I'm going to Ireland! For four days! Leaving a week from today, spending Friday/Sunday/Monday in Dublin, Saturday in Waterford.

Long story short: some very nice people I met at a fan event in London guessed that I would really really like to go with them to see this play in Waterford. It turns out they had some money left over from the London thing, and because they are very nice people, they decided to put it towards my airfare. I still didn't think I'd be able to go, because I'd sent in my passport renewal very recently without using the rush form... but the feds had a strange fit of efficiency and the passport arrived three weeks sooner than they said it would. Well okay then.

I've never been to Ireland at all so this is kind of a silly way to do it, but I'll be in good company, and an old friend from New York who lives in London is trying to come down to meet me too. I'm just sad that I don't get to bring Becka.

[The Internet is so strange. There's this one tiny area, just around this one author and book, where I have a noticeable presence because I put up a totally unofficial reference website. Press people in a hurry will seize on that kind of thing and run with it... so in the last 2 years I've had the dubious thrill of being mentioned by name in The Scotsman and The Irish Times, in hilariously error-filled articles that portrayed me as (a) some kind of scholarly authority and (b) a woman.]

Quote of the day, from Chris Clarke:

"It may be that early human populations carrying the recessive gene in their genome benefited from having certain individuals who were more likely to stand there and lecture the lion about how man is clearly the most fearsome predator on the savannah and then be eaten, thus allowing the rest to escape."

In the NY Review of Books this week, there's a story by John Terborgh on the fate of the Amazon rainforest which is pretty much required reading if, like me, your understanding of the whole mess was just "people are stupid, so we're screwed."

The article talks about why the Brazilian government in the 1970s decided to give people tons of money to settle and farm land that was terrible for settling and farming, and why there's such a demand for logging there, and how other countries with Amazon territory have behaved differently. When you look at human effects on the world from a distance, we look like a blind swarm of locusts; but from closer up it's just a lot of people making short-sighted decisions based on what makes economic and political sense at the time, and what they know how to do technologically.

The cool tone as Terborgh goes through these details at first makes him seem a little breezy about the danger of the situation; but by the end of the story, not so much, as he brings up at least two ways things could get much worse even if logging didn't keep speeding up. One is that the environmental effects of the cleared areas make the untouched areas much more liable to catch fire. The other, which I'd never seen anyone mention before, is that science might find a way to make rainforest soil into good farmland and then we'd have a whole new dilemma; that's what happened to Brazil's grasslands.

Terborgh concludes vaguely that the only hope is "significant international intervention" because Brazil is "a country obsessed with maximizing development," a place where "cycles of boom and bust have encouraged a get-rich-quick mentality and lack of allegiance to place." Sounds familiar. So who's going to intervene over here?

(Damn, the NY Review has been on fire lately, and they put a lot of their stories online: the last few issues have really good pieces on global warming, Gertrude Stein, Islamic law, Turkish politics, and Vladimir Putin, and a jaw-dropping transcript of Bush lecturing the Spanish Prime Minister about Iraq.)

There are some belated updates to
SPARKY'S GALLERY OF SHAME.