the blog quebecois

This is a clip from some Candid Camera-type show. The premise being that a buxom woman, her arms encumbered with parcels, has dropped her car keys into her cleavage and is imploring (male) passersby to fish them out. Hilarity ensues. Probably not safe for work; because as we know, too much blouse-spelunking leads to this, a witty Belgian (if that isn't an oxymoron) PSA.

Turning to more exotic matters, this is a gorgeous animation by Nora Twomey of an Inuit legend. There's some (mainly hinted-at) nudity, but if your officemates start beaking off about it, you can call them cultural imperialists, which should plunge them into dismay and confusion. (Via Screenhead)

So's dysentry, but you don't have people writing poetry about that.

Astute readers will have noticed that I've had nothing to say about the recent deaths of John Paul II and Terri Schiavo. This is in accordance with my one-obituary-per-week rule, with Johnnie Cochran winning the latest prize.

More seriously, I rarely do post on important events when they occur. I'm a slow writer at best and I seldom have much to say immediately after the fact without coming across as trite and opportunistic. And of course, by the time I do think of something to say, others have said it first, and better.

I do have a general philosophy guiding me, though.

Death? I'm agin it.

In response to some of the gloating rhetoric I've seen (especially in regards to the Schiavo case) I'll just note that John Donne's thoughts are as apposite today as they were in 1624:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

Speaking of subjects I've been neglecting; boy, do I know how to miss a meme or what? Over the last couple of days I've had my heaviest traffic ever, most of it coming from other Canadian blogs and many government servers, all of it looking for, I guess, links to the infamous American blogger who published forbidden Gomery fruit. (Which sounds like it should be illegal.)

I did see Instapundit pointing to the story (on Saturday?) and trackbacked it; I decided to hold off until I saw how the legal issues developed. The MSM is still playing it cautiously, so I think I'll courageously follow its lead. I don't have lawyers -- they do, and they're telling them this:

Update: CanWest’s lawyers agree with the assessment that simply mentioning the name of the website could violate a breach of the gag order. In fact, the author of the US blog who is at the center of this was interviewed on CanWest’s GlobalNational newscast this evening, and according to newsanchor Tara Nelson, “we can’t even tell you his name.”

Update 2: Sun Media Lawyer also agrees with assessment: "Sun Media lawyer Alan Shanoff said publishing the name of the blog, Canadian news site or even providing the Internet address could lead to a contempt charge."

It's all rather silly, as anyone with access to the Internet and a two-word Google search string ("gomery blogs" works well, or so I am told) can find the blog in a matter of minutes. But that's the law, and I'm sticking to the letter, if not the spirit, of it.

In a completely unrelated matter, I'm proud to announce my new feature, "Blog of the Week," in which I call attention to a deserving site from my blogroll. This week we spotlight the American political blog, Captain's Quarters. Go and read it. You know you waaant to.

i am the eye in the sky
looking at you
i can read your mind

alan parsons project

Not while I've got my tinfoil hat on, you can't. In fact, you only have a vague idea where my house is, and I like it that way. If you can't find me, what hope do the police have?

The X marks the spot where I live. I think. That's the maximum resolution of Google's satellite mapping over this little corner of Canada.

This is a new blog that specializes in landmarks from Google Maps. Here's the Golden Gate Bridge:

Via J-Walk Blog

nice girls, not one with a defect
cellophane shrink-wrapped, so correct
red dogs under illegal legs
she looks so good that he gets down and begs

elvis costello

You especially want to keep an eye on these two, who seem to have simultaneously dislocated their shoulders.

From the June 1959 edition of Girl Watcher magazine. (Click on the picture to see the rest of the issue. Safe for work? Your call -- no nudity, but doubtless some would be offended by the entire concept.)

In the post below I mentioned that I prefer to delay commenting on matters profound until someone smarter comes along and does it for me. Mark Steyn to the rescue:

The root of the Pope's thinking - that there are eternal truths no one can change even if one wanted to - is completely incomprehensible to the progressivist mindset. There are no absolute truths, everything's in play, and by "consensus" all we're really arguing is the rate of concession to the inevitable: abortion's here to stay, gay marriage will be here any day now, in a year or two it'll be something else - it's all gonna happen anyway, man, so why be the last squaresville daddy-o on the block?

See how much work this saves me? (I heartily -- do I even have to say this? -- recommend the full article at the Telegraph. Registration required, but it's just an email address, if I remember right.)

I don't know what religion Steyn professes; or if he believes in any at all -- but he surely has a better understanding of Catholicism than, say, the CBC, which has spent the last week rounding up every feminist virago and homosexual malcontent it could find to explain how the next Pope must "fix" the church.

North American Catholics might be ambivalent about some of these issues, but to portray Frances Kissling -- a woman who heads the (memberless, but well funded) Catholics for a Free Choice, as representative of any kind of groundswell opinion is ludicrous. She ran three abortion clinics, for pity's sake.

had we but World enough, and Time,
this coyness Lady were no crime.
we would sit down, and think which way
to walk, and pass our long Loves Day.

andrew marvell

Paul Sorene in spiked:

Shall poet laureate Andrew Motion compare Camilla Parker Bowles to a summer's day? Well, a typical British summer is overcast, grey and miserable...so why not? But as the poet laureate works hard for his paltry salary of £500, and seeks a word that rhymes with Camilla in the bottom of his stipend of 500 bottles of sherry, we feel for him.

Sure you do. Suuuuurrrre. You're just dripping with empathy.

But enough, I feel the embers stirring. It is time to dip my quill in green ink and write something fitting. How about a Haiku, so fitting for Charles, a man interested in the ways of the Far East: 'You spurned me long ago / So I married another / You returned to mum.' Or the schoolboyish: 'Roses are red / Violets are blue / Shergar is missing / So you'll have to do.'

But, hold on a moment, I've got it. And, what's more, I've found a word that rhymes with Camilla.

'Camilla / Polyfilla?'

Pretty lame, Paul. Fortunately, the last time I checked, England is still a member of the Commonwealth, which means that we can exchange poetry hints and iambic or trochaic verse (measuring not more than thirteen feet) tariff-free.

I put on my versifier's cape, fired up my pipe and quickly came up with these, which should be good for a couple of stanzas:

Chinchilla, villa, killa, Gila (as in Gila Monster), and Godzilla. Also, if you can work in a reference to Muhammad Ali, you might be able to use Thrilla and Manila.

No charge, pal. For King and Country and all that.

Find your Dead Celebrity Soulmate here. It picked out three possibles for me (above, from left to right); Frida Kahlo, Agatha Christie, and Indira Gandhi.

Oh, dear. I was rather hoping for someone like Natalie Wood:

Like it would kill her if I asked her out for dinner and a movie?

Via The Presurfer

A feature (read: gimmick) of this blog is the way I often name posts after songs, with a three-or-four-line snippet of the lyric from it. Sometimes it works well; other times I spend more time tracking down an appropriate song than I do writing the stupid post.

I'd like to boast that I have a prodigious memory for songs but that wouldn't be quite accurate. In fact I usually just do a search on sites like this or this for some word or theme that matches (however loosely) the entry.

So I run across a lot of songs that look like they might be useful in the future. I've started to keep a list of them and the relevant lyrics, and I'll probably migrate them into some sort of database eventually. Some are so weird that I doubt I'll ever find a use for them, like this offering by Ice Cube, "Ghetto Bird":

why, oh why must you swoop through the hood
like everybody from the hood is up to no good.
you think all the girls around here are trickin
up there lookin like superchicken

It would probably be ideal for something like the Subservient Chicken, if everybody and his brother hadn't already linked to it a year ago.

You might recall this from a couple of months ago -- the TV weatherman who stumbled and bumbled his way through a truly agonizing segment.

Well, I think I found one of his classmates, this time a sportscaster. He's not as comprehensively awful as the first guy; but then, the bar has been set so very, very low.

Via Ace of Spades

I usually work on this blog in the evening. I start after the early-evening news and begin checking out websites and linkdumps looking for something -- anything! to write about. To my consternation (and probably yours, too), I usually find something.

One thing I can't do is pay attention to anything on the TV while I read or write. It's not a matter of dividing my concentration. I'm just totally oblivious to it. So I'll usually leave it tuned to one of the sports channels. I don't even care what's being shown. It's just a bit of noise and color off in the background and if I get stuck on what I'm working on I can check out the game for a few minutes.

Last night TSN was playing a tape-delayed Champion's League quarter-final soccer match between AC Milan and Inter Milan. I'd heard radio reports during the day of some kind of trouble in the tournament but I didn't connect the two until I became dimly aware that the commentators were talking about something other than soccer. I stuck my head out from behind the monitor just in time to see AC Milan's goalkeeper get clonked with a burning flare.

As the BBC's report indicates, this is somewhat of an ongoing problem:

"This sort of thing happens quite often in Italy," Italian football expert James Richardson told BBC Five Live.

"It is not really that extraordinary to see stuff thrown onto the pitch in Italian games.

"A few years ago Inter fans actually tried to launch a burning moped from the same area of the San Siro as last night's trouble.

"This isn't an isolated incident. The hard-core support are very adept at getting flares and offensive banners into stadiums.

All I could think watching it was: Jesus. Terrorism. If you can't stop goons bringing in an apparently-unlimited supply of fireworks and highway or railroad flares, how are you going to stop someone packing a few pounds of Semtex? And if you really wanted to kill a lot of people -- not just from the initial blast(s), but by possibly collapsing part of the stadium structure, and also all those trampled in the ensuing panic -- then a soccer match, or any other big athletic venue, would be your target of choice.

Not for the squeamish: A wild animal mauling a child. Warning: Savage jungle drumming.

Update: Here's a longer version of the video. Apparently no permanent damage was done.

Via J-Walk Blog

CNN:

LONDON, England (AP) -- A grandmother stopped an intruder from entering her home by lobbing a heavy garden gnome at him, police said Friday.

Jean Collop was woken early on Tuesday morning by the sound of an intruder on the roof of her home in Wadebridge, southwest England.

"I grabbed the first thing that came to hand -- one of my garden gnomes -- and hurled it at him, and hit him," she recalled.

"He lay there and I began to scream. I went back into the kitchen and found a rolling pin in case he came down. I didn't want to break another gnome."

A neighbor alerted police who arrived shortly afterward and arrested the intruder.

At the risk of sounding gnomic, let's hope that there's a gnome somewhere out there with Paul Martin's name on it.

OK, it's somewhat ahistorical (I had no idea that 18th-century ships of the line had such a quick reverse gear) and the music is kind of annoying; but this naval combat game is a pretty good timewaster.

from the drip drip drip of the teardrops
to the chink chink chink of the cash
to the end end end of the friendships

iggy pop

Sun columnist Greg Weston reports on what the gangsters in Ottawa are up to now:

All those lavish spending promises we have been hearing from Mr. Dithers and Co. would obviously be paid for, in large part, by spending 10% less on paper clips and new limos.

Some of the savings would surely come from waste reduction, eliminating even a fraction of the squander and stupidity routinely chronicled by the auditor general.

So we thought. Instead, the Martin brain trust has come up with a far simpler solution, one that does not require a single bureaucrat to forego new carpets.

The letter from the purchasing department at Public Works simply directs all suppliers to cut their prices by 10% (or else, strongly implied).

I certainly hope that applies to their favorite ad agencies. Also, if the government is able to unilaterally break contracts, how about a 10% paycut for the civil service?

This is a Google beta development that features more catalogs than you can shake a stick at. If you don't have a stick, there's probably a catalog of sticks somewhere in there.

This is a spooky Flash interactive thingy, based on the horror movie The Grudge, starring Sarah Michelle Gellar. I haven't seen it -- it came out several months ago, if I recall, and didn't exactly burn up the box office, as this is a promotion for the DVD release.

I'm not sure if it's a game or what. You can click on various things, but I'm not sure if it leads anywhere or if it's just content to creep you out.

OK, so I'm a big chicken. Satisfied now?

Warning: Sfx, screams and the cries of the damned, etc.

This is a simple tale of a bird, and a boy, and a water fountain, and . . . well, that's really all there is to it, but it's beautifully done. Music and sfx.

This is far simpler in execution, but with deeper levels of meaning. Something about Einsteinian physics, I think. Minimal sfx.

Enough with the artsy-fartsy stuff. Via grow-a-brain, here's a recreation of the popular game Grand Theft Auto, acted out by, uh, Lego bricks. Warning: Sfx and violence. But c'mon. It's violence against Legos. It's only fair payback for all the pain those little assassins have dealt to bare feet at 3 o'clock in the morning.

This could take awhile, folks.

Via Dave Barry

we twa hae run about the braes
and pou'd the gowans fine
but we've wander'd monie a weary fit

trad.

Will keep you posted.

From Pope Benedict's inaugural homily:

At this point, my mind goes back to October 22 1978, when Pope John Paul II began his ministry here in Saint Peter's Square. His words on that occasion constantly echo in my ears: 'Do not be afraid! Open wide the doors for Christ!' The Pope was addressing the mighty, the powerful of this world, who feared that Christ might take away something of their power if they were to let Him in, if they were to allow the faith to be free. Yes, He would certainly have taken something away from them: the dominion of corruption, the manipulation of law and the freedom to do as they pleased.

Sounds like he's got the Canadian government sussed out.

The story starts (I'm shortcutting here) with an [Please control your cussing] insulting everyone on the IRC channel. Most people there believed it was rather funny, but it got even more funny. For information: The dangerous hacker is called bitchchecker and the one being hacked and original author of the comments, who is talking here, is known as Elch. 127.0.0.1 is always the IP-adress of the computer you're currently using, any request there will return to your computer.

If you can follow 3l3t3 h4x0r d00d slang, this is pretty funny: Some loudmouth on an IRC channel threatening to wipe out someone's else's hard drive and managing instead to kill his own. (I have my doubts about this -- I've never accidentally or on-purpose reformatted my HD while online, but I'd think that the Internet connection would be severed early in the process. The dialogue seems authentic enough, though.)

you want a part of me
well i'm not selling cheap
no i'm not selling cheap

hole

The Presurfer linked a couple of days ago to this, a site which allegedly was "formed in 2003 by an anonymous collective of former Hollywood personal assistants," and claims to sell specimens of celebrities' body fluids.

We obtain the vast majority of our specimens from an extensive network of trustworthy suppliers, who in their dealings with entertainment and hospitality services, come into contact with celebrities on a day-to-day basis. On occasion we purchase quality specimens from private sellers. Regardless of where the specimens come from, we make certain that all specimens obtained go through the same rigorous testing process.

The frightening thing is that there probably would be a market for this, but it appears to be a hoax. The specimens are supposedly verified by the "Allamas Biological Research Facility in Greeley Colorado," which doesn't exist as far as I can find. Nor do any of the order buttons work.

Still, it had me fooled for awhile.

hear me moo
i weigh twice as much as you
and i look good on the barbecue

arrogant worms

Something is up with the cows. I don't know what it is, but they plot in secret and sing violent revolutionary songs.

Ingrates! We feed them; water them; and even defend them from alien invaders.

I propose we study them more closely. With this camouflage we* should be able to mingle amongst them freely:

* By "we," I mean you and me. Unless it happens to be hunting season, in which case you're on your own, Kemosabe.

The National Post:

AMHERSTBURG, Ont. (CP) - Conservative Leader Stephen Harper condemned Paul Martin's $4.6-billion agreement with the New Democrats as a "deal with the devil" Wednesday as he served notice he's poised to topple the prime minister's fragile Liberal government.

Seeking to deflect any blame that his party would be forcing a reluctant electorate back to the polls, Harper condemned the deal to replace $4.6 billion in corporate tax cuts with an equal amount of social spending as a bare-faced Liberal bid to buy both time and votes.

"It is the most disgraceful thing I've seen in all my years on Parliament Hill," Harper fumed.

"I will be asking our caucus to put this government out of its misery at the earliest possible opportunity."

Pull the trigger, Stephen, pull the trigger.

Mrs vulva

Er, mea culpa. This is what happens when you type drunk, kids.

I have been negligent in updating my wildly popular feature, For Those About To Blog, (first iteration here) because of my own laziness and my unerring instinct to spell out every last detail from the general to the particular, which means that I should finish this project some years beyond the extinction of the solar system.

So I'll just give you my raw notes for the second instalment free of charge. Never be too curious about how laws, sausages, or blog entries are put together.

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Does it cost anything to blog?