News from the North

noreply@blogger.com (Jon) — Fri, 01 Jan 2021 04:59:00 +0000

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The Kindle Experiment

noreply@blogger.com (Jon) — Tue, 08 May 2012 19:37:00 +0000

Out of curiosity, and/or in my capacity as a tech blogger, last month I decided to experiment with enrolling a couple of my previously published novels in Amazon's KDP Select program for 90 days. Books in KDP Select can be loaned for free to Amazon Prime members, and you can also make them free to purchase for 5 of those 90 days. The downside is that you agree to make your book digitally exclusive to the Kindle platform while it's part of KDP Select.

As is often the case, it's not clear how well this plays with the Creative Commons licensing for my novels; even if I agree to make my book exclusive to Kindle, other people can make it available for download for free. But I did remove the two books in question -- my thrillers Invisible Armies and Night of Knives -- from the other paid market where I've made them available, Apple's iBooks (where they've only sold a tiny handful anyway.)

Then, as an experiment, I made Invisible Armies free for a Wednesday-through-Friday period, and Night Of Knives free for Saturday-through-Monday. The results were striking. I thought each would maybe get 500 downloads. Instead, 9,108 copies of Invisible Armies were downloaded over that three-day period -- circa 1,000 on Wednesday, 3,000 on Thursday, and 5,000 on Friday. All that while just barely cracking the Top 40 of Amazon's Free On Kindle bestseller list. It turns out that people really like free stuff.

Well -- some people, and some free stuff. That's Amazon USA. Only 84 free copies of Invisible Armies were downloaded on Amazon UK over that time. Then, over the next three days, Night of Knives was downloaded a relatively-mere 1509 times in the USA, more than I expected but far fewer than Invisible Armies, and 75 times in the UK. (It's perhaps worth noting that the dead-tree version of Invisible Armies got far more of a publisher push and sold much better in the UK than in the US, while Night of Knives wasn't published in the US at all, so I would have expected both to do disproportionally well with the UK audience.)

Results? About 25 extra sales per book, relative to my usual monthly baseline, and about 40 library loans so far. Shrug. Still, it's always nice to have another 5,000 readers, assuming that approximately half the people who downloaded the free books will actually start to read them.

Conclusions?

If you make your book available to Kindle readers for free, a surprising number of people will download it.
However, that number is highly variable, even between similar books by the same author.
Based on this very limited data set, a midweek release is better than a weekend release.
Free downloads will enormously outnumber subsequent sales or loans.
The Kindle ecosystem is vastly more popular in America than in the UK.

A theory of development

noreply@blogger.com (Jon) — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 19:52:00 +0000

Start with the default state of humankind: poverty and insecurity¹. In the cities, this means slums: tin-roofed shacks jammed up against one another, sometimes for miles; shit-strewn streets; spaghetti tangles of pirated power or local generators, if any; sardine-packed minibus taxis; unemployment; gangs; hardly any health care.

Things don't seem so bad in rural areas, except you're easily victimized by disease, drought, politics, and, more insidiously, population growth: the land that fed your ancestors enough that they grew and multiplied isn't sufficient to feed your family, because you're more numerous than they were. This would be much less of an issue with better inputs - seeds, fertilizer, etc. - but we're talking subsistence farming here.

Development. Meaning what? Not GDP growth, necessarily. The short version is, things getting better. Real health care. Real education. Work that turns into a job that turns into a career. Things built to a higher standard than "shambles that barely work." Enterprises that pay for themselves and grow without external money.

Development starts with little droplets, scattered around the city. A government ministry. A good school funded with remittance money. A four-star hotel. A port. A power plant. When you pass through the gates and walls around these places - and they will be gated and walled - you immediately get a sense that you're in a better place. Maybe the paint isn't fresh, but at least the trash is collected, and the water runs. Most of the people here are working; they may not be middle-class by Western standards, but they have jobs, plans, prospects. These places are lonely little islands in a vast sea of grinding, hopeless poverty.

Over time, some new droplets appear, and the old ones slowly iterate, improve, rise higher above the sea. (Unless it's a failed state; in which case they sink. Fortunately such are rare.) The little islands become an archipelago. They cluster together like constellations, near tourist attractions, parliaments, hills with fresh air. A few of them may even merge together into a larger island.

And then something else happens, something interesting and surprising; on the outskirts of the city, a much larger island rises. Untrammeled by history and existing claims and buildings, a semi-distant suburb almost invariably becomes the most agreeable and most progressive zone of a developing city. Miraflores in Lima, or Gurgaon in Delhi, or (I understand - haven't been myself) the Lekki Peninsula in Lagos.

Time passes. And then the inner-city islands begin to connect. Channels and corridors development reach out to one another, and form a network. Beijing was like this five years ago, with grand main boulevards but considerably more downscale neighbourhoods and hutongs behind them. (Think also of Baron Haussman's construction of Paris's boulevards.)

From there it's a not-so-simple matter of draining the sea. But the next step, I think, is the building of steps, ramps, and canals, so that those who live in the sea and those who live in the islands can begin to interpenetrate: because up to this stage, one of the hallmarks of almost all development are the walls, gates, and guards meant to keep the poor out. It's not until now that the rich and poor begin to mingle a little. On metro systems that get you there faster than a car will. In shopping areas and movie theatres where anyone and everyone goes. It's a long, slow process; but then, no one ever said that draining the sea would be easy.

¹You can argue that external forces eg colonialization/globalization perpetuate this - though recent evidence is pretty strongly against you re the latter - but it's pretty silly to claim, as some do, that they cause it. That may be true in some specific instances, but in general, it's just a basic zero-sum fallacy.

Official trip highlights

noreply@blogger.com (Jon) — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 16:30:00 +0000

I maintain a Flickr set of all my very bestest pictures, and these are its entries from my latest wanderings. Click through to view large versions.

(Apologies for the repetition from previous posts, but it's handy to have 'em all in one place.) Spooky monk, Lalibela, Ethiopia. Wall, Axum, Ethiopia. Sign, Djibouti. Salt pearls, Djibouti. Salt field and volcanoes, Djibouti. Salt lake, Djibouti. Tree in lava field, Djibouti. Pigeons, Delhi. The Jantar Mantar, Delhi. Pines, Van Vihar, Manali, India. The Spiti Valley, India. Himalayan zoom, India. Himalayan desert, India. Stok La, Ladakh, India. Sunset, Ladakh, India. Marine Drive, Mumbai.

Return of the native

noreply@blogger.com (Jon) — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 16:36:00 +0000

I am back! In Toronto. And full of the usual returned-traveller's appreciation of all the little things, such as Starbucks, air-conditioning, reliably heated & drinkable water, and especially, peace & quiet. India (outside of the Himalaya) is a very noisy place.

Meanwhile, I've been reaping some egoboo benefits of my TechCrunch gig: in the last few days I have popped up at The Times of India, The Atlantic, CNN, The Week, TC sister/mother publication The Huffington Post, Newsweek Polska, and the Spanish-language eNewspaper.

I leave you with a few photo highlights of this trip. 'Twas quite a good trip. I did not get to South Sudan, but that didn't seem fated to be, and Djibouti was a sufficiently weird substitute. I did not get to Srinagar, but between the monsoon and a pilgrimage of tens of thousands that was going on, all the transport links would have been flooded, so that's probably for the best. I did get to hike up to an ancient Ethiopian monastery carved out of raw stone, tour the station (and see the cable) that carries all of East Africa's Internet, dive in the Red Sea with the Special Forces, visit the world's third-deepest depression, ride the world's third-highest drivable road, drink where Watson & Crick drank, attend a wedding in a castle, and spend several days trekking in the Himalaya. There are worse ways to spend a couple of months.

Indiapix I

noreply@blogger.com (Jon) — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 05:39:00 +0000

As threatened

In the pines.

India in miniature.

The last village.

The Jantar Mantar.

Jantar Mantar detail.

Gurgaon, from MG Road Metro.

They don't call it "weed" for nothin'.

The first snowcapped mountains.

In case you didn't notice.

Fallingwater.

Cobra temple.

Onwards and upwards.

Under construction.

kullu valley blues

noreply@blogger.com (Jon) — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 05:38:00 +0000

Uh-oh. I fear I'm out of shape. Well, I'm not as out of shape as I first feared I was, but I'm still out of shape. We went on a day hike today, and after a mere half an hour of steep ascents, I was seriously dogging it. (M., being ferociously fit, barely even broke a sweat.) We're only 2000m up, and it's our third day here, so it shouldn't be altitude. Fortunately, I seemed to kick it up another gear for the rest of the day, and/or the ascents were lower-grade. I think basically my aerobic fitness is OK, but my anaerobic fitness has gone all to hell. I hope Phil-my-Montreal-boxing-coach never reads this. He'd be so disappointed.

So where was I? Oh yes. Leaving Chandigarh, and ascending into the mountains. We felt them long before we saw them, swaying back and forth with every switchback, as we passed Tata and Ashok Leyland trucks - some driving by night, many more parked beside the road. The only road to Manali and thence Leh, National Highway 21, is not a route for the faint of heart or the low of skill. It climbs and climbs, paralleling and traversing many a sheer precipice and roaring river, and at its best it's two unmarked lanes. Plus there are all the more usual problems of driving in India - the endless traffic, and the endless chaos, and the endless noise as everyone leans on their horn to survive.

Eventually the dark turned to light, though more slowly in normal, as we were driving along a steep gorge with 500-foot walls on either side. The road wound past roadside diners and through fair-size towns overlooking the river whose course we were following (and whose name I never got, though it wouldn't be hard to look up.) Scattered houses and a few temples somehow perched on the other side of the gorge, reached by bridges that were sometimes real bridges and sometimes little more than a pole and two ropes to hang on to while you walk across it. The gorge was lush, overgrown, intensely green. At first a few palm trees still hung on, down at its base, but as we climbed they vanished.

Then, suddenly, a tunnel - a tunnel a full three kilometres long, no less, vast and cavernous - and we emerged into the wide Kullu Valley, at the other end of which I sit and type. It too is a green and fertile land. Apple trees grow everywhere, surrounded by corn. Enormous pines reach a hundred feet or more towards the sky. The road up the valley is bleak and unattractive, and even the attempts at pleasantry by the many hotels and motels (the Kullu Valley received 2 million tourists lat year, 80% of them domestic) do little to leaven its oppressive industrial feel; but everywhere else is green and glorious.

And then, finally, Manali; which is to say, its mud-pit of a bus stand, and overpopulated, overtrafficked streets. The first impression is not exactly welcoming. But the touts weren't too bad, and while my overall impression of the town itself has remained stuck at "dungheap", there are many consolations. There's an absolutely wonderful park on one end of town, a huge and downright mystical cathedral of pines; there's only one official entrance, but I have discovered various other unofficial ones, some of which lead through fields of wild marijuana. Our hotel is a little bit away from the worst of the noise and the chaos. The people here are, by and large, very nice. And Old Manali, on the other end of the park, is a classic hippie-backpacker-oasis a la Yangshuo in China, or Caye Caulker in Belize, or (once upon a time) the Vumba in Zimbabwe, albeit largely populated by that distinctly Indian mix of gorgeous Israeli girls and sketchy Israeli guys. (Apparently spending a few months in India after completing one's Israeli military service is Israel's gap-year equivalent, so the Israelis here tend to be young, extremely fit, and more than a little surly.)

Also, did I mention that there are mountains? There are mountains, green and stark in the foreground, snow-capped in the distance. Today we hiked to an enormous and beautiful waterfall - the "holy place" sign next to it was really quite unnecessary - and (once I caught my breath) back down, and across the Beas River, and through three small villages, all of which are booming: new houses, new cars, new construction, new satellite dishes, the works. Between the cash crops, the tourism, the overall development of the region, and India's more generalized economic boom, Manali seems to be doing quite well.

As further evidence, I give you the ski resort we came across at the very end of today's trek, which in summer is a paragliding / quad-bike / pony-ride / various-other-amusements park, densely populated with domestic tourists. Near it is a sign that proudly proclaims the US$365 million tunnel that will replace the Rohtang Pass we intend to traverse on Tuesday, which will open up an entire new region to year-round access. I'm kinda glad I got here early enough to do it the old-fashioned altitude-sickness way. Kids today. Sheesh.

Pictures to come -

notes from the foothills of the himalaya

noreply@blogger.com (Jon) — Sat, 02 Jul 2011 05:37:00 +0000

Wow. India has gotten positively mellow.

Well, relatively speaking. Once - which is to say, the first two times I came here, in 2000 and 2004 - it was a pounding, nonstop, all-out assault on every one of the human senses, including especially those of dignity, decency, propriety and personal space. For travellers it was a destination of constant hassle, a land of lies and scams (some so elegant that they were almost beautiful.) Those moments of transition when I first stepped out of the airport and into India proper - the arena, if you will - remain two of my most searing, powerful travel memories.

This time? I girded my loins, battened my hatches, readied my defenses, and stepped past the airport barriers, and found myself beset by ... nothing. There was no gauntlet of touts or taxi drivers. Nobody noticed or cared. A 21st century train service took me to New Delhi Railway station. There was indeed a vast mass of humanity there, waiting to be security-groped before entering the metro - the metro! Delhi had no metro ten years ago, nor even any hint of one; now it's five times the size of Toronto's. I bypassed them and found an autorickshaw driver, who hardly tried to rip me off at all. We took a six-lane highway past green parks and the airbrushed Red Fort. And I kept thinking: "Am I sure this is India?"

Don't get me wrong. Delhi and its teeming zillions are still a seething, all-consuming vortex of humanity. Step past the gleaming new shopping malls and five-star hotels and you'll find yourself in a twisting warren of narrow alleys and grinding poverty. Once, though, there was almost nothing but those narrow alleys, in which nothing seemed to happen; now they too thrum with activity, as men carry, drag, cycle, and drive immense loads through apertures that seem too small for them. Now droplets and pockets and even corridors of a whole new First World city has erupted from that sea of poverty, while brand-new satellite cities like Gurgaon boom on its outskirts. The infrastructure can't keep pace, as that link attests, but no wonder. It's all happening so fast.

On Thursday night we went to the offices of the Himachal Pradesh Tourism Development Corporation, and waited only ten minutes past the scheduled departure time, while a family of monkeys frolicked outside. (Cows and monkeys remain common sights in Delhi, but I don't expect to ever again see an elephant right outside the railway station, as I did in 2000.) Then a battered but seaworthy Volvo bus appeared, collected us, and carried us across Delhi's vast cityscape and along a massive under-construction highway to Chandigarh, via a stop at a roadside restaurant/department store that sold nearly-life-size Indian Elvis statues, six-foot-high gold-plated lamps, and a surprisingly decent book selection. A wretchedly bad Bollywood comedy played on the flat-screen TV, and M. (my travelling companion) and I took turns taking refuge in my iPod. I think it was about 2AM when we finally began to ascend into the mountains, towards Manali, where I sit and type.

The world is salt

noreply@blogger.com (Jon) — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 04:08:00 +0000

There were six crew and twenty divers on yesterday's expedition: two Frenchmen who owned the boat; two South African women who were the divemasters; two Djiboutian crew; nineteen members of the US military, ranging from career desk jockeys to some Special Forces dudes, all using their Sunday off to go diving - and one random Canadian tourist. Although at first everyone just assumed I was a new contractor or something, and I wasn't actually outed until just before the second dive.

It wasn't until then that the Special Forces dudes started talking to me. It seems the military has implicit but clear social hierarchies. They seemed to approve that I had randomly come to Djibouti, and they seemed pretty plugged-in, too; when I mentioned I had originally planned to visit a friend in South Sudan, they started joking that it was Joseph Kony, a name none of the regular military recognized. Alas, I think they started watching what they talked about, then, too; the best semi-overheard stuff came before that -

"...suddenly every Polish joke I had ever heard made sense to me. Yeah. But the Gorm (sic?), their special forces, those guys were squared away, and they didn't like their regulars any more than we did..."

"dude I was back in Puerto Rico, man, he was stupid. I learned so much here. It's been a great deployment."
"So you're going career?"
"Yeah, man, totally. I love it. I love being a soldier."
"That's awesome."

"...dude ITMed (sic?) for like an hour, we were watching the whole thing. There were three guys who came in to set an IED, I was watching them from the blimp the whole time, they lit up one guy, shot his arm off, he died, second guy got away on a motorcycle with them shooting all around them, but this guy in a ditch, he'd elbow-crawl, and they'd shoot, and he'd stop moving for five minutes, and we'd start thinking, well, we got him, but then he'd start moving again, and they'd start shooting again... this went on for like an hour 'til he got to the end of the ditch and just booked it into these ruins, and he made it, and they didn't chase him. Low-crawling works."

"...we got three broken treadmills in the gym. Get them from Seychelles, they'll cost like, three thousand -"
"- like five thousand -"
"- yeah, maybe, but we gotta get 'em from there, we can't requisition straight from Bahrain, it all has to go through Seychelles."

"...yeah, we got great video, you can Google it. 'Course all the media reports say it was Afghan special forces, they don't say nothin' about us..."

About twenty minutes out of harbour we passed a dead cow floating in the water. Twenty minutes later we passed a pod of dozens of frolicking dolphins, leaping out of the water all around us, flashing silver. "Any day you see dolphins is a good day," said Kristen, the lead divemaster, happily. We saw a few on the way back, too -

It was indeed a good day. We parked first at Shark Island -

- named because it looks like a dorsal fin, not because there were sharks. It was still a good dive, though, and the second one was downright awesome. Bright coral, huge schools of dozens of kinds of fish, lionfish, groupers, and at the very end, I and my dive buddy Gareth (a Navy Reservist with an MBA who went through, like, half the air I did) found a big ol' sea turtle resting between two shelves of rust-coloured fan coral.

Back we rode, more of a big happy family now than we had been at the beginning, in the way all dive boats get - though the military lines of social demarcation were still quite apparent - along the unforgiving shore

and then back at port their bus picked them up, and I shouldered my bag and walked past them to the gate of the port to look for a taxi. Some of them looked envious. The hotel in which I type this is off limits to them, and there are other strict restrictions on what they can do in town. "I've been here five months and I've lost 25 pounds," Gareth said, "nothing to do but work out and dive. Thank God there's diving. Got to spend my money on something."

I got back just in time to make arrangements for today's trip, to Lac Assal, an inland salt sea that marks the lowest point in Africa and third lowest in the world, after the Dead Sea and Sea of Galilee - 150m/500ft below sea level. And am I glad.

On the way in there's an amazing thermocline:

...the blue water to the left is 30C/85F, saltier than the Dead Sea, and very dead; the green water to the right is naturally geothermally warmed to 90C/200F, and full of algae.

Those are pearls ~~that were his eyes~~ of 100% pure table salt.

So is that. And the 60m/200ft of ground beneath it.

We (that being "me and the driver I hired"; I'd say it's low season here, too, except I'm not so sure there's really such a thing as high season) also passed a vast canyon

and endless fields of lava, and a desolate campement

and stubborn trees

and monkeys and camels, nibbling on acacia trees, or simply wandering by.

A long, hot, tiring day, but a great one.

At the edges of the world

noreply@blogger.com (Jon) — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 14:49:00 +0000

I'm always amazed by how quickly the alien becomes familiar. On my first day in Mombasa it seemed strange and surreal to be the only guest in a 100-room Indian Ocean beach resort at the very end of a long, winding road; two days later it seemed perfectly normal. Two weeks ago I flew into Addis Ababa and made my way through and from the airport dazed and confused, uncertain and nervous lest something go wrong; two days ago I did the same thing and cruised through impatiently without even really bothering to think about the process.

I do not think that will happen if I ever return to Djibouti, though, as the airport process is so comically chaotic. After dancing back and forth and back and forth between three different locations in the arrival hall to get my visa, I emerged into the suffocating heat only to find that the only bureau de change had closed for the next few hours. Fortunately my enterprising taxi driver took US dollars. Fortunate and unsurprising; we passed a vast US Air Force cargo plane on the tarmac -

- because Djibouti is home to 2000 US soldiers and 800 members of the French Foreign Legion. The latter is the reason I know anything about the place; it's the setting of Claire Denis's brilliant film Beau Travail. Otherwise this really is an obscure little nation. To the best of my knowledge, nobody I know has ever been here, which is practically nonpareil. (The only other such countries I can think of are Gabon and various tiny island nations.)

It's easy to see why. To be honest it's a profoundly unattractive city, low-rise and industrial, leached of all colour by the hammering sun, strewn with trash, jumbled with crumbling or half-completed buildings, full of aggressive touts and taxi drivers. On paper it's wealthier than any of its neighbours, thanks to its busy port (and military bases) - which also makes it more expensive than any of its neighbours - but you remember that "poisonous stagnation" I was talking about? Djibouti has it in spades.

It's not the hottest place on Earth. Quite. That's in the Danakil Depression, on the Ethiopian side of the border. But it's a contender. My hotel room has only a curtained slit for a window, because the sun is the enemy. There is only one faucet in the bathroom - but it provides hot water, not cold. The city essentially shuts down from 12 to 3 every day. Refrigerator-sized air conditioners dominate all the more expensive establishments, and water is sold at roadside stands by the keg. It's actually pretty mild right now, highs circa 40C/105F, but it cranks up to 55C/130F in July and August.

But at least it has the ocean -

- and goats -

- and chat, aka khat, a mildly narcotic leaf imported from Yemen (which is so close you can practically see it) and chewed all day by pretty much every male inhabitant of the city. Pickup trucks overflowing with the stuff cruise by regularly. Yesterday I wandered past a huge police 4x4; the two officers inside were busily stuffing their faces with chat.

I'm mostly here because South Sudan fell through. Originally I was going to spend two weeks there and one in Ethiopia, but the Abyei crisis torpedoed that plan; then MSF informed me I wouldn't be able to visit any of their projects after all; then I was going to get my visa-like South Sudan permit in Kampala, but crazy airline prices torpedoed that plan; then I realized I was looking at US$1500 to spend four days in-country, which just seemed dumb. So here I am in this strange place. Last night I had a beer at a five-star hotel largely populated by Foreign Legionnaires and US military. It was an odd mix. Tomorrow, with luck, I'll visit Lac Assal, and I've booked some diving for Sunday. But I suspect that when Monday rolls around I will have had my fill of Djibouti.

Transport, landscapes, books

noreply@blogger.com (Jon) — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 10:30:00 +0000

Let us consider, then, the various modes of transport here in Ethiopa.

First, of course, there is one's feet; very popular, if largely due to necessity. A few people go barefoot, though most wear sandals. Earlier today I followed an elderly man with one foot sandalled and one bare for some time; we moved at the same pace, across gravel-dusted tarmac, though I was booted. Well-dressed women wear heels. And in Addis (though not here, so far as I can tell) running shoes are also very popular. Running is the national sport. At 6AM joggers rove all about Addis Ababa. Some are portly office-warrior types. Some are good. Some are really, really good. The best of the best - Haile Gerbreselassie (sic? Internet too slow to Google), the world marathon champion and record-holder - is Ethiopian.

Here in Axum, the bicycle is also very popular. This surprised me. The Chinese influence again, perhaps? It's not exactly Shanghai 1997 and its river of bicycles, but I don't think I've been anywhere else in Africa where people regularly bomb down the roads on a knobbled hybrid. I bet the mountain biking would be awesome, once you adjusted to the altitude...

My guidebook claims that horse-drawn carts or garis are everywhere, but that was then and this is now; they have been all but replaced by the tuk-tuk aka autorickshaw, painted brightly blue. The few garis I've seen were all scrawny horses dragging overloaded cargo.

Donkeys and mules (er, to my shame, I always have trouble telling them apart. One is smaller and has bigger ears, right?) are popular beasts of burden as well, cushioned with blankets and loaded with bags or bales of firewood. Sheep and goats wander everywhere, but carry nothing.

And there are camels. Camels! Don't get me wrong, I hate the filthy, stinking, malevolent beasts, but they do add a certain wild-frontier air to the place. One hump, in case you're curious, and generally loaded with firewood.

To carry more people, one requires a minibus, or a bus, or perhaps - I've heard talk of these, but haven't seen them myself - a luxury bus, one with a bathroom on board, and free water and snacks. I haven't ridden in a bus yet, to my shame; this trip is bounded by time more than money, which means I've been flying. I have been frequenting Addis's minibuses, though, which are basically exactly the same as matatus or tro-tros anywhere, albeit maybe in slightly better shape than most.

And what of the landscape through which one is transported?

Right now it is dry and stony. Watercourses are barren. The trees and grass are thorny, with one notable exception; Australia's backhanded gift to the developing world, the eucalyptus. (It grows fast, makes for excellent firewood and construction, and provides shade and food for animals - but it consumes a lot of water.) The rains are coming soon, everyone hopes, and indeed the skies spat a few drops on us today, and their thunderous deluge has already arrived in Addis.

And the stones - well. Granite, I think, rather than Lalibela's limestone? But I'm no geologist. Regardless, the landscape is hills covered by stones surrounded by rocks resting on pebbles. The new roads they are building everywhere are patterned cobblestone rather than tarmac, not least because the former are available everywhere. Walls and buildings are generally made of stones piled on stones. Doorways and windows are frequently stopped up with stones.

That last seems inexplicable. I would guess it's some sort of cooling thing, but in fact it's not that hot here; we are still two kilometres above sea level. The sun is bright and heavy, though, and at midday verges on deadly. I am sunscreened up but have twice worn my hat against the noonday sun nonetheless.

The style of this post is, I think, somewhat affected by the great Ryszard Kapuscinski, whose great Travels with Herodotus I finished today, alas. He is accused by some of having exaggerated or even invented some of his many exploits. I suspect they're right. I suspect I even know which ones, at that; there's an arch tone to them which is not present in most of his work. But he's such a good writer that I don't care, second only to Peter Fleming in my pantheon of travel writers.

I read it on my Kobo, which is technology's latest gift to travellers. Three books down (Travels with Herodotus, Surviving the Extremes, and The Outlaw Sea) and three to go (Where Men Win Glory, A Game of Thrones, and - er - Gibbon's Decline and Fall.)) I also started The Republic (it comes with 100 classics preloaded) but quickly grew tired of Socrates's stupid semantic games and gave up. It's easy to see why they poisoned him.

Tomorrow, back to Addis; and then, perhaps, Kampala? We shall see.

Notes from the Ancient North

noreply@blogger.com (Jon) — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 10:27:00 +0000

* It is official: Sub-Saharan Africa is freaking booming. I mean, I know the numbers have been saying that for some time; Addis Ababa certainly feels like a boomtown, cranes and construction sites everywhere, and even so the people I talked to there lamented about how Kenya is leaving them behind; but here I am in faraway Axum, an ancient city of some 40,000 near the Eritrean border - and when all construction projects underway here have finished, they will have, at a conservative estimate, quintupled the number of multi-story buildings in town. Not to mention all the roadwork underway. Of course, who knows how long some of these projects may have languished half-complete? And yet even so their very existence says something, and I heard hammering coming from the couple that I passed...

* The boom definitely has something to do with massive Chinese investment. The blanket in my current hotel is a "Jin Quo Han" (sic?) blanket. My internet connection in Lalibela was established via a China Telecom client. There are Chinese officials, engineers - and tourists - everywhere; and instead of complaints about special treatment for whites in the local papers, there are complaints about special treatment for "whites and Chinese." Which is progress, I guess, of a sort.

* The most interesting thing about Axum, though, is not the recent boom, but the antiquity. 80-foot pre-Christian steles loom over a 17th century church... next to which is the small, inaccessible chapel that is claimed by Ethiopians to hold none other than the Ark of the Covenant. (Only one monk is allowed to enter; he lives there all his life. I saw him today, readying a ladder to repair the roof, and he sure had a hell of a beard for an Ethiopian. The deacon claimed he'd been there for 15 years. The beard made that sound plausible.)

* There are also tombs here. Many tombs. The accessible ones were raided by thieves over the years - but it's estimated that 98% of Axum's antiquities still lie buried. The museum here, full of ancient illuminated books and dozens of solid gold crowns and sceptres and the like, hints at the treasures that may lie within. It's all very Lara Croft / Indian Jones. This is some of the oldest gold country in the world, and there are dozen goldsmiths on the streets. Don't know if there's a mine nearby.

* Ethiopian Airlines rocks. I flew Addis-Lalibela, then Lalibela-Axum, and in a couple days will fly Axum - Addis, for the combined grand total of US $165, on shiny new-ish Bombardier Q400s.

* It's off season, meaning every tout in Axum and Lalibela has targeted me. They're pretty laid-back as touts go, though, and willing to (eventually) take no for an answer.

* Lalibela. Well. It's a major tourist attraction because of its vast and ancient churches carved from single slabs of rock, which are indeed kind of mindboggling. My favourite part, though, was my trip up to the (also hewn-from-stone) monastery perched on a mountain above the city. Locals and Lonely Planet agree that it's only a 90-minute walk, so when after 90 minutes I seemed nowhere near a monastery, I began to fear that in my haste and confusion I had climbed the wrong mountain. It's true, I had had to stop briefly every 100 or so (vertical) metres to catch my breath, which worried me considering the Himalaya await, but hopefully it was just altitude adjustment. (Lalibela is a more-than-respectable 2600m/8000ft above sea level.) After two hours, though, I had pretty much given up. And then: blue doors set into a solid stone wall. The monastery. Inside was a bit of a dog-and-pony show with relics and an ancient illuminated manuscript, but nice enough, and the views were breathtaking. I glanced at my phone as I left, and again as I arrived at Lalibela's central intersection; and it turns out that it took me exactly 90 minutes - moving nonstop at a good clip - to descend from the monastery. I retract all my claims that Lonely Planet has grown less hardcore.

* Lalibela society seemed to this outsider to be like the limestone on which it is built, rigid and many-layered. When I went to change money, I waited behind a woman with long, carefully braided hair, in brightly patterned skirt and blouse that looked brand new, tapping her manicured nails on her Nokia - as she waited for an old man in rags and a poncho-like shawl, in sandals so worn they looked bonded to his feet, carrying a shepherd's crook, who was opening a new bank account with five US dollars and two passport photos. (Foreign Exchange and Account Opening were the same window.)

* There were many, many very poor pasturalists in Lalibela, dressed like that old man, walking with both hands on the walking sticks held behind their necks; some had crooks, some were metal-tipped, some supported jute sacks full of unknown goods, some were just bare sticks. Many were there because Lalibela is also a US AID distribution center; every afternoon, hundreds of bags of rice and dozens of shining canisters of edible oil, all embossed with the American flag, were given away.

* Next up in the hierarchy, I think, were the poor locals. Did you think shoeshine boys had disappeared with Dickens? They abound in both Axum and Lalibela, and are popular among the members of the upper classes. Who would count as "middle class" elsewhere, I suppose. It's nice to see an emerging middle class anywhere south of the Sahara and north of the Limpopo.

* Table football is very popular; there were half-a-dozen public-access tables by the road in various places in Lalibela. Ping-pong and a variant of pool are easy to find as well.

* Lalibela is very steep. It's probably 50 or maybe even 100 vertical metres just from the top to the bottom of the town itself. And as a result, the views, oh wow, oh wow, oh wow - expanding out over plains and rippling hills as far as the eye can see. (They're mostly to the not-so-touristy northwest of town, though; I'm very, very glad I wandered out there.)

* Ethiopia is cheap. I'm following my usual "sleep cheap, eat expensive," protocol, and travelling on easily less than US$50 a day. I guess when you have a population of 85 million people and not that much in the way of exports, hard currency is highly valued.

Bookses!

noreply@blogger.com (Jon) — Tue, 17 May 2011 16:39:00 +0000

And see the books.google.com page for previews of the interior. (And its word cloud. I am very fond of its word cloud.)

At some point later this year I will Creative-Commons-e-publish this new 2.0 version of the book. (The 1.0 version is already available.) I have a PDF of the printed version, which is terrific, but full of graphics. Are there any halfway decent PDF→epub tools out there yet?

cast a long data shadow

noreply@blogger.com (Jon) — Thu, 12 May 2011 03:12:00 +0000

Beasts of New York (which is out, like, this week!) on Google Books.

An Easter Egg

noreply@blogger.com (Jon) — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 17:36:00 +0000

For readers of Beasts of New York, an interactive map.

I am pleased

noreply@blogger.com (Jon) — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 16:25:00 +0000

(Click to see it full size.) (More about the book here.)

Squirrel around the corner

noreply@blogger.com (Jon) — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 14:13:00 +0000

For a technically-as-yet-unpublished book, Beasts of New York sure has a lot of reader reviews: seventeen on GoodReads, sixteen on Feedbooks, five on the Web Fiction Guide, four on Manybooks, three on Amazon.com, and a few others scattered about.

(There was a nice one from Pop Syndicate, too, but that site seems to have gone bust, alas. )

I think my favourite to date, though, is here:

Greek Mythology is awesome. There are gods and heroes, epic battles that span the cosmos, and intensely human stories that reveal the truths of our deepest nature. But sometimes as you’re cruising through those fantastic tales of yore, you reach a point somewhere around the end of The Odyssey where you think, “You know what this story really needs? More squirrels.”

squirrels on parade, II

noreply@blogger.com (Jon) — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 15:21:00 +0000

So Beasts of New York - which is now in galley form, and will be an Actual Book within weeks, I do believe - received a very nice review in ForeWord Reviews this month.

If we were to play Pull Quotes, we would probably come up with something like:

Fascinating ... humorous, horrifying ... artfully imagined and constructed ... gets at a lot of complex stuff without being heavy-handed.

Side benefits of punditry

noreply@blogger.com (Jon) — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 04:50:00 +0000

One of the nice things about my TechCrunch punditry gig is that sometimes I get to improve my bad French, terrible Spanish, and, er, nonexistent Japanese, thanks to translations:

Also, new book out soon! More (not very much) later.

We're #7! We're #7!

noreply@blogger.com (Jon) — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 17:27:00 +0000

Two separate reputable sources agree: The Executor was the seventh best graphic novel of 2010 -

(I am amused by their precision of agreement. There's more overlap than I would have expected, actually; four books appear on both lists.)

It was 100% made up. Honest.

noreply@blogger.com (Jon) — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 04:40:00 +0000

Wikileaks of some interest to those who have read my novel NIGHT OF KNIVES:

WikiLeaks cables reveal secret plan to push Mugabe out in Zimbabwe

American officials welcomed the idea, noting that it was "increasingly in circulation" in the capital, Harare, and "may not require outside intervention".

Washington requests biometric information for African leaders

2) Rebel and Militia Groups (SRCC)

-- Efforts by rebel or militia groups or non-state actors--especially entities such as the FDLR that contain Rwandans who participated in the 1994 genocide--to obtain control of or greater participation in national or local government; to obtain control of natural or financial resources; to integrate into the Congolese armed forces (FARDC) or to cooperate with the FARDC in the exploitation of economic resources.

[...]

6) Terrorism (TERR)

-- Individuals and organizations supporting international terrorism, including legitimate businesses and financial transactions, money laundering, drug trafficking, logistical support, cyber crime, and document forgeries. -- Extent to which ethnic, tribal, religious and regional fragmentation could serve to attract international terrorist groups. -- Evidence of transit and safe haven by transnational and regional terrorist groups. -- Vulnerability of populace to Islamic extremism. -- Evidence of domestic terrorist groups. -- Indications of funding from Gulf-based financiers or NGOs.

and, tangentially,

She also asked if the American diplomats had any intelligence on shipments of surface to air missiles (SAMs) to militants [...] one to three SAMs may have been shipped to Nigerian militant groups.

I swear, it was all fiction when I wrote it.

And the beasts begin to emerge

noreply@blogger.com (Jon) — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 02:26:00 +0000

You can now pre-order the gorgeous Porcupine's Quill edition of Beasts of New York from Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, and chapters.indigo.ca.

(And, of course, you can buy the Kindle edition from Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com, and the iBooks version from Apple's iBookstore.)

(And, of course, you can download it in its entirety for free from Feedbooks and Manybooks.)

My quest to conquer all the world's media continues

noreply@blogger.com (Jon) — Sat, 06 Nov 2010 14:44:00 +0000

So I've started writing for TechCrunch. My inaugural post: How RIM's PlayBook Could Have Succeeded.

Also, I have a new Walrus post up: The Long Arm of the Cyberlaw.

Surprisingly carroty

noreply@blogger.com (Jon) — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 01:31:00 +0000

I was briefly interviewed by TravelPost.com, which gave me the opportunity to confess about those termites at long last.

recent scribblings

noreply@blogger.com (Jon) — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 19:39:00 +0000

I wrote

A thing about Burning Man.
And another about the Taliban.
They're more alike than you might expect.

Meanwhile, Jim Westergard's wood engravings for the upcoming Porcupine's Quill edition of my novel Beasts of New York are now online (warning: implicit spoilers behind that link.) And you can order prints! A couple of samples:

Hawk Launches Squirrel

Rat King