When it comes to the outdoors, James is ridiculously capable. A couple of years ago he took me fishing up in Squamish. Well, he went fishing. I floundered around in a freezing river, waving a long graphite stick at the fish who mocked me with their toothy grins. That followed the time we went snorkeling for crabs.
Here’s James’s latest demonstration of woodsy prowess (caution: graphic photos of the inside of a small deer ahead). Boris, Travis and James, among others, discovered a fawn that had frozen to death in Boris’s parents’ backyard on Bowen Island:
In truth, I felt pretty unsure. ‘Doing something’ meant butchering the fawn. I was all for wild game but I didn’t know that everyone at the open house would be as open. And I didn’t have any hunting knives. I had excuses: I had never butchered a deer that wasn’t a fresh kill, I had never butchered a deer, never mind a fawn, in BC, within sight of downtown Vancouver and the birthplace of Greenpeace and all those moral vegetarians.
But, in the end, he went to town and they had a deer feast. I might have even temporarily suspended my no-red-meat habits for a taste of Bowen Island deer.
These are three clever videos I’ve come across in the last day and a half. Monique twittered about this Slate Vvideo, encouraging Americans to go northward in the event of another Republican president:
Professor Lessig is, as always, thoughtful and articulate in his critique of California’s Proposition 8, a referendum on banning gay marriage:
James sent me this well-crafted take on the Mad Men (a show I have difficulty getting excited about) opening credits from the Simpsons:
In passing, I note that none of these three videos are hosted on YouTube. It’s kind of a video hosting and sharing ghetto, when you get right down to it. You can’t ignore it, but discerning video creators seem to favour other solutions.
Oh, and yes, the imminent new site design is wider than this one, so that video frames won’t jut into the sidebars anymore.
James recently hooked me up with an invitation to FriendFeed. They offer a mega-feed of all your social media activity. It’s kind of a web-wide version of the Facebook news feed. For me, that amounts to these services:
Those are my blog feed, deli.cio.us bookmarks, Digg activity, Flickr photos, Google Reader shared items, Last.fm ‘loved’ songs, Ma.gnolia bookmarks and StumbleUpon activity (they have a bunch of others, like Twitter and LinkedIn, that I don’t regularly use).
Holy crap. Who in their right mind would want to see all of that in one place? It’s my stuff, and I don’t even want to see it.
It’s telling that James sent me an invite for this service. We trade links back and forth quite regularly (James, here’s some live Weakerthans). We used to use Ma.gnolia to do this, but have since recognized that that’s just an extra step. We now rely on good old email.
Theoretically I might want to monitor James’s FriendFeed for stuff that interests me. Except, of course, most of what interests James probably won’t interest me. That’s true for any two people–there’s far more chaff than wheat. We filter the information that we send to each other, thereby imbuing those links with meaning. I don’t want the raw feed.
More Than I Signed Up For
I’ve got a related pet peeve about subscribing to blogs. Without mentioning it, a blogger will add to what was appearing in their RSS feed. They might, for example, add Flickr photos or bookmarks to their previous blog posts-only feed. This bugs me, because I’m no longer getting what I signed up for. I usually contact the blogger and request the pure blog post feed. Hopefully FriendFeed doesn’t exacerbate this problem.
When I think about FriendFeed, there are only two ways I would practically use it:
If FriendFeed or somebody else lays some clever filtering on top of my friend’s mega-feeds. To start with, how about a filter that shows me everything my friends tag as ‘fordarren’, regardless of what service it’s in?
If I wanted to stalk somebody, and collect the digital equivalent of every hair or scrap of skin they left behind.
How would you use FriendFeed? If you want an invite, let me know.
When we sat down to dinner at a restaurant in Xlendi, Monique noted an odd correction to the menu:
I have no objection to people eating horses–it’s just peculiar that they subsequently crossed it out. Did they run out of horse? What meat are they using instead?
In related news, Monique has written an exhaustive and illustrated account of her and James’s first week on Gozo. It’s pretty typical of what our guests do. Give it a read if you want to live vicariously through them. You may also want to check out their photosets.
