Posthuman Blues

Neal Stephenson actually has a cool website. It's a rather corporate "buy these books" type of site, but better than his well.com user profile. There's even a site devoted exclusively to "Cryptonomicon," one of the best fiction books of the last five years.

Paul McAuley, like China Mieville, has beaten me to the punch with several unadulterated Cool Ideas that I thought were somewhat original to me: genetically engineered drones used for bloody arena combat spectacles, corporate warfare over genomic copywrite, etc. (OK, so I didn't come up with the quietly brilliant scenario in "Gene Wars," but it's mathematically inevitable that a version of me in some alternate universe did.)

Did you know that Jeff Goldblum Is Watching You Poop? I ran across this site a few days ago. Through some act of divine synchronicity, a friend emailed today to tell me that flyers espousing the Goldblum/defecation theme had been sighted in his parking garage. The Internet has an almost magical way of spawning these Thomas Pynchon Moments.

In my CD player:

"Portishead" (Portishead)
"Earthling" (David Bowie)
"Green" (R.E.M.)
"The Essential Simon and Garfunkel" (disc one)
"Hatful of Hollow" (The Smiths)