Author: Joey deVilla

What the hell, people?!

Updated Thursday, February 20th at 5:45 p.m. EST

Thomas, as we bloggers like to say, fact-checked my ass.

I stated that Iraq kicked out the arms inspectors in 1998, but in actuality the inspectors left under orders from their leader, Richard Butler. The December 18, 1998 issue of the Washington Post reports that they left because they knew that the U.S. would start another bombing campaign. Other reports state that Baghdad was being uncooperative, while Baghdad accused the inspections team of having spies among their number.

More details are available at FAIR’s (Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting) site:

• Common Myths in Iraq Coverage
• What a Difference Four Years Makes: Why U.N. inspectors left Iraq–then and now

Thanks for the heads-up, Thomas!

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I had a conversation last week that went like this:

Her: So are you going to the anti-war protest tomorrow?

Me: I’m not sure. I still have to think about my position on it.

Her: What’s to think about?

Me: For starters, what you just said: “What’s to think about?”

Don’t get me wrong; I do believe that protests and demonstrations can be good things. I am mindful of the fact that my own native country has managed to rid itself of two corrupt leaders through demonstrations. I’ve even participated in some myself. But I made damn sure I’d thought out my position very clearly before joining and doubly so if I was going to do an interview. If you’re going to shoot off your mouth, make sure your brain isn’t loaded with blanks!

With that in mind, here’s a video called Devil’s Advocate Goes to the Protest (QuickTime required). In it, Evan Coyne Maloney goes to the New York anti-war rally and conducts interviews with results that are simultaneously hilarious and sad. Some of the questions that he asks:

• How would you solve the problem [if war is not the answer]?
• Why was the UN unable to disarm Iraq while conducting inspections between 1991 and 1998? (The inspectors were kicked out in 1998.)
• How much time should the inspectors in Iraq be given? Wasn’t eight years enough?
• Has the world community in the past lived up to its responsibility with dealing with Saddam Hussein? Would they do it now?
• Do you think that President Bush will keep the oil fields after invading Iraq? Why did the U.S. not do that after the first Gulf War?
• Do you believe that Saddam Hussein has chemical or biological weapons?

It’s interesting: a right-wing guy borrows a page from Michael Moore’s book to great effect.

Speaking of Moore’s technique, keep in mind that the interviewees weren’t expecting to be interviewed, the questions were chosen with care and that this, like any other video, is the product of editing. Still, I’m sure that all of them did the interview of their own free will and out of a desire to make their opinions heard.

I’m still doing a little work right now, so I’ll turn this over to the comments. Let me know what you think, and we’ll continue the conversation there.

(A big high-five to John “Lemonodor” Wiseman for telling me about this.)

Recommended reading

Thinking as a Hobby, by William “Lord of the Flies” Golding.

My friend Nasreen Rahmann grew up in Germany and as a result has German tastes in pop music.

Which means “none at all”.

(I kid, I kid. But really, where else would David Hasselhoff’s singles be elevated to number one on the charts?)

She was here for about five years working on her Ph.D. in biology, but that didn’t stop her from diving straight into the social scene here in Accordion City. She was one of the most enthusiastic regulars at the Bovine Sex Club’s Kickass Karaoke and had a knack for belting out some of the schmatziest adult contemporary tunes with gusto. Her favourite artist to cover was…urgh…Bonnie Tyler. I’ve seen her cover Bonnie a zillion times, each time as intensely as her first. She couldn’t get enough of ol’ Bonnie, while I usually feel great pain every time I hear her songs.

I didn’t realize how closely was I was listening to her until this afternoon when I took a break from some mad database coding to go buy some vegetables at Kensington Market. We eat a lot of vegetables for a bunch of non-hippie bachelors.

Kensington Market, for those of you not familiar with Toronto, is a charming bohemian mish-mash of old-style food markets (each one specializing in meats, fish, cheese, nuts and spices or fruits and vegetables), second-hand clothing and furniture stores, a couple of very boho cafes, specialty stores such as a head shop and an african drum shop and some offbeat restaurants. Many of the stores provide their own music, often putting their speakers outside their front door. Walking up the street I heard Cheap Trick’s Surrender (the only top 40 song to ever make mention of the Philippines) and Bob Marley’s Them Belly Full (But We Hungry).

At the fruit store on Augusta, I was picking through squash when I caught myself singing along to the crescendo of Total Eclipse of the Heart, which was blasting out the stereo speakers:

And I need you now tonight

And I need you more than ever

And if you’ll only hold me tight

We’ll be holding on forever

And we’ll only be making it right

Cause we’ll never be wrong together

One of the guys working at the store — a Chinese guy with that Dustin Nguyen 21 Jump Street haircut, probably a university student earning some extra cash — joined in, his arms open Broadway singer-style. I took a butternut squash and held it as I would a lover’s face and sang to it:

We can take it to the end of the line

Your love is like a shadow on me all of the time

I don’t know what to do and I’m always in the dark

We’re living in a powder keg and giving off sparks

I really need you tonight

Forever’s gonna start tonight

Forever’s gonna start tonight

He turned to me and put his index finger to his lips because the closing chrous is supposed to be quiet.

Once upon a time I was falling in love

But now I’m only falling apart

Nothing I can do

A total eclipse of the heart

Once upon a time there was light in my life

But now there’s only love in the dark

Nothing I can say

A total eclipse of the heart

We had a good laugh, after which he rang up my bill.

“That’ll be eighteen twenty-five. You do karaoke, don’t you?” he said.

“Yeah. Is it that obvious?”

“Karaoke people aren’t afraid of looking like retards. Nice singing with you.”

Why do I even know these lyrics?

Nasreen, this is all your fault.

(P.S. I still feel a lot better than this loser, who was a die-hard Lionel Richie fan for the longest time. I’ll bet he sings Say You, Say Me in the shower.)

Welcome to The Adventures of AccordionGuy in the 21st Century. I’ll assume that you came here from the link in the Slashdot article, Why Nerds are Unpopular (900 comments and counting when last I checked — be sure to check out the discussion and also the original Paul Graham article). Stay a while!

(Here’s one reason to stay: my photos from the Naked News party.)

According to an article in USA Today, here’s what’s going into the gift bags that will be given to performers and presenters at the Grammy Awards this Sunday:

• Akademiks sweat suit, $150
• Apple 20 GB iPod, $499
• Evolution candles, $20
• Invicta Lupah chronograph watch, $525
• Logitech digital camera, $129.99
• Sunbeam Oster In2itive blender, $149.99
• Sunbeam Healthometer wrist blood pressure monitor, $99.99
• The Sak purse, $58
• Whirly Girls sterling silver bracelet, $240
• Wilsons Leather luggage, $450
• BriteSmile gift certificate, $600
• Siemens SX56 Pocket PC mobile phone, $500
• Mattel My Scene doll, $15
• Crest Spin Brush, $8

“A-listers” like Springsteen, Nelly or that very cute Nora Jones will also get to select items from the gift lounge, where they can choose from goodies like a $500 Stetson cowboy hat, Safilo eyewear ($350 to $750) and Jabra wireless headsets at $300.

It’s enough to make you want to fire up Kazaa Lite and download everything — even stuff you hate — just out of spite.

…I have a meeting with Syd the accountant and all kinds of programming work to do. More later.

One of the themes of the popular television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer is that the monsters and demons of high school are worse than the vampires and demons that Buffy fights. Buffy can dispatch the vampires with a quick stake through the heart, but she can’t do that with the Heathers who constitute the school’s social elite.

If you were like me in high school, with glasses, braces, possessing an apititude for computers, the sciences and writing, and a Dungeon Master of renown — you probably got the crap beaten out of you and then stuffed into a locker by some goombah on the football team. Although each of us handled it differently — I became a master of Schmooze Fu, others withdrew into themselves, and a few either ended their lives, had it ended for them or sought revenge on their tormentors — we’ve all paid the price of being different.

Ubergeek Paul Graham has taken a detour from his usual topics — the ubergeeky programming langauges Lisp and combatting spam — to write the essay Why Nerds Are Unpopular. It’s a lengthy but engaging writeup of that chamber of horrors we call high school and why being smarter than the average bear is more of a liability than an asset during that stage in life. Here’s an excerpt:

Because I didn’t fit into this world, I thought that something must be wrong with me. I didn’t realize that the reason we nerds didn’t fit in was that we were a step ahead. We were already thinking about the kind of things that matter in the real world, instead of spending all our time playing an exacting but mostly pointless game like the others.

We were a bit like an adult would be if he were thrust back into middle school. He wouldn’t know the right clothes to wear, the right music to like, the right slang to use. He’d seem to the kids a complete alien. The thing is, he’d know enough not to care what they thought. We had no such confidence.

A lot of people seem to think it’s good for smart kids to be thrown together with “normal” kids at this stage of their lives. Perhaps. But in at least some cases the reason the nerds don’t fit in actually is that everyone else is crazy. I remember sitting in the audience at a “pep rally” at my high school, watching as the cheerleaders threw an effigy of an opposing player into the audience to be torn to pieces. I felt like an explorer witnessing some bizarre tribal ritual.

(I should scan some photos from my high school yearbook and post them. Brrrrrr.)