quote:

Sunday, April 06, 2003
posted 10:17 PM
GOOGLING THE DIG

"I knew they'd turn up on the net eventually,' writes my friend the Searchstring Sensei.

This is as close as anyone is ever going to get to finding footage. Really quite weird to see, for me in particular.

[Spoiler alert: If you haven't read PATTERN RECOGNITION, I suppose the images at the following link may constitute a spoiler. Albeit a deeply cryptic one. Personally, if I hadn't read PR, and saw these images, I'd probably decide to go ahead and read PR.]

http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&safe=off&q=+site:klad.hobby.ru+Focke+Wulf+

I recall someone here asking, recently, whether anything like The Dig actually exists. Searchstring Sensei provides the definitive answer.

quote:

Wednesday, April 09, 2003
posted 8:14 AM
I CAN"T BELIEVE I FORGOT TO THANK CHRIS STEIN

I hate putting together the "thanks" page at the back of a novel. I hate it because I know I'll forget to thank someone who provided something absolutely essential. I know I'll forget because I have to put that page together when I'm still reeling from having completed the manuscript, and am in full and quite headless flight from the very process of writing.

Well, I did it again. I did it bigtime, this time. Came to me in the middle of the night, last night, when I happened to wake and find myself thinking about that thread about the Russian "military archaeology" site that Searchstring Sensei recently Googled the stills from. How people were wondering whether Damien's Dig, in PR, has any basis in reality. "Silly people," I thought, sleepily, "What do they think I thanked Chris Stein for?"

Eyes shooting open in horror. *Did* I thank Chris Stein. Toss. Turn.

And, of course, I didn't. That's Chris Stein of Blondie, or so he's best known. Also Chris Stein the Japanese model-building otaku, ultra-specialist Japanese magazine afficionado and custom knife maven. Very high otaku-DNA factor, Chris has.

About the time I was starting what would become PR, Chris sent me an email describing, pretty much as you've come to know it, Damien's dig. The scene with the pilot of the excavated plane is imaginary, but the rest of it is worked up quite directly from Chris's brilliant description of this scene he'd discovered. A friend of his had been there, and seen it, and Chris was corresponding with him. Chris mentioned to me, in passing, how cool it would be to go there and shoot documentary video. His email made my ears ring, though in my non-linear way it took months to occur to me that the film I had absented Damien for was in fact Chris Stein's documentary.

Now I can only groan, and apologize. But this is *exactly* why I hate having to do the "thanks" page. Not only will I manage to leave someone out, but I'll manage to leave out the person whose passion, enthusiasm and descriptive powers managed in a single email to affect the entire course and meaning of the book!

Dang.

Though it makes me appreciate yet another advantage of having this website, as I can instantly go public with my apology and this citation.

Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Chris Stein: Aside from all that great music, he's given us...The Dig!

As to how I can manage to do these things... Remember that long early thread about drugs and creativity? Well, I really do write in an altered state. It's an altered state called "writing a book", and, let me tell you, it's seriously *chronic*.