What Cheer, Netop?

I recently finished reading a crappy science fiction novelette called The Purloined Planet by Lin Carter. It's a silly hardboiled detective story knockoff, but it did have one passage that caught my eye:

So voluminous had records become in this distant era, and so pressing a problem had their retention grown into, that in the age of the great Quicksilver entire planets were given over to their storage. This was true, even taking into consideration the latest advances in the fine art of micro-filming, which had by this time become so extremely sophisticated that it was, incredible as it may seem, quite possible to record the entire literary works of Isaac Asimov on the molecules contained in a single flake of mica.

See, now, if this story had been written in the past five or ten years, I would think that the author was making fun of the fact that in the Foundation series Asimov thought that in the future microfilm would be the highest form of information storage and that the best way to transmit a lot of information quickly would be to put it on microfilm and mail it. The mica thing could even be some sort of joke about semiconductors!

But in fact I think Lin Carter just thought it would be funny to mention that Asimov wrote a lot of stuff. Ah well.

[I look in my inbox:

{redacted]@aol.com | 5:14 AM | Re: Expectant mother of Bush's
                   |         | illegitimate child murdered

Me: (doing a double-take) The hell? ...Oh, wait, this is my home email account, not my work account.

Me: (doing another double-take) Wait, what does that say that getting a message like that at my home account doesn't surprise me?

I've been working on putting together some music for urbeatle's Rewind lyrics for a couple of weeks. As part of this I had asked Charlie to provide a couple of guitar solos, which he did. But he also recorded an entire other version of the arrangement I was working with, using the same basic chords and the same number of beats per minute but using a driving rock rhythm guitar to propel the thing. No vocals, but I could put the vocals that I had already recorded for the other version of the song, since they were the same speed ... which was fun, but it didn't quite work.

However, I was going to drive up to New Hampshire and back for Thanksgiving to visit my sister and her family, so I threw all the different versions on the old iPod and listened to them and sang along.

Then I came back to Providence, and this evening I recorded what I suppose is the definitive vocals for this version of Rewind.

Rokk!

-jwgh