Let’s Bring Back Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang Next!

Over at Boing Boing, Xeni Jardin wondered aloud if the term “straight edge” dated back to the beginning of the 20th century, as evidenced in these 1906 newspaper illustrations. It’s for real: I saw the menu for the Straight Edge Kitchen at New York Eats Out, a very cool NYPL exhibit.

The pictures, by the way, come from the American Newspaper Repository, which was founded by Nicholson Baker. Its origins are recounted in Double Fold.

6 January 2004 | uncategorized |

It’s a Small World After All…

Two of the Well’s biggest stars, at least in the geek subcultural hierarchy, get together for Reason as Mike Godwin interviews Bruce Sterling. (In the interest of accuracy, I don’t think ‘bruces’ really spends that much time on the Well anymore; at least he had pretty low visibility when I was a regular member a few years back.) Addendum: Look’s like he’s hanging out on the Well right now, at least for a while.

I’ve been a fan of Sterling’s social-satire-disguised-as-SF for years, and thought The Hacker Crackdown was one of the first books that got the political and cultural implications of hacker culture right (though I said so in cringe-inducing tones, if you look all the way down.) So when PW asked me if I wanted to review his most recent non-fiction book, Tomorrow Now, I jumped at the chance, and I’m hoping the paperback blurbs the part where I called it “a fun hybrid of Robert Kaplan and Faith Popcorn.”

My favorite aphoristic quote from the interview: “Fanatical gestures capture the public’s imagination, but they’re just not as important to people’s lives as massive economic arrangements.” But his quickie analysis of Jules Verne is interesting, too.

6 January 2004 | uncategorized |