Leonard Cohen — Machine of Death

Leonard Cohen

Charles Nadeau (CC-BY‑2.0)

The atten­dant held out the dis­tinc­tive yel­low and orange envelope.

“Thank you Mr. Su” he said cheer­ful­ly as Kam took the enve­lope. “Have a nice day, Sir.”

Kam stepped out of the arcade into the Pacific Avenue rush. He squint­ed against the low October after­noon sun. Damn, no sun­glass­es.
He crossed the street to the new two-story Starbucks and stood in line behind the usu­al col­lec­tion of black clad teenagers, under-employed hip­sters, and multi-level mar­keters in cheap sports coats. Kam stared at the logo on his enve­lope. A laugh­ably cheap image of crossed fin­gers on a back­ground of the ini­tials LD and the mot­to “Only Time Will Tell.” He flipped the enve­lope over and fin­gered the flap. Turned it back over and stared at the crossed fin­gers again. His broth­er had told him that the ini­tials LD stood for Lucky Dayz and that the com­pa­ny that pro­duced the AnswerMachine™ had orig­i­nal­ly been in the busi­ness of man­u­fac­tur­ing claw crane games and bar-top slot machines. In fact the machine itself was orig­i­nal­ly designed as a for­tune telling game called “How Shall I Die?” The design­er had had the bril­liant idea of get­ting cryp­tic sound­ing answers by tak­ing ran­dom phras­es from a live con­nec­tion to Wikipedia. Marketing had loved the for­tune cook­ie vibe of the answers but had nixed the name in favor of the less def­i­nite AnswerMachine™. Still ‘every­one’ knew that the machine only answered one ques­tion — How am I going to die? And ‘every­one’ knew that the machine was nev­er wrong.

“Lucky Dayz. That’s rich.” he said aloud and then remem­bered he was­n’t alone.

He turned the enve­lope back over and slid his fin­ger under the flap. There were two pieces of paper. A close­ly print­ed double-sided “Guide to your Answer”. He ignored this and looked at the 3x5 card with it’s hap­py orange bor­der and the LD logo in the corner.

“Leonard Cohen?” it read. “What the fuck, they’ve giv­en me some­one else’s results.”

He shoved the papers back into the enve­lope and stuffed it back into his mes­sen­ger bag, elbow­ing the man behind him in the process.

“Oh, sor­ry.” He apol­o­gized as he stepped up to the counter.

Americano in hand Kam walked to the condi­ments bar to get half-n-half. Waiting behind the goth girl adding four Splendas to her soy lat­te, his curios­i­ty got the bet­ter of him and he dug the enve­lope out of his mes­sen­ger bag. As he pulled out the card the Guide fell to the floor. An old­er woman with lots of pre­cise spikes and angles in her gray hair stopped to pick it up for him. Handing it over she stiff­ened when she saw the enve­lope in Kam’s hand.

“Superstitious non­sense.” she mut­tered Continue read­ing “Leonard Cohen — Machine of Death”

#fridayreads 1.jun.2012

Picked up The Jewel Hinged Jaw, Samuel Delany. Because Delany came up in a con­ver­sa­tion recent­ly and then I came across this lit­tle screed on io9:overmind http://io9.com/5910814/what-samuel-r-delany-can-tell-publishing-about-its-latest-trend
Typically shal­low but hits a pain point of mine about how many authors have suc­cumbed to the pro­duc­tion line via ghost writ­ers and co-authors and how the prod­uct has suffered.

In the midst of Gods with­out Men, Hari Kunzru. Mixed reviews on Amazon but rec­om­mend­ed by a cou­ple of peo­ple I trust. I’m glad I start­ed it. Yes, the nar­ra­tive struc­ture is a bit odd and there does­n’t seem to be a cap­i­tal ‘P’ plot, but not every­thing in the world has to fol­low the three act arc.

Sandman Slim, Richard Kadrey. Read because I found the sin­gle phrase “like God’s tiny tyran­nosaurus rex” in an excerpt amus­ing. I’m not a hor­ror fan but it was fun­ny enough to send me look­ing for anoth­er Kadrey. (and it went well with migraine.)

HebrewPunk, Lavie Tidhar. One of my favorite writ­ers of the moment dis­ap­point­ed me. Admittedly one of his ear­ly efforts. Not worth the time even if you like Yiddish myth and leg­end. Sigh.

 

Wind Through the Keyhole, Stephen King.  A fairy tale. I like fairy tales. This made up for the last 2 Dark Tower books.

A bunch of dog train­ing books. Because the world moves on and the pup­py rais­ing books that I leant some­one so long ago and nev­er got back are out­dat­ed any­way. The basics nev­er change. The tricks of the trade are refined. The research updates enough to make the sequence of assigned tasks a lit­tle dif­fer­ent. I have yet to find my replace­ment for the nice­ly bal­anced approach of “Mother Knows Best.”

PS When you bork the Kindle app on an iPad because you are switch­ing iTunes from one com­put­er to anoth­er you lose all of the sam­ples that you have down­loaded and thus lose all of the books queued for pos­si­ble inclu­sion in your read­ing list. Is that hell­ish­ly annoy­ing? Or a fresh start?

Leaving Gmail. It’s Not Me It’s You.

New Look Sux.

That’s the title of an email thread that went around my uni­verse. No one likes the new look of Gmail. You can search the web for details of the usabil­i­ty night­mare. But let me just offer this one tid­bit. The CSS is so bro­ken that the pages often don’t ren­der well in Google’s own brows­er.

That, and so many mis-steps with pri­va­cy and cross prod­uct snoop­ing and then there are some things that the Google uni­verse just won’t do for me. (I need bet­ter cal­en­dar man­age­ment. I can’t keep track of my glasses…)

Not that my Google account won’t be going away alto­geth­er. It’s just going to go back to being what it was intend­ed to be in the first place. A quar­an­tine for mail­ing lists that allows me to just not see them when I need to focus on oth­er stuff. A decent chat client. An RSS aggre­ga­tor. A web­site ana­lyt­ics man­ag­er. Lots of things. But not a mail man­ag­er and not a cal­en­dar manager.

What to Do About It

I have access to Microsoft Office 2010 and Office365. I have domains that I can use for email address­es. I can move away from GMail to an Exchange serv­er. Importantly I can move to an Exchange serv­er that I don’t have to man­age. That’s a vari­ety of black mag­ic that I don’t have time to learn right now.

My choic­es are not appro­pri­ate for every­one. . If you aren’t doing busi­ness with your email address­es or you enjoy the arcana of run­ning your own email servers you can leave GMail for a lot of oth­er prod­ucts. But those paths are not what you’re going to find here.

First up… A Plan.

There are 4 parts to this dance.

  1. Get all of the data out of Google.  I“ll need Gmail, Chats, Contacts, Calendars.
  2. Prepare local machines with copies of Office 2010. [a]
  3. Set up Office365. Microsoft’s cloud based Office prod­uct. [b]
  4. Set up mobile devices to use the new Exchange based account. [c]

———-
Notes

[a]  There are lots of these machines. All except the one I’ll actu­al­ly be using for email already have Office 2010 on them. Figures does­n’t it?

Office 2010 final­ly does con­ver­sa­tion thread­ing — the one thing I most desired in an email read­er. And the biggest rea­son I haven’t switched before. It also allows back-dated entry in cal­en­dars. Something Google cal­en­dars does­n’t. I real­ly need this. I track most things in a Moleskine, only trans­fer­ring them to the elec­tron­ic cal­en­dars at the end of the week. Moleskine’s only hold 6 months worth of stuff. I need at least a year’s worth at tax time, no?

[b] I’m only using the Exchange serv­er. Office365 also offers Sharepoint (Magpie makes a hex ward­ing sign) and an online meet­ing thing and oth­er busi­ness stuff that I don’t use. Yet.

[c] I’ll miss my better-than-Apple’s-lame-version cal­en­dar app. Otherwise this is a no brain­er. Follow the direc­tions giv­en in the set­up menu.

Brief Note: Who’s in Your Twitter?

Coming under the head­ing of Don’t Put Yourself in the Position to be Jealous.

I have a twit­ter stream full of authors whose work I adore, or whose way of work­ing I admire. Every time one of them gets a good review, pub­lish­es a book, or places a sto­ry, I cheer. I love that the world is going to see more of their work.

But the ones whose stuff I think is mediocre and who I think have cho­sen to be mediocre. Um, no. I don’t have the time to spend with their psyches.

#FridayReads — 3.feb

This week was all about the short sto­ries. Many avail­able free on the ‘net

From the World SF blog. The City of Silence by Ma Boyong. A lit­tle too easy update of 1984 for the web ruled city. I sus­pect that there is bet­ter mate­r­i­al by the same writer.

The House of Aunts. Zen ChoTo at GigaNotoSaurus. I don’t usu­al­ly read hor­ror. I loved this one. A teenag­er hemmed in by a pas­sel of nosy, inter­fer­ing, undy­ing­ly loy­al aun­ties. A girl’s first crush and a lot of humor.

I read a cou­ple of sto­ries writ­ten by some­one I sort of know that dis­ap­point­ed me great­ly. There is zero chance that he’d find this lit­tle post and yet… I can’t bring myself to point you all to an instruc­tive exam­ple of flat writ­ing. Conflict avoid­ed by writ­ing about the con­flict rather than the sto­ries — whew.

I’m read­ing a lot about the act (crime?) of writ­ing. Mostly web stuff — most­ly lost in space.

On the longer form front.

An Everlasting Meal — Tamar Adler. A cook­book worth read­ing for both the ideas and the prose. I’ve just start­ed. Pleased with it.

Tons of stuff land­ing on the Kindle and in the post office box. A Dorothy Parker bio, Fran Lebowitz (smart ass girls — could it be a theme?) Osama — Lavie Tidhar (alter­nate present polit­i­cal), Palimpset — CV (how cities grow — folk­loric.)  Samples of a hand­ful of things.

It was a week for hunt­ing and gath­er­ing and plun­der­ing oth­er peo­ples’ read­ing lists. Next week — cook­ing and eat­ing my haul.

Happy Friday my dears.