No Such Weblog

Last Chance to See by Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine is an extensive late-1980s trip report: Adams and Carwardine traveled around the world to find species that were about to be extinct, and the people trying to preserve them.

The book is a snapshot of the late 1980s, and interesting alone for the things that have changed (or not!) since then. Consider a Shanghai whose soundtrack consists of Richard Clayderman mixed with bicycle bells (as opposed to Volkswagen clones' horns, and construction noise -- but even that was 5 years ago), at a time when the Baiji is the subject of conservation efforts further up the river, and a favorite local brand for all things from beer to hotels (to fund the conservation effort). Today, the Baiji is functionally extinct, and the conservation efforts focus on the finless porpoise which is only mentioned in passing in "Last Chance to See."

Consider New Zealand's obsession with clean shoes at immigration (no change there as of last year), and the threatened Kakapo -- a species whose entire population is indeed catalogued on Wikipedia, by name; yet, that population has actually doubled since the book was written.

Adams was a master story teller. The stories he tells here -- many of them hilarious, despite the sad subject matter -- are worth being read and remembered.

I got William Gibson's Spook Country at 20% off, in Palo Alto, in the middle of a recent business trip. It provided good entertainment when, later on during that trip, seat pitch was too tight to even open a laptop.

The story that Gibson tells in this book is a fun tale of intricate, expensive, and illegal pranks, spiced with technology, pop culture, politics, and geotagging taken to the extreme ("locative art"). It's an entertaining story well-told.

Gibson knows enough about today's technology (and is a good enough writer) to get away with talking a lot about MacGuffins without making me wince. Unfortunately, however, his prose is ridden with trademark and technology babble: The security guard has one ear Bluetoothed. Hollis hauls around her PowerBook. Tito is told to escape through the restaurant of the W. Bobby doesn't bother to WEP his wi-fi. The cool characters fly Virgin. While all that is preferable to Stephenson's sometimes ridiculous name obfuscation in Cryptonomicon ("Finux", anyone?), it's still annoying this reader. As Joe Gregor puts it, it's like a year of boing-boing, with a plot.

I'd have preferred the plot with a somewhat smaller dose of boing-boing, I guess.