Month: March 2006

Chat a la Friday

Once again it is the day before Saturday. It has been a good week around
here. No rocking out or anything but spring sprang and, really, that is half the
battle of the entire calendar:

  • Update: It must be a requirement that you can prove that you have
    been hit on the temple with a hammer recently to get to be a conservative
    columnist. It has to be. Look at Andrew
    Coyne’s shell game     in his column today:

    Of course, part of the reason the provinces are so
    loose with the coin is the benefactions of Uncle Ottawa, which Ontario and
    Quebec in particular have proved adept at squeezing in all the right places. The
    McGuinty government, which made the fictional “$23-billion gap” its war cry,
    quietly pocketed over $13.2-billion in federal cash last year, a 34% increase
    from just two years ago. Quebec, likewise, enjoyed an 8% increase in the last
    fiscal year.

    It is not surprising, given the fine fiscal
    understanding behind Tory-nomics, that he would not get the difference between
    gross and net in his stunning analysis of Ontario’s position but equating Saudi
    Albertia and Quebec as co-horts in economic solidity it dumbfounding. Compared
    to this, David Frum comes across as
    lucid.

  • Update: “…an eccentric old uncle who’s ignored…” Discuss.

  • Update: pause a moment for the
    250 year old tortoise     that passed away in India. Born around 1755.

  • The Flea has posted a link to the best hoax
    (unless the turtle story turns out to be one) that I have ever seen on the
    internet. I am a huge sucker and the use of a gesticulating professor was a
    brilliant diversion.

  • I was thinking about the bleating cry of the Boing Boing the other day when I read yet
    another rant about how the law of ownership should be amended because people
    have figured out a better way to steal…when it occurred to me that I have
    never seen a fair trade argument in relation to Digital Rights Management. How
    is it that we are so concerned about Juan Valdez and rightly seek out better
    coffee and other goods which are sold with fewer dollars going to the middle man
    and more to Juan but we do not use the same model for Juanita, his guitar
    playing cousin? Maybe because we would steal all Juan’s coffee if we could?

  • I gleefully watched LSU
    beat Duke     last night but realized quickly that no one in the pool
    saw the
    loss     coming so no one gets the big points on question #1. I hearby declare
    after 5837 have declared it before me that Glen “Big Baby” Davis is the new
    Shaq. I remember the, what, 1989 LSU March Madness and the side of beef that did
    ballet called Shaquille O’Neal. It was deja vu all over again.

  • Was Stevie always this chubby
    or has someone done this
    to him?

Portality

Ugh, a portal. That is apparently what Google does not want said of itself.

Although Google dislikes being described as a portal, Sullivan and industry analysts said its new finance section leaves little doubt where the company is headed. “They are being fairly careful about it, but they are walking very rapidly toward becoming a portal,” said Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li. “They have a lot of other services gunning for them, so they have become most keen about building user loyalty so the users don’t have a reason to go someplace else.”

Am I loyal to Google? I use the mail, like Picasa and search through it. I map my travel with it. But am I loyal? I don’t look to it for innovations that will improve my web experience and think of this site and my browser as my portal. In the late 90s there was a urge to create portality, that control of the web. The Federal government had people shopping the idea back then holding meetings stakeholderly. One in PEI attracted millions in public money only to become a wasteland of tumblin’ tumbleweeds.

They seem to be a curse. But why? Are we all still a little Soylent Green about the internet? Do we think that anyone who wants to control us as a conduit must not have our interests in mind? I think it is more that the web is not apt for portals, that the whole thing is an annoyingly unindexed and disorganized playground of surf, idleness and interest and anything that thinks it can organize it for me bundle it all tied in a big bow is missing a point.

Stewed Fruit And Crust

Last evening I was witness to a dish of wild blueberries, oats butter and sugar: blueberry crisp. But then I thought for a moment that it might have been blueberry crumble when I was a kid. I knew we never called it Blueberry Brown Betty but others in school might have. Brown Better always struck me as the sort of thing New Brunswickers might say. But these are distinct but related to blueberry grunt, more dumplings than crust. There must be more in the matrix of grannie-approved stewed fruit dessert terminology.

Then it was the question of onomatopoeic foods. Do people have grunt after bubble and squeek? And what about my dream meal: mahi-mahi with piri-piri sauce on a bed of cous-cous served with cocoa? Makes you think.


Man contemplating piri-piri sauce

Hell In Canada

I must say “hell” about 37 times a day. If I stub my toe or realize I failed to lock the car once I’m inside. It is a pretty low level sweary-mary around our house. So odd it is to read this:

If it’s not the bloody, it’s the hell.

When British censors banned a controversial Tourism Australia ad campaign this month, they did so because it used the word “bloody” in the question: “So where the bloody hell are you?” Now the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation says it won’t run the ad during family programming because of the word “hell.”

“It just shows you the different taste levels of audiences in various cultures,” said CBC spokeswoman Ruth Ellen Soles. ” ‘Hell’ is a problem for us in terms of kids and family viewing. It comes under the category of ‘taste’ and in these situations we listen to what our audience tells us.”

Cultural barrier to the hellish? What the hell is that? You want religious cultural sensitivity? This is religious cultural sensitivity. Seeing as the kids see a great Canadian beer called Maudit around from time to time, I think they would have a hell of a time finding fault. Hasn’t Satan largely been neutered in Canada anyway, relegated to the image on a sports team’s jersey? If I were to describe someone as Old Nick, hell, they’d likely think I was referencing Santa, not Satan. Even – with all due respect – the holy rollers have long since moved from the fear of hell to the fantastic welcome at the pearly gates that they (and they alone) deserve and shall receive. It’s all about upside these days.

The Things You Wake Up To…

…from a Sunday nap. First, an unholy pool crashing upset…thought I am secretly happy some place called George Mason won…but I can’t tell you why. And then I see the goofiest whack across the temple of the English language by CBS sports when you try to check out what happened…they appear to have even registered “GLOG“ as a service mark.

What next? Good Lord, what next???

Craig Questions The Format

I’ve been wonding what this is all about for a long time so I am glad that Craig is wondering, too. Aside from the question of unauthoritative semi-fact, there is much good in the entertainment value of blogs but one simply can and should only devote so much time to being entertained. There are other things to be about in life. But the most interesting comment of his for me is this:

I am also finding old favourite blogs of less interest to me. More often than not, having a high noise to signal ratio. Many, seem to be evolving to a BBS sort of community (which is a good thing), but if you are not interested in the same types of topics that that community discusses, then interest in being part of that community wanes. Thus, I seem to be leaving the using computers and the Internet as a recreation to using same as a tool.

I think this is a very valid observation. One can only rant to oneself so long. And being cranky at the sites of others is only fun when there is mutual fun in the cranking. Things eventually have to settle down to a more honest personal diary-style of writing, writing for writing sake, topical writing, community discussion or even writing approaching what Eric Idle is quoted as saying about Monty Python: “it turns the focus back onto itself. That’s the Python key: to mock the form in which it lives.”

Conversely, there is little place for the type-A-list guru-iffic floggy fantasies as those that have taken that stance have just shown how the ego can get in the way of honest understanding. If I look now at what I thought two and half years ago about what would kill off the bloggy cacophony I would now go with RSS as being the fatal app at least in its present use of being author rather than content based. No one can reasonably be expected to pay attention to everything written by 100 or more individuals. It is too much. So then you read only those you knew or wrote well or were sharing and interest…and the A-heads. And then the futuristic A-heads proved their own dullness and showed their motives. Aggregation became the reductio ad absurdum. I thought this taggy stuff would be it but it only became another bulky impossible aggregation.

Once again, we need a topical tree to index this damn place to find the content, so you find what is actually interesting to you and not what is supposed to be (according to the blogsperts) interesting to all. Any chance of that happening?

Geez

I can be rash. I have bought suits without putting them on. I think. I have only bought two suits. Anyway, Blork mentioned Geez magazine and I subscribed for 25 bucks. That is about 125% of a large La Chouffe at Volo when you add tax and tip. For a year’s worth of a bunch of ideas that is good value maybe. Good value maybe is usually a decent test for me. And my magazine subscriptions are at a low ebb having at least four named here lapse.