For the benefit of people looking for a review of the enetation comments system using Google or some other search engine, I am now making the following statement:
enetation is complete crap. A pox on enetation’s house and for seven generations thereafter.
I’m currently looking for a new comments system, so in the meantime if you want to comment on anything I’ve written, please e-mail me. I’ll gather up all the comments and post them.
People who know me — but not that well — always find it surprising that I have a bit of a conservative streak. One of the times it shows up is when I tell people that they may not believe it now, but someday they will: in many cases, Mom and Dad were right.
“Choose your friends carefully,” Mom always told me. “If you’re not careful, they could lead you down the wrong path.”
My housemate Paul could’ve benefited from this advice.
First Biella got him to give up dairy; this in itself is a minor miracle as Paul lived in Wisconsin for a few years. I hear they can shoot you if you admit to not eating cheese over there. Biella was unsuccessful in completely brainwashing him; while we have a fridge full of such abominations as soy milk and soy cheese singles (which are even more abhorrent than ordinary cheese singles), he has not been able to give up ice cream.
Now caffeine’s off the list, and it’s Kat’s fault. This is even more wrong because Paul’s a programmer. Caffeine’s part of the lifestyle. You might as well tell a Texas cowboy “no more beef!” or a Parisian to stop peeing on the subway walls (“But eet eez our right to meecturate anywhere we damn well please, maudit Anglais!”).
This is an ugly trend, and I envision an army of hippy chicks slowly eradicating all traces of fun from Paul’s diet. This white liberal approach to food rather reminds me of the self-denial that was brought about thanks to parousia (that “Jesus is coming, look busy!” state of mind), and Open Source guru Eric S. Raymond has observed this too:
Why do we tend to treat our natural cravings for red meat and fat as sins, then? Notice the similarity between the rhetoric of diet books and religious evangelism and you have your answer. Dietary mortification of the flesh has become a kind of secular asceticism, a way for wealthy white people with guilt feelings about their affluence to demonstrate virtue and expiate their imagined trangressions.
Once you realize that dieting is a religion, the irrationality and mutual contradictions become easier to understand. It’s not about what’s actually good for you, it’s about suffering and self-denial and the state of your soul. People who constantly break and re-adopt diets are experiencing exactly the same cycle of secondary rewards as the sinner who repeatedly backslides and reforms.
This model explains the social fact that the modern flavor of “health”-based dietary piety is most likely to be found in people who don’t have the same psychological needs satisfied by an actual religion. Quick now: who’s more likely to be a vegetarian or profess a horror of “junk food” — a conservative Christian heartlander or a secular politically-correct leftist from the urban coasts?
Being a first-gen immigrant from Asia, I wasn’t sadlled with hippy parents or their ’60’s damage. As an added bonus, I’ve got cultural relativism to provide me with “cover fire”. All I have to say to shut some self-righteous unbathed patchouli-and-body-odour-reeking vegan up is something along the lines of “That’s your natural tendency towards Western White Oppression talking. In my culture, the general rule is that if it has four legs, wings or served in the Japanese Army under Hirohito and Tojo, it’s perfectly okay to run over it with your Honda and eat it.”
When it comes to diet-as-religion, I think it’s time to make the devil sign and say “Hail Satan!” He’s got all the good music anyway.
This one comes with the highest recommendations of the Promise party crew. It takes place on the rooftop of the Queen Street West store called XOXO (the south side of the T-intersection of Queen West and Soho, across the street from the venerable Black Bull Tavern) and starts at 11. To get there, take the alleyway to the back and climb the fire escape. To those able-bodied people who feel a bit leery about this, let me offer you these words of wisdom: Adventure without risk equals Disneyland. Make the effort and you’ll be rewarded with a spectacular view of the cityscape, and the sweets sounds of DJs Lee Osborne, Ian Guthrie, the Dukes, and Rob Nice.
(I can already hear Cory Doctorow saying “And what is wrong with Disneyland?”)
I’ll be coming from the last ferry from Centre Island (a barbecue with my friends Sarah and James), and I’ll bring you-know-what with me.
This is from my friend Irving (one of the guys from the Promise party crew):
Gerald Belanger’s Nice + Smooth label releases their cd called ‘Oscillate’ – a drum and bass mix with tracks by local musicians. This party is a rare chance to hear live dnb performances. Two rooms at Surface, below Roxy Blu, at 12 Brant St. Room 1 has Sol Azul (live drum and bossa), Subrythm (live drum and space), Andy B, Gerald Belanger and more. Room 2 features Marcus, Freedom, Sunya (live vocalist) and more. 10pm-3am, $5 or $15 with cd.
My friends with the Promise party crew are having another of their gatherings where they haul a sound system down to Cherry Beach and break out the tunes. Featured DJs will include Blissom (deep as deep dish pie house), the Reverend (dub and reggae), Katie and Mesina (hip hop), Joel Richmond (groovy house), Dalia (funk and house), Lee Osborne (tech house) and Freedom (jazzy dub). Instrumentalists Yoshi and Chi will also be there — Yoshi on sitar, Chi on digeridoo.
Things start at 2 p.m. and wrap up at 10 p.m. Details are here. After this, you might want to head to…
Emil “Milkshake” O’Neill (the trainer at my gym with whom I talked in this story) also works at Queen Street West resto/bar/club The Rivoli. He’s organized an live music / spoken word night in the upstairs lounge area. After the scheduled acts have done their thing, the mike will be open to anyone. Since it’s also my friend Will’s birthday (happy 25th, you insolent little puppy), I’m sure I’ll be playing Happy Birthday that evening. The fun starts at about 10:30 p.m.
According to this post on MetaFilter (which in turn is a comment on this article in The Economist about the rising American population and all that implies), the average American produces as much carbon emissions as 20 average Nigerians.
However, judging by the evidence contained in my e-mail inbox, one average Nigerian produces as much scam spam as 20 average Americans.
(Of course, “average people” are complete freaks of nature. As my statistics professor used to say: “The average person has one tit and one ball.”)
Straight up: all us AZNs talk like dis alla time, yo. It be jus’ like kickin’ wit’ my Moms and Pops at their crib from Sunday dinner, dawg.
(Note: Heavy use of the “N-word” in the hip-hop context by a salaryman and his family. It’s a 13 megabyte video in .asf format, which means you’ll need Windows Media Player to see it.)
This one goes out to Wes, who loves the White Stripes (and even my accordion cover of Fell In Love With a Girl).
You’ve probably heard of the White Stripes — the two person lo-fi band with the garage-rock sound and catchy tune with the Lego video — and their latest album, White Blood Cells. The band is made up of two members, Jack and Meg White, whose relationship to each other has been purposely kept secret to add to the bands mystique — are they brother and sister, or husband and wife, and estranged ones at that?
(The latter option is correct: Jack and Meg were married — “White” is actually Meg’s family name, Jack’s is “Gillis”. You can take a look at their marriage licence and divorce certificate if you don’t believe me.)
You might not have heard of Redd Kross, a much-loved but not-quite-heard-of alt-guitar-rock band who’ve been at it for over twenty years. I first encountered them in 1993 when they released Phaseshifter (which opens with the damn near-perfect track Jimmy’s Fantasy) during the Great Grunge Era, when I was a DJ at the engineering pub at Queen’s University.
The White Stripes have a slightly different sound from most rock bands because something’s missing from the sonic space: the bass guitar. Jack plays power chords on lead guitar and Meg drums; the lack of bass gives the band an interestingly sparse sound. Prince did the same thing with When Doves Cry — there’s no bass in it either — and Peter Gabriel made his album Security (the one with Shock the Monkey) sound interesting by not using cymbals.
While the White Stripes sound good on their own, Steve McDonald, leader of Redd Kross wondered what White Blood Cells would sound like if they had a bassist. The end result of this pondering is Redd Blood Cells, in which he took the original tracks off the album and added a track with his bass playing. The Stripes have given this project their blessing, and you can download the MP3s for your legal listening pleasure (hurry — they’ll only be available at the site until August 26th).
I tip my hat to McDonald for his excellent bass playing and restraint (his playing complements the original tracks, rather than relegating them to the background) and Jack and Meg for letting him go ahead with the project. In the current climate of the recording industry, this is a nice little spot of sunshine.
If you’ve been reading this weblog lately, you’ve probably noticed that the page loads rather s-l-o-w-l-y. The blame can be laid squarely at the comments system; I’m using enetation’s system. I’ve been very unhappy with its glacial pace, the regular unavailability of comments and the fact that you can’t format your comments with HTML. I think it’s time to switch to another system. Anyone out there know of a better system? (As of this writing, comments are off-line — again — so you might be better off just e-mailing me instead.
The other technical problem I’ve had is with Blogger, the service that I use to create and maintain this weblog. A number of old entries have simply vanished. If you were to go to the archives page or look one up, all you’d see is a blank entry with a timestamp (here’s an example, and it was a really good entry, too). I back up my site regularly, which means that it’s very unlikely I’ve lost any entry permanently, but it’ll still take some time and effort to get those lost stories back online.
enetation is a free service, and I can hardly be expected to raise much of a fuss whenever it doesn’t work. However, I’m a Blogger Pro paid subscriber, and I was expecting better.
Perhaps it’s time to move to Movable Type, the blogging software to which a large number of A- and B-listers have migrated. Unlike Blogger, you run Movable Type on your server, which means that you have considerably more control over it and can also back up the database. Movable Type also has a comments system built-in, along with many other goodies. I just wonder what kind of work I’ll have to do to move my existing Blogger-based entires over if I do make the switch.
