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Simon Phipps's personal commentary

You are what you eat

I've been meaning to mention that I finished reading The Omnivore's Dilemma [UK] during December and really loved it. It had been jumping into view each time I went to a bookshop and I finally gave in during October.

It was a deliciously smooth read - even with my usual ADD I found it compelling. Michael Pollen digs into the American food system and finds that the mass-market food system has been ridiculously skewed by a policy decision made under the Nixon administration. Attempting to prevent the recurrence of a catastrophic price slump in the food system, the agriculture minister of the time created a price intervention system which controlled price without controlling supply. The result was the creation of eternally cheap corn, which has driven all American food production (and more) to artificially obsess on the stuff.

Pollen goes further though. He finds that the organic production sector has caught the same obsession and is mass-producing organic food in a manner increasingly resonant of the mass-market. Just as proprietary software companies want to steal the term "open source" because of its market power, so the food industry has already gamed the term "organic" and made sure they can use the term without adopting the lifestyle. I find Whole Foods Market a great place to shop, but this book was a real eye-opener to the consumer manipulation at work there.

Overall I'd say this was my book-of-the-year for 2007 and a must-read book. It has a strong US focus and speaks of a food system that doesn't yet exist in Europe (where EU intervention controls supply as well as price and has avoided the destructive corn system that's ruining American health). But it still explores the motivations and dynamics of our food and gives an important perspective as we sail into the future. It's already changed my health, not by being prescriptive but by helping me think.

Labels: Books, Food

posted at 11:57 PM (UK) | Comment? (1 so far) | links to this post | |

1602 Fails to Please

I mentioned in my linkblog that I was going to read Marvel 1602, written by Neil Gaiman. The book tells a story set in Elizabethan Europe but invovling most of the key Marvel characters. This posting involves a big spoiler, so if that's going to be a problem stop right now.

It was an easy read and I had it digested in one sitting. Overall I liked the dark, Elizabethan setting and the wry twists of naming concealing the names of all the Marvel characters included in the story. The contextual elements with contemporary realities were pretty good, and my hopes started rising.

I suppose I should have had disbelief suspended anyway what with all the X-Men characters popping up in a story set in the 16th century, but with the casting of the 'powers' and the inclusion of so much period colour it was actually working remarkably well for me. Until the aliens showed up. That blew it, I'm afraid. Surely there was a way to weave the story without resorting to all-seeing, all-knowing aliens? After that, and with the deep dependence the plot placed on them, it was all over and I was left wanting to go grab Absolute Sandman again to take the taste away.

It was fun as far as it went but I'm afraid I was disappointed. If this is the best that the genius that created Sandman can do with the story, I'll not be touching the rest of the series, sorry.

Labels: Books

posted at 1:12 AM (UK) | Comment? (2 so far) | links to this post | |

Overclocked

Cory Doctorow has a new collection of short stories - Overclocked - and I think it's his best yet. You can go grab the stories at Cory's web site or get it from some place like Amazon (I prefer a book myself).

Cory is at his best in the short story format - indeed, I got the feeling that his first blockbuster was, despite its creative brilliance, actually a short story extended beyond its means. Everything on 'Overclocked' works fine, however. Anda's Game (yes, the SF references are legion) is both a great story and a great prediction of the present, embracing gaming, world development and feminism all in one neat story. His homage to Azimov in I, Robot and I, Row-Boat is insightful and delicious.

The dystopia of After the Siege is unsettling in its references extending the patent pressures of today into "info-war". When SysAdmins Ruled the Earth was less effective although still full of flashes of knowing brilliance, and only the shortest story, Printcrime, was ultimately unsatisfying.

All in all, if you like Cory's earlier works, or Azimov, or enjoy futuristic fiction generally, this is the first essential read of 2007.

Labels: Books

posted at 7:45 PM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

Book Fetish

I was roused from my slumbers yesterday by a FedEx delivery driver with a large, heavy parcel. Inside was a wonderful gift from a friend in America (who another very dear friend connected me to recently).

The gift in question is the huge, gothic magnificence of The Absolute Sandman, Volume 1. OK, I admit I already have the complete series of Neil Gaiman's unique series of graphic novels, but this book is something else. The first of four volumes, it collects the first 20 or so episodes in the series into a heavy, leather-bound and slip-cased library reference volume in a slip case. The stories themselves have been recoloured and opening it yesterday was a journey of rediscovery - yes, I'm reading it all again. The book is tall, wide, heavy, dark, substantial and screams to be on the selves of a dark library in a forbidding castle.

If you've not read any of the Sandman series, I'm not sure how I'd describe them to you. They are woven from threads of classical myth into a rich modern fabric of adult story - by no means a child's comic book. I believe they have plenty to offer the sort of people who read what I write and I'd recommend them to you. While the middle of the series has the best stories, you really do need to start at the beginning and work forwards.

So - totally lustworthy book - thank-you so much, John, I will treasure it.

Labels: Books, Sandman

posted at 12:29 PM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

Amazon Is Parochial

I find Amazon something of a paradox. They have some very innovative thinking in their retail business, and I find the "associates" scheme very effective (I am now using their AStore to manage three of my interests lists, on photography, books and music). Yet they have an amazing blind spot when it comes to geography.

The problem is this; the Associates schemes for each country are distinct. They have stores in many different countries and they expect me to maintain totally separate accounts on each of them. I could live with that, but it gets worse. To earn credit for a sale delivered in a country, I have to have an account in that country and I have to use the unique ID for that country in the referral. To do that, I would have to know which country the reader resides in. Amazon provides no assistance in doing this. The result is that, in the case of AStore, I need to have completely separate stores for each country. I don't bother, the return on the effort isn't worth it since my primary motivation is actually having a simple CMS rather than driving revenue anyway.

How can such an advanced company have such a huge blind-spot when it comes to the international nature of the Internet? I have readers in every country where Amazon does business, and from one page I could be gathering attention for their products in all those countries. As it is, they pretty much force me to focus just on the readers in the UK and the US. How myopic and reactionary. Come on, Amazon, get with the Web on this one.

Labels: Amazon, Books, Music, website

posted at 1:56 PM (UK) | Comment? (3 so far) | links to this post | |

New Booklist for a New Year

I decided that my old book-list page on Webmink was looking a bit freyed around the edges, so I have been meaning to rework it for some time. The problem is that editing HTML takes a repeated investment in time. That's the reason I use an aggregator to build my home page - it simply gathers the work I've already done elsewhere automatically rather than requiring an additional process step.

This, by the way, is the reason most club, small business and church web sites fail - because people don't factor in the effort involved in working regularly to keep things fresh. All they look at is the up-front effort and cost, cover that and then fail to budget for upkeep. It's also the reason gathering metrics for driving quality improvement in an organisation fails if the data-gathering is an additional process step. If you need a metric, measure something people have to do in order to achieve the goal, don't ask them to fill in an extra form or visit an extra web site because when the going gets tough they just won't.

This is all by way of saying that I may have found the perfect tool in Amazon AStore. You'll remember I have been using it to document my camera system - well, I think it may be the perfect mechanism for creating an attractive and useful book list as well. Take a look and let me know what you think of that and the new music list, both with comments of the length I use on del.icio.us for links.

Labels: Amazon, Books, Music

posted at 7:42 PM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |

New Book For The New Year

When I was in Half Moon Bay just before Christmas, I went to my favourite bookshop (Coastside Books, who as far as I can tell have no web site - they are a few blocks down on the west side of Main Street) and as ever left with a new book. It's one I would recommend to every American progressive (and it's pretty helpful for the rest of us too).

Written by a group of people at the Rockridge Institute, including George Lakoff, it's called Thinking Points: A Progressive's Handbook [US|UK] and at $10 it is an absolute must-buy. It is clear, easy to read, persuasive and riddled with useful, transferrable concepts that actually help clarify political outlooks across the spectrum. I almost unreservedly recommend it - my (small) reservations include use of examples with a short shelf-life.

Especially useful are the thinking tools that clarify the way people can use the same words ("freedom", "equality" and so on) yet mean opposite things without any failure of integrity. I would very much like to see some thinking about open source done from this perspective - is anyone aware of such work? Superficially it seems to me that the Free Software and Open Source movements are the "contested variants" of the root "software freedom" concept and that some decent linguistic analysis would really help us gain unity.

Labels: Books, Lakoff, politics, progressive, USA

posted at 3:23 PM (UK) | Comment? (0 so far) | links to this post | |