One the reasons I’m here at Shopify HQ in Ottawa is to meet with Chief Platform Officer Harley “H-Fizzle” Finkelstein in a one-on-one later on this afternoon. He seems to really enjoy them — in fact, he jiggles as much as Christophe Waltz does in Inglourious Basterds:
I’m at Shopify HQ in Ottawa all week and I’ve been snapping pics of the office. Here’s one — it’s the very first thing you see when you exit the elevator.
John Brennan’s approach to protesting the TSA’s ridiculous “security theatre” was to strip naked at the security line at Portland’s airport. He was arrested, held on $4,000 bail and charged with disorderly conduct and indecent exposure.
Equally amusing was a quote from Brennan’s dad, who had this to say when contacted by local TV news:
This is quite a shock. He hasn’t been under any stress that I know of. He’s never really under any stress. He works for a computer company in California. He does something with the Internet, which is just kind of mystical to me. This is quite a surprise.
Now that’s a feeling I’m familiar with. My parents — doctors both — were never quite able to articulate what it is I do for a living when their friends ask.
I’m reminded of this photo, which I posted a little while back:
The province of Alberta — often simply explained to people outside Canada as “it’s our Texas” — is in the middle of an election, and it’s shaping up to be a battle between the right (the Progressive Conservative Party of Alberta) and the far right (the relatively new Wildrose Party, named after the official flower of the province).
The Wildrose Party’s candidates have been attracting the wrong kind of media attention lately. There was the discovery of a blog entry written in 2011 by Allan Hunsperger, a pastor and candidate for Edmonton Southwest, in which he condemned the Edmonton public school board being “wicked” and “godless” for welcoming and accepting gay students. “You will suffer the rest of eternity in the lake of fire, hell, a place of eternal suffering,” he wrote.
Hot on the heels of that debacle is a statement made by Wildrose party candidate Ron Leech, who during a radio interview this weekend said that being white gave him the advantage universal appeal:
I think as a Caucasian, I have an advantage. When different community leaders such as a Sikh leader or a Muslim leader speaks, they really speak to their own people in many ways. As a Caucasian, I believe that I can speak to all the community.
For the benefit of the Doubting Thomases in the audience, you can listen to the audio recording of this statement.
You might be asking yourselves this: “Wait a minute…by his logic — and we’re using the term loosely here — wouldn’t he himself be speaking to only his own people?”
The answer, of course, is “no, silly!” By his logic, being Caucasian is the Platonic ideal. And like the Platonic ideal, everything else is just an imperfect (and darker!) copy.
Leech has since apologized for the remarks, with these explanations:
Expect plenty of “clarifications”, sophistry and accusations of “reverse racism” in the next couple of days as the Wildrose Party’s PR machine works feverishly to maintain the seven-point lead they have in the advance polls.
There’s less than a week left in the campaign; voting day in Alberta is next Monday, April 23rd. This should be interesting.
Move over, Rebecca Black: this is the new Friday! Double Take are two ladies singing about a slightly more grown-up matter, and they’re not afraid to ditch the autotune and let the world hear them sing off-key. Here’s the catchy chorus to their single Hot Problems:
Hot girls – we have problems too
We’re just like you
Except we’re hot
The whole world needs to open their eyes
And realize
We’re not perfect
I’m still kicking myself for not learning Friday on accordion. I won’t make the same mistake twice.
This scene (which is making the rounds of the interwebs today):
reminds me of this scene:
Late last month, one of the most unintentionally funny publications I’ve seen in some time made a splash and then just as quickly disappeared without explanation. It was The Conservative Teen, a magazine with a incredibly oxymoronic title, the slogans “fostering conservative values” and “countering liberal bias” (not exactly burning issues on the teenage agenda) and wholesome-on-the-verge-of-delusional articles that most certainly were not written by teens nor anyone who’s even had contact with a teen. (They might have had fantasies about teens, but that doesn’t count.)
Among its articles are such gems as:
Many of the articles, either in deference to teenager’s inexperience or to John Stuart Mill, many of the articles came with definitions for some of their tougher words (such as “cameo” and “Judaism”). Perhaps it didn’t occur to the writers that kids these days would Google any unfamiliar terms. Then again, they may have wanted to spare the young’uns the terror of Google returning some liberal results for their searches.
The back cover features this full-page photo which works best if you imagine it read aloud by Sam the American Eagle from The Muppet Show:
I’d link to the magazine itself, but its site lived for less than a handful of days. According to this Buzzfeed article, the reason why depends on whom you ask:
The disappearance of The Conservative Teen leaves a void for some enterprising, politically active publisher to fill. My suggestion: get some actual conservative teens — tricky to find, but perhaps you can find the loner in the high school cafeteria plotting revenge, some homeschooled kids or visit a militia training ground — to write at least a few of the articles.