Category: Uncategorized

I can’t talk about Canadian Blogs without mentioning BlogsCanada and its directory of Canadian blogs and their monthly listing of top Canadian blogs. Jim Elve, one of the people behind BlogsCanada also has a blog, Officially Unofficial. He recently got a scoop that hasn’t received enough attention — a two–part interview with Hossein “Hoder” Derakhshan, a Toronto-based blogger, who blogs in both Persian and English, fights the good fight against censorship (and especially for the freedom of his native Iran) and is running for Iranian parliament.

Jim will be hosting next week’s Carnival of the Canucks and gets bonus points from me for being that rarest of breeds: the Canadian accordion player.

The award for Most Idealistic Canadian Blog has to go to Dave Pollard’s How to Save the World, wherein he sets out to do just that. Also of interest are two recent postings, What Keeps Executives Awake at Night, in which he looks at “the usual” solutions to business problems versus his approach, and Are You a Closet Canadian?, which points to a great test to see if your attitudes are generally more Canadian (trending towards “idealism and autonomy”) or American (in the “status and security” area, trending towards “exlcusion and intensity”).

I cannot praise Steph “Sniffles” Troeth’s blog, Dandruff, enough. I love her writing and observations, and had a chance to meet her along with a number of YULBloggers (YUL is the airport code for Montreal’s Mirabel airport) in September. A notable recent entry: The Relationship Quagmire, in which she comments on the inadequacies of XFN (XHTML Friends Network), a computer-readable way of documenting relationships between people.

(I am of the opinion that having computer programmers design social software is dangerously similar to having deaf people design violins. The previous sentence also gives me an excuse to sneak in a link to Seb’s Open Research, which is also a Canadian blog. Clever, no?)

Here’s hoping that Happygirl’s Christmas wishes come true. But really, Happygirl, I think you should wish for better than “A date with a non-boring non-ugly guy who is slightly normal.” I think I fit at least 66% of the bill, but as regualr readers may have deduced, my dance card is full.

G’day, eh?!, and welcome to this week’s edition of Carnival of the Canucks! This week’s theme, seeing as we’re two days away from Christmas and since the Carnival is all about notable entries in Canadian blogs both notorious and unheard-of, is The Twelve Days of Christmas, as performed by the two greatest guardians of Canadian Culture, Bob and Doug Mackenzie.

For those of you not familiar with the Mackenzie brothers’ rendition of the carol, their gifts were:

• Eight comic books
• Seven packs of smokes
• Six packs of two-fours
• Five golden toques
• Four pounds of back bacon (for you Americans: this is what Canadians call “Canadian bacon”)
• Three french toasts
• Two turtlenecks
• And a beer in a tree

And now, the first set of links…

“The horror…the horror…”: Brett Lamb tells funny stories of his experiences as a shopping mall Santa Claus.

Packing tips! I’m flying with The Redhead to attend the wedding of my friends Ashley Bristowe and Chris Turner in the amazingly scenic little town of Canmore, Alberta. Thankfully, Eva at EastrernBlog has illustrated the proper way to pack my stylin’ Boss suit.

It took Boston’s deepest blogger to point me to one Adam Yoshida, who by his writing is a super-patriot. By super-patriot, I am using the MAD magazine definition, which is “someone who loves his country while hating 94% of it”. He has a great polemic about what’s wrong with Canada (not enough like the US, which in turn is not enough like Palpatine’s Empire) called The Northern Abyss (PDF link), wonders why Howard Dean took so many damned Marxist courses and why his family keeps such a low profile and starts his latest blog entry with:

The US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals is more than just a liberal court. It is an active enemy cell, a disloyal institution which has taken the side of America’s enemies in the War on Terror.

He’s the new Ed Anger!

From the West Coast… Tim Bray has some lovely photos of his neck of the woods, the west coast, and also presents his notes on Quicksilver, the first of a trilogy by Neal Stephenson (whom I met recently).

More stuff soon…keep watching this space!

Today’s the last day you can submit anything for Carnival of the Canucks. One last time: if you know of any interesting Canada-based blogs or blog postings from Canadian blogs, please let me know either in the comments or email me. My edition of Carnival of the Canucks will appear tomorrow morning, after which the torch will be passed to Jim “BlogsCanada” Elve for next Tuesday.

Be sure to take a look at last week’s Carnival, which was hosted by the music blog Switching to Glide.

Well, sort of.

OSDN (Open Source Developer Network), the parent company of the geeky website Slashdot (as well as FreshMeat, SourceForge and Linux.com) now has a branded dating service “powered by Match.com”. Here’s the ad:

(I like to think that I’m flexible when it comes to dating, but 18 – 35 is a pretty wide range, even for me.)

There you go, Slashdotters — put on a (relatively) clean t-shirt, brush up on your romantic 1337speak, and prepare your best lies for your personal profile! (“I enjoy long moonlit romantic walks…”)

Recommended Reading

Sex Tips for Geeks by sexy libertarian (cough, cough, cough), firearms enthusiast and open source advocate Eric S. Raymond. I have these horrible visions of him narrating the text of this work while simultaneously being the other participant in the Paris Hilton video (safe for work, it’s a newspaper article titled A Culture Gorging on Porn).

…because Tuesday’s Carnival of the Canucks installment is in my care and I want it to be very, very good.

If you know of anything noteworthy that was posted over the last week in a blog written by someone located in Canada — and by noteworthy, I mean “worth noticing” and “interesting”, and it can come from any perspective, regardless of ideology, creed, or allegiance to operating system — let me know either via comments or email. I’ll be scouring the Canadian blogosphere myself, but any help is appreciated.

For more details about the Carnival, see this posting.

These days, my favourite brain candy — my term for the sort of light reading that one brings to pass away the time on the subway, at lunch, in the waiting room at the doctor’s or mechanic’s — is books on how to be a gentleman. I’ve mentioned The Modern Gentleman before, and I occasionally pop it open at a random chapter and find something that makes me sit up and take notice.

Here’s its wisdom on controlling your alcohol intake, sound advice for the holidays:

Recall the flower of youth, when running on slippery pool decks before hurtling into a cannonball seemed a biological imperative; later in life, wait an extra ten seconds before launching into a graceful swan dive. These boyhood lessons translate into all social behaviors, especially drinking. Be a refined tippler, the part-time, lovable degenerate. Impetuousness ripens into spontaneity, impatience into timely verve, unbridled energy into charisma and elan. Mastering alchohol means picking times to roar, not becoming the nightly wet rag or fun vaccuum. Instead of floundering into slurred oblivion, revel in a sustained buzz of balance and loose chat. Aspire to be “the man that can hold his liqour” as opposed to “that old pathetic drunk”. Get in touch with your chakras and vitality; the venerable vices are not an intrusive competition, but a limbering stretch of control. The ethic of alcohol is about acknolwedging personal limits, even as you intentionally step past them.

The Economist has a great article on one of my favourite “third places”: the coffee house. From places where people exchange information to the plotting of revolutions to the start of some hilarious stories, the cafe is a much-ignored part of culture here in North America.