Looks like we’re going for the record for “number of people that have occupied this house”. 102 people responded with a “yes” to the eVite for tonight’s birthday party, and yeah, I know most of them.
I don’t know how many people will be here simultaneously. This is the party season, so my guess is that people will be coming in at various times throughout the night. That should ease the congestion a little.
Lots of articles in The Happiest Geek on Earth today:
This little exchange has been sitting in the backlog for too long now. I thought it was an appropriate thing to post, seeing as this blog’s first anniversary is Sunday…
“You should make your blog more kiss-and-tell,” Cory told me at his birthday party this summer.
“Telling tends to cut off the kissing,” I answered.
This week in the online comic Achewood, Ray the thong-wearing cat sold his soul in exchange for a piano and incredible music talent. I couldn’t resist doctoring today’s comic, in which Roast Beef says that his computer programming isn’t as good as Ray’s new-found piano talents. I couldn’t resist doctoring the last panel:
Happy birthday to fellow geek, blogger, Scorpio and all-round deep-thinking guy Aaron Swartz! Hey, Aaron, if I had any money to spare, I’d buy you something from your Amazon Wish List. Maybe someone out there with two coins to rub together will.
A quick blurb from the birthday entry in his weblog:
In the US, we have a tradition that when you blow out the candles on your birthday cake, you should make a wish. Every year, as far back as I can remember, I’ve wished that I would see another birthday. It’s not that I’m afraid of dying, I just liked living.
Well said.
If they ever form a superhero team called “Aqua Teen Hacker Force”, my money’s on Aaron for its leader.
Cory’s given me so much Googlejuice that I’m only too happy to return the favour. (This is why I sometimes refer to the world of blogs as “the Sycophantic Web”.)
He appears in an interview in today’s SXSW Festival Tech Report. A sample question:
A lot of Canadian expatriates such as yourself are doing wonderfully creative and innovative things in terms of new media and the Internet. Do you have any explanations or insights here? Is there something in the water north of the border?
Yes, we are taking over. We will eventually own the entire world.
Actually, Bruce Sterling thinks there is something unique about the Canadian perspective. In the introduction he wrote for my new short story collection “A Place So Foreign and Eight More” that is coming out in March, Bruce points out that being Canadian gives you a built-in window to the creepiest kind of alien of all, which is the alien that is almost just like you but is completely different.
I don’t if you saw it, but there was a story titled “The Uncanny Valley” that went around the blogging universe in October. According to this bit of research on human perception and cognition, people of all cultures respond very positively to humanoid artifacts, so long as they aren’t all that humanoid. So, Mickey Mouse or other sort of furry objects or certain robots are ok. But, that kind of warm response decreases sharply as the object becomes more humanoid. Then there is a point at which an object becomes too humanoid. If it looks a lot like a human but it isn’t quite a human, then people react to that with complete revulsion: think of zombies or of the cenotaphs in Clive Barker’s Hellraiser. So, the creepiest alien of all is the thing that you can recognize as being you, but isn’t you.
I agree with Bruce. I think Canadians have this built-in point of view on America. Because you guys talk like us, you look like us, you listen to the same music as we do. Your culture is a lot like ours. But you are different in a lot of really strange ways. I don’t think it is a coincidence that Marshall McLuhan came out of Canada. I think that that was an almost inevitable occurrence. Because it takes being at 30 degrees off true to really see something clearly. It is hard to see something clearly when you are in the belly of it.
I also think that Canada had a couple of advantages at the beginning of the new economy. Socialized medicine allowed people to quit their jobs much more readily and pursue freelance life. So, there are a lot of people like me who dropped out of school and quit their jobs and just went off and did freelance Internet stuff without having to worry too much about the consequences. I think that fostered a kind of extended adolescence where people didn’t have to get involved with button-up corporate stuff. People could remain a lot more free and more inventive and more innovative as freelancers than their American compatriots.
One of the great things about having a weblog and friends with lots of Googlejuice pointing to your blog is that old friends from way back can find you. One such person is Rob “King Floyd” MacDougall, a guy who used to write with me at the Queen’s University humour newspaper, Golden Words (My good pal George Scriban also wrote for the paper). Rob was one of the paper’s best writers, and unlike me, he never wrote anything that ended with threats of libel suits (I got four in my seven-year career, one of which was from the leader of a group called “Students for Free Speech”). When some of our other writers were falling back on jokes about getting drunk or the tired crutch of top ten lists, Rob was writing clever little articles that made you laugh and think at the same time. He found me through the The Adventures of AccordionGuy in the 21st Century and sent me this lovely picture:
Hello again, Rob, and I’ll write soon!
