With the 3-Day Novel Competition only a couple days away, it's time to start thinking about what I'm going to write. When I write story, I usually try to find a song that best represents how I think it should sound. It helps with mood, keeping the tone consistent and creating the characters. I don't have a plot outline worked out yet, but I've come up with four songs that capture how I want the different parts of the story to sound:

Sigur Ros - 'Inní mér syngur vitleysingur' ('Within me a lunatic sings')

Just the other night I was having a "lively discussion" with an unemployed film student (film is what movies used to be made on) who insisted that novels simply couldn't be translated into any kind of digital form, that they were no longer novels the moment they leaped to screens and screens could never replace paper in our hands. Not only that, but any form of digital novel would inevitably bring about a fall in literacy, the film student without a hint of irony. I tried to reassure her that I had no intention of replacing books, which will always have a place in our world. The invention of paper didn't wipe out the art of stone engraving, which is still very useful in cemeteries. Perhaps paper books can someday have their own special place in graveyards, too.   >> "A thriller in 10 chapters - The Observer's literary critic, Robert McCrum, reflects on 10 years of book evolution and literature's impending iPod moment."

But electronic media has a bit further to go before it overtakes soggy old analog media. In the UK, book sales for 2007 totaled up to around 5 billion dollars, with video game sales coming in at only 3 billion or so, although that was a jump of 26% over 2006. According to the June cover story in Prospect Magazine, games software will be the largest entertainment retail market in the UK by 2011. Bigger than books and far more lucrative than movies. Anyone remember radio? >> Prospect >> "Rage against the machines by Tom Chatfield"

 Don't worry, books will still look the same, just like in the image above, only they'll be on your iPod, so they'll be easier to read.

The Wired Science section covers a recent report from the Brookings Institute that studied the carbon footprints of the 100 largest metropolitan areas in America, making it clear that big city living is cleaner than medium-sized city living. Lexington, Kentucky won the award for the largest carbon footprint per capita. >> Wired >> http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/05/cities-carbon-f.html

I live in Vancouver and am looking for an apartment to rent, which is very difficult. Last Friday, I went to see an apartment and accidentally ended up on the wrong side of the street. Luckily, there was a crowd of about ten people waiting outside the building across the street, so I knew where I was supposed to be. By the time I had filled-out my application, 40 people were standing in the lobby sweating and swearing. I didn't get the place.

I've been responding to ads on Craigslist without much luck (not those kinds of ads) but thankfully, today I received an email from the good Reverend S Thomas, who is renting a lovely one-bedroom apartment and, if I'm reading his email correctly, wants me to live in his place for free!

Thanks for your email and it is my gladness to hearing from you.I am  Rev S Thomas the owner of the apartment you are making enquiry of which is located in 610 Granville St,Downtown,V6C 3T3
Actually I reside formerly in that apartment with my wife and our only daugther before and presently we have relocated back to UK but currently right now in Africa on a missionary trip but i will like you to communicate directly with my wife for more discussion.Thou the monthly rent is $850 becauase it well furnished which include utilities like ,hydro,washer and security.Pleases i want you to note that we are not actually keen about monetary part of this rent,so i will like to solicit for your absolute maintenance of this apartment and so that we will be glad to see it neat when we come for a check up because either myself or my wife will be doing that once in a while.I also want you to let me have trust in you.
So here is my wife contact  ( ssarathomass@yahoo.com ) and she will attends to you better.
Thanks and God Bless
Rev S Thomas.

Not finding a place to live in Vancouver makes me miss all of the other places I've lived. And I have a relatively loose interpretation of what it means to live somewhere. I often feel I've lived in a place if I've eaten there and slept there. Some of the best places I've lived in, I only stayed at for a couple of nights, or sometimes only one night a month, like at the Asahi Plaza Capsule Hotel in Osaka. It's a capsule hotel but it feels like MY capsule hotel. 

Temporary housing is an unusual concept but not entirely unique to humans. Many land turtles hibernate out the winter with rabbits and groundhogs. Like turtles, I enjoy having other people around. In Korea I lived beside a dog farm. They woke me up and put me to bed each night. At the apartment I had in Zamalek, Cairo, for a month, there were two enormous horse tapestries covering up stains on the walls. 

The horses were a bit much and the hot water stopped working for a week or two but it was above a 24hr Metro Supermarket, which was incredibly convenient. With living arrangements, I prefer overwhelmingly crowded urban neon crush, like Cairo and Osaka, or entirely remote and removed, like Pedruxella Gran, Basata, or Taketomi.

Pedruxella Gran, in the bottom left corner of this picture, is an olive plantation high up on a hill across from Puig Tomir, the tallest mountain on the island of Mallorca. It's quiet place to hike and look after stupid sheep. Sheep are truly unintelligent animals.

I only lived in Basata for a couple of days but they were soft days of playing chess, eating fresh bread after snorkeling in the Red Sea, then listening to the muezzin let the sun set behind the Sinai.

When examining Egypt from a cultural perspective, if we forget Nubia, or the Jews, the Roman fortresses, the transition to Islam, the visit from Alexander the Great, the sexy Cleopatra and Marc Antony, the Turkish Mamluks, the Coptic Christians, Napolean's armies, the British colonialists, the socialist years... if we forget all of that, Egypt has long been a nation of ethnic, religious and cultural homogenity. However with the entirely modern invention of globalisation, some people now grow up experiencing more than one culture, even speaking more than one language and living in more than one country. Ethar El-Katatney, a reporter for Egypt Today, calls these folks "halfies" and she wants you to know, they're having an identity crisis. >> Egypt Today >> Identity Crisis 101

I have a problem with the term "halfies", mostly because it suggests a very poor grasp of mathematics. If you grow up in two different countries, speak two different languages, maybe grow up practicing one religion in a country where another is more popular, how does that make you a half? Wouldn't one culture + one culture = two cultures? People who grow up with the benefit of more than one culture should be called doubles.

"Doubles" is a much better name because doubles are also delicious fried chickpea snacks from Trinidad. I've never eaten anything delicious called a "halfie".

If we find life on Mars that could mean life happens easily. And if life happens easily, it's definitely happened on planets outside the solar system. So why haven't we heard from ET yet? Because every society wipes itself out before it can reach a significantly advanced stage. In this article from Technology Review, Neil Bostrom explains why we'd better hope humanity is exceptionally unique. >> Where Are They? Why I hope the search for extraterrestrial life finds nothing.

Study finds that losers on the Internets, also losers in real life. >> Time >> How Second Life Affects Real Life

Isiah Otieno was a Kenyan student studying in Cranbrook, BC, until he was struck and killed by a falling helicopter. Look up. >> Globe & Mail >> Death shatters family of Kenyan student studying in Cranbrook

This week's installment is heavy on foreign languages and Tom Waits rambling about acronyms. First up, we go searching for Haruki Murakami 村上春樹:

And then in anticipation of the wild, wild long weekend coming up, an old Wong Kar Wai trailer for the movie "Fallen Angels":

A new stop-motion, outdoor animation called "Muto" by the artist Blu (http://www.blublu.org/) went up on the Internets today:

We'll finish off with Tom Waits and the greatest press conference ever:

The US Department of the Interior today placed the polar bear on the the list of threatened species, although the Secretary of the Interior, Dirk Kempthorne, says it would be "wholly inappropriate" to link the protection of the polar bear with a reduction in green house gases because the listing "will not stop any sea ice from melting". Which, is actually true. The Arctic is already screwed, and therefore, so is the polar bear. The Department of the Interior projects that by 2050, the polar bear population will shrink to 1/3 of its current size as a result of habitat loss.  >Chicago Sun-Times>> Polar bear declared threatened species  

- male polar bear in Wapusk National Park, Manitoba - photo by Ansgar Walk

As the Arctic ice cover disappears, polar bears are turning inland in search of food, causing problems in Canada's national parks, which have long had a no-gun policy, now being reevaluated in light of the rapid increase in polar bear sightings in the parks. As the ice pack disappears, more polar bears will be forced to search for food in populated areas, resulting in more bears getting shot, and then no more bears, problem solved. I mean, it's their fault for being polar bears. They should have tried being equator bears. >>Canoe.ca>>Parks Canada debates allowing guns in national parks with polar bear populations