Attack of the hive-minded shape-shifting sand grains

Coolest technology story I've read in a bit.

Imagine explaining that one at the bar just off campus. "So, what do you study?" "Oh, smart dust, mostly."

I think the one mildly creepy thing that doesn't get mentioned is the possibility that alien dust designed in much the same way has already been covertly blowing around the Earth for years, gathering information as a prelude to an invasion. Help us Black and Decker. You're our only hope.

So it goes

Kurt Vonnegut died yesterday. He was 84, and had been openly relishing the prospect of this day for at least ten years now. Good for him, I guess.

I'm not going to be presumptious enough to call myself a "writer." I write stuff. So do meat inspectors, and they're not writers, either. I may never really earn the status of "writer"—or aspire to it, for that matter. And unless you're really a writer, it's really pompous to list "influences" on your style. But whatever the analgous concept is for duffers like me, I'd like to believe reading Vonnegut's stuff really shaped how I express myself.

Fans of Stephen King or Patrick O'Brian or Douglas Adams can certainly speak of their appreciation of the common threads that run through the collected works of those authors—particular patterns of language, themes, narrative structures, or even fairly subconscious things you might barely pick up on like word choice. Vonnegut was no exception; a passage of text can feel "Vonnegutian" the same way it might feel "Blytonian" or "Orwellian" or "Conradian" ("Conradine?").

What I think made Vonnegut different was how strongly rooted this basket of Vonnegutian literary particularities was in the character of the man responsible for them. I mean, entire lit degrees have been put together by connecting the characteristically clipped "masculine" prose of Hemmingway to his predeliction for drinking things and shooting things and fucking things. Hell, who knows, probably someone's found a way to find a basis for his writing style in Hemmingway's peculiar habit of raising feral cats.

But read three or four things by Vonnegut, boil it down to the common denominators, and you start to feel like you actually know the guy. Now, this is hardly accidental, and Kurt himself embraced this objective, especially later in his career, when he flirted all the more openly with all sorts of fun fourth-wall breaking stuff. Vonnegut knew he was at his best when he was unafraid to inject the personal. The obituaries speak of him as one of literature's great satirists, but I think over and above the satire, and even overshadowing his distinguishing streak of dark humour, he should be remembered as a a master of the semiautobiographical, with an emphasis on the semi.

I think that's why his passing hurts a little more. We'd all made peace with the fact there weren't going to be any more Vonnegut novels, just as there aren't going to be any more Roald Dahl books or Back to the Future movies. But his passing isn't so much about an end to a steady flow of great art as the end of an endearing cantankerous old man that you couldn't help but root for.

The mildly amusing part to all this is that I haven't read his complete works, and I've even missed a few of the essentials. On a purely relative basis, my Vonnegut-fu is fairly weak. But I feel as if I uniquely connected with the man, that his uniquenesses spoke to uniquenesses in me. What shakes me somewhat is how ridiculous the preceding sentence is, at least at fact value. Throughout my enjoyment of Vonnegut, I've all the while known damn well that entire classes of humanities grads spanning the last half century in the English-speaking world have felt exactly the same way.

I guess that's the underlying paradox to Vonnegut: someone who built his career on his deeply individualized disdain for the collective ridiculousnesses of mass society nonetheless engendered a tremendously warm reception from, by all measures, a rather significant slice of that society. He was precisely the sort of favourite writer you didn't like to share with the emo kid down the hall from you in residence. But you probably did. And with the really dumb-sounding girl from two floors up. And with your irritatingly-detached-from-reality chemistry prof. And with the angry fat woman who was interviewed on the news that night after organizing a protest against unethical tomato farming practices.

Poor Kurt. You're stuck with us all.

I'd pay to see that Heritage Minute

Judging by the front pages of the newspapers today, it would seem to be obligatory to spare a moment or two today to talk about the Battle of Vimy Ridge. I happened to have a high school history teacher who was something of a Vimy nut—like, if they had Vimy Ridge conventions he'd be the guy there dressed up as a Klingon. Consequently, I've always had this air of detached expertise whenever the subject of Vimy came up. It's all seared into the databanks upstairs: rolling artillery barrage, Arthur Currie, prior failed attempts, surprisingly low mortality rates. That's before we get into the whole business of national myth-making and the contrast between us and the Aussies at Galipoli and birth of the nation and our glorious dead.

What I'm sorta getting at in a roundabout fashion is that there's very little that's said about Vimy that doesn't sort of prompt at least a teensy bit of eye-glazing, simply because I've heard it all before. That's why I got so excited this morning when I read something intriguing about Vimy that I can't recall having heard in the past. That might have been a moment in Mr. Prowse's class where I was staring at the girl in front of me or something.


Now, there are plenty of other fun blogs and the internet where you can get your daily fix of hip-hip hurraying Hitler. This is not one of those blogs. Hitler had a, shall we say, particularly creative relationship with the concept of pacifism: this is the man who was none too keen on his WWI experiences himself but then seemed to devote his life to inflicting the horrors of war on others. This little Vimy anecdote though, really continues to fill in some of the quirkier blanks in my own understanding of the guy.

In fact, I have to say it's prompted a little curiousity as to why this aspect of the Vimy story isn't included in the conventional grab-bag of coverage of the battle that gets reproduced every few years. I mean, I don't think anyone reading that article is about to write to the Bank of Canada asking them to stick in a portrait of the führer on the back of the ten dollar bill in celebration to his remarkable contribution to Canadian heritage. But the fact that even the most sadistic of men could see the Vimy monument's rejection of triumphalism and respected its message of universal peace strikes me as one of the more resonant commentaries on Canada's military history.

Beam me up

In a week where James Doohan's earthly powdery remains are in the news for their upcoming trip into suborbital incineration comes word that there's a far more exciting place they could be going, namely up Keith Richards' nose.

There's got to be a Greek tragedy or something about the creepily sexual undertones of having your father oozing around your sinuses. Let's Spend the Night Together indeed.