By the time my three loyal readers see this entry, The Girlfriend and I should be well on our way to West Yellowstone, Montana, where a quick weekend adventure awaits. It’s a long story, but basically, she had some business dealings with a place up there that offered to give her and a guest (that would be me) complimentary lodgings and a snowmobile tour of the park. Neither of us are exactly what you’d call outdoorsy types, but the lure of a virtually free weekend away from the wintertime smog of Salt Lake was too tempting to resist. We said yes about a month ago, we bought ourselves some long underwear a couple weeks ago, and by tomorrow we’ll be looking for moose in America’s first National Park.
However, I didn’t want to leave all you folks in InternetLand with nothing to look at on the dull final Friday of January, so in the spirit of last week’s post — that is, in an effort to clean out one of my bookmark folders — here are a few links you may find interesting. I know I did…
- Science-fiction writer Robert Silverberg on how the real world increasingly resembles the future imagined by fellow writer Phillip K. Dick (a truly frightening concept if you’re familiar at all with Dick’s work)
- Another science-fiction writer, William Gibson, writes an an essay about how the way real-life history intersected with science fiction during his childhood (his experience of absorbing history through osmosis and reading “future history” that was already dated is curiously like my own, something I’d like to explore in more detail sometime)
- A lengthy but fascinating profile of Roger Ebert (the only modern film critic who’s worth a damn, in my humble opinion, because he finds the balance-point between film snobbery and low-brow populism — he’s the only critic I know who can extoll the virtues of some artsy foreign film one minute, and admit in the next that he liked a flick just because it starred Neve Campbell)
- An essay about blogging and how it’s been sold as something different than what it is, which is just one more form of writing (a little esoteric, but maybe of interest to those who like to ponder media-related issues)
- From the Hollywood underbelly, an alt-press feature on a horrific car accident involving Eric Red, writer-director of the gory cult classic The Hitcher (what’s weird is that the accident is like something out of the guy’s own movies)
And finally, something to relax the eyes after all that reading:
- A great Flickr photostream of various nostalgic subjects, including, notably, a set of neon and vintage signs in Sacramento, CA
And that’s that, kiddies. Have a great weekend, and I’ll see you on Monday. Assuming that that moose doesn’t take a homicidal dislike to me…
