Category: Uncategorized

“When I Was Your Age, We Ate Maple Leaf Cookies!”

The New York Times has an article on strategies kids take to get by living in the most expensive city in North America. Funny how it reminds me of something:

Peter Naddeo, a 24-year-old musician, earns $15 an hour working as a temp in Web development in Chelsea, and has perfected the tricky art of stretching lunch into dinner. He moved to New York from Pennsylvania last fall and can barely afford his $80 monthly college loan payments. He listens to a hand-me-down CD player because iPods are out of reach. He pays $600 for a 10-by-10-foot room in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, that has one saving grace: a window that faces east. For lunch, Mr. Naddeo usually orders a $3.50 plate of yellow rice and beans from a Latin American diner on Eighth Avenue, and eats late to ward off hunger pangs. Sometimes he hits up a bar in his neighborhood where a $6 pint comes with a small pizza. Or he relies on friends to feed him.

In the ’80s this was called living through a recession and no one had pals who fed him. Though that isn’t quite true as I recall buying groceries for a roommate who was down to eating carrots only. She was getting a little orange. One pal had a bag of maple leaf cookies that were put out on a plate whenever we came over. No one liked them so it was a cheap way to be hospitable. He was on mini-wage and there was only tea, cookies, cards and hockey of the black and white when we were over there. I do like the line above about a “hand-me-down” CD player. Boo frikkin hoo.

Isn’t this just called being young? Don’t you have to be broke for at least half a decade after school? And where is the New York of Archie Bunker? I blame George Jefferson, movin’ on up and all that. Everyone wants to live like people on TV.

The Web 2.0 Ideas That Won’t Go Away

How do you know that Web 2.0 is past, long gone and uninteresting? Reading yet another article about how the law needs to be changed to allow people to do things that no one wants to do anymore:

Earlier this month, some fans of the NBC television programs American Gladiators and Medium found themselves unable to digitally record the shows on their personal computers. The reason for the blocked recordings raises important technical and legal questions about the rights of consumers to “time shift” television programs in the digital era. The blocked recordings affected people that record television programs on their personal computers using the Microsoft Windows Vista Media Centre. Most people are unaware that Microsoft has inserted a feature that allows a broadcaster or content owner to stop the digital recording of a show by triggering a “broadcast flag” that specifies its preference the show not be recorded. When the user tries to record it, Microsoft’s software recognizes the flag and issues a warning that the program cannot be recorded.

So? None of them paid a license fee for the right to record the show and, in any event, it’s American Gladiators for God’s sake. If anyone thinks we need to law of copyright to be altered so that folks can bootleg a hack summer repeat of a 1980s joke, they need their head examined. The things that have not taken off and become part of general society like mashing-up, creative common licenses, YouTube, podcasting, Facebook and (frankly) blogging as anything other than internet diarizing are not vicitms of copyright law but illustrations why we do not need to tamper with the law to respond to another short-term trend. Legislators don’t rush to fnid out what the hobbyists are up to.

And have you noticed that no innovation of the internet is not really having an effect on the US Presidential election?

Victoria Day’s Weekend’s Very Own Bullets

May two-fer. That is the level to which the legacy of England’s fourth best
Queen has been relegated. Drunks at the cabin. I know one. He’s there already.
While I prepare to go to my day’s labour. It’s going to rain all weekend, too.
No gardening for me and less fishing for the man in the cabin with 56 cans of
beer to work his way through.

  • Update: isn’t the
    proper discription     “murdered child with bomb strapped to body”? When we
    rightly speak of the Canadian role keeping schools open, it’s this kid that we
    are trying to keep in the school.

  • Computer solitaire is the
    most successful program of all time. Who knew?

  • Be warned. The CRTC
    is rethinking     it’s lack of justisdiction over the internet. In 1999 they
    realized they should have nothing to do with it but they are now fudging the
    point holding:

    services consisting predominantly of alphanumeric
    text and those with the potential for significant user customization do not
    “involve the transmission of programs for reception by the public and are,
    therefore, not broadcasting.”

    If we could all just stick to the
    keyboard please. I can’t imagine the botch the CRTC would create.

  • Bad week for the control freaks in the PMO:

    In any other time, these would be the most incompetent politicians. Sadly,
    they are only #2 in that race. But for the Liberal policy of letting the Tories
    hang themselves. Seems to be working.

  • Realist Caesarian art found in river because
    who wanted to be associated with Julie after the assasination.

  • Jesus won’t like this.

Read
some McGonagall
today if you have the time. A fitting celebration of Victoria’s gift of
repression of all that is good.

The One Set Of Friday Bullets You’ll Need Today

May. Almost mid-May. This is the best part of the year, right? Is there anything better than the pre-black-fly world? It’s like mosquitoes (is there an “e”?) don’t exist, let alone wasps and hornets. It’s still all about the plants but not quite yet the mowing. May is a time of imagination.

  • You know what may is? May is the time for thinking about the things you will never do this summer. Like going to that bluegrass festival with mass banjo instruction. My inner novice banjo star would do so well at that sort of thing. But there might be bugs.
  • Good to see the powers of the surveillance crime controllers are entirely misplaced:

    In becoming the world’s most-watched nation, Britain was promised a commensurate drop in crime. But the estimated 4.2 million closed-circuit television cameras in the U.K. have made barely a blip on the graph of public safety, a senior London detective in charge of the program admitted yesterday. Calling Britain’s multibillion-dollar surveillance network “an utter fiasco,” Detective Chief Inspector Mick Neville said video footage has solved only 3 per cent of crime.

    Multibillion. That is the beauty of a new technology. Boosts the economy without any real idea whether it works or not.

  • There is one thing that I don’t understand about the post-9/11 anti-faithers like Martin Amis:

    As the Ayatollah Khomeini used to say — in scandalized terms — affiliates of other religions think that they can go to church once a week, or even pray once a day, and that’s that. He said, Islam isn’t like that. The whole wave of Islamism is the revival of the idea that Islamism is the total guide to existence, that it’s not on the edges but right in the centre. If you adhere to this literalist way, [Islam] does follow you into every room in the house. It’s without its grandeur and beauty if you deny this central severity.

    What kind of person has faith that doesn’t get into every room in the house? It is like you have a relationship with the creator of all things and say: “feh – you can stay around but only in the rec room”? What kind of faith is that?

  • Dark matter is really out there. It’s apparently baryonic – unlike me.

Gotta run. School bus trip.

Consider Your Morning Break Options Accordingly

I thought that Tims had lost it when they introduced centralized baking. They certainly lost my trade but this is whacked:

Giving a free Timbit to a baby has cost a single mother of four her job. Nicole Lilliman, 27, was fired yesterday from her Tim Hortons job for giving one of the 16-cent blobs of fried dough to a tot. “I have been fired for giving a baby a Timbit,” Lilliman said yesterday. “It was just out of my heart – she was pointing and going `ah, ah…’ I should have gone to my purse and got the change, but it was busy.”

Can you imagine worse PR? How about Jesus showing up for the second coming and getting booted out before he’s done his coffee for annoying folks with the glow off his halo. No that would be not as bad – because that wouldn’t be firing someone for giving a baby a frikkin’ timbit!!!

Tra-Laa! It is May Again!!!

Is May the best month? Every year I get to March with gasping relief that the piercing cold is gone but it is only 60 days later that you can relax – just yesterday there was snow and hail…the size of corn kernels, too. No canned hams or golf balls but definitely corn. The crocus is done and lily of the valley is on its way. Even the annual two day ant infestation of the house is over. I should mow by Monday.

But April was kind, too. How many times did the Red Sox win in the last few innings, coming from behind or, like last night, waiting for the starter to fade so that they might attack his team mate – the unfortunate signing, the untested prospect or the fading star? Going 17-12 in an April that started in Japan is neither fluke nor overheated. Who would have thought May’s games against Tampa Beelzebubbians, Baltimore or KC would have meaning?

Group Project: Do We Love Biofuels Or Hate Them?

Finally. A new crop farmers can grow – even in the third world – that the industrialized nations a desperate to get their hands on. But all is not well with biofuels. We should have heeded the warning of The House Martins from twenty years ago:

Me and the farmer get on fine,
Through stormy weather and bottles of wine,
If I pull my weight he’ll treat me well
But if I’m late he’ll give me hell.

And though it’s all hard work no play,
Farmer is a happy crook,
Jesus hates him everyday,
‘Cause Jesus gave and farmer took.

Actually, I have no idea what that song means except it’s the only theologically anti-farmer song I know.

The pinch is being felt in the land of beer where prices are rising as there has been a shift from planting barley to malt to other crops to turn into automobile fodder. There has been some indication that there may be an increase in general planting as the marketplace adjusts in response but the effect on food crops has caused the UN to warn a year ago and now scramble to find enough for people to eat at an affordable price. And our Canadian House of Commons is grappling with how last year’s darling has so quickly turned into this year’s curse:

When the legislation was briefly debated in the House on Monday, NDP MPs were overwhelmingly negative toward the government’s approach, expressing concern that biofuels could trigger “a global food catastrophe.” The Bloc is supporting the government bill, but that party’s environment critic literally squirmed this week when asked whether he supports his party’s position. “We have a party line. The vote will be in a few days. I don’t support corn-based ethanol,” said Bernard Bigras. Asked whether he was uncomfortable with his party’s position, he offered a polite “no comment” and left.

A tragic if stunning dynamic is noting how a “green” and “sustainable” principle has caused harm to the poor, thus causing a clash on the left – where 100% of Canada’s public debate is occurring.

So what to do? In the new price range and future expectations nuke, hydro and wind power fueling electric cars (like the forbidden Toronto one) are looking better and better. Maybe also regulations requiring expanded crop production for biofuels is matched by expanded crop production for food. Babbitts and Randian nutjobs will say it is none of government’s business, that if people starve – well, that’s the market! What do you want to burn in your tank? Do you care?

Book Review: “Brewing Battles” By Amy Mittelman

This really should be labeled as “book review, part one” given I have not hit the half way point in this book, published just this year. But as I have complained long and hard about the absence of a comprehensive US brewing history, I am driven to tap and type, to type and tap. In a nutshell, this book gives me a significant degree more confidence that I am getting a fuller picture than either Smith’s 1999 Beer in America: The Early Years and Ogle’s Ambitious Brew from 2006. Not so strange when you consider the simple fact that Smith stopped at 1840 while Ogle starts about there leaving only a few gaps along the way to the craft beer movement. Neither as as comprehensive as Canada’s pan-alcohol 2003 history by Heron entitled Booze: A Distilled History.

But I am still not yet sure that Mittelman achieves the level of Heron’s completeness given where I am in my reading but at the same time I have some hope. The book has, for example, footnotes for just about each paragraph that indicate some good primary research has been done as well as reliance on a number of secondary sources. And that research is well laid out. There is clearly a focus on the role of taxation due perhaps in part by the ease of access to public records as well as Mittelman’s past work in the area. I like the fact that she deviates from Ogle’s claims as to the independent immigrant will of specific personalities as a key factor in brewing history with some reasonable description of how German immigrants banded together in the 1860s to assist the newly created Federal tax department in creating a policy structure that went a long way to create a continuing regulatory environment sympathetic to their business needs. Which is right? Probably a bit of both and a measure of something else as well.

Maybe it’s wrong for me to want a unified theory or at least a single history on the topic. The three recent works do relatively well together in presenting their visions of American brewing. Mittelman keeps a blog which is interesting but needs more readers to spark it up a bit – and maybe for reasons other than the unfortunate matter Andy mentioned the other day. I will keep reading and maybe follow up with more thoughts as they pop into my head.

Monday Morning Quarter Back: Red Sox On Top Edition

Already, we hit the third edition of the Monday Morning Quarterback. I’m not that sure the theme has holding power but at least it gives some meaning, however meager, to my half-hearted obsession with sports.

  • The confusion within the Blue Jays has already hit a new level of panic even though it is only April:

    Frank Thomas’ time as a Toronto Blue Jay ended quietly this morning after a closed-door meeting with team GM J.P. Ricciardi. The future hall of famer, who was mired in an early season slump, will be paid the $8 million (U.S.) owed on his two year deal. He is now free to sign with another team….The move came a day after Thomas was told that his role would be drastically reduced. Thus far this season, he was hitting .167 with 3 home runs and 11 RBIs. In turn, Thomas blasted the club through reporters. “I’m angry. I know I can help this team. My career isn’t going to end like this,” Thomas said on Saturday.

    Note to sad Jays fans: Ortiz has a lower average. Don’t expect him to be drifted, however, as a team with some pride wouldn’t do that. Expect a panicky Jays trade soon.

  • On more tartaned news, there is hope! Morton won Saturday to slip ahead of Clyde and out of the relegation zone with one game left. As I understand it, if Morton wins next week and scores more than Clyde, Morton stays up even if Clyde beats lowly Stirling. Pray. Please pray.
  • The Ottawa Senators have confirmed they don’t deserve access to the coat tails they’ve been riding for a few years. By being swept in the first round sweep was their worst playoff appearance since 1998-99 when they scored only three goals.
  • The Red Sox are playing some of the most exciting baseball I have ever seen with late inning dramatics day after day. The Orioles are the real surprise in the AL East with the other teams floundering as they should given the state of their rosters.

Frankly, I have been pretty good, not wallowing before the blue screen that much. I thought not once of the CFL – well, except to say that if I ever do go to the Grey Cup I am hanging out wit the Baltimore fans. I watched no NBA, no NASCAR and not even any hockey to speak of – and not much of anything else. The weather was too nice. I did catch a bit of Yankees on the radio as we drove around this afternoon, the Jays even having abandoned the Kingston market for its AM broadcasts even though this is the natural place for growing a fan base. We speculated whether this sort of thing wasn’t a step on the same slippery path that found the Montreal Expos playing in Washington DC under another name. Can you say “The Omaha Blue Jays of 2017”?