I cam across a lovely new word last week in the Economist: apparatgeist, in a most interesting piece "The Apparatgeist calls." 'How you use your mobile phone has long reflected where you live. But the spirit of the machines may be wiping away cultural differences.'
The word triggered my reticular activating system and everywhere I turned I saw examples of cultures responding to technology. Here, for example, is the response of an English village to a decommissioned red telephone box:
Yes, they turned it into a library. A different kind of library.
And here is the latest on Margaret Atwood's LongPen idea, only now it's morphed into a low-cost signing tablet that will be useful for virtual legal and banking transactions.
Last and best and utterly unconnected to anything, except the car as culture, is a blog post about the stories of Dangerous Space, Kelley's short story collection. It was lovely seeing that excerpt from "Somewhere Down the Diamondback Road" out of context. I remember watching Kelley write that in the heat and humidity of Clarion and being so in love I hurt. And then going out driving in her little red sports car and being glad I wasn't Billy... (Of course, it also reminds me of our constant bickering over the words carapace and the ever-popular swang.)
In other news, I've been hard at work doing mysterious things for LLF. I'll be able to talk about that soon.
Now back to salivating over roast chicken and roots vegetables, and pondering the maturation of Hild.
