The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

The province of Alberta — often simply explained to people outside Canada as “it’s our Texas” — is in the middle of an election, and it’s shaping up to be a battle between the right (the Progressive Conservative Party of Alberta) and the far right (the relatively new Wildrose Party, named after the official flower of the province).

The Wildrose Party’s candidates have been attracting the wrong kind of media attention lately. There was the discovery of a blog entry written in 2011 by Allan Hunsperger, a pastor and candidate for Edmonton Southwest, in which he condemned the Edmonton public school board being “wicked” and “godless” for welcoming and accepting gay students. “You will suffer the rest of eternity in the lake of fire, hell, a place of eternal suffering,” he wrote.

Hot on the heels of that debacle is a statement made by Wildrose party candidate Ron Leech, who during a radio interview this weekend said that being white gave him the advantage universal appeal:

I think as a Caucasian, I have an advantage. When different community leaders such as a Sikh leader or a Muslim leader speaks, they really speak to their own people in many ways. As a Caucasian, I believe that I can speak to all the community.

For the benefit of the Doubting Thomases in the audience, you can listen to the audio recording of this statement.

You might be asking yourselves this: “Wait a minute…by his logic — and we’re using the term loosely here — wouldn’t he himself be speaking to only his own people?”

The answer, of course, is “no, silly!” By his logic, being Caucasian is the Platonic ideal. And like the Platonic ideal, everything else is just an imperfect (and darker!) copy.

Leech has since apologized for the remarks, with these explanations:

• He did say those words, but they were taken out of context. It’s the standard defence in such situations, but short of a Klan rally, there isn’t a context where his statements would be benign.
• What he meant to say was that in the diverse riding where he was running as a candidate, being white would not be a disadvantage. Were that true, then his from-the-gut answer would’ve been something along the lines of “I’m campaigning on the issues, and that’s really what the people care about,” which is a boilerplate statement in any election.
• Some of his best friends are these people of non-standard skin colour! “I love all of the people,” he said, “all the different cultural groups, and all the different faith groups, religious groups that are there. … I have a great love for all the nations.”

Expect plenty of “clarifications”, sophistry and accusations of “reverse racism” in the next couple of days as the Wildrose Party’s PR machine works feverishly to maintain the seven-point lead they have in the advance polls.

There’s less than a week left in the campaign; voting day in Alberta is next Monday, April 23rd. This should be interesting.

Move over, Rebecca Black: this is the new Friday! Double Take are two ladies singing about a slightly more grown-up matter, and they’re not afraid to ditch the autotune and let the world hear them sing off-key. Here’s the catchy chorus to their single Hot Problems:

Hot girls – we have problems too
We’re just like you
Except we’re hot
The whole world needs to open their eyes
And realize
We’re not perfect

I’m still kicking myself for not learning Friday on accordion. I won’t make the same mistake twice.

This scene (which is making the rounds of the interwebs today):

reminds me of this scene:

Late last month, one of the most unintentionally funny publications I’ve seen in some time made a splash and then just as quickly disappeared without explanation. It was The Conservative Teen, a magazine with a incredibly oxymoronic title, the slogans “fostering conservative values” and “countering liberal bias” (not exactly burning issues on the teenage agenda) and wholesome-on-the-verge-of-delusional articles that most certainly were not written by teens nor anyone who’s even had contact with a teen. (They might have had fantasies about teens, but that doesn’t count.)

Among its articles are such gems as:

• An unsurprising condemnation of Glee, complete with a special mention of Katie Couric, whom the writers still haven’t forgiven for embarrassing Sarah Palin with a so-called “gotcha” question (Palin claimed to read a lot of news but couldn’t name a single newspaper, despite having majored in journalism).
• Why Abstinence Works. It clearly doesn’t, and it turned out that the article was contributed by the Family Research Council.
• Ronald Reagan: The First Black President?
• Libertarian View: Government Creates Poverty
• How to Draw Obama

Many of the articles, either in deference to teenager’s inexperience or to John Stuart Mill, many of the articles came with definitions for some of their tougher words (such as “cameo” and “Judaism”). Perhaps it didn’t occur to the writers that kids these days would Google any unfamiliar terms. Then again, they may have wanted to spare the young’uns the terror of Google returning some liberal results for their searches.

The back cover features this full-page photo which works best if you imagine it read aloud by Sam the American Eagle from The Muppet Show:

I’d link to the magazine itself, but its site lived for less than a handful of days. According to this Buzzfeed article, the reason why depends on whom you ask:

• Ask the contributors to the magazine and they’ll that it ran out of money. You probably can’t find a more ironic example of the free market in action.
• Ask the publisher and he’ll say that he’s unable to continue with the magazine due to illness.
• Ask the guy who registered the site and you’ll get nothing. He’s nowhere to be found, and his (presumably former) employer would like him to explain why he registered The Conservative Teen using company resources without authorization.

The disappearance of The Conservative Teen leaves a void for some enterprising, politically active publisher to fill. My suggestion: get some actual conservative teens — tricky to find, but perhaps you can find the loner in the high school cafeteria plotting revenge, some homeschooled kids or visit a militia training ground — to write at least a few of the articles.

Here’s HackTO’s official greeter. She’ll let you in if you pet her and give her an ear rub.

Hack-what? See this article for an explanation.

I like the way this guy thinks. I would’ve have thrown booze into the mix, but I assume it’s implied. (I draw this from the Catholic sacrament of confession, in which there are two assumptions: you have sinned, and the priest is drunk.)

I wonder if he has any connection to the vicar in Sheffield who had to explain to the emergency room why there was a potato up his cornhole.

In case you were wondering, the title for this post comes from a Simpsons quote.

As I write this, there are about a hundred people gathered in a warehouse space — Freshbooks‘ new offices — in Toronto’s west end who’ve been there since 8:30 a.m. or so, and I am among them. They’re setting up laptops, connecting to wifi and firing up their software development tools.

They’re here for HackTO, a “hackfest” in which developers from Toronto and parts surrounding are challenged to write an app in a day. The apps they write are required to integrate with at least one of the services provided by the sponsors:

• Shopify (whom I’m representing, along with my coworker David Underwood)
• Atomic Reach
• Context.IO
• FreshBooks
• Idée
• SoundCloud
• TinEye
• Trendspottr
• Twilio
• YellowAPI

David and I just finished giving the attendees an overview of Shopify and the sort of apps you can write using the Shopify platform, and all the other sponsors will do the same during the opening presentations. Once these are done, the hackers will form teams and work on building their apps until the 5:00 p.m. deadline. The esteemed panel of judges will then award prizes based on what they believe are the best apps created today, and David and I will award a $500 Apple Store girt card to the app that makes the best use of Shopify.

It may seem odd to spend a Saturday afternoon working, but for many of us programming is more than just a way to pay the mortgage — it’s a calling and a passion.

I greatly doubt that people sell insurance or do people’s taxes as a hobby on the weekends, but like cooking, carpentry and a number of creative lines of work, programming is something that people do as both work and a hobby. I’ve spent many a happy weekend afternoon learning a new programming language, cobbling together multimedia programs for desktop computers or web apps or Xbox games or (more recently) iPhone/iPad apps in the same way some other hobbyist might build model airplanes or sketch buildings or try out a new recipe. That’s what these people are doing today, and as a bonus, their hobby may pay off in all sorts of ways, from learning something new to winning a prize to making some new contacts to getting hired.

Good luck, hackers: I salute you with a filet mignon on a flaming sword!