Tag: Non-partisan blog posts

Tra-la, It’s May!

Comments in the morning. I just had this flashback to four years ago and my newbie blogging reactions over how nice I thought it was getting up in the morning to a bunch of stuff to read. Even though the stats are still sort of collapsing (everyone seemingly migrating to the beer blog ever so slowly), the comments are far more important at Gen X at 40 as I now and for some time have had no real expectations for this organ of mine other than being a place of pleasant if vigorous and unexpected.

You see things have changed. Last month I got about 105,000 visits from 57,207 unique visitors. While that latter number is the highest ever, I think the visits peaked in August 2005 at 338,790 but I only had 30516 uniques in that month. So I think we can see that I have gone from a 1/11 to less than 1/2. I used to kid myself that you were coming back 11 times a day. Can you say “spam filters”? It is indicative of it all, of course. Where once we thought these blogs were going to be newspapers, we are just pen pals. And that is more than good enough.

I have to give particular thanks for one particular reader this morning. Chris Taylor was good enough to share baseball tickets he could not use. I had it in my head they were for Toronto and Detroit and they enter the weekend’s mid-table letter pile. And, as it is for a Thursday, I think 5 hours driving for a 3 hour event will be a pass and I ask if I can pass them on again to someone who is going to use them and the ever kind Chris says sure. So I give the tickets away, come home to find them, end up having to dig through the recycling box to find the envelope and there it is – and it is not for the Jays against the Tigers…it’s for the Thursday night game next week against the Sox! I am so there. Six rows back of the visitor’s dugout screaming my love for Manny. I think I will go early to get some photos. My daugther is already planning the poster referencing Gerry Remy and portland.

What is the superlative of “woot”? “Most wooty”?

The Horror Of Twitter

The BBC’s technology page runs (over there at the middle right) short quotes grabbed from blogs as part, one supposes, of an effort to be hip through enhanced vacuity. While I am sure the entire sum of this person’s work and thoughts deserves far better, the Beeb’s choice of quote this morning hil-air:

I was honestly woken up last week by the fear that I would stop blogging because Twitter is so much more compelling.

Somewhere over the weekend I heard of the new generation gap – between those with online habits and those without. But it is worse. It’s between those with a concern for content and those without. Twitter seems to be MetaFilter for people with even shorter attention spans. Fabulous. As MySpace devolves to Facebook and Facebook to Twitter, there ought to be a VC rush to back services that strip even more and more away. Maybe I ought to create a site with only punctuation marks available for discussion. Here’s a suggestion: “?”, “!”, “;-)”. Boffo.

I love how an object appearing to be “bhammersley” just typed “omg” like a fourteen year old Valley Girl…though I think it is spelled “omG!”

Ummm…Melamine

I have not put my mind to the question of whether the passing of my cat is related to the pet food poisoning matter. The one ate from the same dish and the late Frobie had symptoms for years. Yet, now learning more as we are about what has been going on, it would not be hard to wonder:

As American food safety regulators head to China to investigate how a chemical made from coal found its way into pet food that killed dogs and cats in the United States, workers in this heavily polluted northern city openly admit that the substance is routinely added to animal feed as a fake protein.

“…a cheap additive that looks like protein in tests…” “…not believed to be particularly toxic…” Just another reason to say thank you China.

You Are Now Entering Fairyland

Nothing is more important to any politician – left, right or centre – intent on a little social engineering than creating new myths that bear little resemblance to actual history but which prop up the political needs of the day but this is either funny or unsettling:

“Real nationalists don’t want destroy, they want to build,” said Mr. Harper, who even at one point quoted Quebec’s nationalist conservative premier of the 1940s and 1950s, Maurice Duplessis. “The real nationalists aren’t afraid of reality, they want to improve it, and that’s what our government is doing”… Mr. Harper finally found a sympathetic ear Saturday night. “There is nothing more precious than the family farm, which represents so well all the values on which our country has been built,” he said to rapturous applause.

Is it just me or wasn’t Duplessis sort of, you know, a quasi-fascist thug whose name has been mud since he got the boot. And wasn’t this nation built on military garrisons, state chartered resource-stripping monopolies and colonial policies that lasted well past the days of being a colony? I suppose you have to tell the people what they want to here but there has to be a limit, one would think, well before the point of the giggles.

Next thing you are going to hear is about how the Erie Canal and wagon trains opened up the route to Alberta.

Friday The Last Of April Chat-a-roo

Wasn’t it just last Friday? Time is flying. I am making arrangements for an undergrad reunion so I suppose I am a bit sensitive to these things. Yes, 25 years ago I was a seedy weedy sullen yute at the University of Kings College and soon people will be returning there from across the globe. From Engerlant to the Yukon so far. Of course I dread it. But if you qualify as a mid-late 80s grad, you should go. Two words: video dance.

  • Update: The Flea is good enough to point out one of the sillies things I have read in a long time. Never mind Alberto Gonzales, WMD, Libby, drugged up Limbaugh just saying no, Enron economics, Saskatchewan in the 1990s, moral majority, Oliver North, trickle down economics and a bazillion other things we could all trot out if we have 27 seconds to spare – conservatives apparently don’t lie. What was it Alberto said? Oh, yes – they just don’t remember. Flea’s line is far more honest and admirable:

    …what I like best about being a reactionary is that I do not have to make sense.

  • While I promised not to slag Web 2.0 for a while, I think it is entirely in my rights to point out that Blogger and Podcaster magazine is a wee bit Web -1.0 for me. Don’t get me wrong. I bought Yahoo magazine back in around 1996 and still wish I had those sitting around. But why do I need a magazine about this which is essentially a magazine?
  • I announced the formation of CAMWA – join in.
  • The New Liberaltarian Progressive Democratic Conservatives are having a bit of a hard time. First, I have a hard time with the fire and brimstone the-sky-is-falling the-sky-is-falling flip out of last week turning into the 8 billion dollar green millstone placed around the neck of the consumer…but not so much the polluters. Then, there is the steering of public funds into the boosting of Tory backbenchers prospects through focused funding of local instances of national celebrations. [Ed.: Yes! I can write that sentence without using the word “sponsorship” so it must be different.] Not to mention the application of creationist analysis to a war zone: torture is a theory and as there is no proof it cannot be. I hope the Prime Ministers groomer is especially on her game. Wouldn’t want him to notice the slide and take it personally.
  • But green is not all bad. David recently posted about generating kites in the sky. It was announced this week that the largest solar power facility in North American is going to be built in Sarnia. Soon there will be again talk of the sling tide project.
  • It’s also been a bad week for movie actors. Just as the Prime Minister’s handlers wish he had found other things to do – besides, you know, saying what is on his mind – so, too, wished Hugh Grant that he had not thought that kicking the arse of someone in public was a good idea. At least he only used his foot. Richard Gere tried to enter into some sort of merger with Shilpa Shetty, a noteworthy Indian actress, and now like Grant he faces charges.

What is it about men passing their best before date? You consider an agreement with a toothless non-profit the same as an agreement with a nation state. You consider low level assault either by boot to the arse or smothering hug to be your right. You consider traveling 1600 km to sit in a dorm room only to realize you are equidistant to the old wrinkly stage again the right thing to do.

Pity men as they move into their golden years. We can’t help it.

Barbara Pym

I rarely read fiction any more. And I don’t think I can point to a favorite author in that part of literature where there are no references to beer or brewing. Well, this does allow me to read Inspector Morse mysteries as that character is never seen consuming solid food, preferring a quick pint followed by a slower one as a means of problem solving.

But I read this yesterday about an eccentric British novelist called Barbara Pym who died 27 years ago. Usually I find good eccentric writing mainly in the form of essays. Right now I am reading Starkness at Noon by Richard Boston which is a collection of his pieces from The (Manchester) Guardian from the mid-90s. And, oh, he was involved in the establishment of CAMRA to some degree in the 1970s so there is that, too. He appears to be the opposite of Pym in many ways – mainly a bit rough around the edges – but one cannot pick and choose amongst one’s eccentrics. But they both seem to have an interest in personal quirks and foibles. And I do have that whole problem with watching Heartbeat on TVO. Yet I am prepared to only get page ten…depending on the beverage references.

Four Years. Four. Long. Years.

3628 posts over four years. That is an average of 3628 posts for every four year period. All the while I have made few observations of note on the war that began weeks before the blog did, on the state of Canadian politics, on me, on blogging. But I did great Friday bullet point chats. Yes! It started just after I left my thirties and on my next birthday I will be 45.

No phrase captures what blogging means to me more that “plea for help”. While there have been highlights like astronaut art, Tantrama City and a careful examination of my relationship with pork, it has not been without its downside. The obvious cut and paste gap fillers, the riding of too many band wagons, the shoddy appeals to science, religion and law. But there has been sport, there has been travel in the states, there has been…sports and travel in the states.

And there has been you. While I have let my real life relationships drift, I have met exactly three…no, eight more people because of blogging. I mean met. The rest of you hide behind anonymity or silence. But for all of that only two have been banned with two others ripping out of here on that sea on confused anger and self-inflating indignation that likely is the hallmark of the rest of their lives. In the end – and like so many of us – I can honestly say on a daily basis thank God there has been beer. It it weren’t for the beer blog I would have packed this in years ago. And Hans. Thank God for Hans. Gary’s nice, too.

Now I have to rush again…a little late for work…again.

Stats Are A Mug’s Game

Expressing the results of a statistical survey is a tediuos and difficult thing to do yet it is the stuff of bloggers dreams, rife with the opportunity to point the finger of accusation and scream “BIAS! BIAS!!!” without any recourse to any foothold in reality. Yet this statement leaves me wondering about the use of “but”:

A quarter of those surveyed feel their organization “walks the talk” when it comes to work-life balance but only 29 per cent feel their employer truly cares about their work-life balance.

Never minding the fact that an employer really cannot “truly care” unless you are the employee of a sole proprietor, would not a 25% part of a whole be smaller than a 29% part of the same whole, indicating that 4% more employees feel kindly about the acts of the boss than those who hear the words of the boss? Ought not the dour “but” be a hopeful “yet”?

I am so confused I need you to comment.

Watertown Update

Interesting doings across the river in Watertown according to WWNY, though their choice of illustrating the story with a photo of half a Bulgarian nuclear reactor from 1968 is some what curious:

The Town of Watertown’s first two domes aren’t even off the drawing board yet, and already there is talk of a third dome. At a town board meeting Monday night, town supervisor Joel Bartlett disclosed that a group of private investors are considering a $25 million theme park in the town. The theme park would have its own dome.

News of the possible investment comes as Bartlett and other town officials consider whether the town should raise $10 milion to build two domes of its own. One dome would be the “event” dome, seating 6,000 people for sporting events, concerts and conventions. The other would be a smaller dome that would replace the town’s west side fire station. The cost is pegged at no more than $10 million, with the money coming from grants and taxes other than property taxes.

“It’s a big investment we’re asking folks to consider, and we want to do our ‘due diligence,'” Bartlett said. Town officials said a “board of managers” would ovedrsee the domes. The town board will get more details at its next meeting.

Good – no plan that the contractors to be chosen will be Uzblkinovokinov + Concretovi…though a glowing green blob on the horizon would certainly make finding it on the drive over easy enough. We like going over – as is obvious – but in winter a shorter hop is better than always putting six or eight hours of driving into a weekend so the prospect of new things to do so close is pretty nice. The expansion of Fort Drum is obviously creating an economic boom over in Jefferson County as the main drag seems to have had a new mall area pop up over the last few months.

Have a look around yourself as the season opener for the Wizards is now officially a Gen X at 40 sanctioned event:

The Watertown Wizards open the 2007 New York Collegiate Baseball League season on Friday, June 8th, at Alex T. Duffy Fairgrounds, against the Glens Falls Golden Eagles. Game time is 7:00 PM.

Glens Falls! Pttuie!!! At least we are not playing the Diamond Miners. More info on the Wizards here.