DarrenBarefoot.com

The Perils of Procrastination.

What else is there to do when it's quarter to 4 in the morning, and you're stuck cram...er, studying for an exam that is to take place at 10AM? Why, construct a blog entry that is full of distracting links.

First of all, allow myself to introduce ... myself.

My name is Becky. I'm 26 years old, and I'm a terminal procrastinator. I'm also posing as a graduate student in Rhetoric and Communication at the University of Saskatchewan. What makes this even more interesting is that I call Savannah, Georgia my home.

Upon hearing where I'm originally from, the inevitable question that follows is "why are you in Saskatchewan, of all places?!" Good question. The five cent answer is that I wanted to get far away from Georgia, school tuition is way cheaper in Canada, and I wanted to truly experience biting -50 degree windchills.

So far, so good.

Alas, the stacks of notes and books on my desk beckon -- but here are the aforementioned random and distracting links:

Dictionary of Newfoundland English. There's over 5500 entries, from alley-coosh to zosweet. Think of it as a Newfie's OED.

You'll never guess what Keanu's band is named. I want a teeshirt.

Coke? Soda? Pop? A generic names for soft drinks map. I'm sad to admit I fall into the category of calling almost all carbonated drinks "Coke," while refusing to refer to them as "pop."

Just in case you're looking for a pilgrimage, check out the Spam museum. Do it for the love of Spam.

Paper faces: a popular pasttime in Korea -- and an interesting (while somewhat creepy) collection of (meta)pictures.

And because it's now after 4AM, I found the website of things I've pushed through toast extremely funny.

Bad writing, part deux

While we're talking about bad writing, I have a favour to ask of Darren's readers. I'm going to be developing and delivering a workshop on business writing for entrepreneurs, and I need fodder for the cannon.

Do you have any examples of absolutely hideous (or just moderately incompetent) writing in a business setting? You don't even have to tell me WHO wrote it, and you're free to deny, deny, deny if you wish. I will remove all identifying material before teaching the class, to protect the guilty.

If you have something truly juicy, you can send it to my "work" email address: sue at directis period ca.

I should clarify that it's bad business writing I'm looking for, not bad technical writing. There is plenty of both out there, but I'm talking about things like sales letters, business plans, marketing plans, business reports, etc.

On my own website, I extended an offer to provide a free edit of any business document in the future for anyone who sent me a bad business writing example in the next week. The same applies here, with the caveat that if I get too many responses, I just won't have time to help you. I do work, after all.

Waiting With Bated Breath

I often see 'bated breath' written as 'baited breath'. I can see how that happens: you hear the term, and the only word you know that sounds like 'bated' is 'baited'. It makes a certain amount of sense, too, imagining a person waiting with bait in his or her mouth for some form of prey to come by and wander in.

Of course, it's not 'baited' breath, but 'bated' breath, as in 'abated'. Merriam-Webster assures me that the word comes from Middle English. The term 'bated breath' means 'with restrained breath', a perfect description of the state in which you sit holding your breath listening intently for any sound.

It's also a good description of the state I'm in as I wait to see if another of the Guest Bloggers (we are a motley crue) breaks the ice and posts something. Anything... come on... Darren's only here for another day...

I guess I'll have to jump in. By way of introduction, my name is Dean Cochrane. I am currently a software developer, but am an aspiring (and as yet unpublished) writer. I, like probably ten percent of the people you meet, have a novel in the works. I am a semi-veteran blogger, and a genuine net veteran. I can remember using a beta version of Mosaic and thinking "Hey, this could really catch on!".

I don't remember where I came across a reference to Darren's blog, but I linked it and continue to read it because it's literate, wide-ranging, and generally interesting. Hopefully I can give a little back.

Oh, one other thing: my pet peeves, English-language-wise, are possessive its and the i before e rule.

Welcome Guest Bloggers

As it says at the top of the page, a number of veteran and noob bloggers have volunteered to post in my stead while I'm abroad. I fear that they may be so fascinating that I'll lose all my traffic when I return.

Ultimately, we decided to bring a laptop along for the trip. We actually ordered a 12" PowerBook, but Fedex has managed to lose it, so we'll probably end up bringing Julie's 15". I do hope to post occasionally, but it will depend upon Internet access. I'm not optimistic about Wifi on safari, but you never know.

My Impending Travels

As I've mentioned, this Friday I'm heading off for nearly a month in Ireland and South Africa. I won't be posting much between now and Friday, as I'm insanely busy and fighting a pitched battle against illness. The following is an itinerary for my travels, should you wonder where I'm going:

April 30: Depart Vancouver for Ireland (via London)
May 1 - 7: In Dublin and surrounding area
May 7: Depart Dublin for Johannesburg
May 8: Pretoria
May 9 - 12: On safari in Kruger National Park
May 13 - 14: On safari in private game reserve
May 15: Pretoria
May 16: Fly to Cape Town
May 16 - 20: Hermanus (near Cape Town)
May 21 - 22: Arniston
May 23 - 26: Cape Town
May 26: Fly home (in one massive flight to London and then Vancouver)

Hoax or Patriotism: Free Sex for Iraq-Bound Soldiers

Via BoingBoing, we learn of Operation Take One For The Country (safe for work, especially if you're in the US Army), an effort to provide soldiers heading to Iraq with free sex. Apparently OTOFTC women (organized into small 'battalions') go to bars and clubs frequented by military personnel, pick up those who are shipping out, and, you know, think of England.

OTOFTC is a movement of like-minded women (women predominantly as of right now) who have covertly organized into groups to frequent eating and drinking establishments near armed service bases where troops are preparing to ship out overseas, and take one for the country, so to speak. We are a virtual organization and have no official headquarters or charter. We believe US service men and women deserve our support and we are willing to make caring choices about making them happy.

This originally comes via Fleshbot (not particularly safe for work), who aptly remarks 'we have a slight issue with the name of the operation: wouldn't giving one for the country be more appropriate?'

UPDATE: BoingBoing has a further post on this subject, discussing this phenonmenon in a historical context. Apparently the practice reaches back at least as far as World War II, where these patriotic souls were known as khaki-wackies, victory girls, and good-time Charlottes.

This reminds me of a post-9/11 phenomenon, where-in firefighters apparently became the objects of affection for millions of female New Yorkers. Maybe OTOFTC is just an institutionalization (Eight syllables!) of this reward-heroes-with-sex approach? I wonder what US-hired mercenaries get? Maybe the government retains a special-ops battalion for them.

Or maybe it's all a hoax, and just an inventive way to sell some T-shirts. They're missing the boat with the T-shirts, incidentally. They should be military base-specific, and read something like 'I took one for the country at Fort Worth'. Currently, they're not nearly tartish enough to sell well.

New Trend: Reality, Uh, Reality in Your Town

Last month I wrote about Navigate the Streets, which looked like The Amazing Race on a local level. Now, via Alan, I read about The City Chase, brought to you by Bell Canada:

The City Chase is part urban obstacle course, part scavenger hunt. It's a one-day, real-life version of televisions Survivor, Fear Factor and The Amazing Race rolled into one. The 2004 City Chase series will be limited to the first 250 registered teams in each market.

The use of 'market' instead of 'city' or 'region' in that last sentence is no doubt illustrative of this game's true motives. At least Navigate the Streets was associated with Right to Play. The best this race can offer is, ick, the Toronto Sun. It costs $75 per person to enter, which is pretty steep, given that it's a brand-new idea.

I should have seen this trend coming--reality TV games on a local level. Everyone likes the shows so much, they want to play in the games. How long before we get a local version of, say, The Bachelor?

iTunes Store and Iceberg Journalism

Via Slashdot, I read this story about the one-year anniversary of the iTunes music store. The article is more or less a puff piece for Apple and other online music offerings, and fails to discuss the stores' apparent success in context. There's a highly visible pull-out table which propoounds the fact that, in March 2004, the iTunes store sold 4.7 million songs. That number looks impressive, and dwarfs the competition, but how impressive is it really?

In the past year, iTunes has sold a little over 50 million songs. That's equivalent to about 4.1 million CDs. In 2002, record companies in the US sold about 900 million CDs. iTunes, therefore accounts for roughly 0.5% of all music sold in the US. Add the rest of the world's CD sales, and it probably gets reduced to about 0.1%--barely a drop in the music industry's massive bucket.

This is an important fact that this article totally ignores. Iceberg journalism at its best. The story also fails to mention that CD sales are generally increasing.

I've said it before and I'm probably beginning to bore you, but I'll say it again: there's a better way than DRMtastic downloads.

Moose Tickler

Incidentally, I'm trying to propagate this term as gently-pejorative slang for a Canadian. It was invented by an Irish friend of mine, and I haven't used it for a while. When you go abroad, or meet foreigners here, encourage them to refer to you as a moose tickler. The image it generates in my head makes me laugh--as if it were some bizarre national sport, like cow-tipping.

I also welcome any grammarians' opinions on whether it should be one word or two.

A Digital Sun Dial

Yes, you read that correctly. From the over-written marketing literature at digialsundial.com:

In a singular blend of artistry and utility [not to mention irony], the digital sundial combines the ancient science of sundials and advances of modern technology with elegant simplicity. Like a digital clock, the digital sundial displays the current time using digits. In the true tradition of all sundials, the device is purely passive - it operates without electricity, and has no moving parts. Instead, the sunlight is cast through two cleverly designed masks in the shape of numbers that show the current time of day.

Unfortunately, the clock doesn't adjust for daylight savings and is runs consistently behind in winter. Mind you, in Vancouver, there's rarely enough sun to work with anyway. Still, an excellent gift for the geek in your family (disclaimer: though I may be the geek in your family, nobody buy this for me).

Noah's Ark Spotted, Again

Having a passing interest in Christian relics, I did some reading about Noah's Ark a few years ago. There have been a number of expeditions to Mount Ararat and the surrounding area, but it's actually a really tricky part of the world to access. Personally, I'm not a big believer in people 8000 years ago building an ocean-going vessel three stories high with a deck area equivalent to 20 standard college basketball courts.

I was interested, then, to see the satellite images that (ominous-sounding) Shamrock -- The Trinity Corporation claim 'unequivocally show a man-made object.' Unfortunately, none of the news reports actually show the satellite photos.

My skepticism didn't stop me from writing a play which involved somebody discovering Noah's Ark. Here's a bit:

PHILOMENA: Over here is where it starts. I melted a foot of ice before I found anything. Then–
MARGO: Wood.
PHILOMENA: It goes very deep, at an angle. At least 300 cubits, like the book says. The cave mouth must have been the entrance…or, rather, exit.
MARGO: (Looking up.) It’s enormous.
PHILOMENA: Were you expecting a canoe?
MARGO: I don’t know what I was expecting…it’s…there’s…
PHILOMENA: Try a full sentence now dear.
MARGO: I’m sorry, I just…
PHILOMENA: Yes, yes, hail Mary, full of grace…
MARGO: Do you know what this means?
PHILOMENA: I think I do.
MARGO: If I can prove that this, that what we’re inside is the remains of Noah’s Ark. it changes everything. It validates eight thousand years of flood myth study. The results of my tests could throw biology back three hundred years. If I find viable DNA of the original animals in here, it could refute Darwin.
PHILOMENA: Darwin?
MARGO: Yes.
PHILOMENA: Now, dear, a big ship full of animals is extraordinary, but we mustn’t get too big for our britches…
MARGO: This proves that the world was very different than we thought. We can’t be sure of anything anymore.
PHILOMENA: You’re not a Creationist, are you? (Pause.) It must be rather difficult to resolve Darwin and all that, then?
MARGO: Well, exactly...it just seemed so, I don’t know…
PHILOMENA: Accidental.
MARGO: Yes. The world just isn’t that chaotic.
PHILOMENA: God has a plan.
MARGO: That’s what I’ve always thought.

Interestingly, it's not just the Christians--most cultures of the world have a flood myth in their history or pre-history. One tantalizing explanation for this universal myth is offered by Walter Pitman and William B. F. Ryan, who wrote Noah's Flood. In it, they provide compelling geological and hydrological evidence of a very rapid expansion of the Mediterrenean Sea about 10,000 years ago. This, they argue, caused an exodus that forced many peoples away from the Sea in all directions and gave rise to the myth.

I Have Seen the Future...

Link Round-Up: Massive Link Spring Cleaning

Here are a bunch of links to sundry things that I've meant to mention, but haven't found a meaningful way to do say.

• Mona Lisa getting kind of warped.
• Mark Burnett, the man behind the reality television curtain and inventor of the best reality TV show ever, EcoChallenge.
• New York street art.
• The URL says it all: InvestInMyBreast.com. In the pathetic tradition of SaveKaryn.com and GiveBoobs.com. Technically safe for work, but it feels kind of porny. What struck me is how many of these women wanted to go from 36C to 36D or 36DD. I'm a small-to-medium-breast man myself, but I can see a lot more value in going from A to B than C to D. But, then, I don't have them, so what do I know?
• Via Slashdot, we find that occasional universities make meaningful advancments to help all of humankind. I give you Koolio, the beer-delivering robot fridge.
• This is great weblog model--half the page for raves, and half for rants.
• Ultimate season is upon us, and frisbee is apparently the bloodstream of the universe. Who knew?
• Via Alan, we find the Premiership Shirt Hall of Shame. I mean, for the love of all that's sacred, look at Millwall. This reminded me of some of Ireland's Gaelic Games league jerseys, which are kinda gay (c'mon lads, purple and yellow?). I'd show you more, but the GAA site is deeply broken.
• Classic rock trivia. Did you know that Chuck Berry holds a degree in cosmetology? I went off to verify if Mr. Berry was still alive (as it turns out, he's still going strong at 78). The first place I thought to look was Find a Grave.
• Is 'We Built This City' really the worst song ever?
• This guy draws money.
• Eleven essential D & D office supplies. Ah, if only I had a #8 and a #1. That'd be better than my lousy -2 Cursed Shield of Idiocy.
• What's this thing for?
• 50 practical tips for the prosperous prostitute. You have to scroll down a little bit.
• Are you American and have never voted before? Why, you're a voter virgin.
• Via Genia, we find this nifty, time-sucking Bush and Rice shoot-out game.

Great Canadian Song Contest - The Finalists

I'm one of the judges in Dave Pollard's Great Canadian Song Contest. I've already discussed my original submissions and the 76 possible nominees. Along with three other judges, I listened to and ranked the 76 songs on a scale of 0 for lousy and 3 for great. Dave tabulated those rankings and came up with a list of 21 finalists, which we have to sort in order from most favourite to least favourite. At the risk of starting a massive, flaming debate, here are my rankings:

1. Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, The - Gordon Lightfoot
2. Real Canadian Girl, A - Stompin' Tom Connors
3. Northwest Passage, The - Stan Rogers
4. Wheat Kings - Tragically Hip
5. Case of You, A - Joni Mitchell
6. Helpless - Neil Young
7. Log Driver’s Waltz - Wade Hemsworth
8. Four Strong Winds - Ian Tyson (Ian & Sylvia)
9. Acadian Driftwood - The Band
10. Canadian Railroad Trilogy - Gordon Lightfoot
11. C’est l’Hiver Demain - Robert Charlebois
12. Hillcrest Mine - James Keelaghan
13. Lukey’s Boat - Traditional (Great Big Sea)
14. Far Too Canadian - Spirit of the West
15. Bord de la Fontaine, Au - Traditional (Le Vent du Nord)
16. Crawl, The - Spirit of the West
17. It’s Hockey Night in Canada - Lynn Miles
18. Ziguezon, La - Traditional (La Bottine Souriante)
19. Barrett’s Privateers - Stan Rogers
20. Mon Pays (C'est l'Hiver) - Gilles Vigneault
21. Last Saskatchewan Pirate, The - Arrogant Worms

A Very Personal Photoshop Contest

Anatomy of an Album

The Cowboy Junkies have a new album coming out in June called One Soul Now. Because I've been a massive fanboy for 15 years, I've already ordered my copy. Along with it, the Junkies are offering a CD-ROM (I know, how retro) called The Anatomy of an Album:

The CD-ROM takes you “behind the scenes” of the writing and recording of each song on the new CD. Anatomy Of An Album includes photos, lyric drafts, commentary and over 90 minutes of music (demos, songwriting sketches, etc.). It can only be purchased in North America through our website and we think it's pretty darn cool.

You can download a sample section, and for the dedicated fan, it looks pretty cool. The sample shows how a song called 'From Hunting Ground to City' evolves from a demo in 1996 to finding its way onto the album. Lyric and music sheets are also included. It's a little hokey, but the Junkies have always been musicians interested in the creative process, so it's a natural fit. Also, they're natural archivists--they have extensive online tour diaries, so this sort of project is no surprise.

A Very Controversial Photo

As reported by Plastic, the US military is doing its best to prevent photography of the flag-cloaked caskets of Americans killed in Iraq being published. Apparently they pressured the Seattle Times to fire a reporter a Kuwait-based cargo worker after she took such a photo that ran on the front page of the Sunday edition. This tactic isn't suprising, as similar coverage during the Vietnam War significantly influenced public opinion. I obtained the following photo via Sean Bonner.

It's a harrowing photo. War is an awful thing, and the politics of this one make this image all the more tragic. What makes the photo exceptional is the delicacy and care with which the soldiers appear to be treating their fallen comrades. I know this image is being wielded as a metaphor and a political tool, but, to me, it's a much more intimate than that. To me, it's a photo about brotherhood.

Imagine Portaging with Those Things

The University of Missouri concrete canoe team is going to regionals.

Concrete canoes stay afloat just as steel barges do, by displacing more than their weight in water. To further lighten their craft, teams make concrete using powder-like glass particles instead of rock or gravel. This year, the team set the boat's thickness at one half inch. "People think Styrofoam is the only thing that floats," said project manager Tim Riechers as he got set for a weekend of presentations and races in Lincoln, Neb.

Who knew? This sport seems to rival golf in terms of being designed to frustrate, but each to his or her own. Here are some photos from the University of Michigan team (cross-country rivals, perhaps?) building their canoe and an article from the magazine for canoe afficianados, Paddler.

Party Photos

Steam Boy Cometh

Via BoingBoing, we learn about Steam Boy, the new film from Japanese anime maestro Katsuhiro Otomo. Though I grew up addicted to Robotech, I'm pretty ambivalent about anime. Like any cinematic style, it can be awful or great. I did see Spirited Away, which was deeply surreal and quite wonderful.

What's interesting to me about anime is its evolution. That is, unlike most North American narrative art forms, it's not evolving toward reality. If you check out the trailer for Steam Boy, it seems to have the same quality as something done 20 or 30 years ago. Specifically, I refer to the sort of visual dissonance between the foreground and the background.

Can anybody recommend a good book on the history and art of anime? I'm looking for a survey or primer--something that will help me understand the conventions of the medium.

Large Duck Row

In a previous item about bird (the winged type) pictures, Winston kindly commented and requested a larger version of the duck row photo. Here you go, in three super-sizes:

• Large
• Huge
• Wallpaper -- not great, because it's really a landscape photo

Recording Everything, Ever

A while back, I had an idea for a one-person, near-future play. In this future, babies are fitted with tiny cameras (somewhere not visible--don't ask me for details) and an embedded storage device. From birth, they record and can access everything they see, for their entire lives. Their entire life experience is recorded in the first person. Later, they can download the data and view it on a TV (or display wall or 3-D display or whatever techno-gizmo is hip). This isn't an original idea, but I thought it might make an engaging Fringe show.

The play would include one or more displays or screens, which would allow the peformer and the audience to review incidents in his life relevant to the plot. It'd be a meditation on memory, technology and how the two mix, blah, blah, blah. Suffice it say, I haven't gotten around to writing it.

I was interested to read about HP Labs' experiments with always-on cameras that essentially duplicate my premise. It's an interesting article, but it seems to disregard the central questions--in a Heisenbergian way, how does knowing we're recording everything change us? How does it affect our memory? Would we remember anything at all with our brains? How would you test children when they've essentially got everything 'memorized'? Would it eliminate falsehood and deception from our society?

BC Blogging Conference Follow-Up

A few weeks ago, I ran an ad-hoc survey about the possibility of having a blogging conference here in BC. We received 96 responses, which I thought was pretty good. You can view the results here. I'm hosting them locally because they expire after a month on (the otherwise excellent) CreateSurvey.com and I wanted to excise the email addresses to protect people's privacy.

I'm not going to offer a detailed analysis of the results. They were encouraging enough to go forward, and so I've met with a few people (including Boris and Roland and Jodie) to discuss what form the conference should take, who should keynote, when and where it should occur, what (if anything) it should cost, and so on. We haven't arrived at any concrete decisions yet, except to say that whatever shape the event takes, it won't occur before September at the earliest, and may be much later than that.

Our plan is to create a draft outline, and then run it by a few people who have extensive experience running conferences. That should be a reality check, and should give us a good basis to move forward. The next step will probably be to email everyone who supplied their email addresses via the survey with the plan, and open things up for a more public discussion. If you'd like to be part of this dicussion, but didn't include your email address on the list, you can just make a comment below or send me an email. Do likewise if you'd like to be notified with further developments about the conference.

After that, if all goes well, we'll have an official public launch with marketing and a Web site and the like. I know that's not much information, but it's early days.

OMG i h8 r pm! ha ha :-D

Earlier this week, I read about a new initiative to attract young voters to the political process. Through a program called Youth Text 2004, Canadian cellphone users can communicate with four of Canada's largest parties via text message. The parties will reply within 48 hours and, in theory, open a dialogue with otherwise ambivalent young Canadians.

While voter turn-out among young Canadians is awful, this idea is deeply misguided. In an era of soundbyte politics, we're actually encouraging Canada's young people to think only in 100 characters or less? Do the parties really think they'll be able to convert the young electorate using SMS?

However, I had to try it out. On Monday at 14:00 PST, I sent out two messages to each of the four participating parties. The questions were 'What is your party leader's position on legalization of pot?' and '[Party leader] - boxers or briefs?' What follows are the responses I got, entered exactly as I received them (errors and all):

A brief analysis:

• Greens: They reflect their hipness and youth awareness with the timely reply and lack of capitalization. They also tried to extend the dialogue to other subjects. Some points for their lame attempt at a humourous reply to the second question.
• Liberals: The quote from Martin is almost dadaist in its obtuseness. The 'we did not understand...' message appears to be the standard reply for whack-jobs and inappropriate questions.
• NDP: They offered a terse and cogent reply that was capitalized and punctuated correctly (not sure if that's good or bad in the world of texting). Extra points for their response to the underwear issue.
• Conservatives: As if we need any more verification that this is an old boys' party. Not only did they not answer either of my questions, but they sent the same reply five times, followed by a blank message.

Pictures of Birds

In preparation for going on safari in South Africa, I wanted to practice with the zoom lens (70 - 210mm) on Julie's all-manual Pentax K-1000 camera. We went out to the George C. Reifel Migratory Bird Sanctuary. It's 300 hectares of managed wetlands south of Vancouver, with plenty of trails and some gorgeous views. It's unusual terrain for the Lower Mainland, and has been host to over 250 species of birds. I'm no ornithology expert, but it's a great place to walk around and, you know, look at birds.

The photos are here. They're not in the same class (they're not even in the same school) as Mr. vanderWoning, but I was pleased to even get animals roughly in focus at distance. The zoom lens permitted me to shoot this sandcrane while still heeding this sign's warning. I made a couple into lousy wallpapers as well.

Friends in Advertising

I recently referenced my friend Chezlene, who sent along that email joke. As I mentioned, she's an actor. She has tiny hands, so she does a lot of hand acting for toys and such (that's how I first learned about Flavas from Mattel). She acts with the rest of her body, too, though.

Recently, she was in this commercial for CareerBuilder.com, and it got chosen as a best spot of the month by AdWeek. The commercial aired on American stations earlier this year, but you can see it here in WMV format or Quicktime. As commercials go, it's relativing amusing. And Chez plays the bank-teller-at-a-personal-crossroads very convincingly.

Business Card Data Extraction

Here's a service I want. Basically, it's RipDigital for business cards. I want to be able to put the 200 business cards I've collected over the past couple of years into an envelope and send them off to a company. This company will extract the data from the business cards and make it available to me in several formats (CSV file, Outlook contacts, etc). For bonus points, they'd have a Web interface that shows me a scan of each card (to jog my memory) and lets me annotate each contact with additional information.

I know that there are many business card scanners, but I have two problems with them. One, optical character recognition continues to disappoint me. There are always messy errors. Two, I just can't be bothered. I'd be happy to pay for this service instead of scanning and tweaking all this data myself. Surely with third-world out-sourcing this service could be offered at an affordable price.

This service might already exist. I did a quick run through Google, and came up empty.

Link Round-Up: Five Wired Articles

I had a couple of Wired articles that I wanted to reference, so I've fattened the list up to five:

• Free sex through text messaging. Those wacky Brits.
• Interesting article about weblogs--"Readers are hungry for bias."
• Convert your Vaio to an iBook.
• South Africa is slowly but surely reversing its brain drain.
• This is a nifty newsletter I get every week from the Wired Gadget Lab. I highly recommend it.

No Man's Land

I'm not sure how I missed this movie. I probably fell victim to the cinematic international date line that I crossed when I moved to Ireland in 2001. Movies are released on radically different schedules in different parts of the world. Hollywood films would usually take 2-3 months--with the exception of the simultaneously-globally-released block-busters--to get across the water. Films made in Europe are the reverse, opening months or even years later in North America.

Regardless, I caught a good portion of No Man's Land on one of our crappy movie channels this evening. It looked like a fantastic film. It seemed to be a gritty examination of the war in Bosnia and an indictment of war reporting. Roger Ebert puts it well when he says 'No Man's Land has been compared to Catch-22, MASH and Waiting for Godot--which means, I suppose, that it contains equal parts of irony and futility.' Among many fine performances from the Bosnian and Croatian actors, there's Simon Callow playing a very different role from his flaming Scotman in Four Weddings and a Funeral.

The film gets an 88 from Metacritic, which is high praise indeed. That puts it at #91 on their all-time list. I don't mean to sound like Dick Clark with all the numbers, but everyone seems to agree that it's a quality picture.

Email Joke of the Year

As a rule, I disdain email jokes. They're generally stupid. Everyone who knows me knows this about me, or would conclude this about me. So, I never get any email jokes (this is not an invitation to send me email jokes).

However, Julie was giggling extensively at this joke that our friend Chezlene (actor and hand model) sent her. I read it, and laughed out loud. What are you going to do? I did a quick Google search, and it doesn't seem to have spread everywhere yet, so I include it below. Apologies if everyone has already seen it.

I hate email hoax warnings, but this one is important!!!!

Please send this to everyone on your email list.

If a man comes to your front door and says he is conducting a survey And asks you to show him your bum, do not show him your bum.

This is a scam. He only wants to see your bum.

I wish I'd got this yesterday. I feel so stupid and cheap.

I did another Google search, and found that there are a number of variations.

Googlewhacking the Afternoon Away

I was actually looking for Google Fight (to determine which of these terms is more popular), but mixed it up with Googlewhack. I'd kind of forgotten about this fun little site, where you endeavour to find two words that will return exactly one result from Google. As the Web gets bigger, and Google indexes more formats, this is getting trickier.

I'm pleased to report that I haven't lost my touch, though, and scored a successful Googlewhack with bantustan pectoral.

Pick a Play, Any Play

You wouldn't think it, but one of the biggest challenges for small and medium-sized theatre companies is play selection. In choosing plays, they have to consider:

1. Artistic merit
2. Marketability
3. Cast size and gender - there are inevitably five women for every man at auditions
4. Availability - will the playwright grant permission to produce the work?
5. Cost - can the company afford the rights to the play?

Unfortunately, unless your artistic director et al are very well-read, it's often difficult to find plays that satisfy the company's demands in all of these categories. Usually either #1 or #2 are sacrificed to satisfy #3 through #5. Enter playdatabase.com, which extends your AD's brain. You can search on various factors, including number and gender of players, running time, genre, etc. I'm a little skeptical about the search capabilities, though. I entered a query that I was sure would return, among others, Edward Albee's The Zoo Story. Despite that play being in the database, it didn't return that result.

Regardless, they claim to have indexed 12498 plays, which is really impressive. They have most of the plays of George F. Walker (they have the obscure and obtuse Bagdad Saloon but not the more recent and comprehensible Suburban Motel), and several of Sean Dixon's plays.

More German Animals

Margaret Marks makes reference to the German boar-cam I mentioned earlier in the week. She points out that 'there are a number of webcams watching storks’ nests in Germany too, for instance, storchennest.de'.

What a creative name for your stork nest cam site: StockNest.de. Regardless, this one looks and sounds like it's near a major road, as a yield sign can be spotted behind the massive nest (or else the sign is really small) and you can hear the sound of passing BMWs, Audis and Trabants. I don't see any storks, but I've only been watching for 68 seconds.

Science Questions and Answers

Mary-Ev writes to offer this page of scientific arcana from the New Scientist. There's a veritable treasure trove of concepts explained, mysteries solved and enigmas unenigmized here. For example, there's that peculiar phenomenon that one experiences after eating asparagus:

A number of different sulphurous compounds have been implicated, though one of the most thorough investigations indicates that the effect may be caused by a cocktail which includes methanethiol, dimethyl sulphide, dimethyl disulphide, bis(methylthio)methane, dimethyl sulphoxide and dimethyl sulphone.

Thank goodness that's cleared up (I can hear my biochemist sister typing up an explanation already).

Reminder de Soiree

Indiana Jones is Having a Garage Sale

Do You Live in BC and Have Broadband Access?

If so, go to this page and click the Start button to test your connection speed. Don't use the Web or check email while the test is going on. Once it finishes, come back here and report what service you're using (Telus, Shaw, etc), where you're located and what up/down speeds you got.

My local ISP claims to provide a connection '8-15 times faster than cable or ADSL'. I'm not buying it, but I need a data set to offer a meaningful complaint. So, if you've got a minute, test your connection and report back.

UPDATE: Thanks to everybody who has provided their stats. That'll be plenty. My current speed is shamefully slow--190 kbps down and about 100 kbps up. So, despite what Donna says about Novus (see comments), there's either something wrong with my connection or with their service.

Link Round-Up: Wackiness

Just some early-week wackiness, from a broad range of sources:

• Via Fark, we learn that April 15 was National High-Five Day. I had no idea. My sadness at missing the big day was somewhat ameliorated by this fine (if offensive in to just about everyone) Photoshop contest.
• Tintin gets his own coin. Hey EU, ease up on the crack.
• From the wonderful FOUND Magazine, we get the The FOUND Polaroid Project. Don't miss their Find of the Week.
• This is an old piece, but this English teacher in Japan had his students make English captions for a comic strip. Hilarity ensued, Tokyo-style.
• Gas signs of the world, unite.
• In a similar vein (and nearly deserving of an entry to itself), it's the world's largest roadside attractions. Don't miss this enormous Johnson, this huge rod or the big banana.
• Silly Flashy Flashness.
• The Hokey Pokey by Bill Shakespeare. I'm slightly ashamed to say that the final line made me laugh out-loud.

10Socks Update

Mimi writes to enquire how my numbered socks are working out. Well very, thank you, though I haven't actually worked my way through all of the numbered pairs yet. As I work from home, I don't really need a pair of dress socks every day, and have too many other socks to choose from.

I've already done laundry, though, and failed to include both #8's in the load (I started with pair #10). So, currently I've got one clean #8 and, presumably, one dirty #8 in the laundry basket.

I'm very happy with the quality of the socks--they fit snugly and are reinforced in all the right places. I'd definitely recommend them.

From Dawn til Dusk at the Gap

Via BoingBoing, we find this entertaining entry about somebody who meets Quentin Tarantino in a mall:

“That’s a dynamite purse. Where’d you get it?” As I turned to respond to the question and the little bells in my head went off alerting me to the fact that the voice I heard sounded just like Quentin…oh my God I would recognize that big bell pepper of a head anywhere…Tarantino! My pink vinyl purse with two black cats joined at the tail often generates conversation, had I known that the man who brought me Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction would engage me in conversation I would have paid 10 times the price.

Later, they go to some place called Crate and Barrel (turns out it's a kind of Pottery Barn) and the Gap to find a “not too faggy polo shirt”.

Clever Cactus

On this page, I've been fairly skeptical about social software. My experience has been this--the more specific the focus, the more useful the application. So, I like LinkedIn--used for business connections--more than Friendster, Orkut and the like. Through an Irish colleague, I learned about Clever Cactus, social software for creating private file-sharing networks.

This prospect appeals to me. I have friends whose musical tastes I admire, for example, so I'd be keen to see what they had on their machine. I've got 5266 songs on mine, and sundry other fascinating files, and would be happy to share the bounty with my friends and colleagues. I can't imagine that they've built this system with, you know, copyright infringement in mind, but what the heck? It's only among friends, right?

Clever Cactus has adopted the Orkut invite-only model of populating their online community. Until I actually assemble some people with some content, it ain't much use. If you're interested in signing up, and particularly if you've got, you know, files to share (wanna buy a watch?), drop me an email or post a comment.

Incidentally, Clever Cactus's CTO has a weblog.

100 Greatest Movie Characters of All Time

Empty Prayer, Empty Mouths, Talk About the Passion

Yesterday I finally got around to seeing The Passion of the Christ. I've delayed this long because, like a dentist appointment, while I knew it would be good for me, I scorned putting myself through the experience. This is often the case with challenging movies--I know I should see them, but it's often hard to motivate myself. Yesterday, I eschewed the pack of Jolly Ranchers that was The Girl Next Door and attended Mr. Gibson's latest epic.

I paid for my ticket at one of those self-service machines that so many people seem to ignore like a leper. I was amused to note that, when I choose The Passion, the screen displayed the film's rating: R. This film, however, had a non-standard addition to the usual 'extreme violence, torture' warning. It read 'may be offensive to the religious'. It's the first time I've seen this particular caveat. Surely this isn't the first film to meet those requirements?

If I put aside the religious context of the film, and evaluate The Passion based on my standard criteria for feature films, it falls dreadfully short:

• Plot: The central dramatic question--will Jesus be crucified?--is answered far too early. There are no reversals or twists in the story, and the film lacks suspense.
• Character Development: None of the characters change in the course of the film. In fact, we're barely given any information about them at all.
• Acting: While the performances are generally strong, they're singular. James Caviezel suffers. Monica Bellucci and Maia Morgenstern mourn. Only the actors playing the more minor roles--Simon, Pilate, Peter get to display much range.
• Theme: The film's morality is muddy at best. Without more information about the context of Jesus's suffering and the sins of humanity, it's unclear what the movie's central message is.

In truth, though, The Passion is more of a docudrama. Yet, even in this it only preaches to the choir. Even a dramatization needs to offer a backstory, introduce the personalities and elucidate confusing passages. If you hadn't grown up in the western world and were totally unfamiliar with the Bible, what would you make of Gibson's Last Supper flashback? It's brief and obtuse--should Peter and the others eat Jesus? What does it mean when he says the bread is his body? I know the answers to these questions, but most of the world doesn't.

Gibson has been very fond of espousing his loyalty to an accurate depiction of the Gospels. After seeing the films, I went back and read the Gospels to compare. Regarding Jesus's final day, he does follow the scriptures carefully. However, as with any adaptation, his interpretation is far from literal. In the film, there is a gory scene of at least 10 minutes in which Jesus is whipped and beaten by the Roman soldiers. This beating is referenced in only two of the four Gospels, and occupies a single sentence in each. In John, "Then Pilate took Jesus and scourged him" and in Matthew, "and having scourged Jesus, he delivered him to be crucified". Gibson takes a minor note of this Bible story and turns it into a lengthy sequence that borders on the pornographic. In another instance, Gibons seems to ignore the fact that at least two of the Gospels say that when Jesus is taken to Herod, the king sends him away 'arraying him in gorgeous apparel'.

I might also add that despite his/her (it's very ambiguous) appearance throughout the movie, Satan isn't anywhere to be seen in Jesus's final day as a man. Gibson also takes license with the brief flashback sequences. Why does he choose to show the ones he does, and not others? If his goal is to depict Jesus's suffering, why do we see him teaching or breaking bread with his disciples? Personally, those were the parts of the film that interested me most--the main action was pretty predictable.

I compare this movie with another, more-accessable spiritual docudrama: Martin Scorsese's Kundun. It has its own problems, but it does a much better job of explaining its central elements--the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama, the precepts of Buddhism, the invasion of Tibet. In fact, Gibson doesn't even bother to explain what's going on--he just assumes everybody knows who this Jesus guy is, who those two women called Mary are, and wades--knee-deep in Jesus's blood--on through.

Roger Ebert is referring to Kundun, but his words are even more applicable to The Passion: [the film is] 'an act of devotion, an act even of spiritual desperation, flung into the eyes of 20th century materialism'.

It's unfortunate that Gibson's film is only for the believers. For those people, I'm not surprised that the film is a deeply spiritual experience. For the rest of us, however, it asks far too much.

[UPDATE] Via Roger Ebert's review of the film, I found these two (note his comment on The Magdalene Sisters) insightful commentaries. I don't entirely agree with them, but the author is obviously very well-read and makes articulate arguments.

The Future of Tech Docs?

Everything You Wanted to Know About Digital Photography

But were afraid to ask. In a comment on this item, Richard cites this page, which is a remarkably-exhaustive discussion of all things digital. Among other things, he's tried out a ton of online printers. I hope my step-mother is reading this--I regularly fail to help her resolve her digital photography issues, and this page ought to help. This is from a column I wrote a while back:

Despite my explicit and lengthy instructions about how to email digital photos, my step-mother often contacts me for assistance. It’s a good thing she does. The last time she sent me a photo of my newborn nephew, it was ridiculously large. Miles’s bald head filled my 19” monitor. He had a little eye-booger which, because of its scale, is burned into my mind for eternity.

iTunes and Playfair

A couple of weeks ago, Slashdot mentioned Playfair, an application that enables you to crack music files bought from the iTunes music store (still not availabe in Canada, I might add). Essentially these files have digital rights management (DRM) associated with them that restrict how you can use them. In truth, Apple's DRM is better than anybody else's, but a polite taxman is still a taxman, so to speak.

After some legal posturing, Playfair was offshored (ah, the irony) to India, where Apple's lawyers continue to hound it. Discussions are ongoing on Slashdot, and I added the following brief to the noise, arguing against buying music from Apple:

Let me quote Cory Doctorow here, who is fond of saying:

No consumer ever woke up in the morning and said "you know, I want to do less with my music today".

For me, it's the principle of the thing. If you look at the last hundred and fifty years of technological development, copyright regularly gets broken. It's happened again with peer-to-peer file sharing networks.

DRM represents and maintains the status quo. Artists still get shafted while studios make more profit and we get less control over the music we 'own'. Furthermore, it endorses instead of punishing an industry that refuses, again and again, to embrace technological change. Alternatives like voluntary collective licensing of music file sharing offer a way forward.

In my view, buying from the iTunes store is a tacit approval of the music industry and its appalling treatment of its consumers over the past five years. Me, I'm waiting for a paradigm shift.

A Klingon to December Wedding

I found these photos from a do-it-yourself Klingon wedding via this entertaining Fark Photoshop contest (my favourites are here and here).

Isn't this the sort of thing that these people are going to regret in 10 or 15 years? I mean, I don't have many of the hobbies and interests that I had 10 years ago. Maybe they won't be hardcore Trekkies in 2014. They might not be so keen on the wedding-with-bat'leth-and-daqtagh then. In short, I advise staying away from the extreme theme weddings.

Dye Sublimation on Your Desk

As you know, most home colour printers use inkjet technology. Essentially, this sometimes messy screening process involves shooting tiny dots of ink at a piece of paper. There's a superior approach to colour printing called dye sublimation. Basically, it involves using a heating element to heat dye impregnated in a ribbon to over 350 degrees, at which point it turns into a gas and migrates into the surface of the specially coated photo paper. Temperature controls how much dye transfers at any point on the paper. One critical aspect of this approach is that the dots on the page can be of variable sizes.

Until now, the cost of dye sub has been restricted to professional printers and photo developers. I read today, via Engadget, about the HiTi 730PS. It's a dye sub printer for the home, capable of printing images up to 6 x 8 inches. The prints cost about 40 cents each, and the printer starts at US $368. I haven't actually seen these printers in action, but apparently they offer a vastly superior print quality for a decent price. The printer also includes an LCD display, so that you don't have to download your images to your computer before printing.

I Have a Massive Head

Today, my Indiana Jones-esque Filson Packer Hat arrived. This is the second one I've owned, and they're excellent for hiking and walking of all sorts. They wear in nicely and are extremely durable. I wore the first one for several years, but ultimately gave up on it because it hurt my head.

See, my brother and I have very large heads. I don't know why, but it just worked out that way. So, despite my local outdoors store stocking a broad range of these hats, I had to special order an XXL. I'm kind of tall, but in most other respects (keep your dirty jokes to yourself, thank you) I'm within regular human parameters. I'm like Calvin, sans talking tiger. So you ask yourself, why such a big head (obscure Saturday Night Live reference there--Rich Hall doing David Byrne)?

Link Round-Up: Gadgets, Gimmicks and Technical Oddities

Stories about technological goodies.

• What's in Dan Gilmour's gadget bag? His endorsement of the Treo 600 has made me seriously consider buying a PDA/phone combo again.
• A networked clipboard? Sounds kind of chaotic to me. You never know, though--it's often these wacky ideas that succeed on a massive scale.
• Read my forehead and buy a new car.
• Three tech toys that you shouldn't buy.
• Finally, after years of mentally recording my weight, the USB-equipped scale. Now I can free up valuable space in my brain for more episodes of Alias.
• Get a penthouse view for cheap.
• Jetsons, here we come. Though, as the article states, I want to see it fly higher than six or eight feet off the ground.
• This is some fine lateral thinking: free CDs with your cup of cola. Presumably you always have to order the extra-large, so everybody wins.
• The smell cannon. Enough said.

Canadian Government Gets Litigious With BlogsCanada

BlogsCanada, a popular directory of more than 7,700 Canadian blogs, has received a Cease and Desist letter from the Canadian government for trademark and copyright infringement. While the site does spoof the style and formatting of the Government of Canada site, the first words on every page are "Definitely NOT the Government of Canada". You can read BlogsCanada's press release, view screenshots and see the letter. This is reminiscent of the PaulMartinTime.ca issue previously discussed on Slashdot, and reflects the ruling party's increasingly hard line on digital rights issues.

Ironically, I'm more conversant with American copyright law than Canadian. Still, doesn't this fall under "fair use" for parody and satire? Alternately, I was under the impression that our government wasn't legally able to hold copyrights or trademarks. Clearly, I was wrong.

Regardless, in light of the Liberal Party's recent behaviour and with an election on the horizon, this is the wrong time to be going after citizen-journalists. In practical terms, no one is going to confuse BlogsCanada with the government's actual site. More importantly, how is the government going to benefit from convincing Jim Elve to change his site? The satisfaction of a job well done?

James Bow has more (and more articulate) things to say on this subject, or here's a whole host of other people with similar views.

Lost? Photo Recognize Yourself to Foundness

A couple of weeks back, I mentioned an idea about making video games adaptable to any urban environment. As a sort of footnote, I discussed another application:

Imagine being lost in a foreign city, taking a digital photo and plugging it into the PalmPilot. Software compares your photo to the city database, and tells you not only what corner you're on, but what direction you're facing.

As Slashdot reports, two researchers at the University of Cambridge are way ahead of me:

Roberto Cipolla and Duncan Robertson have developed a program that can match a photograph of a building to a database of images. The database contains a three-dimensional representation of the real-life street, so the software can work out where the user is standing to within one metre.

Never be lost again. Now, if we could just extend this to the whole planet. Of course, it'd be trickier in the wilderness, what with all of that stuff that grows, dies and falls over. Of course, as one Slashdotter puts it, this sounds like a solution in search of a problem. We've already got GPS devices that can find you. Mind you, if your cell phone isn't GPS-equipped (and whose is?), then this means one less device to carry around.

Other Yous

I'm going to try to start a meme. It's called Other Yous, and it works like this: You ego-surf on Google to find other people with your full name. Then, based on the results, you compose profiles of the other people on the planet who share your name.

For example, my wife is:

• The "Pets" columnist for the Sunday New York Post
• The third girl in Haverhill High history to score 1,000 points. She went on to play college ball, becoming an all-conference guard at the University of South Carolina. She's apparently got a heck of a three-point shot.
• An office assistant at the Chamber of Commerce in Elk Grove, California (also, coincidentally, the home of the Apple head office).
• The owner of the Lake Shelbyville Sports and Fitness Center and has a son named Kyle (oddly, my middle name) in Shelbyville, Illinois.

Why haven't I done this for me? Well, Other Yous only works for names that are somewhat common. If you're John Smith or Darren Barefoot, you're kind of out of luck. The former offers too much to choose from, and the latter too little. It's also more difficult if you'd had a lengthy or popular online life. For example, I bet Tim Bray or Robert Scoble have a hard time sifting through their results for the other Tim Brays and Robert Scobles of the world. My friend Hugh Grant would have a related problem.

Go forth and collect meaningful data about the other yous on the planet. Tell your friends.

Pig Brother

Lernen Sie unsere heimischen Wildtiere näher kennen und nehmen Sie live an spektakulären Naturereignissen teil!

CNN reports that a German Web site dubbed Pig Brother has attracted more than a million visitors in under two weeks with its live Webcam coverage of a family of wild boar. Their server must be very resilient.

I watched and listened for a few minutes tonight, which is tomorrow morning in German boar time. I didn't see any pigs, but I did hear them. At least I think I heard them--part of me suspects that the audio is pre-recorded and played in a loop. It's probably not, but I've played enough video games to have recognize the same atmospheric audio track over and over again. Don't forget to take a Schnappschuss like I have.

My Little Babushka

Here's a strange story out of Russia. The Russian pageant coordinators held an Internet vote to choose the Russia entrant for the Miss Universe contest. Internet votes being as they are, several groups (including anti-globalisationists such as stopbarbie.org.ru) hijacked the vote and elected a normal-looking woman:

With her generous form Alyona Pisklova is an unlikely poster girl for Russia, a country which prides itself on its rather skeletal Slavic body. But she became the runaway favourite to enter the Miss Universe contest when it was decided to drop the traditional selection jury and rely on internet voting.

Apparently she was 5'2" and 130lbs. Yet, there's a final twist that reeks of conspiracy. It turns out that Ms. Pisklova is only 15, too young to participate in the pageant. I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that this is just spin from the pageant organizers, who have quickly come to understand the shortcomings of Internet voting. Weren't they paying attention to the Internet vote on gay marriage that that right-wing site hosted that got hijacked by the gay agenda?

Color Your Friends and Family by Numbers

Via Gnomedex, I discovered Color by Number, a software package that lets you convert photos to colour-by-number patterns. You choose a photo, choose the brand of paints or crayons you want to use, and it generates a blank pattern.

While this is mainly of interest to those under 10 and over 80, I downloaded the trial version. I started with this photo of me, all sweaty in a pub after a hike in Deep Cove. If you look carefully, you can see the sweat line on my hat, which I use as an informal measurement of how hard I'm exercising. It's only about halfway down the brim, so I probably didn't go all out. Plus, if I recall correctly, it was a pretty hot day.

Which Color by Number magically turned into this pattern:

Which, if I paint correctly, will apparently look like this:

What a remarkable likeness. Still, I'm sure this would fascinate my nephew in a few years. You know, once he can count.

More-On-TV

Can I Borrow a Couple Mill?

One of the 19 extant copies of the third edition of Shakespeare's Hamlet is being auctioned by Christie's today:

The nearly 400-year-old book is one of 19 copies of the 1611 printing of known to exist, and is the only one remaining in private hands. It was owned by Mary Hyde, Viscountess Eccles, a reknowned New Jersey book collector and English literature scholar best known for her extensive Samuel Johnson collection, now at the Houghton Library at Harvard University. While other rare finds from Lady Eccles' collection are also being auctioned Wednesday, early editions of "King Lear," "Richard II" and "Macbeth" among them, the "Hamlet," because of its condition and rarity, is expected to attract the most attention. Christie's has estimated its worth between $1.5 and $2 million.

How about we pool our cash together and see what we can come up with?

Meme du Jour: Fifth Sentence

Via Caterina.net, we find the following instructions:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

The only book on my desk at the moment is Perestroika, part two of Angels in America. Amusingly, the fifth sentence on the 23rd page is: "I'm drenched in spooj."

Snapshot of the Planet

This is terribly addictive. Via BoingBoing, we find this page that displays image from the latest LiveJournal (a popular online diary site) updates. These images may not be work-safe (so far I haven't seen anything naughty, but you never know), but there's a terrible voyeuristic thrill each time you click Refresh.

That page reminded me of this Google hack (which I first mentioned here), which searches Google for file names used by common digital photography equipment. It applies a random number to the file name's preface, and displays the Google results. It's both fascinating and mundane.

Link Round-Up: History

Stories about and from the days of yore. Whenever yore was.

• Have you ever heard of the Andrea Doria? Me neither. This page wants to teach you about it.
• I recently saw The Magadalene Sisters. While I was familiar with these odd women-only work camps while I lived in Ireland, the cruelty of the nuns and priests that ran them is appalling, and rivals Canada's residential schools. This article from the Irish Times describes the closure of the final laundry in 1996. Not 1896, or 1966, but 1996! Becky, incidentally, has held forth on this topic.
• I was in a bookstore the other day and discovered this super-cool graphic novel biography of Louis Riel. I'll also link to the publisher's site, but they've clearly spent a small fortune on an absurdly unusable site. There's no apparent way for me to easily reference an individual book or author on their site. If you're not Canadian, here's a summary of Monsieur Riel. If you are Canadian and still need this summary, shame on you.
• Of Flesh and Stone, an examination of female nudity in statuary and graveyards. Safe for work unless your boss is a marble-fetishist (the rock kind, not the child's toy). Via BoingBoing.
• The Turin Shroud has a face. I did a bunch of reading on the Shroud several years ago, while doing research for a play. It's no surprise that the Shroud has more detail to show us. More importantly, this discovery has nothing to teach us about the authenticity of this relic.
• Really impressive videos from Battlefield: Vietnam, the sequel to the very popular Battlefield: 1942. I've been intentionally avoiding these games because I fear that if I buy one of them, they will consume my life.

Today's bonus link is the recent history that was The Cheeky Girls. Having exhausted my interest in reality TV music shows in Ireland (the best, by far, was the BBC's Fame Academy), I haven't paid much attention to recent events on American Idol. However, I have observed that the unnamed forces behind William Hung, the anti-pop-star, are just copying the meteoric rise and fall of the Cheeky Girls. These women were two young Transylvanian women who were awful, awful singers. When they auditioned for Pop Idol, the British precursor to American Idol, they sang their self-penned song, "Cheeky Girls". They were summarily rejected, but got some attention for their twinned scantily-cladness. 8.4 seconds of fame ensued. Clearly, there's a bit of fame to be had for being the very worst as well as the very best. Enjoy it while it lasts, Will Hung.

I imagine this market-the-worst approach has been applied in every single country in the Idol franchise. Now there's a topic for a Masters thesis: Pop Idol and the Global Cult of the Loser.

Universities and Gender

I was recently flipping through MacLean's infamous magazine that annually ranks Canadian universities. In truth, I don't think this has a lot of meaning outside of academic circles, but there was one recurring fact that surprised one--way more young women attend university than young men.

Now, I was aware that this was a trend, but I wasn't aware of how dramatic the gender gap has become. Check out the stats from a sampling of universities (male-to-female):

Guelph: 37 to 63
Brock: 39 to 61
Dalhousie: 43 to 57
McGill: 40 to 60
Ottawa: 41 to 59

The most recent national stats I could find were from the 1999-2000 school year. Nationally, 102,790 women entered university while only 72,765 men did. That's a ratio of 58.5 to 41.5, and I suspect the ensuing four years have only increased that gap.

This gives hope to the feminist in me. Clearly, if we're training a majority of women, they're likelier to become tomorrow's leaders. At the same time, I wonder why, increasingly, young men aren't going to university? Are the girls just working harder than the boys? Is there a gender bias in high school? In light of 500 years of academic gender disparity, should this be a cause for concern at all?

I'm certainly not advocating for some kind of affirmative action to get more men into university. Currently, female academics interested in becoming professors benefit from these kind of equality policies. How long will it be before those policies work against female scholars instead of for them? Not long, from the looks of the numbers.

How Do They Dealcoholize Wine?

Julie is making a risotto for dinner, but she needed wine. It being Easter Monday, and our nation being absurdly Puritanical when it comes to alcohol sales, the liquer stores were closed. Instead, she bought some dealcoholized wine from the local grocery store. I read on the label how the alcohol was "gently removed" and wondered how it was done.

It turns out that there are several methods. Among them are the spinning cone and cold filtration. The cold filtration process is apparently patented, so my 6-second search came up pretty empty. On the other hand, the spinning code sounds like more fun and works this way:

Wine is fed into the top of the spinning cone column (a vertical cylinder roughly 40" in diameter and 13' in height) and flows down over a series of alternating stationary and rotary metal cones. Centrifugal force transforms the wine into a thin liquid film, which is contacted by ascending nitrogen gas fed into the bottom of the cone.

The nitrogen acts as a carrier to extract the volatilized aroma and flavor compounds from the wine. These essences are then condensed, separated and safeguarded while the liquid is run through the cone again, at slightly higher temperatures, to remove the alcohol. Then they are reintroduced to the dealcoholized wine and blended with unfermented varietal grape juice to create a beverage with less than 0.3% alcohol by volume.

This article also discusses the spinning cone approach to hangover-free wine. As this article notes, most 'dealcoholized wine' has about 0.5% alcohol in it. So, technically speaking, it's not alcohol free. This four-page piece (PDF) seems to offer a decent survey of the popular methods of separating the juice from the lemon, so to speak. It's got more information on the cold filtration process (described there-in as 'thermal gradient processing'). It also explains that, unsurprisingly, we're talking about a niche market here--about 0.5% (ironically enough) of all the wine consumed. Of course, that's still 4.5 million litres of dealcoholized wine drunken (drunk? drank?) annually.

Busy Bodies

I really dislike busy bodies, and my neighbourhood is full of them. Today I was walking along the shoreline, and happened upon a sixty-ish woman remonstrate with a mother and her young son. The older woman was telling the mother that her son shouldn't be--get this--tossing rocks into the water. Her argument seemed to be that the rocks were artificially dumped there as part of the retaining wall.

I walked past, shaking my head. The mother dismissed the woman, and so the older woman was walking behind me. For a minute, I was torn between my urge to tell this woman off and to keep my counsel. I choose the former and turned around. The following conversation ensued (edited to make me sound more articulate):

ME: Excuse me, I overheard your conversation with that woman.
WOMAN: Yes.
ME: Well, those rocks are eventually going to be moved by the tide anyway.
WOMAN: But if everyone did that, those rocks would be gone.
ME: How many people do you see throwing rocks in the water? I see one small boy. Even if he did that every day, and his ten friends did it too, I don't think that would have a meaningful impact on our taxes, do you?
WOMAN: It's like the other day, this guy let his two dogs crap by those bushes and didn't clean it up.
ME: The difference there is that that's against the law. Throwing rocks in the water isn't. If you want to make that against the law, I suggest you lobby your city councilor. It's not for us to make rules about what people can and can't do.
WOMAN: Well, I guess that's why everything's going to hell.
ME: I guess so.

With that, she walked off. I know that Polonius advises us to 'give every man thy ear, but few thy voice', but I couldn't resist. If nothing else, I didn't want the kid to be chastised for something that wasn't wrong.

Greatest Canadian Update

A while back I mentioned that, in the rich tradition of copying the best bits of the BBC, the CBC is launching a Greatest Canadian contest. A debate ensued as to who should be nominated and the criteria by which they should be judged.

The CBC has launched their official site, and is encouraging us Canucks to submit nominations. I'm trying to think of a decent subversive Canadian that I could start a campaign to have nominated, but I can't get past Pamela Anderson and Bill Shatner. And, frankly, neither of them deserve it.

Amandla!

In preparation of my trip to South Africa, I'm reading Nelson Mandela's autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom. It's a very compelling read, and provides a personal perspective on his extraordinary life. Additionally, the book reads like a primer for effecting revolutionary political and social change.

In the book, Mandela makes reference to the Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika (Long Live Africa), which was a song of protest and has become the new national anthem. He always describes it as beautiful, but doesn't offer much in the way of illumination. His writing is compelling if unremarkable.

I was pleased, then, to watch Amandla! A Revolution in Four Part Harmony. It's a feature-length documentary which discusses the modern history of South Africa in the context of freedom and protest music. It's Buena Vista Social Club meets Cry Freedom, and effectively tells the story of the fall of apartheid through song. Prominent musicians, freedom fighters and writers are interviewed, and the film does an exceptional job of weaving their stories and music together into a compelling film. The director is perhaps overly enamoured of the bleached-out, high-contrast style and there's a few ill-advised 'dramatizations', but for the most part it's an excellent film. I was especially pleased to be able to hear Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika. Like most of the music in the film, it is indeed beautiful.

Incidentally, I'm now interested in reading a popular 20th century history of South Africa. If anyone has any recommendations, let me know.

The Golden Ratio of Elevator Trappage

One of the elevators in my building is out of order. I happened to be riding one of the functional elevators with the building manager, who explained that somebody got stuck in the broken one. The person who got stuck said they were in there for half an hour, while the elevator technician reported that they were actually in there for 10 minutes.

Hence, the Golden Ratio of Elevator Trappage. For every actual minute that passes, it feels like three minutes have passed. Remember this the next time you're talking to an elevator escapee.

Ugh

As I sit here in my vintage Winnipeg Jets t-shirt, let me assure you that I'm the least qualified person in Canada to dispense fashion advice. I don't often discuss it on this site. In fact, a quick search for the term fashion suggests that this is the only other entry on the subject (though, now that I think about it, there was a posting on men's shoes) Also, let me apologize in advance to anyone who wears and enjoys the footwear I'm about to mock. But, frankly, you deserve it.

(Unless, of course, you live in the Arctic or the Australian outback. In these cases, you likely know less about fashion than I do.)

Who decided that Ugg boots were an attractive accessory? What possible aesthetic merits could these boots actually have. I mean, they're mukluks without the fancy stitching. They're deeply ugly. Their design seems to run counter to every other fashionable boot (and shoe, for that matter) in history--instead of extending the line of the leg, they actually shorten it. They're not flattering to any body shape, in any colour, when worn with skirts, shorts or pants.

Yet, celebrities are wearing them and they're selling out all over the country. Why are people buying them?

These people deserve ridicule because they're great trend apes. They're shaved, mimicking baboons. They're fad monkeys. They've chosen not to develop a fashion sense of their own, so they cling with their vogue-seeking prehensile tails to whatever is currently in the fashion mags.

The first and most common protest to my invective will no doubt be "hey, they're comfortable." Lay not that flattering unction to your soul. The same women who are buying Ugg boots also wear four-inch heels, ultra-tight jeans and sundry other unpleasant garments. Fashion and comfort are mutually independent of one another, and always will be.

None of us are totally immune to the siren call of fashion. However, I'd expect people to apply common sense. I'd hope that they'd look in the mirror at the shoe store and say, "you know what, having two inside out lambs on my ankles isn't as attractive as I'd hoped. Can I see something in a slimmer heel?"

Dear Me

Via BoingBoing, we find this photo of a killer whale's whamadoodle (is this safe for work? Your call). This photo would give John Holmes an inferiority complex--that's gotta be three feet if it's an inch. If you look carefully, you'll note that the, uh, wetsuit-wearing whale-wrangler clutches a plastic bag in his, uh, off-hand. He's a brave, brave man. The orca, however, looks remarkably relaxed.

While searching for some hard facts (ah, I can't help myself) on whale phalli, I found this scientific article from the Center for Whale Research in lovely Friday Harbor. Amusingly, it's entitled An Annotated Bibliography of Cetacean Releases. Thanks to Woody's World of Penis Euphemisms for the synonym du jour. That's safe for work unless your IT department is packet sniffing and objects to phrases like 'mushroom-tipped love dart'.

Sorry for the juvenalia, but I've been writing a whitepaper on call centre integration all day, and I needed some revelry.

Learning Piano Remotely

I just read about an interesting educational project at Acadia University in Nova Scotia:

The goals of the MusicPath project were to interconnect digital acoustic pianos in "real time" via high speed networks over long distances using the MIDI protocol, to investigate the twinning of the delivery of MIDI with videoconferencing and to examine how such an inter-connection could change the delivery of music education, examination and performance.

The project page notes that the next step is to "to use the digital ink capability of the Tablet PC's to allow the teaching to include direct transfer of the marked up musical scores." Given the attention to nuance required to teach high-level music lessons, I wonder how well this technology would work. Obviously, there'd have to be no latency. Like, absolutely none. What good is it if you're listening to a student and have to wait for the streaming audio to buffer?

On the otherwise useless Project Journal page, there's a video clip that apparently discusses the project and shows the system in action. Ironically, I can't watch the video stream because of the usual buffering/streaming/network bogosity.

A Terry Gilliam Moment

I'm waiting for the elevator this morning, on my way to a meeting. The elevator doors open. Standing barefoot in the corner is a small boy of about two.

ME: Hi.
HIM: Hi.
ME: Whatcha doing? (No reply.) Where are you going? (No reply.) Should we go find your Mom?
HIM: Yeah.
ME: What floor do you live on? (He looks like he's thinking hard, but he's got nothing.)

It's academic what floor he lives on, because in my building you can only access your own floor and the common areas. We head to the lobby. He jumps out of the elevator, crosses the lobby, and smushes his face against the glass door to the party room. Pool, shuffleboard and fun times await him silently.

We wait for a couple of minutes, while he stares longingly into the party room. An elevator arrives, and his exasperated father in a Paul Smith shirt rushes over. I was late for my meeting, but had an excellent excuse.

The Hottest Babes in ASCII

For those of you unfamiliar with ASCII, go here. If you're unfamiliar with ASCII art, go here. Once you've made it through those primers, you'll be all ready for the Hottest Babes in ASCII. Though it sounds kind of porny, it looks work-safe to me (besides, are you working today?). Ladies, you can check out the Hottest Guys in ASCII. Look, it's Steve McQueen.

I'm Shillin' for the Man

I've resisted for many months, but after a conversation with Boris yesterday, I'm going to try out this Google AdSense bollocks. While a little extra cash is always nice, I'm interested in its application as a micro-payment system for content publishers like myself. Who knows, it might only net me 8 cents a month.

I'm not that interested, though, which is why you don't see any Google Ads on the front page. They're only on individual pages like this one and projects like the Hall of Technical Documentation Weirdness. I figure this is a decent compromise, because most of my regular visitors only see the front page, and the ads won't mess with the front page design (which I'm finally in the process of redesigning).

So, I'll give them a try for a bit and see how they work out. If anyone thinks I'm a egregious, mercantile bastard now, feel free to say so. You could probably appeal to my capitalist guilt (or should that be socialist guilt?).

I note with some irony that the current ads are mostly for technical writing services. Ah well, I'm always happy to give the competitors a little help. AdSense veterans can correct me here, but it looks like Google only serves one set of ads for the whole site. So, for example, my entry on the declining market for LSD offers a "Free Consultant Finder".

Helene Scherrer on Canadian Copyright

In response to this article (found on Slashdot), I wrote to the Honourable Helene Scherrer (and CC'd my local MP, the Prime Minister and the President of the Canadian Recording Industry Association). If you're not down with our Heritage Minister's comments, you should let her know too. Caution, this is a pretty long letter:

Dear Ms. Scherrer:

I agree with you. Copyright is broken.

• Because of how music is currently published and distributed, 80% of the world’s recorded music is out-of-print and unavailable for purchase. That’s four-fifths of our musical heritage that the average citizen has no access to.
• Your government seeks to turn Bill B-8 into law, unreasonably extending copyright to unpublished works produced from 1930 to 1948.
• Canadians already pay a significant media levy to reimburse artists copyright owners for infringement. The levy has raised $28 million in its first two years of operation.

Canada’s copyright laws need revising. Every twenty years or so, innovations in technology and cultural change break copyright, and so governments need to respond. However, your statements at the Juno Awards opening ceremony suggest that you support an American approach to the file-sharing issue. That is, legally harassing citizens into compliance.

I’m writing to offer a better alternative.

First, though, I’d encourage to ask some hard questions of the Canadian Recording Industry Association. In light of the following points, how certain are they that file-sharing is to blame for the recent struggles of their industry:

• The major record labels claim that music sales are down because of file sharing. That may be true, but it may also be due to the decreasing quality of today’s music and growth of independent labels. More likely, it’s because of the emergence of other ways for young people to spend their time and money. Video game and Internet use have increased in proportion to the CRIA’s pleas about reduced sales. Last year, television viewership was down 20% among 18 to 24-year-old males. Isn’t it likely that album sales might reflect this attention diversification as well?
• A study at the Harvard Business School found that “Internet music piracy has no negative effect on legitimate music sales.”
• In 2003, the Australian music industry had its most profitable year ever—album sales exceeded 50 million for the first time ever.

Regardless of the state of Canadian copyright law and the complaints of the record industry, Canada needs a new approach to file sharing. For that approach, we need to look south of the border, to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

They want consumers to receive the same kind of deal that radio stations enjoy. They want consumers to pay a small, monthly ‘voluntary licensing fee’—say, $5—to the music industry. In return, file-sharing music fans will be free to download whatever they like, using whatever software works best for them.

This approach has appeal for everyone involved. Consumers no longer have to fear litigation, and can build deeper, more robust file-sharing networks than ever before. The RIAA receives brand-new, recurring revenue, and doesn’t have to waste more resources penalizing their customer base.

The EFF is throwing around some pretty heady numbers. The estimated gross revenue of the recording industry is about US $11 billion. If the 60 million Americans who currently use file-sharing software paid US $5 a month, it would translate into $3 billion of pure profit—no CDs to ship, no online retailers to cut in on the deal, no payola to radio conglomerates—for the music industry. Clearly, not all 60 million people are going to opt in. If one-third of file-sharing Americans bought into this service, that’s $1 billion in net profit. People are willing to pay for music—they’ve been doing it for 100 years.

I’ll be watching your ministry very carefully in the coming months, and evaluating how you address this difficult issue. If you choose the low road, and advocate legal action against Canadian citizens by the record industry, you can rest assured that I won’t be voting for the Liberal Party in the next election.

A Day in the City

I know I'm animating like it's 1999 here, but I've developed a recent affection for time-lapse photography. In a small way, it makes us see our world differently. Yesterday, I set up my tripod and took photos of the city at intervals throughout the day. Because I had several meetings and tend to be forgetful, I wasn't overly careful about the duration of the intervals. There's also a bit of shakiness between shots--maybe my tripod is a bit dodgy. Click the tiny image for the full size version, which is about 1.7 MB.

If I get a laptop, I'm going to set it up with the camera attached to it. Then I can configure the camera like a webcam, and have it grab an image every x minutes. That would be more accurate and result in less shake.

Locals will recognize the patch of blasted earth where the infamous night club Love Affair used to stand.

Sims 2 Screenshots

In truth, I haven't been following the development of this game at all, but the screenshots from Sims 2 look like a remarkable improvement over the last game. Not that there was anything wrong with the first game's graphics--The Sims didn't require fully-rendered arm hair. However, these look much better. For one, it looks like you can zoom in and out. The perspective no longer looks isometric, so it's much more flexible. Also, some of those screenshots are pretty kinky:

Judging by these video clips, the sequel seems to have retained all of the humour and whimsy of the original.

Calgary Fan Gets Bertuzzi'd

As Canadian readers will know, the NHL playoffs started last night. The Canucks won in a zaney 5-3 victory. After the game, however, there was an ugly incident in which a Canucks fan attacked somebody in a Calgary jersey. While this will be no surprise to English soccer enthusiasts, this sort of thing is rare at Canucks games. The crowd is way more white collar than it used to be, so most arguments these days are concluded by comparing bank accounts.

One interesting note about this photo (actually a capture from a video clip, from the looks of it): for ten o'clock at night, it looks very bright. Mind you, the like is very bluish, like that of a streetlight.

The Onion isn't a Legitimate Source?

Parents in London, Ontario are protesting the extension of a safe schools program that would protect gay and lesbian students. In doing so, they prepared a pamphlet which, without irony, included a photo from a story from The Onion, the premier online satirical site.

"We knew it was a gay paper and we hold that even as a joke, the gay community is proud of their advancements into the safe schools program in the U.S.," she said. "We don't think homosexuality in schools is a joke."

Asked whether she believed it was a real photo, Ashworth said the caption included the teacher's name, city, state and grade. "We researched in depth and that was one of the things we found," she said, noting the group spent seven weeks accumulating research.

The Onion is a gay paper? But I've been reading it for years and haven't been converted yet. As a further reflection of the idiocy of this parents' group, their organization is called STOP, Simply Truths Our Priority. Bit of a grammatical error there, eh?

UPDATE: Just ignore this. Blogarama

Another Jem Lover

Ever since I wrote about Jem and the Holograms back in September, I've gotten a steady trickle of Jem fans coming out of the closet and visting that page. I just received a fantastic, all-caps note from one 'garagesalemary'. I don't want to muddy my pretty page with all of those capital letters, but click on the 'Continue reading' link, because it's worth it. Among others, it features the unlikely phrase 'Jem check [sic] book cover'.

HI THERE I'M A BIG FAN OF JEM AND THE HOLOGRAMS I STARTED WATCHING THE SHOW BACK IN 1985 WHEN I WAS 14 YEARS OLD NOW I'M 32 AN STELL LOVE JEM WHEN THE SHOW WENT OFF THE AIR IN 88 I WAS SO UPSET IT WAS LIKE HAVING YOUR CHILDHOOD TAKEN AWAY FROM YOU. BUT AS THE YEARS WENT BY AND I STARTED WORKING. I DID GET ALL THE JEM VIDEO,S FROM BLOCK BUSTER VIDEO STORE. AN THANK GOD I DID BECAUSE NOW THERE OUT OF PRINT. SO I STARTED GOING TO GARAGESALE AN FLEA MARKETS ASKING EVERYONE FOR JEM DOLL'S BUT ALL I GOT WAS JEM COLORING BOOKS AN POSTERS AT LEAST THEY WERE NEW IN 99 I GOT LUCKY WHEN SOMEBODY TOLD ME IF YOU WON'T TO FIND JEM DOLLS GO TO BARBIE SHOWS THAT WAS AN BIG HELP TO ME. SO NOW I HAVE ALL THE JEM DOLLS TAPES AND HER CAR (ALL NEW). IN 2001 I WENT TO KAY JEWELERS TO HAVE JEM'S EARRING MADE FOR ME, IT'S ALMOST THE SOME BUT MINE IS 14k GOLD AN COST $85.00 DOLLARS. 2003 MY ROOMATE GOT A COMPUTER AND I WENT ON EBAY BUYING EVERYTHING THAT WAS JEM AN THE HOLOGRAMS HELL THERE EVEN A JEM CHECK BOOK COVER, AN NOW JEM IS ON DVD JEM IS BEEN APART OF MY LIFE. ONE THING IS FOR SURE AT LEST JEM STUFF IS WARTH BIG MONEY.THANK YOU JEM FOR ALL THE GOOD YEARS TO COME...........................

Robot Sushi

Via BoingBoing, we find this nifty work by Vancouver artists Kenn Brown and Chris Wren. One of them writes "Some say here in Vancouver, that we have a Starbucks on just about every other corner...and if that is true, then there is easily 2 or 3 Japanese restaurants for every Starbucks."

Both are true, really. I used to explain to my Irish friends that there was a sushi restaurant in Vancouver for every pub in Dublin. As for the Starbucks, that's also a fact. In fact, there are two Starbucks kitty-corner to each other on Robson Street. This peculiarity is referenced in the excellent Christopher Guest film Best in Show, which was shot here in Vancouver. Parker Posey's uber-yuppie character claims that she met her husband when their eyes met across the street, from one Starbucks to the other.

Plan B

Next month, my (bear with me here) step-sisters' father and step-mother are leaving for a multi-year, around-the-world sailing trip. They're going to be writing about it on sailfreyja.ca--I helped them set up their weblog. Freyja is the name of their boat (in addition to being the name of a Norse goddess, thank you Deities and Demigods).

To assuage the fears of their friends and families, Angela has produced a kind of worst-case-scenario FAQ. It includes questions like "What about pirates?" (it's happened once already) and "What if terrorists blow up the satellites?" Plan B applies when the courage of the fearless crew fails and the Freyja is lost.

Seeking Guest Writers

As you may know, at the end of April I'm heading to Ireland and South Africa for three and a half weeks. While I may occasionally post to this weblog, updates are likely to be be few and far between. Unfortunately, there are few WiFi hotspots in Kruger National Park.

To prevent the site from going completely fallow for a month, I'm seeking some guest writers who can post to this site. Ideally, I'm looking for three to four people. A couple would be blogging noobs--maybe you want to try out online writing and a couple would be experienced bloggers with other sites. I've already got one noob lined up, but it anyone else wants to volunteer, that'd be swell.

I'd expect that you'd post at least three times a week, with content and a style vaguely similar to what normally appears here. Noobs, don't worry if you don't know HTML. The bits you'll need are really easy to learn, and the veteran bloggers can help ensure your entries are formatted correctly.

If you're interested, drop me an email. If you've already got a weblog, include a link to it.

UPDATE: All right, I've got a few bloggers interested in the guest-blogging. Now I just need another noob. Anyone, anyone?

Link Round-Up: Dubious Behaviour

Cheating, crimes and other suspect activities:

• Now that your cell phone has a camera phone, how can you effectively lie to your girlfriend about where you are? Technology to the rescue.
• What do to when you spot your cousin in a porn movie.
• The life of a parking cop.
• This is hardly cheating, but it is thinking out of the box.
• From Slashdot, the tale of catching a 419er (you know, that Nigerian spam scam). In Dublin, no less.
• Thief steals phone. Owner calls thief. Thief reveals her location. Jailarity ensues (to borrow a common Fark phrase).
• Mass CD copying made so easy, a shaved baboon could pirate the new Alanis album.
• This movie portrays some hilarious behaviour, which may or may not be dubious. Via Todd, it's a wacky educational film from the fifties, teaching boys about the evil homosexual lurking around every corner. Apparently you can spot them because they sport sunglasses, moustaches and nice cars.

The Economics of LSD

Via BoingBoing, we find this interesting piece on the declining fortunes of acid as a recreational drug:

Lead researcher Dr. Lloyd Johnston says the group has never seen such a dramatic drop in the use of an established illicit drug as they're seeing now with LSD. In both the 2000 and 2001 surveys, 6.6 percent of high-school seniors reported that they'd used LSD in the previous year. In 2002, the figure dropped to 3.5 percent. And in the most recent survey, from 2003, only 1.9 percent of high-school seniors claim to have dropped acid.

Hilariously, the drop in usage is partially attributed to the Grateful Dead and Phish ending stopping their endless touring. More siginficantly, the DEA busted the LSD motherlode in two arrests in rural Kansas in 2000. Apparently these guys basically had the market cornered, and now they're doing life sentences. So, no supplier, no drugs.

Maybe LSD needs rebranding. Like, it should be spelled ac1D, and maybe Dennis Hopper could become its hip spokesperson. "Kids, I've done my own weight in ac1D, and I'm a major motion picture star. What are you waiting for?"

Your WYSIWYG HTML Editor of Choice

I'm as skeptical of WYSIWYG as the next person, and I use NotePad and HomeSite for much of my HTML editing. However, sometimes I want to see, more or less, wha t I might get. I've been using Dreamweaver 4.0 for a couple of years, but clearly there are better options out there. After all, the copyright date on this version of Dreamweaver is 1997-2000, so hopefully things have improved in the last four years.

So, what's your WYSIWYG HTML editing software of choice? Why do you like it?

Par-Tay

I announce with heavy regret that later this month I'm turning 30. That's right, the big three-oh. I no longer enjoy the shining gleam of youth. I'm now in the middle of my life. My dreams of a career as an NHL defenceman are fading fast. Three days earlier, my wife turns a mere twenty-nine.

To console ourselves, we're having a party. If you know me, come on down for a drink. If you don't know me but want to, and you're not a sociopath, come on down. I want to meet you, too. If you're stalking me (I should be so lucky), feel free to lurk in a doorway across the street. There's a fancy, printable invitation here.

If you're going to come, drop me an email or add a comment to let me know, just so we can get a sense of numbers. Details follow:

Thursday, April 22, from 8:00pm onward
In the Shebean* at the Irish Heather
217 Carrall Street, just up from the Gassy Jack statue

*The Shebean is a small, private pub that's part of the Irish Heather. Go to the main bar and ask for the Shebean (as in "she been good to me") and they’ll direct you.

For all you alcohol connoisseurs, Sean Heather (proprietor and publican) assures me that the Shebean has the finest selection of single-malt whiskeys in western Canada. For you sports fans, in the event of a Canucks game, the Shebean is equipped with a TV, which Sean assures me will have cable by April 22.

Monkey Business

TSN, one of Canada's sports networks, had its panel of experts choose which teams will advance from the round of 16 in the NHL playoffs. For the second (at least) year in a row, they've welcomed another hominid into their prediction pool: Maggie the macaque (go here if you don't know what a macaque is, and get out of the house more). I didn't actually see her make her predictions tonight, but last year she spun a wheel to choose the winners from each series. While I don't think she did very well last year all round, she was the only biped on the planet that fingered the Anaheim Mighty Ducks to go through to the final.

I applaud the folks at TSN who are self-deprecatory enough to let the monkey in on the action. I think it's a win-win scenario--if the experts out-pick the monkey, then they can take pride in their superiority. If the macaque beats them, then they can point to the parity around the league and extreme difficulty in choosing winners.

In the interests of full disclosure, here are my picks for the first round. Hopefully I beat the monkey (you keep your dirty comments to yourselves):

TB v NYI: Tampa Bay in 5
MTL v BOS: Boston in 7
PHI v NJ: New Jersey in 7
OTT v TOR: Toronto in 5

DET v NSH: Detroit in 5
SJ v STL: San Jose in 4
VAN v CAL: Vancouver in 6
COL v DAL: Colorado in 7

Sex Doesn't Sell?

A new survey, compiled for the Christian Film and Television Commission (CFTC), proffers the dubious argument that 'moral' films without sex and nudity sell better than their tawdrier equivalents:

An analysis of 1,120 cinematic releases over the past four years has shown that films without sex scenes, such as Disney's Finding Nemo or Toy Story 2, earned an average of $41.1 million (£22.3 million), while films with sex have grossed 38 per cent less with an average of $16.7 million.

This is absurd propaganda and it's shameful that major newspapers agreed to publish the results. Of course films without sex sell more than films with sex, for blatantly obvious reasons:

• Children only attend G-rated films.
• Successful G-rated films are produced and marketed by marketing giants such as Disney. They receive maximum exposure and are shown in the maximum number of theatres.
• As the ratings increase, the possible viewership decreases. For R-rated films, instead of having a viewership demographic of 0-65, you've got 18-65.

It's an idiotically obvious conclusion for the surveying company to draw, and the CFTC masquerades these 'facts' as an argument against sex in cinema. Notably, the survey only covers the last three years. Historically, when a country is in conflict, values become more conservative. This is exacerbated by a right-wing president in the Whitehouse. Is it any surprise that Finding Nemo is tops at the box office?

The most shameful journalism occurs when the journalist Elizabeth Day compares My Big Fat Greek Wedding to Spiderman (which had no sex but plenty o' violence). Spiderman had a massive marketing budget behind it, and for the first six weeks of its run never appeared in less than 3000 cinemas across the US. It generated it's US $403 million box office gross in a 16-week blitzkrieg of publicity. My Big Fat Greek Wedding, on the other hand, never appeared in more than 2016 cinemas, succeeded on word of mouth, and took a year to earn its (very impressive) US $241 million. Furthermore, the writer stupidly compares the two films in the British market, where Wedding only took 46% of the box office of Spiderman, considerably less than the global take of 60%.

This is a classic example of the media ignorantly glomming onto highly-dubious survey results, and therefore endorsing them. It's a truism to argue that films without nudity and sex will always top the box office--it's not front page news.

Though, now that I look at the all-time box office successes, I see that put-your-hands-on-me-Jack-and-sketch-me-naked Titanic is in first place. So, there's still hope for skin in cinema. Skinema. Whatever.

A Tunnel to Vancouver Island?

Don't worry--nobody's actually planning one. However, if I had an extra CAN $11,921,682.49, I could dig one. That's what the Tunnel Boring Machine they used to bore (as in dig, not depress) the Channel Tunnel is going for on eBay:

This 580 tonnes monster machine is a prized relic from the greatest construction achievement of the 20th century, the Channel Tunnel. With 227 double-headed rock picks tipped with tungsten carbide and a top revolving speed of 2.38 rev/min, this TBM removed a half million cubic meters of chalk and soil in creating the Eurotunnel route. Although no longer fully operational, this enormous piece of engineering folklore will be of interest to science museums and technical enthusiasts around the world looking for a slice of history during the tenth anniversary of Eurotunnel's opening. The TBM is currently located at the Eurotunnel terminal in Folkstone.

Bummer about the non-functioning part. I'll bet you could make a really cool townhouse out of that thing. If you do buy, make sure you're happy with it. As the ad says, 'returns not accepted'.

Another Valuable Internet Archive

Hot on the heels of www.archive.org, we find another Library of Alexandria on the Web, doggedly preserving our collective heritage: The Air Sickness Bag Virtual Museum.

One can tell a lot about an airline's image from their Air Sickness Bags. Some barf bags are no more than a baggie with a twist tie, while other sickbags could win international design competitions. Are they art? I think so. You decide.

The site offers images of 1354 unique bags. A quick browse raises some questions. Why does this bag show someone throwing refuse into the air sickness bag? And why does this SA Airlines bag read "solid litter only"? Surely that rules out vomit.

This site reminded me of another, equally obsessive site: The Stewardess Uniform Collection.

Suggestions for Visiting Toronto

My Irish friend Declan writes with the following query:

I'm going on holidays in Toronto for 2 weeks in May, and I thought I'd take advantage of your local knowledge. I know its the otherside of the continent from you, but I thought you might have suggestions for things tourists should do when in Toronto/Ontario. We might rent a car so anything within driving/train distance of Toronto.

I'm embarassed to admit that I haven't been to Toronto since I was five. Now, it is about 3300 kms away, so I don't feel too bad. But, after the CN Tower, the Hockey Hall of Fame and a musical or two, I've got nothing. God forbid that the Leaves are still in the playoffs at that point, but stranger things have happened.

Does anybody have any suggestions for Declan?

Two Decent TV Shows

Last night, to celebrate the first anniversary of our business, Julie and I went to C (Flasherama ahead), a fancy seafood restaurant down on False Creek. We happened to be seated beside Ellen Muth, the lead in Dead Like Me, a TV show on Showtime. This reminded me that I had wanted to mention this and another show as two decent new additions to the 2003-04 season. In truth, I've only seen a couple of episodes of each, but they looked very promising.

In the first episode of Dead Like Me, Muth's character gets killed by the meteoric toilet seat of the Mir space station as it burns up in atmosphere. Instead of going to Heaven, she joins a rogue's gallery of grim repears, whose job it is to collect souls. Unfortunately, they're not reimbursed for this work, so they also have to make their way in the world. I assume that this is mitigated somewhat by the fact that they can't die again. The cast is strong, and includes the excellent Mandy Patinkin, who most famously played Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride. The show, predictably, is shot in Vancouver.

Wonderfalls is a promising mid-season replacement about an over-educated, under-employed young woman who works at a tourist tat shop at Niagara Falls. One day, inanimate objects in her store start talking to her and telling her to do things. Hilarity, as you might imagine, ensues.

Both shows are offbeat dramas, styled after Six Feet Under and Carnivale. I do wonder how the shows' producers plan to extend these premises to multi-year runs, but that's part of the fun.

Incidentally, the official Dead Like Me site can be found here. Showtime sees fit to restrict its site to the US, which is why I linked to the fan site. Besides, fan sites are inevitably more informative and entertaining.

Watching Hockey

My friend Matthew Bissett and I were watching the final game of the Vancouver Canucks regular season. That's unremarkable in iitself, except that my wife remarked that:

Without question, you two are the only hockey fans in the country watching this game and discussing the continuing influence of postmodernism on Canadian opera.

While this is undoubtedly true, we were pleased to see Vancouver win the division for the first time in a decade and avoid playing the savvy and venerable Dallas Stars in the first round.

Newest Meme: Fake Your Abduction

All the stylish girls are doing it. What's with this? In the past few weeks, there have been three reported incidents of women faking their own abduction:

• Lethbridge City Councillor Dar Heatherington claimed to have been kidnapped and driven 1600 kms to Las Vegas. While I know there's nothing to do in Lethbridge, this is going a bit far, isn't it?
• Two women in Texas locked themselves in the trunk of car. One then "freed herself" and called police.
• Most recently and spectacularly, Audrey Seiler, University of Wisconsin student, went missing for four days and was later "found" in a wooded area.

Did I miss a memo? Or a movie of the week? Aside from a desperate need for attention, what's prompting all these people to kidnap themselves? Maybe the first one got some press, and the others are copy-cats?

What's most laughable is the egregious errors these people commit in the act. From the story on Seiler:

The honor student told police that after taking her at knifepoint, her captor used duct tape, rope, cold medicine, a gun and a knife to keep her under his control. Although those items were found in the marsh where she was located, buttressing her account, police obtained videotape Thursday that showed Seiler entering a Madison store and buying those items.

Also, during the time she said she was held captive, two witnesses reported having seen her apparently "walking freely" in different areas of the city, he [the police press officer] said. Someone used her computer during the time she was missing. Also, he said, the computer had been used to look up a five-day weather forecast and search wooded areas in and around Madison.

C'mon, haven't these people watched CSI? And this from an honour student? It's going to take more than that to convince the police, the media and the public.

What's most shameful is the taxpayer's money (not to mention what they put their friends and families through) these people are wasting. As in mountain rescue situations where the victims were skiing/snowboarding out-of-bounds, these people (assuming they're found mentally fit to stand trial) should be forced to pay the costs of their case. And the bill would be substantial. In the case of the Texas women, the police sent a helicopter and 20 cruisers to their "rescue".

Fundraiser du Semaine

For the locals, friends of a friend are having a fundraiser tomorrow night. The most compelling feature seems to be that each table that you sit at is named after a Vancouver Canuck. If that Canuck scores during Saturday night's game, then your table gets a free pitcher of beer. Given my non-drinking status, I will no doubt be remanded to the Momesso table.

On a sidenote, if the Canucks win tonight and the Avalanche lose, then Vancouver will clinch the division title and have nothing to play for tomorrow. As such, they're likely to rest several regulars. If you go, wait until the starting line-up is announced before choosing a seat. The rambling fundraiser invitation follows:

Check it out! We're really desperate!

Me and some of you and some other folks made a sitcom last September. So far we shot six episodes, they look great, and we've garnered quite a bit of interest from still other folks. Our whole goal is to make quality local work for local folks.

But here's the rub:

If we don't get another thousand bucks, then everything grinds to a crashing halt!

So: Fundraiser - Saturday - Ten Bucks - Check below for more details, and please pass everything along to everyone.

Thanks, Community.

You're the awesomest community ever.

Peter New

TRIPLE 888 HAPPY LUCKY GOLDEN DRAGON ALL-NITE MARKET FUNDRAISER!!!!!!

Please come out and support Independent Canadian Television!!

Saturday April 3rd
at The Cotton Club
1833 Anderson Rd. (Entrance to Granville Island)
Doors open at 6:30 PM

SPECIAL EVENTS:
7pm – Canucks vs. Oilers
Last regular Season game of the year!!!
BIG screen TV action
Each table represents a player from the Canucks,
When your player scores …..you get a free pitcher of beer!!!

ALSO: The World Premiere of “HOOPED!” a new film from Steam Powered Films and Long Hard Comedy Rocket!

9:30PM – LIVE BAND!!!!

PLUS:
FREE APPETIZERS

LOTS OF DOOR PRIZES:
A WALK ON ROLE in the 2nd season of the series
Pitchers of BEER
Dinner for TWO
And much, much more!!

Tickets only $10!!
What a deal!!!!

For more information or tickets please contact:
Jen Young - 604*729*3997, Tony Gronick - 604*789*2102, Michael Coleman – 604*808*7689, or Peter New – 604*837*9710

Link Round-Up: Pictures of Stuff

Someday, everything is gonna be smooth like a rhapsody, when I paint my masterpiece:

• Anomalies and curiosities of medicine. Less pictures than I hoped, really.
• I want one of these. Again, just the one picture.
• Found this nifty-looking comic book via an ad on Fark. I think.
• The modern American family.
• Brian's page of antique weirdness. Found this while searching for other popular weirdness sites.
• Short code contest results. What's a short code contest you ask? I asked too. Here's the answer. I don't know nothing about no short code, but this one looks way more impressive to me than the winner. Clearly the winner has an elegance that's not apparent to the un-short-code-trained eye. Clearly code length is a factor.
• This entry summarizes my childhood team sport experiences perfectly.
• Now you too can read the priciest comic book ever. Best line: "This is no time for horseplay!"
• Finally, that certain vehicle accessory you've always subconciously wanted. Apparently they come in 'every colour imaginable'.

Cycling in Lotusland

Check out the weather. I couldn't ignore such a fine spring day, so I blew off work for a couple of hours, rented a bike and went on a 20km ride. I intentionally rented a bike with an odometer, because I wanted to measure some distances that I frequently jog or rollerblade (there and back again, in most cases). I include them here for my local readers and in case I forget them

From Homer and Pacific to Science World, via the sea wall: 2.3 km
From Richards and Pacific to Quebec and East 2nd via the sea wall: 3.5km
From Homer and Pacific around False Creek to the Cambie St. Bridge: 4.2km

Damien Rice and the Frames

On our Irish friends' recommendation, we went and saw Damien Rice at the Commodore on Tuesday night. Another Irish band (who apparently rival Monsieur Rice in popularity) The Frames opened. The place was pretty packed, actually--I was surprised by the turn-out. Unlike Colene, who suffered fools on the dance floor, we sat up on the balcony.

I'd never heard a single song by either band before, which was kind of refreshing. It meant that I was anticipating hearing a particularly song, or didn't get bothered when the band did something bizarre with a favourite tune (though, in truth, I generally encourage experimentation like that).

The Frames seemed a decent, straight-ahead rock and roll band. They seemed kind of like an Irish Northern Pikes. Their songs seemed to follow a familiar pattern--start out quiet and slow, speed up and rock out, then finish with a long instrumental coda. The lead singer was charismatic, but that didn't make up for his otherwise ordinary voice.

Damien Rice and band followed. Mr. Rice has a mature voice with a decent range, kind of Cat Stevens meets Eddie Vedder for tea. His songs seemed likable enough, and the band seemed tight. However, he had an irritating habit of applying distortion effects to both his voice and his acoustic guitar. Not just for a phrase or verse, but for entire songs. The result was a raging wall of sound that prohibited you from hearing a single lyric. It's like he's been reluctantly placed in the John Mayer, Dave Matthews and Jack Johnson genre, and is working furiously against it. Additionally, there's a reason it's called an 'acoustic' guitar. When you apply distorition and the waa-waa and strum furiously, all you get is trebly cacophony.

I need to figure out if this is common Damien Rice practice, or if his albums are less grating. By reputation, he's a quality songwriter, and like I said, he's got a quality voice. All in all, a decent night of music, but I would have appreciated more subtlety and less noise.

We sent our Irish friends to see Sarah Harmer at Whelan's. Karl reports:

We went to see Sarah Harmer the other night - she was very good, better than I was expecting. We even bought the CD at the back on the way out, which I never do, so that's a good sign! It was also the first night of the smoking ban here, so that made it even more pleasant...

Trippiest Birthday Cake Ever

Last night we were discussing mad ideas for birthday cakes. Out of the repitlian recesses of my brain, I remembered the video to Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers' "Don't Come Around Here No More". An homage to Alice in Wonderland, this 1985 drug-indcued gem features Tom Petty as the Madhatter and the band as his court. It does really effective work with changing scales--Alice is drinking tea then she's swimming in it, Tom's clothes get crazily oversized. The pig-woman in the baby carriage also wigs me right out.

Near the climax of the video, we see Alice laid out on a table as a birthday cake. Tom and the band cut slices out of here (she's apparently made of cake) as she protests fruitlessly. Feminist examinations aside, that image has stuck in my head for the last 20 years. After the Dire Straits' 'Money for Nothing' and Michael Jackson's 'Thriller', this is probably the video I remember most from the 80s.

And, thanks to the magic of the Internet, you can watch it on this page (scroll down to Tom Petty). It's RealAudio, and the server seems to be powered by an arthritic gerbil, but it's worth the wait.

UPDATE: And, speaking of weird baked goods, check out the thoracic cavity cake (grossness ahead).

Let's Go Download Some More Music, Eh?

As Donna, Tim (who offers the unlikely interjection, 'Go, Judge Finckenstein!') and sundry others have pointed out, the music industry's legal campaign suffered a shuddering uppercut yesterday:

Individuals who share personal copies of music files on the internet are safe after a Federal Court rejected a motion on Wednesday that would have allowed the music industry to sue them. Justice Konrad von Finckenstein said the Canadian Recording Industry Association hadn't shown copyright infringement by 29 people who had allowed their music files to be uploaded.

There's a pretty good CBC Quicktime report here. Distressingly, to be a Internet law expert in Canada, apparently you have to have Art Garfunkel's hair. Judge Konrad von Finckenstein (is there a better name in Canadian judicial history?) compares (PDF, the complete decision) file-sharing to "a library that places a photocopy machine in a room full of copyrighted material". This metaphor seems to work for sharing or hosting files. Surely, however, if you download a file, it's like using that photocopier to copy a whole book, and therefore illegal? In short, this is only the first round of a lengthy court battle which, in light of how things have gone in the States, the RIAA et al are likely to win.

Regardless, this is handy, as I've been downloading rare tracks for the Great Canadian Song Contest Speaking of downloading music, via Richard I discovered JazzPromo.com, a Canadian jazz site where you can legally download 25 hours of MP3s for free.

Yep, Gettin' Slashdotted

In case you didn't notice, the site's getting pasted at the moment due to this reference on Slashdot. I'm optimistic that things will die down by this afternoon.

I'm none too pleased with my ISP, Dollarhost. I warned them last night that, you know, a big storms a comin'. They replied "there shouldn't be a problem with this, is there any requirements that your server needs to have in order for this to function properly?" This suggests to me that they didn't quite grasp the scale of the problem, despite my inclusion of several URLs to resources on the Slashdot effect. What's more frustrating is that because they're hosting many sites on the same box, when my site went down, so too did my company's, my step-sister's mother's and a friend's.