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…”)
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.
Upstairs at the Rivoli (332 Queen Street West, on the north side, a half-block east of Spadina), the fun starts at 9:00 p.m., and host Carson T. Foster’s mom will be there! I think it would be very fascinating to meet “Mama Cars”.
I attended Gideon Strauss’ blogger convivium last night, playing the role of “the ambassador from Accordion City“. It was finally a chance to meet Gideon, whom I knew only through his blog and some communication via email and blog comments. I rather like meeting people whose work I read and enjoy, and sometimes some very interesting things happen.
I had a nice hot mug of Gluhwein, a bowl of excellent potato-leek soup, and some excellent conversation with the crowd that ran the gamut of urban planning (“Have you ever notcied that suburban architecture seems to make the storage of cars its number one priority?”) to people switching from one demonination of Christianity to another (“They’d signed a temporary mutual non-burning pact, and the part of the phrase that got me was the word temporary“) to the very sweet concern for my well-being of Summer and Shimmer, the Strausslings (“If you’re out all night, do you sleep during the day? When do you go to church?”).
I didn’t get a chance to give my answers to Summer and Shimmer, so here they are: “Well, I ususally don’t sleep in later than noon on Sundays, and I’m often up earlier”, and “Not as often as is proscribed, but more often than my rather secular friends think. There’s a nice mass at St. Mike’s at 5:00 p.m., which is well past the span of most hangovers, and a charming cantor-and-guitar mass at 9:00 for procrastinators and accordion-playing pop-culture aficionados who happen to be shopping at the nearby HMV around that time.”
There was some singing too. I pulled out the accordion, Angela alternated between piano and violin, and others made use of the Strauss’ collection of interesting percussion instruments. We started with some Christmas carols and later, a few hymns. Carols tend to be universal, but I recognized the melodies of only half the hymns, coming from a rather different branch of Jesus Fan Club. I recognized the words — a good number of hymns crib their lyrics from the Psalms — but the melodies were unknown to me. It’s like being a speaker of North American English being telported to downtown Sheffield, where “apples and pears” means “stairs”, a “lorry” is a truck and “lunch” means “an owl, deep-fried in its own feathers, smeared in mayonnaise”. They asked me to play some of my busking numbers, and did Steppenwolf’s Born to Be Wild, All My Love in response to a request for Zep, Fatboy Slim’s Praise You, Cecilia when Bethany found Angela’s Simon and Garfunkel songbook, and my rendition of Jim Breuer’s impression of The Hokey Pokey if AC/DC covered it.
I had a wonderful time meeting the Strauss family and guests at the convivum. I’ll cut-and-paste some thank-yous from Gideon’s blog:
Thank you to Will, Sarah, Darren, Chris, Kathy, Ray, Jake, James, Brian, Nicole, Rich, Rob, Joey, Daniel, Bethany, Summer, Shimmer, and Angela, for a most convivial convivium!
And thank you, Gideon!
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.