No time tonight to do anything other than link you to this — the latest incarnation of the Ice Hotel. Salivate, but not too much. You’ll sully the furnishings.
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Wisdom
Having the tooth out wasn't a problem, but now i am condemned to drink warm, salty water and have no proper food for a while! I promise there'll be no photos of the clotted, gaping socket though.
Sunday, February 10, 2008
The invasion of memory
Jonathan’s post about Googlereality got me thinking, especially as I’m switching over to a new mobile provider which gives me a fancy phone and free internet surfing / email over the phone as part of the deal.
Free internet surfing using a 3G network for only £15 a month?, I thought. There must be a catch. As it turns out, there is — but an intriguing one. You may surf the network’s website and news / sports / weather / info services for free. You may search the net with Yahoo or Google for free. But the moment that you click on a Google search result, you start to get charged for data transfer.
What’s interesting about this is that it’s the user equivalent of paying your library bills to get catalogue access only. And what’s strange about it is that they didn’t limit free surfing to their website only. So is the point that searching is fun, but the end result isn’t? The Google thrill-of-the-chase? Of course not — they want to dangle the carrot, get you to bite it, and then owe them money.
But the googling and reading of the result is like taking a snap of something amazing. It’s easier to lazily enjoy than it is to absorb, and quicker too. I’ve forgotten, very slightly, what the golf course near the forest looked like under the new year’s snow, but I remember very well how the photos look. If I’d left the camera at home, I’d remember more, but you wouldn’t be able to share it with me. Similarly, since we can all find the same stories online, the same glints of oft-linked wonder, are we storytelling less?
I remember reading (yes, reading. Not reading the “reading” entry in Wikipedia) about countless new and strange things with every turn of the pages, and excitedly telling everyone at dinnertime, and wonderful filigreed conversation starting to emerge. A few nights ago, I was stopped short in one conversational gambit when my dad told me that yes, he’d read about that on the BBC website already. End of paragraph.
Luckily, photos are open-ended things, as are poems. If there was a search engine called Googleverse, which gave only poems as search results, and intelligently too, that would be quite something.
As it happens, Google does have something similar. But then, it would. And no, I won’t link to it.
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