My neighbour Adrian was in our local supermarket last week. The nice ladies who work there informed him of their suspicions that the Muslim who lives in our village is a member of al-Qaeda. Adrian was naturally puzzled, since there are no Muslims in our village, until he realised that they meant me. Breaking it down:

Beard + Albanian car = member of al-Qaeda

I’m fairly certain that I’ll never be able to shake their suspicions, no matter how much evidence we present. On the plus side, it’s unlikely that anybody in the village is going to try anything funny if they think I might carbomb their house.

Imagine that you speak a language that only one other person in the world speaks. You don’t even think about it as a language - it’s just the world you inhabit together. One day you wake up and that person is gone, and that means that your language is gone, as if it never existed. You can’t capture or call it, and words start to fade from the pages of your memory. People tell you - there are other languages in the world. Losing this language - why, that gives you the opportunity to learn one of these other languages instead! It’s true, you can learn another language - but it won’t be the language that you’ve lost, and your tongue will still be silenced. The worst knowledge of all, though, is that as the language leaves you like rain soaking back into the earth, you’re also losing the memory of the person that you spoke it with, the one person who shared that world with you.

I watch his face to see if he understands, but it long ago ceased to matter. I’m dreaming of words that I will never hear again, and inside I weep for the voice that is gone forever.

What would it be like, we wondered, if folks who knew tools and innovation left the comfy bright green cities and traveled to the dead mall suburban slums, rustbelt browntowns and climate-smacked farm communities and started helping the locals get the tools they needed. We imagined that it would need an almost missionary fervor, something like the Inquisition (which largely destroyed knowledge) in reverse, a crusade of open sharing, or as Cory promptly dubbed it, the Outquisition.¹

Imagine these folks like this passing out free textbooks, running holistic programs for kids, creating local knowledge management systems, launching microfinance projects, mobilebanking and complementary currencies. Helping rural landowners apply climate foresight and farm biodiversity. Building cheap, smart, quality housing for displaced people (not to mention better refugee camps), or an Open Architecture Network for cheap informal rehabs of run-down suburban housing. Hacking together DIY windmills and ad hoc smart grids, communication systems, water treatment systems — and getting really good at adaptive reuses of outdated infrastructure. In other words, these folks would be redistributing the future at a furious clip.

Yeah, just imagine! Actually reading about how development works² would reveal that what they’re describing is one of Doctorow’s barely-readable novels rather than the real world. The model of sending out experts to tell the ignorant masses how to do things right (which the ignorant masses welcome with open arms, if they know what’s good for them, etc, etc) has been almost completely discredited as a vehicle for meaningful development since the early 1990s, making it deeply ironic that they would project their their self-aggrandising futurism onto such a retrograde screen.

1. This is a really uninspired, inaccurate and embarrassing title.
2. They could start with Duncan Green’s excellent From Poverty to Power, which is as good an overview of mainstream development thinking as you’ll find.

Calcium sulfate is also “The traditional and most widely used coagulant to produce Chinese-style tofu. It produces a tofu that is tender but slightly brittle in texture.” Wikipedia claims that “the coagulant itself has no perceivable taste”, but I still appear to be eating my own house.

This makes me sad.

I vaguely recall Big Apple Records in Surrey Street being one of those record shops, purveyors of white labels so obscure that even I had no idea what they were - all shiny black sleeves and illegible marker pen. Now I discover that Big Apple Records was the spiritual home of dubstep in its early days.

Bastards. They could have told me they were planning a musical revolution.

28 May 2008 Podgorica : A man suffering from a psychiatric disorder directed traffic in Montenegro’s capital for about half an hour until he was caught by police.

The 36-year-old man, dressed in a police uniform, started directing traffic with a baton at a busy intersection in the centre of Podgorica on Sunday evening…

… Police discovered that the man was a patient at a local psychiatric clinic, who had committed similar offences before.

“I always wanted to be a policeman and finally got the chance,” the man reportedly told police.

This guy clearly wants to be a policeman really badly, so I say give him a uniform and let him have a go. He can’t possibly do a worse job at directing traffic than most of the rest of the Montenegrin police force.

Unfortunately that just didn’t fit with WFP’s corporate vision, the losers, so I survived in the Airwolf underground for years. However it may not be possible to conceal my true allegiance for much longer, as I am about to place a bid on a full-size Airwolf Replica.

The full size Airwolf replica was made with an existing Bell 222A airframe. The side panels, nose panel and refueling port were all made from the specs from the original Airwolf and are exact. The ADF pod and chainguns are not included in this auction, but will be available if anyone is interested.

You’re damn right I’m interested in the chainguns. For all those pundits wringing their hands about what can be done to help the people of Burma, the answer is a single word - Airwolf.

There’s a pessimistic view of human behavior embedded in library construction and the watchfulness of the sentries who guard them: if we, the public, could get at the books, we would most certainly destroy them.

There was the expectation that the barriers would be torn down with the coming of electronic libraries, that once the book’s spirit left its object, it would likewise escape its economic shackles. Certainly it makes sense: an electronic text isn’t degraded by copying in the same way that every reading is an infinitesimal destruction of a physical book.

Is this “infinitesimal destruction” - the sense that an artifact being degraded by those who value it the most - embedded in the nature of a book? I find electronic books ghostly and unsatisfying; the Kindle is a ouija board for the stillborn soul of a book, a mausoleum rather than a library. Is it wrong to want the world to collapse slowly around me while I collapse back into it?