Alan Graham and Bonnie Burton’s review of the best blogs out there, Never Threaten to Eat Your Co-Workers: The Best of Blogs, is out! And among the blogs featured in the book is…The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century!
As one might expect, the book also has an accompanying blog.
I’d like to thank Alan and Bonnie for considering me worthy of
being included in a book that contains the “best of blogs”, and
congratulate them on a job well done!
I’m flying to Boston on Thursday to catch up with The Redhead, but I’m also squeezing in time to see my Beantown peeps. Wendy’s organizing a gathering in Boston on Friday; see here for more details.
This week’s Canadian blog linkfest is being hosted by the blog with the Atkins-compliant name, The Meatriarchy!
If you’ve missed any installment of the Carnival, you can always check the archives.
[ via The Meatriarchy ] “Fluorescent” is Korean slang used to describe someone who takes a
little bit longer to get the joke. Well, that’s the kind way of putting
it.
(Think about how fluorescent tubes light up when you turn them on and the derivation of the expression will become clear.)
Adam Daifallah seems like a pretty sharp guy, but as we all do from time to time, he had a moment of fluorescence:
Until now I have always defended Ann Coulter against her detractors,
many of them my own (often conservative) friends. I find her writing
style crisp, original, and not to mention hilarious. I especially love
her acerbic barbs at Ted Kennedy.
But I’m afraid in the last two
weeks she’s crossed the boundaries of good fun and good taste to the
land of the indefensible/despicable. What really put me over the edge
was this line from her column last week on The Passion:
Being
nice to people is, in fact, one of the incidental tenets of
Christianity (as opposed to other religions whose tenets are more along
the lines of “kill everyone who doesn’t smell bad and doesn’t answer to
the name Mohammed”).
I mean, that is just unbelivable. It
is beyond the pale. It crosses the line. She was always pushing the
limits before, but she seems to have kicked it up yet another notch —
and her column this week, also on The Passion and tearing a strip off New York Times columnist William Safire, isn’t much better.
Ah, the old “wogs smell bad” canard. I thought that was a thing of the seventies,
when I was a “New Canadian” and taking weekly lumps from the Sons of
the Family Compact for the crime of having been born elsewhere. And the “all Muslims are jihadis” stuff is a bit much.
Well, Adam, better late to the party than not showing up, I always say.
At some point during Gideon Strauss‘ blogger convivium last Christmas, I mentioned to him that I used to like programming while listening to a set of MP3s of William Gibson reading Neuromancer.
I kept them on my OpenCola-issued laptop while I worked there, and I
forgot to make a backup copy before dutifully handing it back when I
got laid off.
Gideon, a Gibson fan, asked me to let him know if I ever found more
copies. I’d forgotten about his request until this past weekend, and a
little Googling found me this site and this site, which has 8 MP3s, representing four 90-minute cassettes of the Neuromancer audiobook.
According to this page on the William Gibson Aleph, U2 — one of Gideon’s favourite bands — contributed a track to the audiobook.
Gideon, everyone: enjoy!
“The sky above the port was the the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel…”
…where it’s work, work, work. I’ll try and get caught up with my
“blogligations”. The usual blog entry will appear later tonight.
In the meantime, a little trivia about the blogs I write:
Last night at 11 (my timezone, Eastern Standard Time, a.k.a. GMT -5), AKMA wrote:
Anyone feel like recording a chapter of Lawrence Lessigs new book?
The license pretty clearly indicates that, so long as were not
making a commercial venture of it, we can make a recording of
(perform) the text. There are a Preface, Introduction, fifteen
chapters, a conclusion and an afterword. If youre willing to
contribute an MP3 recording of a chapter (ideally, hosting it on your
own server but Ill bet we can gird up the Disseminary
to host chapters for you, if you can host it yourself drop us a
comment and let us know which chapters youll take. Heck, we could have
duelling chapters; which version of chapter 5 do you like, Accordion Guys or Jenny the Shifted Librarians?
(Disclaimer: I just typed their names in there. They havent offered or
anything. Yet.)
12 hours later, this item has already appeared on Boing Boing and
received 26 comments on AKMA’s site, and a flurry of email has appeared
in my inbox regarding this project. All on a Friday night! I have deduced two things from this:
I have signed up to read a chapter, but haven’t chosen one yet.
I’m going to go look over the book and see if there’s one that tickeles
my fancy or if there’s one that nobody’s volunteered to read yet.
I will see if I can convince Boss Ross and Boss Ross’ boss Elliot Noss
to contribute a chapter. They’ve got great speaking voices and their
contribution to the ‘Net at large is far greater than mine. I write a
blog and helped generate some buzz for P2P; they’ve helped make the
Internet work.
But not today. I’ve got an aunt and uncle from the Philippines whom I’m joining for lunch at the St. Lawrence Market, followed by catching up with Cory’s book reading, a haircut, a couple of birthday parties to attend and a friend from out of town who need to sample some more of the local night life.
While I laud my fellow bloggers’ industriousness, I suggest that they
turn off the computer and get some fresh air. And a double rye and coke!