Things of rage and wonder

Internets! Allow me to share things with you that need sharing. In no real order beyond that in which I read them:

1. On the bus this morning, I finished The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon, which is one of the more perfect novels I've read in awhile. I went home and squeed about it just now to zingerella (who has not read it) and human_loser who has. human_loser pointed out that you can't actually say anything about it that isn't incredibly spoilery because it's that tightly written a novel. At any rate: apocalyptic hardboiled detective story in an alternate universe where the Jewish homeland is in Alaska. Also some of the best cursing this side of Warren Ellis.

2. Then I read that my illustrious school board feels like children are not already bombarded enough by ads, and should perhaps be getting more ads at school, where they are a captive audience. The funds this brainwashing will generate, according to CBC? $1300 a year. Not even one computer at the extortionist prices that we're charged. Fabulous.

3. Then I made the even worse mistake of reading the Sun at lunch, since we get it for free now. There was a lot of stupid in it but this editorial takes the cake. Apparently police treatment of Caledonia residents during the Six Nations' reclamation of their own land is worse than the beatings, kettling, arbitrary arrests, sexual threats, and artificial limb-removing that went on during the G20. Really? The police handled the Caledonia people—many of whom were racists, a few of whom were literally neo-Nazis—with kid gloves. Also, I'm pretty sure that the OPP wasn't issuing passports or curfews. I love how the Sun and Blatchford in particular just get to make shit up, call it "news," and even get paid.

4. Okay, onto some more cheerful things. I'm reading The World That Never Was: A true story of dreamers, schemers, anarchists, & secret agents by Alex Butterworth. This book is non-fiction, apparently. I know very little about the author or his credentials as an historian, but as it seems well-researched so far, I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt and take the following passage, which I shall quote out of context, as a description of something that actually happened in 1867:

The highest priority was still the maintenance of robust communication with the outside world. Recollecting his first, hated job at the Department of Patents a year before, Rochefort mayhave regretted dismissing too hastily the myriad proposals for balloon guidance mechanisms that had then crossed his desk. In the absence of any great leap forward in the years since, it seemed that the most outlandish suggestions were now to be encouraged with funding. Pigeons equipped with whistles to deter Stieber's falcons proved especially effective, the pellicles strapped to their legs carrying photographically reduced letters. Each delivery kept a team of hunched copyists busy for several days, transcribing from a megascope projection. Even the eccentric Jules Allix's twenty-year-old notion of a communications system based on 'sympathetic snails'—pairs of molluscs rendered telepathic over huge distances by the exchange of fluid during mating, whose synchronized movement could communicate letter codes—saw a brief revival of interest.

(Spoiler: This worked exactly as well as you'd expect.)

I was clearly born in the wrong century.

ETA: More about the snails.