travelling companions can make or break a holiday, and MissMarkey’s ability to not just seize the moment, but jump up and down on top of it, would have made this trip truly epic.

Next time.

We could see the famous Cadillacs planted nose-down in the wheatfield. There were some vehicles parked nearby, but no apparent way of driving through the turnstile gate in the fence, so we, like everybody else, walked.

I’d heard that, very soon after the cars had been planted, visitors had begun souveniring smaller pieces, and graffiti-tagging the bodywork, in effect adding to the artwork. Certainly the gate had been well and truly tagged.

But as we approached, it became obvious that the cars – or what was left of them – were a uniform blood-red colour. A fresh artistic advance, supplied by a team of painters, clad in white overalls and spattered with gore. It was their vehicles parked by the Caddies, and they must have gone through a tonne of paint that day.

They were winding down from their effort, slightly demented after a day in the field, proud and protective of their achievement. “Fresh graffiti on car eight,” someone called out, and a painter was despatched to cover the offending tag.

The cars are covered in layer upon layer of paint. Apart from the graffiti, there are enough periodic repaintings that the paint sometimes sloughs off in sheets a centimetre thick, and such fragments litter the nearby field. Chunks of car have been removed – in one case an entire roof panel has been taken away for illicit display – and the whole installation is gradually deteriorating.

But it’s still spectacular. We posed for photographs, the low sun on the red paint making the scene even ruddier, poked around, left a book inside one car, and then hurried back to the van. It was cold out there in the Panhandle breeze, and we still had a long way to go.

Oh yeah. The story of the ranch is that an eccentric millionaire bought ten old clunker Cadillacs and buried them nose-down in a wheatfield, the angle of the cars exactly the same as the slope of the Great Pyramid. The trademark fins of the Fifties and Sixties Cadillacs pointed up into the sky and people came from all over the world to marvel.

When Amarillo expanded out over the surrounding farmland, the cars were exhumed and re-interred three kilometres further out. They are probably safe from encroachment for a decade or two, but there may not be much left by then. Just shells of paint.

We had to get back on the road, and we pushed through the barbed wire fence in the approved Australian manner, me lifting the strands apart so Discoverylover could push through. Just behind our plain-as-pie van was a fair dinkum classic Cadillac, straight out of American Graffiti, fins as sharp as razors, front end loaded down with chrome that sparkled like a galaxy in the level sunlight. It was gorgeous, and the driver was even more so. My Route 66 shirt was gaudy, but this chap had on a shirt that was elegant in a way that only Americans can do. Plain black with the Cadillac logo embroidered across the back in glittering thread. He was wearing a ten gallon hat and a tie in the shape of a set of tailfins, held down with a Cadillac pin in what looked like and probably were diamonds and gold.

“Now ain’t that something?” he asked, sticking his thumbs in his belt and pointing with his chin at the row of Caddies.

“Going to park your car there?” I asked him mischievously.

He looked me up and down, and seeing that I was smiling, he broke into a big Texan laugh. “Naw, they can plant her right alongside when the good Lord calls me home, but until that day, I’m going to enjoy me my Coupe DeVille. Ain’t she purty?”

“Sure is!”, I agreed, wondering if I could possibly arrange a swap.

“She was state of the art in her day. Power steering, power seats, Hydramatic transmission, Four Thirty Vee-Eight..,” he rattled on and on, “…four barrel carburettor…”

My ears glazed over after a while, but he was fired up. “Lookey here,” he said, reaching into his coat pocket, “The keys are individually matched to the original factory serial number.”

He hauled out a keyring – more diamonds – and some small change and a couple of golf tees spilled onto the ground. We bent down to retrieve them from the Texas dust.

“What are these?” asked Discoverylover, holding up a golf tee with a tiny Cadillac logo. She’s not a great sports fan.

“Oh, that’s what I put my balls on when I drive.”

“Wow,” she goggled. “Those Cadillac people think of everything!”

Later:

From the photographer’s caption:

After the perfect blue New Mexico skies of the day before we awoke to a cloudy and windy morning. We made our way out to Cadillac Ranch intending to add our names to the thousands of spray painted “tags” that decorate this iconic art installation, only to find that a group of students from Denmark had just finished painting the cars to resemble their national flag.The students were still on site admiring their work,and I didn’t have the heart to be the first to deface their “flag”,so I just shot a couple of pics and headed into town to see what was left of Route 66 in Amarillo.

Earlier:

People climb up on these things to tag the rear ends and to pose for photographs in a suitably heroic manner, so I guess that the pillars on car number two just rusted out and gave way one day. This photograph shows the ranch in November 2010, and given that the hood has folded in two, it’s probably from the weight of someone climbing on it and getting a nasty surprise.

A little serendipity: someone has painted a Danish flag on the flank of car number one!