Categories
It Happened to Me

Even for “Engrish”, This is Incomprehensible

I work just south of Chinatown, where I saw this t-shirt on sale on Friday:

Engrish t-shirt seen on Spadina

Odd as Engrish can be, it usually makes at least some sense. Whoever made this shirt wasn’t even trying.

Categories
It Happened to Me

Why I’m a Good Movie Date

I provide at least as much entertainment as the movie itself:

Me in a cardboard cutout poster for “Made of Honor”

(By the bye, we saw Forgetting Sarah Marshall last night and it was pretty entertaining. Perhaps not as memorable as other Judd Apatow-produced films as The 40 year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up or Superbad, but still fun.)

Categories
Uncategorized

The Punk Rock Jacket Generator

Here’s another “generator” along the lines of the Self-Cutting Generator I wrote about yesterday: The Punk Rock Jacket Generator. An example of its output is shown below:

Punk rocker with jacket that read “Accordions Rule”

Categories
funny

The Self-Cutting Generator

First, we had the Church Sign Generator. Then the Tombstone Generator. But finally, there’s something for the emo kid in all of us: the Self-Cutting Generator!

Here’s an image I made using the Self-Cutting Generator:

Self-cutting generator: “Being emo is hard. Let’s go shopping”
Soon to be a Fall Out Boy album cover.

Categories
The Current Situation Toronto (a.k.a. Accordion City)

Toronto Transit Strike Survival Guide

T-shirt: “I survived the New York City Transit Strike 2005″
Photo from Bridge and Tunnel Club. Click the photo to see it on its original page.

Even though a transit strike might not happen on Monday, if you live and work in Accordion City, you really should be making contingency plans. The Toronto Star published a Strike Survival Guide today featuring information on carpooling, where to park, where not to park, cycling, using GO Transit, getting a cab, going to the airport, highway driving, getting an ambulance, and service for the disabled.

Categories
funny The Current Situation Toronto (a.k.a. Accordion City)

Bob Kinnear’s Funny Bogus Wikipedia Entry

Last night, someone frustrated with the impending public transit strike here in Accordion City (slated to start at 4 a.m. Monday if this weekend’s negotiations fail) decided to do a little creative editing of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 113 leader Bob Kinnear’s entry in Wikipedia. Knowing the edit would be corrected in short order and wanting to preserve this for posterity, I took a screenshot of the page, which appears below:

Screen shot of the nasty Wikipedia entry posted about Bob Kinnear on April 17th, 2008
Click the screenshot above to see it at full size.

For those of you who are extremely curious and have a little time to kill, here’s the history of edits to Bob Kinnear’s Wikipedia page.

Categories
Geek

“Grand Theft Childhood” Authors: Kids Who DON’T Play Videogames are at Risk

Grand Theft Childhood is a new book written by Dr. Lawrence Kutner and Dr. Cheryl Olson, a husband-and-wife team who co-founded the Harvard Medical School Center for Mental Health and Media. In the video above, Drs. Kutner and Olson talk with X-Play’s Adam Sessler about some of the findings from the study documented in their book.

Some notes:

  • Their study lasted several years and received $1.5 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Justice.
  • In their study, they surveyed and interviewed over 1250 kids and 500 parents.
  • There is “absolutely no evidence” that playing violent video games turns children violent.
  • What’s more important are patterns of play — there are some that parents and teachers should note.
  • In their research, Drs. Kutner and Olson tried to find out which videogame playing behaviours are normal, and which aren’t, a cataloguing of behaviours that did not previously exist in the literature on this topic.
  • They debunked the experimental methodologies used by researchers who’ve made the vidogames-violence connection.
  • One of the flaws in those older experiements was that it didn’t take short-term vs. long-term behavioural effects into account. He cited an example of boys’ horseplay after seeing an action film: it wears off pretty quickly.
  • They found that both boys and girls who played M-rated or violent videogames exclusively more than 15 hours a week to be statistically more like to get into trouble, but they also found that boys who didn’t play videogames at all were also at greater risk.
  • At least for boys, gaming is a marker of social competence.
  • Consider the case of the Virginia Tech shooter: although the pundits were quick to place the blame on videogames, he didn’t play them at all, and his dorm-mates said he wouldn’t play videogames with them.
  • Kutner: “Kids who don’t play [videogames] at all are actually at greater risk for getting into trouble. It says something about their social relationships.”

[This was also posted to Global Nerdy.]