December 2003 Archives

While picking on dumb articles in one's local free alt-weekly is a bit pointless, I just can't resist doing so with Georgia Straight's Debunking the Paradise Myth. I think I'd sum it up as: 'I used to like Thailand before all these damn tourists showed up. Also, you should all stop going there, it'll really improve the place.'

Tourism is not a panacea, but expecting a desperately poor nation with the natural beauty of Thailand to reject tourists (and their money) in order to help the poor is not in line with reality. By all means, ethical tourism should be encouraged and sex tourism discouraged, but calling for people to stop going to countries impacted by tourism is as naive as going to Thailand and being surprised that it has bugs, snakes, pickpockets and scam artists.

By far the strangest/most interesting pages I've seen one my pictures used: Quantum Consciousness.

(As an aside, it's kind of interesting seeing what gets hotlinked from bulletin boards and livejournal; by far the most popular is this picture of our cat. It's never gotten to the level of abuse where I've felt I needed to block people from doing this.)

Good Martin Amis interview and Yellow Dog review. The review is the first I've found that comes close to line up with my own take on the book - there's more going on in it then most reviewers acknowledge or recognize.

Just in case you're short of things to read, here is New York Times' Notable Books 2003: Fiction and Nonfiction.

Paul Ford (of ftrain) has the lowdown on the work he did for A New Website for Harper's Magazine, which looks amazingly cool.