February 16th, 2010, 2 Comments »
James sent along this great, long profile of the city from The Walrus magazine. It’s by Gary Stephen Ross, the current editor-in-chief of Vancouver magazine. He’s written an insightful, well-observed piece that’s neither cheer-leading nor bitter:
Amid the stereotypes, of course, obscured by them, Vancouverites live substantial, complicated, inaccessible lives. Newcomers say folks here are quick to engage you in a friendly chat but slow to invite you over for dinner. There may be a flaky, hippie vibe to the lineup at Trout Lake Farmers Market on Saturday mornings, but there is a seriousness of purpose as well, an act-on-it conviction that organic tomatoes from the Okanagan are in every way superior to industrial tomatoes from Mexico. Local initiatives to address the Downtown Eastside, too, are more than compulsory nods toward civic responsibility; they are attempts to ameliorate vexing problems before they ossify into permanence.
For anybody wanting to understand our city, this is a terrific place to start.
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February 15th, 2008, 5 Comments »
If you’ve been alive and on the web over the last year, you’ve probably discovered the joy and weirdness of LOL Cats (Anil had a good explanatory roundup a while back).
I was over on Shipment of Fail (a newer, less nuanced meme), viewing the latest installments, and found this entry featuring coitus interruptus (rated R for animal phallus) between two tapirs. That pointed to, you guessed it, LOL Tapirs. Here’s a sample:
That, of course, is a reference to a cousin of LOL Cats–the bucket-obsessed walrus. This is all profoundly weird.
Speaking of new blog discoveries, I found an awesome new one courtesy of Metafilter. It’s entitled Stuff White People Like, and features short, anthropological studies of, well, things that Caucasians dig. You know, like bicycles, recycling and co-ed sports.
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May 10th, 2007, No Comments »
Una points to this Red Herring article about Layoffspace, “the only social network for the unemployed”:
LayoffSpace.com, based in the Philadelphia suburb of Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania, addresses issues that go beyond sites like Monster.com, whose primary role is to list jobs, Jake Ludwinski noted.
“People who are unemployed are really down on themselves,” said the former business analyst. “They have all this time on their hands. What do they do with it? We need a place where we can get them together.”
Soon we’ll have a social network for everything, and for subsets of everything:
- OrkOrk: A social network for walrus enthusiasts
- OrkPhile: A social network for walrus lovers
- OrkWidows: A social network for the ignored spouses of walrus lovers
And so on. There’s an interesting side effect of launching a network for the unemployed–do users leave when they find new jobs? And is that a problem?
I’m not crazy about the name. I generally advise against a name that’s a take-off of another, more recognizable brand, unless it’s a short-lived satire or something. Brands change over time, and so MySpace’s reputation will, in some way, always stick to Layoffspace. Plus, I definitely would have capitalized the ’s’.
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