09 March 2008

Stooped and typing II

The title is a misnomer. As it happens, I'm lying nearly on my back, in a green corduroy armchair, feet up on a tufted leather ottoman. There's Frank Sinatra on the CD player, which is the only music to play with tufted leather ottomans. Laundry's going downstairs, so I've got 25 minutes or so. I'm going to pour out the remnants of the half-bottle of Bailey's Waterhouse gave me as a housewarming gift and try to reacquaint myself with the blogging instinct.

Women seem taken with this week's New Yorker cover, a painting of a cartoonishly wide-faced, narrow-eyed, and ivory-skinned woman whose hair and blouse both are converging thatches of vines and blossoms. Two made special mention of it. I think they think it's pretty.
In unrelated news, you'll see below that I was at Northern Voice, the "blogging and social media conference." (I include the quotation marks because that's the way I say it in my mind—the same as on the news, when you hear "Facebook, the social networking website" in each new report about the Filipino kid whose stabbing death on an East Van schoolyard provoked a flurry of RIP "wall" posts.)

I spend the day among the bloggers, and before I run down to secure my position among the dryers, let me tell you that they're smart, chubby, and casually dressed. That you could have guessed. Their defining characteristic, though, is more interesting, and more alien: an unqualified love of technology and, by extension, the future.

The belief seems to me to have an ominous underside, but I don't know why.