Blog to the future

Having coined the phrase “cyberspace”, sci-fi legend William Gibson is now in it morning, noon and night maintaining his own blog.

In the past few days the fiftysomething scribe has posted such intriguingly headed messages as ‘Los Alamos Trailer Park Nuclear Weapons Drug Bust Mash-Up’, ‘Medicine Hat Simulacrum’ and ‘He Was Also Frightened Of Invertebrates’.
With Mrs. Gibson out for the night and fuck all on the telly, 9.52pm on Friday night found him getting nostalgic for the computer-less days of yore.
“As anyone knows who’s ever looked at any bio notes on me, Neuromancer was written on a typewriter,” he reminisces. “This is often presented as evidence of weird lotek eccentricity on my part, but in 1981 I didn’t know anyone who wrote on a computer. All the hotshit professionals had the IBM Selectric, which turned out to be the endpoint of typewriter evolution. Stephen King may have already had his Wang, which was the first I heard of anyone writing fiction on a new-fangled ‘word processor’. Me, I was writing on a Hermes 2000. It was built by E. Paillard & Cie. S.A., Yverdon (Suisse) with all the precision of a Swiss mechanical watch. That precision, plus the rigidity of the small but heavy steel frame, made it one memorably fine writing tool. I had inherited it from my wife’s step-grandfather, who’d been a journalist. I wrote all my short stories on it.”
Even when he’s being anal, the man’s fascinating.
Also worth looking up in the www.williamgibsonbooks.com archive is his lengthy dissertation on the technology being used by U2 on the Vertigo tour.
Somebody else who has a web presence, but might be wishing she didn’t, is 14-year-old Sacramento schoolgirl Julia Wilson, who got yanked out of biology class this week by two Secret Service agents.
Her crime? Maintaining a MySpace page called “So Bush is an idiot, but hey what else is new?”
The pubescent Osama Bin Laden compounded her wrongdoings by illustrating it with a cartoon of the Pres’ hand being stabbed.
“I don’t condone what she did, but it seems a little over the top to me,” says her master of understatement dad Jim. “You’d think they could look at the situation and determine she’s not a credible threat.”
Get the full story at
www.sacbee.com/111/story/38768.html
Anyone who thinks that Borat’s doing Kazakhstan a grave disservice should proceed to the recipe section of the official Kazak Tourist Board site,
www.kz/Firsteng3.htm
Who can fail to be tempted by Uyz (“Thick milk of the female that has just calved”), Soup with Fat Of Tail or Delicacies of Horse Flesh (“From the carcass of the slaughtered horse the ribs with flesh are cut off and the blood is let trickle down for 5-7 hours)?
Which just leaves time for quick visits to
www.gougoule.com/jerry (hip-hop soundtracked French tomfoolery); www.metacafe.com/watch/233388/steve_irwin_on_south_park (Steve Irwin gets the South Park treatment); and www.terrorbullgames.co.uk (The War On Terror that all the family can play).