Margaret Atwood's LongPen: Carbon Free Book Tours
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 12.14.06
George Monbiot should get one of these. Booker Prize winning author Margaret Atwood invented it: "As I was whizzing around the United States on yet another demented book tour, getting up at four in the morning to catch planes, doing two cities a day, eating the Pringle food object out of the mini-bar at night as I crawled around on the hotel room floor, too tired even to phone room service, I thought, 'There must be a better way of doing this." So she invented the Longpen. The author can talk to fans via video chat hookup and sign the book via the longpen- an internet-connected pantograph. The reader gets words with the author, a personalized note, and for a small fee, donated to charity, a copy of the video. No more flying and dying! ::Unotchit LongPen
How fascinating! I want to attend one of these. To think, she can excel in writing novels, short stories, and poetry, and then in her spare time, invent technology.... we should all be so cursed!
To think, she can excel in writing novels, short stories, and poetry, and then in her spare time, invent technology.... we should all be so cursed!
The reason that she can write and invent new technology is because she has spare time. Not the other way around. So many of us are forced into make-work in order to survive and then we don't have time for anything but consumption.
It's the excess consumption that is destroying our planet.