Unlike most Mondays, today I worked a full 8 hour shift. Bribed by the promise of 150% hourly pay, last week I agreed to take the extra work.

Mildly noteworthy:

• Both Sunday and today, it was impossible to keep the ice from running out. People would buy it faster than the machine could make it. Many customers looking for bags of ice were turned away.
• Recently, I discovered to my amazement that Lincoln is fortunate enough to have a radio station that airs Democracy Now. So today during the noon hour, being the sole attendant, I celebrated Independence Day by turning the radio to said program. They were running a special edition featuring various celebrities reading from Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. The somber accounts from over the past two centuries lent the otherwise ballyhoo atmosphere with a rather contemplative flavor. Luckily, I didn't get burned at the stake.
• Midway through my shift, I was visited by Yanthor and Anya. After an all-night drive, Anya had arrived back from her trip early this morning. Just outside Lincoln, her ride had run out of gas, and Yanthor had to go out and help them at 5am, but he got stopped by a cop on the way. Fun times. They wondered if I would be interested in joining them for an evening viewing of War of the Worlds. Initially, I said I would be.

Later, upon arriving home at 19:00, I decided I wasn't that much in the mood to attend a theatrical viewing of anything, and perusing various War of the Worlds reviews floating around the net did nothing to help my enthusiasm. I informed Yanthor and Anya that I was canceling, and went for a twilight bike ride instead.

I surveyed around the city, went to the path that has all the berries and ate a few of the sweet fruits, and observed (mostly by sound, but occassionally sight as well) explosives being detonated around the neighborhood.

Then I returned and read Ran's latest exciting (and fairly lengthy) essay: The Age of Batshit Crazy Machines. There's a lot of good stuff in there, but I'll pick a couple of my favorite bits, for the soundbite culture:

I was once on a flight that sat half an hour at the gate while they waited for a fax. I said, "It's a good thing they invented fax machines or we'd have to wait three days for them to mail it." Nobody got the joke. Without fax machines we would have fucking taken off! New technologies create new conditions that use up, and then more than use up, the advantage of the technology. Refrigeration enables us to eat food that's less fresh, and creates demand for hauling food long distances. Antidepressants enable the continuation of environmental factors that make more people depressed. "Labor saving" cleaning technologies increase the social demand for cleanliness, saving no labor in cleaning and creating labor everywhere else. As vehicles get faster, commuting time increases. That's the way it's always been, and the burden is on the techies to prove it won't be that way in the future. They haven't even tried.

[...]

They dismiss their opponents as "luddites," but not one of them seems to grasp the position of the actual luddites: It was not an emotional reaction against scary new tools, nor was it about demanding better working conditions -- because before the industrial revolution they controlled their own damn working conditions and had no need to make "demands." We can't imagine the autonomy and competence of pre-industrial people who knew how to produce everything they needed with their own hands or the hands of their friends and family.

...

Have you ever wondered, watching Star Trek the Next Generation, why they even bother exploring strange new worlds? Why don't they just spend all their time in the holodeck having sex?

...

Respectable scientists have suggested that if it's possible to simulate a world this detailed, it would be done, and the fake worlds would greatly outnumber the real one, and therefore it's very likely we're in a fake one now. [...] Maybe we're in a game so epic that part of it involves living many lifetimes in this world to solve a puzzle, or we're in a game that's crappy but so addictive we can't quit, or we're game testers running through an early version with a lot of bugs. Or we're stone age humans in a shamanic trance, running through possible futures until we find the path to get through this bad time quickly and safely, or we're in a Tolkienesque world where an evil wizard has put us under a spell, or we're postapocalypse humans projecting ourselves into the past to learn its languages and artifacts. Or an advanced technological people, dying out for reasons they doesn't understand, are running simulations of the past, trying and failing to find the alternate timeline in which they win.