Accordion City’s garbage collectors and other outside workers went on strike this afternoon after the city and the union failed to beat a noon deadline for coming to an agreement. The strike will affect all kinds of services, from garbage pick-up to parks and recreation to clean-up crews for the upcoming Pride Parade, and later on, the Catholic World Youth Day gathering (I hear they’re going to have some rockin’ rallies).

It’ll also make the streets of Chinatown, a mere half-block from my house, stink to high heaven. The main drag is a mix of restaurants and food markets, and every day, they somehow manage to produce stacks of garbage taller than I am. Combine this trash with no pickup and hot summer weather and you’ve got one — ahem — aromatic neighbourhood.

It might make for an interesting photo essay.

The parks and recreation facilities won’t be open either, which means that a lot of public pools and baseball and soccer leagues won’t be running. As Murphy’s Law would have it, today is the last day of classes for grade school kids.

More details here and here.

From The Happiest Geek on Earth:

Decentralized Meta-Data Strategies. Sam “Neurogrid” Joseph’s paper on metadata searching in P2P networks.

$KINK. Perl porn, meet Lisp porn. The things I do to entertain you people!

<reaction>AIEEE!</reaction>. Someone’s made a programming language where you write the code in XML. Be very, very afraid.

Lamest. Social engineering attempt. Ever. A half-assed attempt to get me to open an e-mail message with the Klez virus attached.

Yet another reason to take up the accordion if you haven’t already

If the examples I have provided aren’t enough to convince you to take up the accordion, here’s another one. According to this article at Scotsman.com (“but it’s nae oatmeal!”), researchers at the University of Heidelberg have found that musicians have 130 per cent more grey matter in a particular part of their brains compared with those who are unable to play a note. Other researchers at the Chinese University of Hong Kong found students who had studied music using Western instruments showed improved short-term memory for words. Another group doing studies in Boston found that musicians have cerebellums that are 5% bigger.

Allow me to add that we’re good-lookin’, funny and smell nice too.

Apparently, these beneficial effects apply not only to playing the almighty accordion, but the other, lesser instruments as well.

Possible career change

Screw programming, I’m going to join Men Without Hats!

Recommended Listening

Ooh! An MP3 of The Safety Dance, the song I use to categorically prove the existence of God (well, I do that with Louie, Louie too…) can be found on this page!

Wiroglyphics

Isn’t it neat that subcultures can blossom at Internet speed? The concept of warchalking hasn’t been around much longer than a week and already we’ve got two sets of warchalking symbols. Which ones should you use? See the Happiest Geek on Earth for a quickie review and recommendation.

Iron Chef Filipino

Queen Street Stories,

part 3

Gaming the system

Sunday

One of the nice things about the accordion is that it’s made me rather identifiable to the shopkeepers, waitstaff and bartenders at the shops, restaurants and bars on Queen Street. I’ve struck up some casual friendships with a fair number of them. I often drop by this one particualr store, as they carry something I buy regularly and have cute staff.

“So what’s new?” I asked my friend at the counter.

“I got the neatest present from my boyfriend the other day. It was a [toy name deleted to protect the not-so-innocent] and a video of [character name deleted to protect the not-so-innocent].”

“They made toy versions of [character name deleted to protect the not-so-innocent]?”

“They did. I didn’t know that, either.”

“What inspired him to give it to you?”

“We rented this video the other night, and you know how they put ads for other videos at the start of videos these days? One of them was for [character name deleted to protect the not-so-innocent]. It was so sad and cheesy and hilarious that we spent the next twenty minutes rewinding the tape and watching it over and over again. So my boyfriend decided that he’d see if the video of [character name deleted to protect the not-so-innocent] was available on eBay. It turns out that someone was selling not only the video, but a toy version too!”

“Good old eBay. Was it expensive? You know how it is — the rarer the item, the more obsessive the collectors.”

“That was a problem. There were two other bidders for [toy name deleted to protect the not-so-innocent], and he was sure he was going to be outbid. So he wrote the other two bidders and e-mail and came up with this total lie that he was buying [toy name deleted to protect the not-so-innocent] for his son who was — get this — terminally ill with cancer!”

“Holy shit!”

There was a moment of silence before I asked: “Uh, did it work?”

“Yes. In fact, the two other bidders were incredibly sweet, and e-mailed back saying ‘Of course you can win the bid!’ and wishing his ‘son’ well. I think they even sent a card.”

“So your gift is tainted then, isn’t it?”

“Well, my boyfriend felt so guilty that he donated $300 to Save the Children.”

“I guess that’s one way to tip the scales back in the right direction. But in the end, it might’ve been cheaper for him to win the bid honestly.”

“Yeah,” she said, and then broke into a smile. “But I know that my man’s willing to lie, cheat and steal for me.”

We should all be so lucky.