Tag: Me and Mine

Discount Carnival

Michael in Atlanta has this week’s Carnival of Canucks up and Radio Steve leads the issue with the party tonight at Rob1’s barn making the top news from PEI. Rob has a keg, by the way, and is giving away beer.   This guy is doing being the ex-banking-exec-country-drop-out thing in a big way.

By the way, the fact that this post won’t lead to a high school style kid invasion is an indictment of the supposed popularization of blogs. Best invite to mass teen party ever? 1980, Truro, Friday at 2:55 pm. Vice principal comes on the intercom to say “The girls volleyball team will be having tryouts at Black Rock this evening at 8 pm. Bring your own ball.” Black rock was a sand pit on the edge of town. 400 teens showed with their own balls of black rum. Cop car rolled around midnight.

Sledging

fun until your boots fill with snow
Crazy Carpets matting down the rough

When Rupert the Bear or Oor Wullie slid down hills in the hardcover cartoon annuals sent from Scotland when I was a kid it was “sledging” not “sledding”. Whatever it is called, for those of you worried that we sold the farm when we…sold the farm and moved to the city, this is the view from the from window of the family sleddging.

Earlier: I saw a Northern Harrier – a medium sized hawk identifiable by a white patch above its tail and its habit of flying slowly a few feet above the ground – tracking over ice next door at Elevator Bay this morning. I don’t know if this means the ice mice have moved south or if it had a hankering for fish.

Attention Brewers and Distillers!!!

A fan writes...

I am greatly flattered by the above letter which arrived today from Keith of Electron with two CDs and three mini-CDs enclosed, two of his work under the name The Stereo Effect Project and three from his pal in Germany going by Heptane Sun Quad.

I am enjoying this electronica as it reminds me of incidental music from space shows of my childhood, both cartoons and Apollo news coverage, as well as, more generally the Fripp and Eno stuff I got into from King Crimson, Fripp’s Exposure and loop albums to Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports which I first heard at Dave Swick‘s apartment in the winter of ’79-’80 in Halifax when I was in grade 11 visiting with his brother, Rob. Soon there after, new wave like Gary Numan’s cars incorporated the synths into a pop music reaction to punk which itself was reacted to mid-80’s by the Smiths and others.

Biometric Day

Yesterday was very biometric:

  • The date for my seminar with the Surveillance Project at Queens was reset for later this month. I am going to talk about my thesis on the constitutionality of automated biometric surveillance and the recent cases on the liberty right in section 7 of The Charter of Rights and Freedoms;
  • The US confirmed that we need to get the new biometric passorts before October. I, too have no problem with this as it is not my country.
  • On West Wing the nutty DARPA (not ARPA) character in the Hawaiian shirt admitted to spokesperson lady that they were doing biometric studies within government on the biometrics of citizens. [It was very well described in the script.]   And she was shocked at the imposition on the US Bill of Rights.

Neato. Gaff and gaaf. Spelling has yet to settle on that one.

I am Robot and Proud

A few weeks ago, I bought a CD by I am Robot and Proud (aka Shaw-Han Liem of Toronto) called “You Make Me this Happy” from Electron, discussed here, run by helpful Keith. I appears I am Robot and Proud has other newish CDs out called The Catch and Grace Days. I just listened to “Saturday Afternoon Plans” [recordco mp3 link here] from The Catch and I liked it very much. All good to listen to with Oswald.

ISSNs and Personal Websites

I had an interesting set of exchanges today on the topic of the ISSN. I noted a few days ago that Steve’s site had an ISSN or international standard serial number – scroll down lower left to see it. Wanting all that Steve has, I applied for my own. This morning I received a nice email which stated:

Thank you for your application. At the moment, we are no longer assigning ISSN to weblogs, but the situation is under review. The question of whether weblogs will be able to be assigned ISSN is under discussion in the international ISSN Network. The question hinges on the scope of the ISSN but also on the very real consideration of the limited staff resources of ISSN centres worldwide.

In further emailing I learned that the global ISSN system is run out of Paris; that last October they put the halt on listing new personal web pages, web logs or blogs under ISSN; that the ISBN system relating to books does not apply; and that there are global meetings in Paris from time to time on the ISSN system. Very neato.

The person with whom I was having this conversation then went to the effort of called me at work after tracking me to my house. Apparently there are only two staff at the National Library of Canada who administer the ISSN system in the country and they have been overwhelmed by requests for blog registrations particularly – but apparently inadvertantly – after this posting by a Joe Clark who Steve (of the now coveted ISSN) knows as an web accessability writer.  I suggested that I might help the National Library of Canada and its application crunch by way of a post to this old ‘osphere.

There is an answer, however, to the nerd who want another registration number in their life. While my helpful friend in the National Library of Canada ISSN office, who will go unnamed (even though there is a 50% chance of you guessing which one it was) indicated that ISSNs for web blogs get you little but are a real headache, the good folk at CIPO will take 50 bucks on line for a one-time registration of Canadian personal web sites under the Copyright Act. While copyright is inherent in that it arises with the act of writing, registration provides proof of the fact of your writing as of the time registered. This still allows you to grant Creative Commons licenses at all that as they are licenses granted under copyright interest to your own works.   Plus you are paying so can expect you are providing for the resources you are using. 

Consider the lot of the poor ISSN registration worker. The ISSN has now registered over 755,000 serial titles worldwide and grows at an annual rate of about 50,000 new listings.  As a reult,  even though the Guardian recently pointed out that of the 4 million things called blogs, only 50,000 are updated daily, the scale of blogs to periodic serials is clearly daunting and, for two librarians kind enought to pick up the phone, overwhelming.    Let them be, oh bloggers, let them be!    Then lobby Paul Martin for more funding for the National Library.

First New Thing of 2004

Not so much greasy as fatty

Not being hung New Year’s Day has advantages. A bagle, 30% butter fat cream cheese and artichoke heart salad for lunch, french restaurant dinnerware, damask linen. I’ve had two already. How many until I would kill myself through tangy goodness overload? Cream cheese is one of those things that we have to be forgiving with ourselves about. This 30% butter fat is care of the Baltic Deli – I’ve never seen a higher percentage. I think that’s called butter.

Later: photo reduced due to outcry by the hungover. What the hung see.

New Reads?

For 2004, I know I need some new blogs to read. Right now my reads generally and quite happily fall into these categories:

  • People I have met or know people I have met;
  • People who are yapping about blogs and how they are the future and will have us all eating food from tubes someday undefined but surely soon;
  • People with a connection to Kingston, Atlantic Canada or Scotland;
  • People who have linked to me;
  • People talking about food and drink.

I know I do not want to read blogs mainly about my job – law – as the lawyers who write blogs mainly about law tend to be the lawyers you drift away from at gatherings of lawyers. I do not want to read blogs about US politics as they have that thick veneer about “liberal” and “right” that defies either comprehension or perhaps only extra-territorial translation. Are there gems out there based on other themes? I am really pleased how Switching to Glide has begun to develop from an idea – are there other music based group blogs, for example?

And how do you find new reading?

Rocket Lord of the Rings

Happy kids asleep. A few good feeds in jammies, then new clothes. Choral music on CBC radio all day. Missed the Queen… but, really, she missed me as well, didn’t she.    It has been unusually warm here and Saturday may hit a sunny ten above. I don’t miss the snow – only wish I had a patch of garlic growing in this weather. 

With a bit of an achy cold starting I felt little compulsion to move off the couch despite Ralph Bakshi’s 1978 two hour cartoon of Lord of the Rings being on the TV. I saw it when it first came out at the Centennial Twin Cinemas in downtown Truro when I was in grade 10, the scene of many of my Friday nights in those years.     I had read the Tolkien books when I was about 12 and, although I never took to playing/worshiping Dungeons and Dragons and all the other pre-Internet outlets for nerdy fantasty geeks, I was not then utterly offended by the movie. I do recall, though, that hopes were high in the era of Close Encounters and Star Wars – and that we expected something new and important. For the first moments, we thought that the cartooning was imaginative. Soon it was repetitive. Then tedious. The Orcs are creepy if you think the bad guys – Cylons? – in Battlestar Galactica were as well. This review captures the disappointment. Watching it tonight it strikes me that it certainly owes a lot to the genre of Spiderman and Rocket Robin Hood, without, though, the benefit of the voices of Paul Soles and other Wayne and Shuster regulars but, sadly, with the tell tale repetition of short scenes over differing backgrounds a few minutes apart. The ending is the best crap bit:

The orchestra now begins playing Christmas music as Gandalf rides Shadowfax through the Orcs, slaying at will. He begins killing them in hideous detail, and in gruesome slow motion at that. Two Orcs fall dead over the camera, the backs of their heads spraying blood. What the hell! Since they’ve already gone this far, they may as well make Lord of the Rings into a slasher flick too! Why not just give Gandalf a chainsaw and be done with it?

Watching tonight, I remembered this last bit from when I was 16, how creepy the choice of image compared to the accompanying stirring-to-a-private-schoolboy music, how at that age I believed (as English teachers told you) that story endings with slo-mo mass slaughter was really bad art… as opposed to now – since Columbine – when it is also cause for preventative arrest.

Why would Bravo show this on Christmas night? It is so embarrassingly bad  it defies camp. It is not even a welcome antidote even to a fifth hour of the Kings College Boys choir singing “Once in Royal David’s City”. And, yet, I watched it again. Christ was born to give me a day off to watch Bakshi.

Signs of Christmas

Well it is time for some kind of obligatory post for Yule from GX40 HQ. Signs of the season seen today:

  • LCBO line ups and emptying shelves. Panicy staff asking who had driven to the Bath and Gan stores looking for fluidy back-up.  Fortunately the Walnut Brown oloroso was there for grannie;
  • The three year old boy of the house getting seriously freaked out out over the Santa and naugthy thing. He is convinced he is off the list. I am close to letting him know that the whole thing is a fraud put on by the eastern corporate establishment;
  • Quiet roads first thing. Largely a half day in K’town so cruising about for last minute things listening to Guitar Picking Martyrs was quite pleasant – skip “Broken Fuckin’ Heart” (track 5) if the kiddies are in the back row;
  • Although Kingston is a military town and a university town like Halifax, the bars are dead. Must be a difference between army and navy. Co-worker happy happy joy joy pint o’ Guinness was in an echo chamber with, oddly, M. Pied Lourd for a bartender.
  • Fox Sport World Canada once again has that weird Egyptian indoor soccer championship – the Egypt International Futsal Tournament – on TV all through the dark days of mid-noon the 24th to the dawn of the 27th. Check here for soccer listings to get you through the entire bleak mid-winter.

So there you go. Happy Christmas to all you readers, to those who have done something worth writing about and to my favorite bloggers to the right – with special best wishes to the silverorange guys for providing the juice and space and the guys at Switching to Glide for running with that idea.