According to this story, 1.2% of the gun dealers in the United States sell weapons that account for 57% of all firearms used in crimes.
Just in case you didn’t know (and hence didn’t get the joke title), here’s an explanation of what the Pareto Principle is.
We’re only a couple of days into National Accordion Awareness Month, and nobody can accuse me of not pulling my weight. Here are my contributions…
Thanks to a recommendation from Scott “Hello, My Name Is Scott” Ginsberg — he’s the guy who wears a name tag, which gets accordion-like results and doesn’t weigh thirty freaking pounds — I’m going to be interviewed on the Keith Larson Show on WBT News/Talk Radio (1110 on your AM dial in Charlotte, NC) this Friday at 11:35 a.m. Eastern. They haevn’t given me any particular “script” to stick to; as far as I can tell, it’ll be me nattering for twenty-five minutes in my radio-friendly schmoove voice, after which Rush Limbaugh takes over. I hear he’s going to eat a tree on his Friday show.
A big thank you to Scott for the recommendation! You’re the man!
Next week, I’ll be taping a segment for an episode of an upcoming W Network / WTN show called Living Romance. This particular episode concerns itself with serenading and will feature a mariachi band, a violinist who plays for his girlfriend in the morning to wake her up and at night to lull her to sleep (oh yeah, that’ll be happening once the honeymoon’s over), and me. As with the radio show, this will be largely unscripted, although I think there’s going to be a busking segment where I attempt to woo women on the street. Which sounds like an average weekend for me.
On Monday, June 16th, the Canadian Film Centre will premiere five new short films, including one called Squeezebox, on which I served as technical consultant, extra, accordion foley artist and soundtrack musician. That, and I also gave two of the young teen stars help with their music and math homework. The preview screening will take place at the Uptown Theatre on Monday, June 16th at 7:00 p.m., followed by an after party at The Phoenix at 8:30.
I’ll be there, and if you live in Accordion City and want to come along, drop me a line and let me know!
…which I’m afraid might be too much of a good thing. I wake up and start coding, and before I go to bed, the last thing I do is check files into version control. Then I sleep, only to dream about coding. In one particular dream, I was standing in front of the Kickass Karaoke crowd, and they were asking me “why isn’t it done yet?” and on the screens, there was SQL instead of song lyrics.
Thankfully, I still managed to squeeze out enough personal time for the weekly dinner with my family and a couple of hours to make an impromptu visit to meet the utterly charming Min Jung Kim when she passed through town. No one expects the Min Jung Inquisition! (Min Jung, you can try on my accordion any time, and thanks, Rannie for the invite!)
The rest of my life, however is TLAs (three-letter acronyms): PHP, ASP, SQL, P2P. (Okay, “2” isn’t a letter.)
All I have to do is survive the next couple of weeks and things will get back to what passes for normal round my way.
I’m going to try to post something later on tonight, but there are no guarantees. In the meantime, how about another one of those silly Internet quiz results that I save for these occasions?
Yeah, as if we hadn’t guessed that already.
The beauty of the Internet is that it allows anyone with the will, knowledge and obsessiveness to catalog the most obscure information and make it available to the world.
Case in point: The Unh! Project is an online collection of gutteral moans from comics. It features one of my all-time favourite noises, blurrrgh!, a noise I often used in my own comics back at Queen’s — it’s the sound of someone paying the price for having a few too many Moscow Mules.
On Monday at noon, I took a little time off work to visit and offer moral support to my friend Liz, who joined 10,000 other hopefuls at the Canadian Idol audition. The auditions were being held somewhere near the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, a quick bike ride from Big Trouble in Little China, a.k.a. my house. With the accordion slung on my back and a bag of pop and snacks for Liz, I biked around the north side of the Convention Centre looking for any sign of the audition without any success. The news stories predicted that thousands would show up — where were they?
Luckily Liz had brought her cell phone.
“We’re on the other side of the building, past the train station,” she said. Ah. The south side. I keep forgetting that the Convention Centre has a south building, located in the green space that is also home to the SkyDome and the former railround roundhouse which became the Steam Whistle Brewery.
When I arrived, I saw a ridiculous scene: instead of some kind of queue, the Idol hopefuls were corralled into a parking lot normally reserved for service vehicles. The lot wasn’t paved and was surrounded by a chain link fence. The north side of the lot had a row of porta-johnnies and a small grassy slope where a number of people lay motionless. The people inside were milling about listlessly, a good number of them with that sleep-deprived look that those of us who worked at Internet start-ups should find eerily familiar. A quartet of scowling people in red gold shirts with the word SECURITY emblazoned on the chest and back stood guard at the fence’s gate. That’s where Liz met me.
“Oh my God, Liz,” I said, “it looks like…like some kind of concentration camp for pop stars!”
“Let’s get you inside,” she said.
She had a word with the security guy at the gate with the most leader-like demeanor. At first, he said that he’d let me in if I left my bike outside. However, as I chained my bike to the nearest rack, he saw the accordion and decided that I was a straggler trying to sneak into the auditions and decided not to let me in.
“Hey, I’m not trying to audition. I have a real –” I caught myself about to say “real job”, which might’ve been impolitic, considering that dozens of sleep-deprived, grouchy aspiring pop singers were within earshot. “Um, I’m a computer programmer here to offer a friend some moral support and snacks. The accordion thing’s just a hobby.”
The security guard shook his head, looking resolute behind his Dirty Harry sunglasses.
I handed Liz the bag of snacks over the fence. “I feel as if I’m visiting you in prison!” I said. We both extended our thumbs and pinkies, pantomiming the act of talking on the phone through Plexiglas, the way they do in the movies.
“D’you think I should’ve put a file in the Doritos?” I asked.
“Some wire cutters would work well on the fence,” she replied.
“How long have you been here?”
“Since three in the morning. There was a line-up down the block, and then they corralled us into this lot.”
She went on to tell me how the transition from a line along the sidewalk to amorphous blob in a parking lot upset some people. Suddenly, camping out early — some people have been waiting here since Friday — was pointless. They might as well have spent a rainy weekend indoors and shown up in the wee hours of Monday morning.
No wonder some of them looked really miserable; they’d just been punished for showing some initiative.
Ah, MacGyver.
The thinking man’s hero, solving problems with his flair for cobbling together hastily improvised feats of engineering. Give the man a ten-speed bicycle, two bottles of Polish vodka, a tube of toothpast and an eggbeater, and he’ll whip up a particle accelerator. This favourite ’80’s television show of every tinkerer, hacker, engineer and evil chain-smoking twin sister had a dedicated legion of fans, including my friend Herb, who went so far as to get the license plate MCGYVER (unfortunately, the 7-character limit on Ontario custom plates meant that he could only get an approximation of the great impromptu inventor’s name).
Would you believe that there’s a Web site that houses every MacGyver episode? You’ll need my friend Bram Cohen’s great P2P software, BitTorrent, to download the files (they’re in .AVI format, as in the dreaded Windows Media Player). If need help deciding which episode you’d like to see, you might want to consult this episode guide.
I’m going to have to download the series finale, which I missed. From what I hear, it involves time travel and supposedly they reveal MacGyver’s first name. Now that’s must-see TV!
(This entry’s title isn’t a MacGyver quote that was ever used in the real show — it was from a MacGyver episode that the Simpsons were watching.)
Second-string TV shows seem to be a recurring theme this week. Last night at the Thirsty People of Toronto Meeting, one NTN Trivia game that had me completely stumped was one centred entirely around the Naval legal action series JAG. I’ve seen only three episodes, and one was at Kansai International Airport, and it was dubbed into Japanese. The only two things I know about the show are:
[Mucho thanks to skimpIzu from the #infoanarchy IRC channel on freenode.net!]
I still get email about the New Girl story. I got one today, and that prompted me to look at the comments for the entry and see if there were any new ones since I last looked.
There turned out to be twenty comments that are new to me (for a grand total of 193), the funniest being this one from Chuck:
I met my wife on-line. She told me she was 14. I told her I was rich. Boy were we surprised when we first met.
Now that’s comedy.
While I’m making Matrix references, here’s a shout-out for New Girl, courtesy of Morpheus:
