Tucows’ Starkville office
(formerly Boardtown, Inc., and purchased
by us earlier this year) is in the middle of
hurricane-a-palooza and have been rain, wind and power loss. On behalf
of the Toronto and Flint offices, our
thoughts are with you guys.
To anyone in the track of Hurricanes Ivan,
and Karl, hang in there!
Although this video’s title is Why Judo is Better Than Karate, I think that an equally apt title would be How Microsoft Won the First Browser War.
I remember reading a zillion articles about how small, agile companies
like Netscape were going to put lumbering corporate dinosaurs like M$
out of business; this video makes an excellent counter-metaphor.
A couple of the Queen West regulars have told me that Johnny Depp is in town for the Film Festival and has been hanging out at Shanghai Cowgirl. Be careful, Johnny: their sweet potato fries and wasabi mayonnaise may be tasty-licious, but a few plates of those and Sir Mix-A-Lot may be writing raps about you.
Val Kilmer’s presence is also being felt in town, albeit in a different way:
Photo by Cory Doctorow.
Cory Doctorow took the photo above during his last visit to town. He, Possum and I had just come from watching The Village (“A ninety-minute Twilight Zone
episode”, he called it) and were walking along Grange Avenue towards
Spadina when we saw “Val Kilmer” with a peace sign on a side door to one of the Chinese markets.
“You think it’s for his career as a whole, or just a specific role?” I asked. “I liked him best as ‘Nick Rivers’ in Top Secret.”
A couple of weeks later, during her visit to Toronto, Wendy spotted this graffito as we were walking on Phoebe towards Soho (just north of The Black Bull):
Photo by Yours Truly.
The peace sign beside “Val Kilmer” suggests that the tagger probably saw The Doors and had some kind of epiphany. I haven’t seen the movie — was it really that good?
It’s Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year. Shanah Tovah to all my Jewish readers, especially The Redhead!
What better way to commemorate the holiday on this rather earthy blog (see definitions 3 and 4 of the word) than to show you this week’s Shabot 6000 comic?
Like me, it’s so very wrong and so very funny! Don’t show this to your rabbi. Trust me on this one.
…now someone’s posted a recipe for deep-fried Oreos. They’re basically Oreo cookies dunked in pancake batter and then deep-fried.
I don’t even want to know the fat and carb counts for these puppies.
We could probably harness the rotational energy from Dr. Atkins’ grave to power an entire city.
[found via del.icio.us]
From the “I really wanted to post about this sooner” department: My bloggy friends Marc Weisblott (who does the words) and Brett Lamb
(who does the pictures, and some words too) are the masterminds behind
the new blog on all things Toronto — or Accordion City, as I
like to call it — called Better Living Centre.
The BLC, as its founders like to call it, will focus on news and events
in and around the Toronto area. I’ll leave it to Brett to tell the story of why he and Marc created the blog.
As for the name, I believe it’s derived from the building at the Canadian National Exhibition with the same name, a 50’s modernist “machines for living”
edifice that used to feature home furnishings and appliances when I was
a kid (imagine Sears trying to put on a World’s Fair type of show
featuring their goods). I have no idea what’s inside it now.
There’s all kinds of good Accordion City-related stuff in Better Living Centre, and in light of mainstream journalism’s flight from blogging and general web availability (witness the recent moves at the Globe and the Post), there’s a void of Toronto-specific news reportage that can be filled with interesting bloggers.
It should be an interesting companion to another Toronto blog, GTABloggers (whose focus is more about Toronto bloggers socializing). I’m going to have to cross-post there sometime.
S&R is a discount department store in Kingston, the city in which Crazy Go Nuts University is situated. It was a popular place with students, and for the guys in my house — 103 Clergy Street West — it was the go-to place for cheap hats.
For a little while, hat collecting became a hobby of ours. My housemates Greg Popoff, Mark Bereczky and I were particularly fond of our fake fur hats with furry ear flaps and a high dome; we looked like two members of the Politburo and the North Korean Ambassador in them. I was also partial to a black felt fedora that I’d purchased at S&R and had taken to wearing it fairly often in the beginning of second year.
It was the fall of 1988. Although I was in second year, I was in a first-year chemistry course. I am the opposite of the rest of my family; where they seem to like chemistry and biology, my strengths were in physics and math. I was disinterested in biology, but I absolutely loathed chemistry. “Damned electron shuffling, that’s all chemistry really is,” I used to say.
“You take notes,” said Cathy, my chemistry lab partner, “your handwriting’s neater than mine.”
“Suits me fine,” I said. “I’m in Electrical. As far as I’m concerned, chemistry’s for making batteries and beer.”
Cathy was my partner-in-chemistry in a couple of senses; she was a lab partner and a drinking buddy. She probably heard me complain more about E. (the girl from this story, the one who said that the three kinds of men in this world were “scum, art fags and Joey”) than anyone else. She also helped judge the entries in the “Win a date with Joey deVilla” contest in the paper later that year.
Cathy ignited the bunsen burner as I started writing the introduction to the lab assignment.
“Joey…”
“Hang on, Cathode,” I said, calling her by my nickname for her, “I just have to finish the intro.”
“Joooo-ey…” she said, her voice filled with worry.
“What?” I said, turning my head. As I turned, an orange and yellow burst of colour came into my view. It took me another moment to register what was going on: I was still wearing my fedora, and somehow it had caught on fire. I must’ve been leaning too close to the bunsen burner.
“Oh, shit!” I said, for two reasons: the obvious one as well as the fact that Paul, our lab T.A., was about to enter the lab. Luckily, he was deep in conversation with another T.A., so he hadn’t yet noticed that some idiot had just set himself alight.
Luckily, the lab was on the first floor and our station was right by an open window. I grabbed my fedora by the rear brim and pitched it out the window into a nearby snowbank.
Paul walked towards our station. I didn’t know if he’d seen the incident or not, so I opted to put on my most guile-free expression and act as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.
“Hey, Paul,” I said. “What’s up?”
He sniffed the air for a moment and then looked out the window.
“Could you explain what that is?” he asked, pointing to the smoldering hat outside.
“Oh, that. It’s…it’s…well, I’d classify it as some kind of exothermic reaction.”
“Very rapid oxidation,” added Cathy helpfully.
“I can see why you partnered with him,” said Paul to Cathy as he walked away. “He’s an idiot chemist, but a good note-taker.”