sounds!

I was on the road this weekend, driving north toward the Iron Range of Minnesota, when I decided to call my friend Peter on the cell. The phone started angrily beeping at me, and I quickly hung up. Tried again. More maniacal beeping. On the third try, I realized the nature of the beeping: it was a busy signal. A fucking busy signal? Such things still exist? When was the last time I heard one of those? A decade? Naw, couldn't be that long ago, but it sounded as antiquated as "Pac-Man Fever." But this brings up an important question: Should there be a museum for non-music sounds -- the beeps and blurps of post-industriality?

 During the long drive, I read the New Yorker's Slavoj Zizek profile, but now I see they didn't put it online. So I guess I have to tell you to go to the newsstands and read it. Driving 90 mph and reading the profile at the same time made me say this sentence to myself: Camille Paglia is the Slavoj Zizek that America doesn't have the balls to produce. Ouch, bad me.

 Still on the road, Zizek expunged, I picked up the Sunday edition of the Star Tribune, which had a huge full-page advert for the Star Tribune Electronic Edition. The Star Tribune was a pioneer in the online news world, but I'm a little suspicious of this endeavor. And I quote: "The eEdition of the Star Tribune has the exact same stories, headlines, and advertising as the Metro Edition of the Star Tribune, in the same familiar format that you are used to." You have to pay a bunch of money and download a huge application called the NewsStand Reader to get it. See ya.

 Third William Gibson post in as many days. He talks to The Guardian about blogging (a sidebar from this profile).

 I like the idea of Friendster.com, but I didn't become addicted like some people. It has become so popular that I could probably auction my sub-5000 user-id number. Okay, maybe not.

 More al-Sahaf news: dance remixes.

 I am also one of those people who thinks the keyboard reached its apotheosis in around 1990 with the IBM 101-key keyboard. All it needs is a color remake (gosh, beige was futuristic at one time), and I'd buy one instantly.

 Pynchon writes (!) a piece on Orwell (!) for The Guardian (!).