I am a few pages into William Gibson's Spook Country, which is, as usual, rich with cultural references. Here's a bit of trivia on things appearing in it, as I did with
All Tomorrow's Parties watches:
- Ativan is a trade mark for Lorazepam, a quite usual, and old, anti-anxiety drug. It's also uses for abstinence syndrome symptoms. Milgrim, one of the characters, is addicted to it. As already mentioned in the Wikipedia article I point to, Rize, the other pills Brown gives to rize, is not exactly the same: it's actually a Clotiazepam. The drug Prison Break's Alex Mahone takes, is quite similar: Midazolam; it's also a Benzodiazepine
- Milgrim is able to read Volapuk encoding, an informal romanization of Russian, that is, a way of transcribing russian text using ASCII. It's not really related to the Volapük language, other than by name; a name which sounds funny in Russian
