Posted on by mwhybark

Zero History

Finally started Gibson’s Zero History, which I had been putting off for months. I’m happy to report it is entertaining me very much.

The book is about industrial espionage in the global clothing industry. A major supporting character is introduced wearing a ridiculous suit in International Klein Blue, and the hardback’s boards are this color. This little joke make me smile every time I pick up the book and, distressed, note my oily finger stains here and there on the spine.

An aspect of the book I find very peculiar is that it feel tremendously nostalgic to me – Gibson has allowed his futures of the past to merge with ours, and rightly so. Reading his earlier stuff always felt like some sort of message from a prophet as he described various improbable ways of navigating a comprehensively networked world. Well, now we live in that world, albeit without widespread use of wetware jacks and eye-glasses based HUDs.

I have developed a fascination with Japanese pro baseball in the wake of the Tohuku quake, and have been flabbergasted at the ease and accessibility of any given thing to do with it. Mind you, not via completely constructed tollways.

There’s no automated crossposting of NPB team goods from the primary site of the Japanese ecommerce giant (and Tohoku Sendai Golden Eagles team owner) Rakuten, but it’s trivially easy to view any given subsite on Rakuten in English, if machine-translated.

Likewise, only the tiniest amount if imagination and investigation was required to find unofficial internet relays of any given live Japanese (and Taiwanese) baseball game, the largest challenge being staying up lat enough to watch the games. I have mostly been watching them, as I did the tsunami, on my iPhone.

Posted on by mwhybark

Resist False Winter

Yesterday was the warmest day of the year to date, reaching 69 degrees at this nearby weather station.

According to UW professor Cliff Mass, the spring has been the coldest on record since 1948 from an off-the-cuff perspective (number of days over 55).

I moved a bunch of the furniture from our main living area out on to the deck and did a thorough de-furring and vacuum run. Wehn that was done I moved outside to weed whack and take on some other chores.

We are expecting a new grill on Tuesday, so Viv cleaned up the deck for me while I turned and repaired our compost bins. I still have a huge pile of scrap from our deck demolition a couple years ago and I used the rest of the afternoon to build a standing potting bench. I may add a shelf or two in service of bracing the structure but not until the weather improves.

Using deck scrap to build furniture produces very heavy furniture.

It went very quickly, though, and makes me think i might build that x-braced picnic table after all this summer.

Viv has dug out nearly all the beds and transferred many of the potted plants to either new pots or the ground. I got my potatoes in a week ago but still haven’t popped any starts into the vegetable bed. Well, one start – Viv found a volunteer lettuce in one of the flowerpots.

Lacking a gas grill at the moment, I cooked a couple steaks over wood, which is always a challenge as charcoal is so hot. They came out nice, though. I used a teriyaki-and-mustard glaze that burned black much faster than the steak did so what appeared to be horribly charred was actually nicely medium rare.

All this yard work meant the dog did not get his walk; we are hoping to get a good one in today despite the return of rain and cold.

Posted on by mwhybark

I Dream of Maakies

I awoke on April 23 from a dream, which I felt immediately compelled to share with the artist concerned (Tony Millionaire, of Maakies and more):

I had a detailed dream of a huge, twenty-five-pound signed-and-numbered limited edition Maakies book, 24 x 12 or thereabouts and and two inches thick, indigo dyed upper edging and deckle pages on the opening side. The book’s cover featured a large illustration and the book itself and the printed cover’s primary color was a light fawn brown. The printed cover of the book and the boards themselves felt soft and smooth, something like leather in the case of the boards and an unknown substance for the jacket.

The book came in an even larger box with a separate interior tipped-in ‘tear sheet’ (which appeared to be a signed silksceen). The box itself was possibly square, as the sales display literature referred to the book and box set as ‘Uncle Gabby’s Square Deal.’

The box was made of heavy cardboard wrapped in a kind of faux morocco leather, roughly the color of a 1940s Scrabble box, but the cardboard was much heavier, say 5 to 7mm. I did not see the cover art on the box that I remember but I think it was different from that on the book.

The interior of the box was lined with green baize, and the inner side of the box (the bottom of the box, which separated as does a board game box) was subdivided into several small compartments in addition to a large one for the book. Included in the compartments were at least two small croupier’s rods, apparently made of a fine hardwood and with delicate handwrapped leather grips, and a set of ivory or ivory-colored standard six-sided dice. It’s possible there was more stuff.

I don’t recall if the baize had gaming markings on it or not, but the intent was clearly to present the box as a kind of gambling surface.

The book was not titled ‘Uncle Gabby’s Square Deal’ and featured a large, intricate illo of Drinky Crow and Henrietta, possibly on the high seas, and whatever the title and copy on the cover, they were ensconced in classic, Greg-Irons-by-way-of-Millionaire nineteenth century bannering devices, possibly worked to appear as engaged in the rigging of the ship.

The book was signed and numbered, one of an edition of 550, and tucked behind the book display were three watercolor collage works by none other than you, Mr. Millionaire, only one of which I got a good look at. Apparently the watercolors were swag the proprietor was intended to bestow on purchasers of the tome at whim. They appeared to have careful and sarcastic or insulting instructions and invective to the bookseller on them in your hand, incorporated into the design of the works.

The book-and-box itself was priced at $550.

It seemed incredibly urgent to me that I let you know about this on awakening. I would say that I would be likely to buy such an improbability.

I wanted to get it in here too.