Blah

Dang - October 2009 may be an all time low for blog posts...all the action happens on the other blog. Here I'm meant to have more G's blah life moments. So, let's recap the blah life today:

• Wake up
  
• Eat cereal while perusing the interwebs - thankfully other bloggers updated their sites and I had something to read!
• Change the cat litter - hopefully this cheered up the kitty
• Put away laundry
  
• Go to grocery - passed the same group of homeless alcoholics twice in the alley - saw an interesting bit of graffiti
• Work on travel research for a possible holiday road trip
• Eat cold, left over pizza for lunch
  
• Make spicy pumpkin bread
  
• Pay bills and reconcile bank statement
• Make black bean soup - this took forever. I have gotten out of cooking and I didn't time things very well but the soup turned out to be tasty.
• Skim through the latest issue of Cooking Light while listening to weekend All Things Considered
• Work on knitting a blanket while listening to podcasts of Real Time with Bill Maher and Slate's Political Gabfest and drinking Lefthand Warrior IPA.

This day was about twice as productive as usual. All right so you're definitely full of blah now.

I do want to officially make an endorsement. In a previous post (actually in two previous posts) I included a picture from a web site I've frequented lately but didn't actually put in a web site link. The Darth Bunny below is from the web site Animals with Lightsabers and I can't get enough.

Anyway, this post has really tasked my atrophying blogger muscle. I'm going to watch Jon Stewart now.

the end of the world is coming...

Actually this isn't another blog post about cute animals, it's about dystopia in the arts.

Today I went to the book signing for Margaret Atwood's new novel - The Year of the Flood, which I highly recommend. But before you read that, you'll have to read Oryx and Crake, which is something of a precursor to The Year of the Flood.

As the book review in the first link indicates, both books are about a possible future in which climate change has had some of the more obvious outcomes (you know, the ones we hear most often - sea levels rising, droughts and desertification, etc.). Also the gaps between the social and economic classes have grown wider. The military has been privatized and permeated everyday life. The media is controlled by this military - but in a subtle way so that not everyone knows. Oh and there are the "secret burger" franchises in the future. These secret burgers are called that because the meat from which they are made is secret (meaning it could be any part of any animal - including human). Interestingly, there was an article in the NY Times today about hamburgers.

Some call this science fiction but Atwood calls it "speculative fiction." If you ask me, some of these things don't sound that out there. Anyway, I'm not doing the book justice because there a lot more themes than I'm recognizing here.

My point of this blog is that I'm fascinated by stories of these possible futures. I read The Road by Cormac McCarthy last year and that really started it. I couldn't put that book down! Well, except for one time when I was so scared I had to put it down for a minute. I won't tell any more about that book.

I've read all of Kurt Vonnegut's books, many of which are "speculative fiction." One of my favorites is Galapagos. In this tale the human race is wiped out by, what else, a disease that makes humans infertile and things are going to poop anyway with, you guessed it, food in short supply and the gap between the rich and the poor growing.

Recently I (finally) read Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 - also about a possible future. I have the Ender's Game and a zombie book on my list next. Zombies are not really a possible future (I hope) but I find the various manifestations of zombies in books and movies fascinating. Not sure why...

And one other thing: