I need to run away from the computers for a bit, but there are a few more links left, which will be covered in the remaining two (Bob and Doug Mackenzie managed to enumerate only 8 of the 12 days of Christmas) entries. Stay tuned!
For you non-Canuckleheads, a “two-four” is the Canadian colloquial term for a case of beer, which holds 24 bottles.
One thing that bothered me as a teenager growing up in the 1980s was what Douglas “Generation X” Coupland later called “legislated nostalgia”. Simply put, it’s being made to feel nostalgic for someone else’s past, and in the eighties, we were having the sixties marketed very strongly to us. The Boomers derided us as the “nowhere generation”, while at the same time, many of them froze themselves in time, maintained a permanent semi-adolescent state and soaked up any opportunity that the “Thirteenth Gen” could’ve used. They ended up raising self-indulgent children with poor impulse control, a few of whom I had the misfortune of dating.
(Speaking of children with poor impulse control, have you seen these dolls that Blork Blog points out?)
(By the way, “south-east Asian”, a.k.a. “oriental”, and “hippie” are almost contradictions in terms, which is one argument for multiculturalism — we’re pretty much Grateful Dead-proof and perhaps your last, best hope against the patchouli-reeking rabble.)
Anyhow, for those of you, who like me chanted “Bring me the head of Jerry Garcia!”, who preferred DM to CSNY, there’s Boomer Deathwatch, a site devoted to the watching boomers bite it. Schadenfreude at its finest.
Boomer Deathwatch is run by Rick McGinnis and Kathy Shaidle (yup, Ms. Relapsed Catholic herself), both of whom I met at David Janes’ warblogger/conservative blogger party in the spring.
Speaking of David Janes, check out his home office. That’s a pretty sweet collection of gear. Maybe we should have some kind of local blogger post-fest where people blog photos of their computer desks.
(By the way, David helped launch The Carnival of the Canucks.)
I’m a slow but passable reader of French, but Karl’s blog helps keep me sharp, and his blogging, like mine, is a mish-mash of geek and life. This week, he attempted animal haiku and talked about how XFN is a big, steaming pile of merde.
Richard, the “gwai lo” in Just a Gwai Lo (that’s “white guy” in Cantonese) asks if low-carb means low-taste. Nope: it’s low-fat that means low-taste. The taste downside to the Atkins diet is that without bread, rice or pasta, there’s not much to sop up the juices and sauces of your meal. He’s another daily read of mine.
Operating system humour. Chris Cummer at ob.blog found this on Slashdot:
Microsoft: Where do you want to go today?
Apple: Where do you want to go tomorrow?
Linux: Are you guys coming or what?
Although Guile and I disgree about Freddy vs. Jason, (I hated it, he thought it was Citzen Kane), he’s come up with some good advice for those of you who have yet to see Return of the King. When Guile isn’t involved in kinky creamed-corn-wrestling with the lovely Chun Li, he writes some bang-on summaries of what’s been happening on Survivor: Pearl Islands.
Yes, I’ve met him, and as a matter of fact, he does glow in the dark. When Gamma Fodder isn’t studying noo-cue-lar physics, he’s hanging around my neck of Accordion City and writing some pretty funny stuff. In one of those “it’s a small world” coincidences, he’s a friend of Rob “King Floyd” MacDougall, with whom I wrote for the humour paper Golden Words at Crazy Go Nuts University. Rob’s Canadian, but he lives somewhere in the Boston area, like this cute girl I know.
(Look, it’s my blog, and I can get all Redhead-sappy if I want to.)
Like Gamma Fodder, Relapsed Catholic is not afraid to handle hot material. We agree to disagree much of the time, especially in areas where immigrants are concerned — I’m an immigrant, and sometimes she’s of the “Ever since my family came to Canada, we’ve had nothing but crap from immigrants!” school. I have to admit that we sometimes agree, and that her Don Cherry-meets-Don Rickles approach to religion, politics and pop culture is fascinating. Agree or disagree, she always makes for an engaging read.
Kathy recently wrote a poem poking fun at Kwanzaa, which has been described as a phony holiday created by a criminal by her and Jewish World Review (Tony Pierce, who’s black and left-leaning, also thinks of Kwanzaa as fake or at least fake-ish).
And then it hit the AOL fan. If freedom-of-speech and racism issues are your cup of political tea, you should take a peek.
My own feeling is that although Kwanzaa’s roots are pretty dubious, but I’m still looking for a non-drooling-right source to corroborate the evidence gathered against it. However, there is a precedent for the meaning of holidays to be supplanted — take Christmas being moved to knock out Saturnalia (and alas, maybe Spendmas knocking out Christmas) — and instilling more of a “Yes, we’re black and we should be proud” spirit, while realizing all the while that what holds us together as humans far outshines the differences. You know, like that little dream of Dr. King’s.
Of course, that may be a long time coming.
Boss Ross, thinks that the boss of a certain special lady friend of mine misses the point about public participation in ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the people who oversee the assignment of domain names (such as drinkyourownpee.com) and numbers (which all those nice domain names translate to). If the minutae of internet governance isn’t your cup of tea, there’s Ross’ entry on his quitting smoking, a must-read if you’re trying to quit the vile weed.
Elliot Noss, He Who Reigns Above Us All at Tucows also has a blog, and if internet governance is your bag, you should read his article on the recent WSIS meeting in Geneva.
My former coworker at OpenCola, Gary Lawrence Murphy, is a programmer, musician and expert observational chronicler. He writes about an anti-RIAA guerilla stickering campaign — one that I believe BoingBoing (co-edited by Canadian expat Cory Doctorow) hasn’t yet blogged it — that’s pretty cool.
Politics always makes for strong emotions and strong statements, and Deenster (who also worked with me at OpenCola) has a posting about her own experience with anger in the Israel/Palestine debate in her charming blog, Pony.
My one-stop checkpoint for things about the internet and juggling information is Circadian Shift. Jen Vetterli is a tireless aggregator of this sort of information, and as someone who works in the research and innovation wing of a company that helps make the Internet go, I find it incredibly useful.
Tony Gill,who runs Gill Advisors and has a business blog, in thinking about the parallels between the internet and coffee houses and the proposed replacement for the World Trade Center, writes:
Today, as in years gone by, freedom is not in the tallest structures in the world, but in small coffee shops on street corners where people gather to exchange information and ideas, to read a newspaper or magazine, or to connect to the Internet with laptop computers or wireless handheld devices to check their email and, perhaps, post notes to their websites on a Saturday morning.
Abnu is a Canadian working for an American company in Toronto (the most roundabout description since the tag line for the movie Victor Victroria). Naming and branding is his line of work, so he’s got something to say about the naming of “Operation Red Dawn”, in which one Saddam Hussein Al-Tikrit was captured.
Never mind “A Boy Named Sue”, here’s a girl named Bill! Bill’s one of the YULBloggers (a Montreal blogging social group) I met this September, and her blog, Geekward Ho is one of my regular reads. Her blog currently has a number of good Christmas jokes and some observations about what she learned over a three-day period.
My favourite right-wing canuck, Colby Cosh, wrote the best summary of The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King ever:
Hey, have you guys heard about this Return of the King movie? It’s pretty darn good! It’s about these Irish midgets who save the world! You should check it out!
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 Americas 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!