afternoon musings

So, I now have an apartment in Fredericton. Well, I'm not in it yet but we're going in Monday to sign stuff and hand over money. It's a fairly spacious place, I think it will fit the ridiculously booked lifestyles that we lead.

I know that if I wanted to be environmentally friendly and give that Al Gore his wings I could buy e-books, or maybe even go big and shell out for a Kindle but I enjoy the texture of books, and I enjoy owning things so I just keep buying them. I'm in Chapters right now considering picking up Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, it's absence from my collection a serious black mark against my geek credibility.

I'm also thinking about picking up a book from the other side of the fence. If you enter Chapters from the parking lot instead of the mall, you pass buy a table filled with books debating spirituality. The new paperback edition of the God Delusion is there (which is suggested reading for anyone and I'll happily lend my copy to you folks) along with Letter to a Christian Nation and other atheist points of view, but I'm already on that side. So, I was thinking about picking up one of the books that defends Christianity and creationism from these arguments. You know, just to see how the other side thinks. And you can take that as a reaching out in understanding way or a Sun Tzu's know your enemy kind of way, though in truth it falls between the two.

I was thinking about books and printing things as I left the Super Store earlier today. I had deposited some money in to the bank machine and when you do that you don't get the option of not taking a receipt. So I threw it in the garbage and Al Gore cried and then I thought about killing trees and removing them as homes for little animals and then pulping them which pollutes water and the air and all that jazz, and I still think that books are worth it. At least it's a renewable resource, it could be worse if wrote stuff down on plastic. But mostly I was just thinking that being able to give untarnished information to others is worth pretty much anything to me. By untarnished I guess I meant to say immutable, as verbal discussions are bound to change the info in some way. And while I don't think anyone would argue that having life saving non-fiction like a list of poison symptoms and antidotes is a bad thing, I say that fiction, and even outright blatant lies pretending to be non-fiction are important enough to write down. Like Mein Kampf, one of the most dangerous volatile books ever written, is important to keep around so we understand just how easy it is subvert frightened or uneducated people with bigotry. The only problem I have with printed lies is that a lot of the time you can only sort them from truth looking back at them years later.

Of course these days that argument doesn't work for the justification of environmental damage and "but I like it" isn't an argument at all, so maybe I will save up for a kindle