Month: July 2001
Bruce Sterling: Furoshiki Revisited
This article by Blather's Dave Walsh first appeared in The Irish Times of Monday, July 23, 2001, as PCs are the fabric of life '"I've never seen on these furoshiki." Maya leaned over the table. "I've certainly heard of them..." The intelligent cloth was woven from a dense matrix of fibre-optic threads, organic circuitry and piezoelastic fibre.The hair-thin optical threads oozed miniscule screen-line pixels of coloured light. A woven display screen. A flexible all-fabric computer.' - Bruce Sterling, Holy Fire Just eight years ago, in 1993, the average Westerner had never heard of the Internet, much less shown a desire to own a home PC. Back then, the idea of widespread Internet use seemed as crazy as having human moon-dwellers by 1999. We're now half-way through 2001, millions of us are "jacked into the matrix" - to use the parlance of early 1990s cyberpunk literature - but Martin Landau and...
Paranormal Ireland – Where has all the weirdness gone?
"There are two ways to slide easily through life: to believe everything or to doubt everything. Both ways save us from thinking." - Alfred Korzybski, Manhood of Humanity QUOTATION, n. The act of repeating erroneously the words of another. - Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary Some time ago, we grew weary of writing about the paranormal. It was a pathetic state of affairs - the bizarre became, for us, the mundane. So, we shut up, and stopped writing about it. Now, without for one minute claiming that we somehow caused a fugue in the Hibernian gestalt or a committed grievous quantum act, for some reason people in Ireland stopped sending us weird shit. We miss it, in some twisted way. Back in 1998 or 1999, a constant stream of UFO sightings kept piling into our mailbox. The papers were regularly reporting on ill-behaved poltergeists and ghostly hauntings. Not anymore. We...
Savage Controversies – Irish Lake Monsters
"The most savage controversies are about matters as to which there is no good evidence either way." -- Bertrand Russell Part 1: Tempis Fugit... Some Blather readers may remember the 'Norway' fiasco, back in the summer of 1998, when I travelled to Norway, in search of lake monsters and mayhem. Those of you who don't remember, check out http://www.blather.net/archives2/issue2no16.html As expected, weird aquatic beasts were thin on the ground in Norway, and even more sparse in the water, but the chaos was abundant, the company was mixed, the craic mighty, the lunatics were depressing, and the post-expedition fall-out diabolical, with Swedish lake monster hunter Jan-Ove Sundberg annoying anyone who he seemed to think had anything to do with him *not* finding a lake monster in Lake Seljord. A concise record of the madness of those crazy seventeen days is still circulating on the Discovery Channel, on a programme called 'The...