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Carnival of the Canucks, Part 1: A Beer in a Tree

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!

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Carnival of the Canucks — down to the wire

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.

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Slashdot gets a dating service

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:

Photo: OSDN dating 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).

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Even More "Carnival of the Canucks" Nagging…

…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.

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Accordion, Instrument of the Gods

Kickass Karaoke Tonight

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”.

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It Happened to Me

Convivial!

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!

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"The Modern Gentleman" on Holding Your Liquor

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.