Accidental Death Remediation

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One of the ten thousand billboards blighting Interstate 70 reads: Homicide, Suicide, and Accidental Death Remediation. Barb and I speculated about the services provided and she got it first try. I couldn’t get past, “Who the hell would be willing to do such a job?” I found the answer on their website:

“It’s a job no one else wants to do: cleaning up human blood and tissue and getting rid of the stench that often follows death. But a Menifee mother and daughter have started a business to do just that. Calling their business Crime & Trauma Scene Specialists, Debbie Haar and her mother, Shirley MacNeill will clean up homicide or suicide scenes, homes where someone has died a natural death or even what they call “pack-rat” homes that need special care. The two are also trained to do extensive cleaning of medical offices and funeral homes and can remove tear gas or pepper spray from inside buildings.”

Eastern Standard Tribe (Amazon summary)

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“Art is a member of the Eastern Standard Tribe, a secret society bound together by a sleep schedule. Around the world, those who wake and sleep on East Coast time find common cause with one another, cooperating, conspiring, to help each other out, coordinated by a global network of Wi-Fi, instant messaging, ubiquitous computing, and a shared love of Manhattan-style bagels. Or perhaps not. Art is, after all, in the nuthouse. He was put there by a conspiracy of his friends and loved ones, fellow travelers from EST hidden in the bowels of Greenwich Mean Time, spies masquerading as management consultants who strive to mire Europe in oatmeal-thick bureaucracy. Eastern Standard Tribe is a story of madness and betrayal, of society after the End of Geography, of the intangible factors that define us as a species, as a tribe, as individuals.” —  Amazon review of Eastern Standard Tribe by Cory Doctorow. Or you can read it for free.

Quotes from William Gibson novels

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William Gibson –touring to promote the paperback release of Pattern Recognition– was interviewed by Leo Laporte on Tech TV’s The Screen Savers. Leo asked some good questions, including one about Gibson’s creative process. Gibson said he did not work out the plot in advance and wrote from day to day with no idea of what would happen next. He said he waited for the first sentence and everything grew (“fractally”) from that. And he would never consider going back to edit that first sentence because the story would (I think he said) “collapse.”

“The ghost was her father’s parting gift, presented by a black-clad secretary in a departure lounge at Nirita.” — Mona Lisa Overdrive

“I put the shotgun in an Adidas bag and padded it out with four pair of tennis socks, not my style at all, but that was what I was aiming for: If they think you’re crude, go technical; if they think you’re technical, go crude.” — Burning Chrome

“Through this evening’s tide of faces unregistered, unrecognized, amid hurrying black shoes, furled umbrellas, the crowd descending like a single organism into the station’s airless heart, comes Shnya Yamazaki, his notebook clasped beneath his arm like the egg case of some modest but moderately successful marine species.” — All Tomorrow’s Parties

“The courier presses his forehead against layers of glass, argon, high-impact plastic.” — Virtual Light

“They set a Slashhound on Turner’s trail in New Delhi, slotted it to his pheromones and the color of his hair.” — Count Zero

“The sky above the Port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” — Neuromancer

“Five hours’ New York jet lag and Cayce Pollard wakes in Camden Town to the dire and ever-circling wolves of disrupted circadian rhythm.” — Pattern Recognition