Blogs for today

Spyblog agrees with my reaction to the Mexican microchip story – astonishment and horror-fixation, roughly – quoting a AP story including some even weirder implications. Jewelry and mobile phones loaded with RFID chips indeed. Of course, the next step would be to carry your own scanner so as to know if anyone was pinging the chip – one imagines the habitues of that Barcelona nightclub warily eyeing the read-out on their diamond-studded mobys and wondering if it was just a routine security check or the preparations of a tech-savvy murderer.

Gregorian Ranting has some amusing stuff concerning books…”People get startled whenever they see how many books I have. Sometimes their jaws drop and they say things like ‘You have so many books… have you read them all?'” …and quotes Flann O’Brien:

“On the other hand, a school-boy’s Latin dictionary looks read to the point of tatters. You know that the dictionary has been opened and scanned perhaps a million times, and if you did not know that there was such a thing as a box on the ear, you would conclude that the boy is crazy about Latin and cannot bear to be away from his dictionary”

At school, I remember, there was a curious phrase in constant use. People spoke of any book that was not a textbook as a “reading-book”, which begs the question what other kind of book there is.

Of course, it was really a distinction between exercise books, text books and the like and anything you might read without being forced to.

Jason Kitcat has been the target of a handbagging by the Austrian foreign ministry after his presentation to an e-voting conference in Bregenz apparently offended them. I wouldn’t worry too much, anything that annoys the current Austrian government is probably a good thing.