Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

From today's Guardian: Michel Houllebecq on Lovecraft and the Cthulu mythos.

Few beings have ever been so impregnated, pierced to the core, by the conviction of the absolute futility of human aspiration. The universe is nothing but a furtive arrangement of elementary particles. A figure in transition toward chaos. That is what will finally prevail. The human race will disappear. Other races in turn will appear and disappear. The skies will be glacial and empty, traversed by the feeble light of half-dead stars. These too will disappear. Everything will disappear. And human actions are as free and as stripped of meaning as the unfettered movement of the elementary particles. Good, evil, morality, sentiments? Pure "Victorian fictions". All that exists is egotism. Cold, intact and radiant.

Wonderful stuff that pierces to the heart of why I read Lovecraft.

One of the triumphs of English wildlife conservation has been the reintroduction of the Red Kite to the edges of the Chiltern Hills.

It's always a pleasure to drive along the high stretch of the M40, between High Wycombe and the long descent to the Oxford plain, as you're always sure of a chance to see one or two of these beautiful birds. Tonight, however, things were very different. Instead of just one or two kites, the sky was full of them.

Thirty, maybe even forty, raptors swooping and swirling - occasionally dropping so low that you could see each individual feather. Tails twisted as they captured every last gust of the dying evening breeze, wings stretched out, the signature spread feathers silhouetted against the bright evening sky.

A lovely way to end the day.