Category: Uncategorized

A quick reminder: The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century has been nominated for the 2005 Canadian Blog Awards “Best Blog” award! Vote for me today!

[via Superfrankenstein] The mash-up the world’s been waiting for — Family Circus comics with captions taken from H.P. Lovecraft!

Congratulations to fellow blogger Maria “Adventures in Downtown Toronto” Davo on becoming a Canadian citizen today! From one immigrant to another, welcome!

Being a well-known blogger in Accordion City, Maria is probably the second best-known Mexican immigrant to Canada. The mantle of best-known Mexican-Canadian goes to “Ren”, from Ren and Stimpy, pictured below:

Now, let us all rise for the Royal Canadian Kilted Yaksmen Anthem [1.9MB, MP3].

Bonus Viewing

The Royal Canadian Kilted Yaksmen episode of Ren and Stimpy

It’s blog awards time again: voting for the 2005 Canadian Blog Awards

is open until this Wednesday, and The Adventures of Accordion Guy in

the 21st Century is nominated for “Best Blog”! Won’t you please vote

for this blog, which presented these goodies over the past year?:

• The Beer Hunter, the interactive map that displays beer, liquor and wine stores that are currently open in Toronto
• The “totally dismal and excellent” Archie comic in which Betty goes goth. It got picked up by Boing Boing.
• Blogacatmas, which made it into the Globe and Mail.
• My blogger-on-blogger officiated by bloggers wedding, which made it into both the Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star
• Henry Rollins’ “William Shatner” Story
• The Quick Boys Moving story
• My photographic debunking of a Dateline NBC story (the “dingy alleys: of Liberty Village)
• A well-received article on the relics one gathers over time, and thinking about throwing them out
• I’m still the smoothest Asian on TV since Mr. Sulu.
• One of the best Archie comics double-entendres (which also got picked up by Boing Boing).
• The best “for rent” ad you’ll ever see for a place near downtown Toronto.
• I explain the three Canadian political parties in comic form, which could be useful in the next couple of months.
• I have performed accordion numbers at burlesque shows and was kind enough to share my photos and movies with you.
• Owner of a Lovely Butt
• The David Hasselhoff 2005 Calendar
• The best damned explanation of the Barong Tagalog anywhere.
• A programmer’s challenge which got mentioned in Wired
• Proof that “Jack” from Fight Club is really a grown-up “Calvin” from Calvin and Hobbes
• The Bloggers’ Prayer
• Batman vs. the boners
• A video showing the origin of the phrase “Jump the shark”
• The oddball Wendy’s training video from the eighties
• The first use of the word “blog” — in Superman comics, back in 1959!

This one has been languishing in the “oh yeah, I should blog this” file and it’s about time I posted it.

I’ve mentioned the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School

before. My ties with it are many: it’s where Wendy worked, I met Wendy

at a conference organized by Berkman, Wendy’s former boss John Palfrey and my boss’ boss Elliot Noss know each other and each holds the other in high esteem, and I know a number of people there.

Global Voices is a project/blog founded by a couple of people I know: Ethan Zuckerman (whose wife, Rachel Barenblat, conducted our wedding ceremony) and Rebecca MacKinnon.

It’s a citizens’ media project that spotlights blog entries from

outside North America and Western Europe, providing news, perspectives

and stories that we’d otherwise miss. A team of editors keeps an eye on

the blogosphere, each covering a specific region (Middle east, Africa,

South Asia, East Asia, Americas and Eastern Europe) and distilling the

most notable blog entries. If you want to see the greater blogosphere,

Global Voices is a good starting point.

I also know Lisa Goldman by way of her sister, Deenster.

Aside from being a perfectly charming dim sum lunch companion, Lisa is

also an engaging writer who lives in Tel Aviv and blogs about life and

“the current situation” over there in her blog, On The Face (here’s the explanation behind her blog’s name).

Here’s where both Global Voices and Lisa meet: Lisa’s been invited to represent the Israeli blogsphere on Global Voices Online!

She’ll be doing a roundup of the most notable Israeli blogs of the week

and posting her summary on Global Voices every Saturday.

Congratulations, Lisa, and thanks for the weekend reading material!

I decided to take a tiny bit of my lunch break and cobble together my

own statement on Sony’s

nasty anti-piracy “rootkit” (software hidden on Sony music

CDs that takes control of your computer without your permission) by

mashing up Dan

Kaminsky’s visualization of affected systems worldwide and

one of the Sony PlayStation’s most beloved games, Katamari Damacy. The

result:

Those of you with better Photoshopping skills should feel free to

create more “screenshots” from this conceptual game.

An alternate name for this game could be “Katamari XCP” — XCP is the

name of Sony’s rootkit. It works well with the game’s theme song:

“Na na na na na na na na,

Katamari XCP…”