Results tagged “bigbrother”

• Whidbey Island buckles down for some really long ferry lines next month. Courtesy of the Hood Canal Bridge closure.
• Sweet note taking skills by CHS Blog, as they provide thorough notes from last night's productive shit showon the future of 12th Ave.
• For real? Big Brother is looking for you. He's watching you. Right now. This very second.

photo by Flickr Contributor lachance

With unseasonable weather descending upon much of North America, schools getting ready to reconvene, and sports seasons getting exciting, it's a busy time of year for us here in the Ist-A-Verse. Luckily, even with all the things we have to do, we still managed to get together to let you know what we've all been up to.

Michael Dirda, in the New York Review of Books:

In contemporary America, as Jonathan Raban reminds us in Surveillance, any quest for anonymity—"to live obscurely" according to the Greek ideal for happiness—has grown increasingly difficult, if not impossible. And it's not only an Orwellian Big Brother who is watching. We track each other. We check out the backgrounds of friends, Saturday-night dates, and business associates; we data-mine and Google-search; when on line we worry about hackers, viruses, and identity theft. Schools and playgrounds are patrolled by guards, while spy cameras observe our children in the hallways and bathrooms. Only those who know the code can unlock the steel gates to our "planned communities." Amazon monitors our taste in books. Our cell phones take pictures and record conversations. People can't walk their dogs now without taking along their Blackberry or wearing their Bluetooth.

Well, we're finished with World War Z, which means we'll finally have time to pick up Jonathan Raban's Surveillance and that some lucky souls at the library will move up a notch on the hold list. Surveillance, of course, is the first book in Seattlest's Book Club. If you haven't picked up your copy yet, don't forget to ask for the Seattlest Book Club discount at Santoro's Books in Greenwood and Bailey-Coy Books on...

Texas is thawing, the Northeast is freezing, and a sort of natural order seems almost restored to the Ist-A-Verse. Almost.

Well, it was certainly eye catching. We tried to walk past the P-I on a newsstand yesterday and it might as well have reached out with with a cluster of fish hooks to our eyeballs. What kind of a headline was that? A bunch of different colors, a bunch of different weights, a bunch of different sizes; it had it all and it took up the entire front page. When we first saw it we thought we'd come across the special retirement home edition or something, but we looked around and they all were printed like that.

-The Kalakala takes a step towards financial freedom.