The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

Toronto alt-weekly paper The Grid has an article that makes the same point I’ve been making in conversations about Toronto’s mayor, Rob Ford, and the video allegedly showing His Worship smoking crack. While the video has not surfaced, both a reputable news organization and Gawker will attest to its existence, and there’s still too much suspicious evidence that Ford’s ties to drugs are a little too close for comfort.

In the article, appropriately titled The Photo That Gets More Incriminating All the Time, Edward Keenan explains who and what are in the now world-famous photo of the Mayor. While it warms the heart-cockles to see Ford making nice with minorities, there are a number of disturbing things in the photo, which I’ve taken the liberty of annotating. Consider:

• Anthony Smith, on the left, was gunned down in what appears to be a targeted killing. The guy who shot him “was offered and accepted a highly unusual plea deal to manslaughter before Crown discovery even took place”.
• Muhammad Khattak, in the red laces on the right, was shot on the same night as Smith, but survived. He was arrested in the Project Traveller drug raids that took place shortly after news of the video was announced and faces gang and drug-trafficking charges. He’s out on bail and awaiting trial.
• Monir Kassim, second from the right, was also arrested in Project Traveller and faces charges of gun- and drug-trafficking, illegal gun possession, theft and more. He too is out on bail and awaiting trial.
• A guy who doesn’t appear in the photo, but took it, Mohamed Siad, was also arrested in Project Traveller, charged with gun- and drug-trafficking and gang offences. While in Don Jail, he was stabbed, apparently because he provided the photo to the media and is believed to be the person who showed the “crack video” to the Star and Gawker.
• Even the inanimate objects in the photo are suspicious! The house, 15 Windsor Road, is known to the police for all sorts of druggy things, and was subject to a warrant in Project Traveller. One of its occupants is Fabio Basso, a “good friend” of Ford’s back in high school.

Read more in The Grid.

As for the most suspicious-looking photo foursome of all time? It’s these guys:

What happens when you cross the trailer for Pacific Rim…

…with the audio and promotional style of old-school Toho films from the original Godzilla era…

…and run it through some processing to make it look like it was made in the 1960s?

You get something quite wonderful:

Here it is — a Pacific Rim trailer, done as if it were a trailer for Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla (which is actually a ’70s film, but it feels like a ’60s one) — which is essentially what Pacific Rim is, anyway.

It may be Shark Week on Discovery Channel, but on YouTube, it’s the first Geek Week! It’s YouTube’s online celebration of all things geek-tastic that runs from August 4th through 10th.

Skyhook

It began yesterday with the feature Skyhook, in which Freddie Wong goes to the world’s greatest crime-fighting gear specialist (I assume they refer to him as “Lucian” rather than “Lucius” to stay out of copyright trouble) to get some equipment to help him out in case his date goes terribly wrong.

Here’s the video:

A Brief Aside: My One Beef With Skyhook

Skyhook’s got great special effects and an amusing story, and it’s nice to see that Freddie could get the girl, but did we really need another “awkward Asian guy on a date” story to continue the stereotype? Some of us — say, Yours Truly, to cite my favourite example — are cooler than other side of the pillow.

Exhibit A, from earlier this year. And I have plenty more, yo.

You want dating stories that go horribly wrong where the Asian protagonist isn’t completely awkward and awful? Here are Worst Date Ever and Consolation Fries.

Global Geekery Monday Highlights with Chester See

Here’s Chester See, delivering the news about some of the highlights today, which is Global Geekery Monday on YouTube week:

Among the goodies for Global Geekery Monday are this imagined trailer for a Naruto movie…

…18 Days, a re-telling of the tale of Mahabharata…

…this amusing deconstruction by the YOMYOMF crew called How to Be More Asian…

…a video for the song Teenage Rebel by Doctor Who-inspired band Chameleon Circuit…

…and Prelude ZZ, episode 1 of Mobile Suit Gundam ZZ.

Found via Reddit. Click the photo to see at full size.

Even though I’m in Tampa as I write this, I’d like to wish the people in those provinces in Canada that get a day off today a happy Civic Holiday! I’m sending this greeting in the form of a photo taken by Colonel Chris Hadfield, the Space Station’s best spokesperson ever, who took this shot while flying over Niagara Falls with the Snowbirds earlier today.

The Civic Holiday is held on the first first Monday of August, and judging by the many names it goes under and that fact that it’s not celebrated everywhere, it seems to exist largely as an excuse to have a long weekend in August. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Here are the names it goes by:

• British Columbia Day in British Columbia
• Civic Holiday in Manitoba, Northwest Territories, Nunavut, and Prince Edward Island
• Heritage Day in Alberta
• New Brunswick Day in New Brunswick
• Saskatchewan Day in Saskatchewan
• A lot of names in Ontario, depending on the city or town:
  • Founders’ Day in Brantford
  • James Cockburn Day in Cobourg
  • John Galt Day (put it back in your pants, Libertarians, this isn’t the Ayn Rand character) in Guelph
  • George Hamilton Day (not the well-tanned actor) in Hamilton
  • McLaughlin Day in Oshawa
  • Colonel By Day in Ottawa
  • Peter Robinson Day in Peterborough
  • Alexander Mackenzie Day in Sarnia
  • Simcoe Day in Toronto

Want to know how the various civic holidays got their names? The Globe and Mail tells all.

Click the image to see it at full size.

This page from an old issue of Mondo 2000 (think of a late ’80s/early ’90s gene-splice of Wired magazine, High Times and Omni, and you’ll get a general idea of what it was like) shows what the 1992 idea of cyberpunk was. It gets posted over and over again on Reddit’s “Cyberpunk” subreddit (much to their chagrin), but it’s been ages since I’ve seen it — the last time was in the original magazine — so I thought I’d post it here.

The R.U. in the title of the photo spread is a tip of the hat to R. U. Sirius, Mondo 2000′s editor.

Most of the gear in the photo — the cameras and scanners, audio recorders and playback devices, the encrypted communication tools, and even much of the functionality provided by the old-school PowerBook — could easily be replaced by a single present-day smartphone. You have to keep in mind that 1992 was a time before browsers, when surfing the net was something few people did (and they did it on Gopher or Usenet), when 14.4kHz modems were blazing fast, email addresses were rarities (I had one — 3jmd2@queensu.ca), and a household without a computer wasn’t a strange and rare thing.

In case you were wondering, the PowerBook 180’s specs were:

• Processor: Motorola 68030 running at 33MHz (that’s right, megahertz, not gigahertz)
• Cache: 0.5K L1 cache, no L2 cache
• RAM: 4MB (Once again, megabytes, not gigabytes) on the motherboard, expandable to 14MB
• Display: Maximum resolution of 832 by 624, 512K VRAM
• Operating system: Came with System 7.1; the latest Macintosh OS that supported it was System 7.6.1; here’s a video of a PowerBook 180 booting up this OS

While many of the tools in the pictorial have changed shape or have been amalgamated into newer devices, the following have remained more or less the same (at least in appearance and functionality) and would still be recognizable to a cyberpunk from 20 years ago:

• The laptop: Still a design that folds shut, and still based on the Dynabook concept. Sure, they’re thinner and have way more processing, memory and networking capabilities, but a person from 1992 would still recognize a 2013 laptop.
• Voltmeter: Aside from a couple of convenience features and being pretty much all digital these days, multimeters from 2013 look pretty much like multimeters from 1992.
• Laser pointers: Perhaps a little smaller these days, but still mostly used to entertain cats or annoy humans.
• Torque wrenches: More of them come with the nice rubberized grips these days, but otherwise they’re the same.
• Shotgun microphones: Aside from packaging, they’re pretty much the same.
• Black clothing: The classics never change.
• Metal briefcase: Still in use today. The coolest use at the moment: as a housing for a portable Bitcoin miner, pictured below at this year’s Defcon:

Before I return you to 2013, one more blast from the past: the trailer for the 1995 film based on the William Gibson short story of the same name, Johnny Mnemonic. Enjoy!

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.

Not only is it Shark Week on the Discovery Channel, it’s also Shark Week at the Florida Aquarium in Tampa! I’ve decided to dress for the occasion:

Click the posters to see them at full size.

I know that these stories take place in the same “universe”, but still, the people behind the posters aren’t even trying anymore.