Blogrolling.Com is getting an XML-RPC interface. Cool! [Scripting News]

Cool!  But as a Radio Newbie, I haven't a clue how to implement the Radio plug in Dave wrote.  Dave said to hit Technorati for tech support.  Well, nevermind....

12:57:09 PM    

From Dave Winer's Scripting News.....

Chris Lydon has mastered the art of text wrapping around pictures.

Ok, so I go to the link thinking I'll just be trying to puzzle out how he did it and then I was blown away by both the text and the images there.  I remember the first time I saw a full color web page in a browser and suddenly I'm back to being in awe of the power of art and images.....

12:54:12 PM    

Pynchon on Orwell. Thomas Pynchon introduces a new edition of 1984:

Prophecy and prediction are not quite the same, and it would ill serve writer and reader alike to confuse them in Orwell's case. There is a game some critics like to play in which one makes lists of what Orwell did and didn't "get right". Looking around us at the present moment in the US, for example, we note the popularity of helicopters as a resource of "law enforcement," familiar to us from countless televised "crime dramas," themselves forms of social control - and for that matter at the ubiquity of television itself. The two-way telescreen bears a close enough resemblance to flat plasma screens linked to "interactive" cable systems, circa 2003. News is whatever the government says it is, surveillance of ordinary citizens has entered the mainstream of police activity, reasonable search and seizure is a joke. And so forth. "Wow, the government has turned into Big Brother, just like Orwell predicted! Something, huh?" "Orwellian, dude!"

Link Discuss (via Schism Matrix) [Boing Boing Blog]

I'm probably one of a small number of people on the planet who has read everything Thomas Pynchon has written, including Gravity's Rainbow twice.  Pynchon nailed our modern condition years before it went mainstream.  Gravity's Rainbow in particular is a wild yet haunting ride through the eroticized landscape of Germany and Europe at the end of the Second World War and is perhaps the defintiive novel about the DP, who in the end Pynchon implies is everyone living in a post-modern, oil-fueled, technology dependent world.  Don't know what a DP is?  Read the book.

10:08:45 AM