The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

Click to see the photo at full size.

I have no idea what the context for this photo featuring Neil Patrick Harris in a toga taking on five ninjas is, but I approve nonetheless.

Thanks to Ashwin Panchapakesan for taking a photo from an earlier blog post and making this poster!

Pictured above is why they pay me the big bucks. It’s not the computer science degree, seven years’ work as a developer, ten years as a tech evangelist or my membership in the KISS Army. It’s to break out the accordion at biz dev meetings and lighten things up with a little pop tuneage.

I love my job. It’s very nice work if you can get it.

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.

But then again, I’m a “have your cake and eat it too” kind of guy. After all, that is the purpose of cake!

Yesterday, I posted a video of an old Family Feud episode featuring the casts of The Love Boat and WKRP in Cincinnati. Seeing this old game show reminded me of another game show from the same era: the Canadian game show Just Like Mom. In Just Like Mom, the goal was to see which of the mother-child contestant teams knew each other the best through matching answers (in a way similar to The Newlywed Game) and in a finale bake-off in which mothers try to identify the dish their child prepared.

Just Like Mom’s second season was hosted by the show’s creator Catherine Swing and her then-husband Fergie Olver. I have vague memories of being creeped out by Fergie, and the video compilation above confirms them: he got way too kissy-kissy with the girl contestants. Watch and squirm as he plants on-the-lips smooches on reluctant girls not even in their teens, in what Encyclopedia Dramatica calls “an alchemical mixture of creepy that remains unmatched today on broadcast television” and “a group think experiment gone awry”.

(I’m surprised that when attempting to silence critics of the online snooping bill, Bill C-30, Vic Toews didn’t say “You can stand with us or stand with Fergie Olver”.)

If he didn’t break statutes on the show, he certainly bent them. It’s tempting to bend the statute of limitations (if it applies) and call the cops on this creep.

Bill C-30 is a pending Canadian bill that gives police and other appointed special investigators to get information from “internet companies” (the bill’s a bit vague on the definition) to give them information about you – name, IP address and other identifying information – without a warrant. On its own, its terms don’t give “The Man” free access to who you are and what you do online, but the resulting law will require Canadian ISPs to build in facilities to allow for “eavesdropping” that’s not unlike what they do in China. Once that capability is built in, the genie will be out of the bottle; or more accurately, the governmental genie will be in all our bottles. As Ivor Tossell puts it in the Globe and Mail, “You can’t bring oil barrels full of honey to the forest and then act surprised when bears show up.”

The video above is from the Canadian television show Rick Mercer Report. One of the regular features of the show is “Rick’s Rant”, in which he does a short polemic on something topical as he walks through Toronto’s “Graffiti Alley” just off Queen Street West. This one does a great job of explaining why Canada’s Public Safety Minister Vic Toews, who introduced the bill, is wrong when he said that critics of the bill could “either stand with us or with the child pornographers” (which will someday be used as a classic example of that old high school debating trick, association fallacy).

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.

Here’s an interesting listen: the isolated vocal tracks from The Rolling Stones’ Gimme Shelter. It sounds like an old spiritual!