I normally don’t do celebrity news on this blog, but David Janes told me about this one-liner from the celebrity blog The Superficial that was too funny not to mention:
K-Fed could show up to court with a cage with “baby” written on the side and still end up getting the kids.
I think that this one-liner, coupled with the “breaking news“, calls for a Family Guy clip:
Don’t forget: if you live in the Parkdale/High Park riding (“riding” is a Canadian term that means “electoral district”), there’s an all candidates meeting tonight (for my readers outside Ontario — there’s a provincial election coming up). Here’s a photo of the poster announcing the meeting, featuring the candidates who will be present:
Zork Hun? I had no idea you were allowed to run using your Star Wars name. But seriously, that name just leaps off the ballot, doesn’t it? I’m half-tempted to vote for him just for the name.
If you have to smoke, do it outside. Do it for the accordions.
Back in 2004, when Wendy still lived in Boston, she overheard the bus driver talking to a friend.
“What am I going to do with my Dad’s old accordion? I should just give it away, but I have no idea how to do that,” she said.
Wendy had a word with the bus driver, and a week later, they met at a Dunkin’ Donuts, where the bus driver brought her the accordion in a large black garbage bag. “It must’ve looked like some mobster deal,” she told me.
I came to visit Wendy a week later and tried out the accordion. On the first squeeze, a cloud of dust belched from its vents, and the room was filled with what must have been twenty years’ worth of cigarette smoke. When I took it home and took it apart, I managed to shop-vac out a lot of cigarette ash and remove a fair bit of sticky cigarette tar from the reeds. There’s a fair bit more cigarette-related damage that needs to be fixed, but the work involved is complex enough that I’m going to leave that to my main accordion repair guy, Joe Caringi, to handle.
I remember the days before the smoking ban here in Accordion City. As a young single guy, I’d come home from a night out on the town with my clothes reeking of smoke. Bad as smoke is for clothing, it’s worse for bellows instruments, which suck up lots of the surrounding air as they’re played.
Ireland has a long tradition of mixing accordion playing with carousing at the local pub, and their 2004 smoking ban has turned up an unexpected benefit: in addition to improving the air quality in pubs, it’s also improved the music quality:
Doctors at Dublin’s St. Vincent’s Hospital carried out a survey of people involved in the cleaning, repair, maintenance and renovation of accordions.
Writing in the British Medical Journal, John Garvey and colleagues said they wanted to check the impact of the smoking ban on the quality of traditional Irish music played in the smoke-free pubs.
They managed to contact six of the seven Irish experts who work with the instruments.
All said there was a strong smell of cigarette smoke from accordions played in a smoke-filled environment when they were opened. Soot-like dirt was deposited throughout the instrument.
One repairer commented that the deposition of dirt could be substantial enough to affect the pitch of the reed. Two others claimed that if a musician tended to play in a particular key, that this could be determined from the distribution of dirt around particular reeds.
All the repairers were categorical that these signs had definitely improved in accordions they had worked on since the introduction of the smoking ban in Ireland.
The doctors concluded the smoking ban has been “music to the ears of the people of Ireland.”
There you have it: another reason to quit smoking!
(And for those who doubt the deleterious effects of second-hand smoke, this should be your wake-up call. Fixing an accordion’s second-hand smoke damage is hard enough; fixing a lung’s smoke damage is much, much harder.)
[Thanks to Rahul for letting me know about this!]
Click the photo to see the Flickr photoset.
For the curious, there’s a Flickr photoset with pics from Saturday’s “Furries vs. Klingons” bowling competition in Atlanta.
Someone at the National Review suggested that the event might be the death knell of Western Civilization, but it’s really no sillier than a great deal of the activities that the National Review’s right-wing heroes partake in at Bohemian Grove (and far more harmless).
Click the picture to see it at full size.
Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.
The photo’s caption: Fans at a heavy metal concert in Tehran University. The audience have to headbang sitting down because of rules against dancing.
“Of course, Mr. President, you probably already know all this stuff from your ‘Lindsay Lohan’ days…”
It looks as though the U.S. War or Drugs will continue for a bit longer. U.S. Border Patrol Deputy Chief Ronald Colburn, in answering a question by Senator Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), used hyperbole in the name of job security by equating weed with terrorism:
“There were nearly a million people that weren’t successful in crossing both borders this year. And speaking of weapons of mass effect, 2 million pounds of marijuana is a weapon of mass effect that we prevented from happening this year along the border.”
This is a bit of a stretch if you use the definition of “weapon of mass effect” as it appears in the CSAT Top-Screen User Manual [PDF], a chemical security manual produced by the Department of Homeland Security, which defines it as:
…an industrial gas that can be used as a weapon without reacting with other chemicals to create a third material.
Via the LiveJournal “scans_daily” community, here’s the “slashiest page ever to appear in a children’s storybook that does not star Bert and Ernie”:
Here’s the text:
Without Superman realizing it, Batman stuck a small Bat-transmitter on Superman’s cape. The device sent out a signal, and the Caped Crusader followed it to Clark Kent’s apartment. Superman was just getting ready for bed when he looked out the window and saw that Batman had sicovered his secret. Now the two of them had to trust each other.
Robin’s not going to like this.