"I suspect that the literary equivalent of “code that performs nothing” is authorial “voice.” Literary null-objects are certain kinds of refined word-choices and grammatical stylings that convey the “message” of “I’m the author and you’re the reader.” One can skate along on this blather for quite a while without venturing to state much of anything; but “voice” keeps the channels open, and prevents the crash-state of the reader standing up and throwing the book against the wall."

"Served by the refrigerator’s dose and university, eisenhower favored him if there was any television he could give him in his bowls."

In which Chairman Bruce writes about his new pants (!), and sounds, well, just like Bruce Sterling: "I’ll probably be wearing tactical pants for the sake of my dentures, hearing aids, spectacles, “longevity” quack cyberpunk vitamins, and similar geezer knickknacks. Strange to surmise that the rugged gear of mountain-climbers should somehow evolve into support garments for the elderly — but, well, mountain-climbing thrill seekers do tend to die young. Why should they get any say about what happens next?"

"21st century networked society vs. Lovecraft's commonplace book".

Chairman Bruce annotates a lamentation (which I agree with!) over the fate of delicious, in his usual style.  (And wow, when did the Wired website get so aggressive?  His blog is much more enjoyably read via RSS.)

"Nobody is less surprised than me to see that interacting pieces of software can do weird emergent stuff, and act all buggy. This is not, like, some surprising discovery. It’s more like a law of computational physics.
For the stock market to go into a “tornado” of dark pool trading is not all that great, though. Especially when days tick by, and nobody knows what the hell actually happened. This is not a chaos-theory lab experiment: this is supposed to be the bedrock of global capitalism.
That is not a stable market, folks. That’s not a free market, either. Why would any sane person have any confidence in the behavior of a creation like that? It’s like a series of mechanized panics waiting to happen. Ivan the Terrible had more common sense than this rickety robot."

My father's mother, and much of that side of my family, would be among those Indians raised speaking English instead of more-remotely-ancestral languages (in her case, Tamil).

H. G. Wells prophesies, well, something like us, in 1937; with commentary by Bruce Sterling. Can't recall if Bush mentioned this.

"It’s also quite eerie to learn that the best current candidates for Neanderthal cloning are a group of murdered Neanderthals who were devoured by cannibals 49,000 years ago. Imagine these gruesome cannibal victims being turned, at long long last, into little living Petri puddles of Neanderthal flesh. Are those gonna be the most luckless parahumans ever, or what?"

"Paranormal Romance is a tremendous, bosom-heaving, Harry-Potter-sized, Twilight-shaped commercial success. It sorta says everything about modern gender relations that the men have to be supernatural. It also says everything about humanity that we’re so methodically training ourselves to be intimate partners of entities that aren’t human."

"As for me, I'm a tireless global vector and I'm also very prone to respiratory illnesses. So a mutant 21st century swine flu would be well-nigh perfect for me. Once I caught the flu while reading Stephen King's THE STAND. As I twitched in my bed with hallucinatory high fever, the television in the next room ceaselessly babbled about the Jonestown mass suicide. I was convinced the world was ending. That was 31 years ago. After that experience, the massive global pandemic doomster thing has all been downhill for me. I just can't get worked up about it; the reality never matches the technicolor hype."

bruces unleashes some design-speak. But the point is right.

Maynard makes a nice point about Wikipedia vs. traditional encyclopedias in his post.

Bruce S. in fine form. Interviewer, maybe not so much. "An educated citizen is not a friction-free technocratic philistine myrmidon with an ISO rating. Those guys exist, don't get me wrong, but they bear the relationship to education that the Ron Paul c

Nth in the annual series. Worth reading, but skipping the other posters will cost you little.

Most of this is given over to a joyful demolition of an almost unbelievably bad piece on Cuba by a "permaculture activist"; not the kind of environmentalism I want, thank you (or the kind of socialism, either, come to that).

This is no more a "plain tale" than I am the raja of Kashmir. It would be a good thing to understand all the ways in which the reader's mind is being played with here. The ending is not for the squeamish.