Month: May 2005
Categories
Missing Man’s Friends Ask For Help
Liz “I Speak of Dreams” Ditz pointed me to a blog entry in which a missing man’s friends are asking for help:
A friend of mine, David Koch, is missing on a mountain in Canada [Grouse Mountain, not far from Vancouver], and
I’m looking for help to publicize his situation so the Canadian
authorities don’t give up looking.
Dave’s the associate publisher on DMReview,
a Thomson/SourceMedia publication. He drove from Seattle toward
Vancouver on Wednesday, stopping in late afternoon to take a tram up a
mountain he and his wife had visited years before. Apparently he missed
the tram back, and attempted to hike down. He hasn’t been heard from
since.
A search effort was organized, but it’s looking like the authorities in Canada are starting to give up.
Dave is a truly great person, and I simply can’t imagine that he
could be left on his own at this point. I’m looking for any contacts
you can suggest in the national media – NYTimes, the wires, broadcast,
etc. – who might be able to recommend a reporter who could help to
publicize Dave’s situation. If you have any ideas as to how we should
go about the process, please email me or call me any time day or night.
[via Just a Gwai Lo] Food for thought from an article in the blog called The Cake Eater Chronicles titled Lonely or Broken?
How many people do you know who seem to have a serious attachment to
being lonely? They’ve made loneliness into their mate and they talk
about loneliness the way some women and men talk about their
significant others. Because those people are out there. I’m sure you’ve
met a few: single women and men who constantly bemoan how if only I could meet the right person
and then never actually get off their ass to do something about it. You
invite them out, you introduce them to someone you think they’ll get
along with, hoping against hope that this will get them to quit their
bitching, or at least move to a new stage of bitching, and five minutes
later—POOF!—they’ve hit the self-destruct button and are back at
your side, bitching and moaning again, about how that person wasn’t
right for them, what were you thinking, etc. They have run back to
their ever faithful mate: loneliness. These are the people, in my
experience, who have the ideal mate all laid out in their mind and they
won’t settle for anything but that, while they know, somewhere in the
back of their mind, that said ideal mate simply does not exist in
reality. They set the bar too high for any mere mortal to pass over.
In other words: there are people out there for whom loneliness is their drug of choice and, boy are they ever addicted to it.
The scene: The Bishop and the Belcher, a pub on Queen Street West, Accordion City. I’m there attending a farewell party for popular Toronto blogger Christie St. Martin, who’s moving to Brooklyn. I have my accordion, which I’m wearing in “backpack mode”.
Two young women dressed in punk-goth style walk past me while I’m near the bar, talking to Eva.
Woman 1 (to me): Hey, an accordion! Oh, it’s you, Accordion Guy!
Woman 2: Accordion Guy? He’s real?
(This sort of thing has happened before.)
The Quebecois are a bit touchy when it comes to the subject of
defending the French language — even more so than the French in
France. While “stop” signs in France have the word “STOP”, which is
considered to be a perfectly acceptable French word by the Academie
Francaise (here’s a writeup in English),
they say “ARRÊT” in Quebec. My sister’s old boyfriend, who came from
France found it laughable in the same way that men who exclaim “It’s
not a toupee, it’s a hair replacement system!” are.
The Quebec equivalent of the Academie Francaise is the Office Quebecois de la Langue Francaise (Quebec Office of the French Language), and they have a suggested Quebec French equivalent for the term “script kiddie”. It’s…
As a script kiddie would say, in the argot of IRC and instant messaging: WTF?
(Thanks to Adam Hill for pointing this out to me!)
Patrick Lee pointed me to this Nerve story (some of the ads on the page might not be safe for work): Sex Advice from Accordion Players!
My only complaint about the article is that they didn’t invite me to contribute!
Also happening this weekend in Accordion City:
From the Doors Open site:
The City of Toronto Culture Division is proud to
present Doors Open Toronto – one weekend, once a year – when over 100
buildings with architectural, historic or cultural significance open
their doors to the public for a city-wide celebration.
Step inside national historic sites, hidden
gems, modern landmarks, places of worship, banking halls, mansions,
museums, theatres, historic transportation hubs, architects’
offices and more. Many of these buildings are not normally
open to the public. No tickets or pre-registration required
– admission is free to all buildings. The official program
guide will be available in the Toronto Star on Thursday, May
19, 2005. Doors Open Toronto invites you to get to know the
city, whether you’ve lived in Toronto all your life or you’re
visiting for the first time. See Toronto like you’ve never
seen it before!