My petty annoyances. Now with maps!

• A: The road which meets the road that goes to my house.


• B: My house (and what ghosts there do remain).


• C: This new house being built.

The green stuff is apple trees, and they (among other things) block the view west and southwest from my house. So every day, or at least every day in happier, more productive times, I leave the house and at the end of the driveway look over to see Mount Adams, which is very large and impressive from here. And now there's this new house that's gone up right on that corner, between the edge of the apples and the edge of the hill we all live on, and suddenly my trips all begin and end with this unfinished, ugly house. Not to get too dramatic, but I've got this unsatisfied psychic hunger. I guess that is pretty dramatic (and lame). Let's say that my interior mental landscape has warped to adapt to the exterior physical one, and it is awful.

So now you know. I am going to go build a house right at the foot of the mountain, is what I'm going to do.

I've been slowly going through the Arts & Letters Daily archive, and I just read the following. What's the opposite of timely insight?

Scenes from a Revolution, by Norman Lebrecht

"DVD is killing CD - what will it do to the book?" What in the world? The essay turns out to not even be about music or books, but films, and Lebrecht predicts a curious future where the ability to buy old films will doom those flashy TV shows, all of us having devoted our time to the classics. This argument might benefit from a brief examination of the DVDs people actually buy.

And then there's the general "Wow, get a load of these DVD things!" feel, from a piece written in the grimy analog past of distant November 2005.

A cameraman was mistaken for bacon.

(Apparently this blog is now 100% Things I Found At Wired Monthly.)

((The robot front-end doesn't seem as interesting, in the story, as the spectrometer, and there is nothing about whether it represents some new thing in spectroscopy or not. Maybe you could just rent time on one and carry around a discrete probe disguised as a ring that beamed back the information over a wi-fi connection, and then it whispered facts about your food to you over your earphones.))

(((Look for this issue to be explored in my upcoming Sci-Fi Channel original movie, Eatamobot. The new flavor of fear.)))