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Tonight was Technology Swearing Night at D’s.

Steve was trying to send pictures from his futurephone, which with T-Mobile’s fine software was almost impossible. One of those things where you need someone else to send you an email first so you can reply to it with the picture, etc.

Meanwhile, Jeremy & Keri & Lisa all had Gameboy DS with which they were playing Mario and using the kind of language I associate with dockworkers or characters in a David Mamet play. It’s always good to see someone who usually speaks in precise, hyperliterate paragraphs suddenly yell MOTHERFUCKING BITCH! I’M KILLING YOU! FUCK YOU! FUCKING FUCK! at a small electronic device.

Sample quote of the evening: “You aren’t even professionals. This is ROTISSERIE CHICKEN FISTING!” from Lisa.

Danell is the new Network Engineer at D’s because she can, if instructed, restart the wireless gateway. Slap-happy Don was unwilling to do anything because “I’m sure the network guys would tell us if it was down”, until I said “I am a network guy and it is down” and about five people laughed.

I don’t have any tasks tomorrow. It’s like some kind of dream. What shall I do?

Or he could just go creationist on us.

Once upon a time, Michael Crichton wrote good hack novels. The Andromeda Strain, for example: snappy tech thriller. His stuff was mostly literary chewing gum, but like Stephen King he could drag out a good hack plot and slap it around and make something you’d read on a flight.

He has slowly been going mad over the last 20 years. Unfortunately in his case it means mean mad; he’s joined the Orson Scott Card Literary Assholes Circle. The first hint of this was Rising Sun, which was a piece of racist shit pandering to the Yellow Peril mood of the 1990s. Remember? When Japan was going to take us over? It was made into an even worse movie. Thanks for topping us up, Mike, we didn’t have nearly enough race hate.

And then we had Airframe, which as far as I could tell was a screed against the whole idea of consumer safety or product liability lawsuits.

Finally he’s really gone and done it, with an antiscientific novel that attacks climate science, complete with a recondite appendix full of graphs and charts showing how all those pesky scienticians are wrong. He comes perilously close to ringing the Godwin Gong by comparing the “safety culture” to totalitarianism. More details here.

Maybe for his next opus he’ll novelize The Bell Curve or collaborate with Dave Sim in an attack on the Other Half!