If you’re looking for a good time for a good cause tonight, please consider the Calgary Stamp-Aid, a night of comedy to raise money to help the people of Alberta rebuild after the recent floods. If you can attend in person, it’s happening at the Gladstone Hotel (1214 Queen Street West at Gladstone, just east of Dufferin). If you can’t attend in person, you can watch it online! The fun starts at 9:00 p.m. Eastern (7:00 p.m. Calgary time).
Who needs Paula Deen when you have one of these?
The recent crash of the Asiana jet at San Francisco airport has shown the upside of citizen journalism, what with the photo above taken by passenger David Eun, a Samsung executive, who also tweeted this:
I just crash landed at SFO. Tail ripped off. Most everyone seems fine. I'm ok. Surreal… (at @flySFO) [pic] — https://t.co/E6Ur1XEfa4
— David Eun (@Eunner) July 6, 2013
…and with this eyewitness video shot by Fred Hayes on his smartphone:
And then, there’s the downside. You’ll find more on the Public Shaming blog, in the article titled Idiots Use Plane Crash in San Francisco to Mock Asians, Blame North Korea.
The ignorant tweets came in two categories, the first being “let’s use a tragedy to make racist jokes”. Click on any of these screen captures to visit the corresponding Twitter accounts and see what other great intellectual gems they’re sharing.
Imagine the hue and cry from these people if someone made an “Americans can’t drive” joke in reference to reports that one of the people killed in the crash may have been killed by being run over by a rescue vehicle.
The other category of tweets made about the crash is “It’s enemy action!”, in which people are clearly unable to discern the difference between Nice Korea (home of Samsung, PSY) and Naughty Korea (home of Kim Jong-Un, son of the bad guy from Team America: World Police). Once again, click on the screen captures of the tweets to see the Twitter accounts of these masters of geopolitics.
Click the picture to see it at full size.
In case you’re not aware of fan fiction, here’s Wikipedia’s entry for the term.
The blog postings are light this week because I’m on holiday! I’m out and about with the Special Lady all week; drop me a line if you want to catch up with us. In the meantime, we’re having a better time than the guy at the front of the roller coaster below:
Yelp has a handy feature that lets you view a heat map of the parts of cities that correlate most strongly with certain key words in their reviews. Their Toronto heat map for the word “hipster” should come as no surprise to anyone:
Click the heat map above to see the full version.
This might work if it’s a peace offering to a friend, less so if it’s for a significant other or spouse. A cronut might be even more effective.