the blog quebecois

catch a four leaf clover
maybe we'll get over
try and love might come your way
here i am, on a cloud

erykah badu

Point your mouse left or right to steer; click and hold the left button while moving the cursor up or down to control the speed or reverse direction.

Keep going until you find one that looks like a kitten. Then you can try this fascinating exercise in pattern-recognition. If you find one that looks like a kitten, it's probably time to quit.

If I were Hillary Clinton, I would be immediately disavowing any possible connection with this ad, sponsored by Hillary Now, appearing this week on New Hampshire TV stations.

Not because it inaccurately hints at her not-so-secret lust to inhabit the White House in 2008. Not because it's unseemly to be staking out turf so soon.

She should run screaming from it because it's the crappiest piece of animation since The Mighty Hercules.

Credit, such as it is, goes to Bruce Yarock, a veritable one-man buzzsaw of activity, from video "production," to selling motorcycles, musical instruments, Florida real estate (no doubt smack in the middle of the Everglades), and his very own 22-song double CD.

Bruce Yarock? Sorry, Bruce, but Ya Don't.

I was contacted last week by the good folks at CrispAds, inquiring as to whether I'd be interested in having them place ads on this site. I was frankly a little surprised -- I'm averaging about 4,000 page views per month, which is more than I would have dreamt of when I started the blog -- but apparently there might be people interested in advertising to my paltry readership. (By "paltry" I mean of course the first definition, small, negligible, trifling, rather than the second: cheap, shoddy, contemptible. Not that they're mutually exclusive.)

So I agreed. Scroll down and on the left sidebar you will see 160x600px worth of prime blog real estate just begging to be filled, for the low, low price of $20 (US) per month.

It is a downright bargain, you cheap, shoddy, contemptible potential advertisers. For I have, in the grand capitalist tradition, undercut my nearest rival by $5.

Then when I have crushed the competition and driven them from the field, I will . . . raise my prices. Bwahahahahaha.

That's the medium-to-long-term plan. In the meantime, I'm going to have to convert this site to a three-column display with the ads on the right. I don't want to breakup the look of the left sidebar, and it's only fair to advertisers (and also to my financial interest) that the ads are as high up on the page as possible.

I have a very limited aptitude for working with HTML and CSS, though, so it could be a while until I figure it out. Otherwise, that 160x600px blue monolith will probably sit unsold, silently mocking me. Maybe I could make it blink or something.

The Western Standard commissioned a poll gauging the mood in the western provinces:

The poll sampled 1,448 adults in British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba and had a margin of error of plus or minus 2.6 per cent, 19 times out of 20.

Thirty-six per cent of respondents agreed with the statement, �Western Canadians should begin to explore the idea of forming their own country.� Forty-three per cent of Albertans agreed with the statement, with the greatest level of support coming from the youngest age group (18 to 29 year olds).

The cover story here (.html) or here (.pdf file).

Methodology here (WordPad document).

For some perspective on this, separatist sentiment in Alberta had historically percolated around 10-20% -- the same level as in Quebec at the start of the "Quiet Revolution" in 1960. By 1976 that had risen to about 45%, at which point the first PQ government was elected.

I don't think that this poll is an outlier. An Edmonton paper (I think it was the Sun) published a poll a few years ago with similar results, though it was dismissed as analomous and too small in size. It'll be interesting to see the reaction this one draws.

If that Alberta number is accurate then this country could be perilously close to breaking up. Alberta has a long tradition of cataclysmic political change. Only four parties have ruled her since she became a province, and once thrown out of office, none of them have returned to power:

Liberal Party (1905-1921), the United Farmers of Alberta (1921-1935), the Social Credit Party (1935-1971), and the Progressive Conservative Party (1971 to present).

The Progressive Conservatives are looking a bit long in the tooth, I'd say.

Another comparison between Alberta and Quebec is I think instructive, and maybe decisive. As I wrote in 2002 in the first entry in this blog:

Western separatism is a different creature than Quebec's. The Quebec variety is top-down: Intellectuals, media and politicians. In the West, it's grassroots: Farmers, small business owners, and the guy who sleeps in his truck outside Ft. McMurray while waiting to get a spot in Syncrude's barracks.

The trigger is going to be Kyoto. If the Feds bungle it (as they've shown every sign of doing) then all bets are off.

Via Nealenews

I'm not sure how this works, but it is interesting:

Bench'Mark is a project inspired from street culture and street art. It is a piece of public seating, a bench on which people are invited to leave their mark. The users can make graffiti on the bench using their finger. The written or drawn mark will randomly appear on the surface of the bench.

The marks float smoothly on the surface of the seat... until someone else uses the bench! When someone sits down the marks left travel towards the person who sat, bumping onto his/her bum seeking for their attention. The marks keep following the person's movements on the bench and in turn, people can read, play or brush away the marks.

Oh, great. Having your bum sexually harassed by graffiti. It's a piece being displayed at the Royal College of Art (I think -- the original link points to this catalog, but it isn't clear where exactly it is in the show) by Louisa Stathopoulou, a product designer at Mitsubishi.

Via we-make-money-not-art

crusades and creeds descend like fiery flakes of snow
bad mouth on a prayer day, hope no one's listening
roots down in the wet clay, branches glistening

jethro tull

James Doyle at normblog enters the Left's hall of mirrors and comes through unillusioned:

. . . the view seems to be that if one is provoked into doing something awful, the primary responsibility lies with the provoker. Blair is responsible for the bombings, they say, because if he hadn't gone along with the Iraq war the bombings wouldn't have happened. But no one will deny that if the bombers hadn't blown people up in London, there would not have been the appalling recent increase in attacks on mosques. So the same reasoning determines that the primary responsibility for the increase in attacks lies not with the Islamophobic thugs who carry them out, but with the bombers; a proposition Blair's critics are unlikely to concede. Many of them are presumably inclined to hold him responsible for the mosque attacks as well. But then if we are supposed to go back three stages along the chain of provocation, Blair cannot have been responsible for the bombings after all: that honour must belong to whoever provoked him: Saddam Hussein, perhaps? With such critics, one gets the sense not just that Blair (and Bush) are as a matter of fact responsible for nearly everything bad that happens in this arena, which is already implausible enough, but that these leaders have a special metaphysical status: only they can be responsible. Everyone else is just a pawn in their game. Thus the claim that Blair is directly or primarily responsible for the bombings rests on a paranoid fantasy.

i'm gonna take you on a trip so far from here
i've got two tickets in my pocket
now baby, we're gonna disappear

eddie money

Well, there oughta.

I'm just sayin'.

If you look below the calendar on the left you will there confront a most exciting discovery. Click it to behold a Google world map.

You can leave a marker indicating where you live -- zoom or scroll the map as you need, or switch to a satellite or hybrid view. You can also leave a short message and the URL of your blog or website, if you have one. If you'd like a (free) account of your own, go here.

Note: To install the map, the developers generate a couple of pieces of code to cut-and-paste into your template. I don't know if there was a problem with the code or with my site, but neither worked. I eventually just stripped the Javascript out and used this as a link

<a href="http://myguestmap.lorca.eti.br/guestmap.jsp?id=gnotalex">My guestmap</a>

(you'd use "yourloginname" replacing "gnotalex," of course) which seems to work fine.

Update: Apparently you have to fill out all the fields. If you don't have an URL, just use something like www.google.com or www.fakeaddress.com. Also, you have to select one of the icons before you place it.

i am, i am the elephant man
it is incredible how i can
look just like an elephant, man

suede

That's no leathery, creased elephant -- it's a leathery, creased hand that an artist has painted to resemble one (leathery, creased elephant, that is). More hand-animals, quite well done, here.

Now if I had this talent, I would surely apply it to loftier pursuits, such as painting on nubile young women-canvases. Oh, wait, he does that too. Warning: Some NSFW.

The Washington Times:

The U.S.-Canadian military commands responsible for protecting North America from terrorists have changed the names of key readiness exercises to more politically correct words that do not offend American Indians. [. . .]

An exercise called "Amalgam Chief" has been changed to "Amalgam Arrow," the message states. And an exercise dubbed "Amalgam Fabric Brave" is now "Amalgam Fabric Dart." "Fabric Indian" was deleted in favor of "Fabric Sabre."

The problem is more serious than we initially thought, gentlemen. For starters, the US is going to have to rename pretty well nearly all of its military helicopters, past and present. A few that come to mind (well, with some assistance from Wikipedia): Apache, Comanche, Kiowa, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Black Hawk, Shawnee, Chinook.

Canada gets off a bit easier. Our Iroquois-class destroyers will have to find some other designation, assuming we indeed still have any. Fortunately our naval helicopters are immune from this revisionism, unless I'm overlooking some obscure Indian tribe called the Sea Kings that specialized in falling out of the sky.

Via Nealenews

I'm increasingly impressed with the quality of free online games. This one being an example in point. It's a promotional thing for Etnies Surf, a skateboard/surf/BMX/Xgames retailer (mainly clothing and footwear) and it's quite simple in construction. There's only one level that I can see and it's pretty linear -- only one or two ways through it, and the targets are in the same place every time -- but it's in a convincingly 3-D setting and the graphics are, if not up to Tony Hawk standards, then at least detailed enough to make you say, "Hmmm."

The drawback today is still the bandwidth. I've got a fairly good DSL connection, but it still stutters occasionally on this and other byte-rich content. I think that in a couple of years we'll be routinely streaming Xbox and Playstation-quality material. O frabjous day!

Warning: Music, standard skateboarding sounds, pool of blood when he hits the curb or mistimes the cars zooming through at intersections.

Use your arrow keys to steer; spacebar to jump. I think if you do it really really well you might win a pair of shoes or something, but don't quote me on that.

It is true, what they say: French is the language of clever little remakes of mini-putt games. Click on "Jouer!" on the left hand side and beware the cat. He doesn't steal the ball, just emits annoying meows on a regular basis.

Austin Bay subbing for Glenn Reynolds at his MSNBC spot:

We know polls often (usually?) exaggerate. Still, if only one in five of oil-rich Alberta’s population “wants out,” that’s a hot social and economic flare. Coddling the Parti Quebecois is no longer in Canada’s political cards. The Liberal Party machine, based in Ontario, is corrupt, and with “Adscam” everyone knows it. The stage is set for a revitalizing Canadian political rebellion, led by Western Canada.

One thing that nearly all bloggers have in common is that they like to know when another blog links to them. Using a variety of sources, I think I have a pretty good handle on finding other blogs that link to J-Walk Blog. In fact, I think I find about 90% of them -- but I may be wrong.

This is an experiment to see how "findable" blog references are. Put me to the the test, fellow bloggers.

All you have to do is post a link to this particular blog item (i.e., the one you're reading now). Just call it J-Walk Blog Link Experiment or something like that. After a few days, I'll post a list of every blog I found that linked to this item. If you're not on the list, I'll invite you to send me the link to your entry. I'll post these unfound links, and we'll try to figure out why I didn't find you.

By the way, this is not just a cheap way to get some linkage (although it won't hurt). I really think it will be a useful experiment. I'll reveal all of my sources and, hopefully, learn about some new ones. I think other bloggers and the blog tracking sites may benefit from the results.

J-Walk is a popular über-blogger (and Excel guru) who finds interesting stuff to link to. It's usually one of the first sites I check in the day, looking for, um, interesting stuff to link to.

Here you go, John. We'll consider it a seminal moment in the science of blogging. (Blogopology? Blogatrics? Blogetics?)

A short short piece of animation, probably as an experiment, of a girl on a jet-powered hovering motorcycle or something. Very cool. There's background music, though, and the banner at the top of the screen is NSFW.

Furthering the sci-fi theme, this is an advertisement for Microsoft's new something or other. Server software or something. Whatever. I probably won't be buying it, but it's very well done, with a retro Buck Rogers theme. There's music and sound effects, so it might not be SFW. Or maybe your boss hates Microsoft, so take that into consideration.

There's no excuse for this, except that it shows a bunch of pretty women (and one goof) dancing to a catchy song. You should be advised, therefore, that the video contains music, so it might not . . .

Oh, hell. It's Friday. Crank it up.

and i try and i try
what do i gotta do
do i gotta get water from the moon

celine dion

Wired:

Gemini and Apollo astronauts wore plastic bags taped to their buttocks. After defecation, the crew member was required to seal the bag and knead it, mixing in a liquid-bactericide to provide the desired degree of "feces stabilization." The first men to walk on the moon stepped onto the lunar surface wearing astrodiapers - undershorts layered with absorbent material. Which may explain all the jumping up and down.

I suppose all hobbies seem strange to the uninitiated; but this collection verges on the obsessive.

To save you the trouble of installing the Japanese font for the page (and then learning Japanese), I ran it through Google's translator:

* Worshipping borrowing doing the picture " selfishly " from Project, C-90 it increases.
* The cassette tape lining up, because cod feeling it was good, this page was made.
* Because is, there is no collector ? ? meaning separately, is.
* Selfishly using the out-town way picture, because color it is it was linked to the place, considerably in the midst of regret.
* If with, looking at this page as we similarly, the person who heals was, this the happiness.

I dunno. Maybe you'd be better off learning Japanese.

Speaking of strange translations, these are screenshots of a pirated Chinese copy of the recent Star Wars release, Revenge of the Sith with English (sort of) subtitles. The title itself is rendered as "The backstroke of the west." Very funny, but be warned that some of the dialogue contains profanity.

The reference to the Presbyterian Church seems mystifying, but a commenter who knows Chinese explains:

Probably the translation for the Jedi Council is "Council of Elders", "zhang lao hui". It just so happens that "hui" can mean both "council" and "church", and in fact the translation of "Presbyterian Church" is also "zhang lao hui".

Attn staff:

Henceforth, the word "blog" shall not appear on this, er, blog. It will be replaced with "bl0g" and its various permutations, such as "bl0gging," "bl0gger," and "bl0galicious bl0gadacious bl0gbabe."

Not that we have anything inherently against the word "bl0g," but if we use it too often, as we tend to do, then we get rewarded by Google's AdSense by exclusively targeting us with ads for free bl0gs. Which, to put it mildly, don't pay that great, a few pennies at best per click.

There are people who are making acceptable money off AdSense. They tend to focus on things like digital cameras, mp3 players, etc., for which advertisers pay much more for a slot. (It makes sense -- the people looking at those bl0gs are usually thinking about a purchase or are actively comparing prices.)

So begone with bl0gs. Hello, mesothelioma attorneys! Or if you prefer, asbestos lawyers!

I like Ferry Halim's whimsical games on the Orisinal site, but sometimes they get a bit too whimsical, know what I'm sayin'? Take this for example. Four cute little doggies in a race of some kind. You can click your mouse to help them along. Or something. I played it three times and got zero points each time.

There must be some point to it, but damned if I can figure out what it is. Warning: Music.

Update: Duh, try waiting for the instructions for a change. The dogs aren't in competition with each other: you try and space them to jump cleanly across as many balls as possible.

I screwed up my browser unplugging a plug-in that I shouldn't have plugged-in in the first place, so it looks like I'll be spending most of the night fixing it or installing a new one. Your journey here is not all in vain, though. Here are 45 games (simple logic puzzles for the most part) to keep you amused.

Okay, the resemblance isn't perfect, at least not in these two pictures. But they're fairly old and both Sheryl Crow and Tom Petty look much more gaunt these days. Especially Petty.

Anyway, it was the best I could come up with on short notice. You think that bl0gging is a glamorous business, friend? Ha! I've spent the last two days trawling through Mozilla forums trying to figure out what's gone wrong with my browser.

I finally got it running again, but there are all sorts of little things that aren't working right. I am not bitter. If I have to start using Microsoft Explorer, I still will not be bitter. Jaded and possibly homicidal, but never bitter. It's such a negative emotion.

Where was I? Ah, yes, Sheryl Crow. I'm linking to this video of hers not because I like the song -- it's rather insipid, and I don't even know the name of it -- but because it's got nice CG effects added to it by a N.Y.-based production house called PSYOP.

It isn't a direct link, so you'll have to click on "Platinum Select," then "Sheryl Crow," and then on one of the two pictures or the "Play" button that appear on the right.

Check out some of their other efforts, too.

Via Ursi's BLOG

Making fun of the way people look is a cheap and disreputable form of humor, so it's something I never (erm, disregard my previous post) do. Having said that, I don't have a problem laughing when other people do it. Like this. Warning: Probably NSFW. There isn't any nudity, but there's music and a fair amount of anatomical description.

But who are we to laugh at true love? Witness these poignant scenes of unrequited passion, as acted out by typographical characters: Act I; Act II; Act III.

There's also an Act IV, but it doesn't seem to have much to do with the first three. I guess the guy just gave up.

Sometimes, though, it all works out, resulting in a house in the 'burbs and a flipbook animation of children's drawings about a familiar song.

A promising new feature from our test labs -- the Game Of The Week!

In my journeys around the Interwebthingy, I frequently come across small games that for one reason or another, I find interesting.

And so this would be the best of the best?

Er, not exactly. If I found something truly outstanding, I'd probably post it that same day. As for these, I think they're worthy of notice and maybe you'll agree.

If you've got a favorite that you'd like other people to know about, please email me (gnotalex -at- gmail -dot- com) or leave a comment.

Our inaugural kicks off with Splashback. You try to clear the board by creating chain reactions. I found it difficult to get beyond the third level.

Via Ursi's BLOG

Computer problems. Back soon. I think.

Well, I finally solved my browser problem. I was working on something and looked up to see that the monitor display had rotated counterclockwise 90 degrees. It was as if I'd picked up the monitor and put it down on its left side. Uh-oh, thinks me. This could be a sign that something might be wrong.

Now the recommended fix for this problem is to indeed flip the monitor on its side so that everything's right-side up and there you go.

But part of me hungered for a more elegant solution. My first thought was that the monitor was blown, but it has an onscreen menu and when I brought that up it was correctly positioned. Windows booted normally until it loaded the Welcome splash screen, when it again went sideways. So it's the video card or the driver.

The video card reported that it was in tip-top shape, thankyewverymuch (and if you think it's a lot of fun checking these things out while tilting your head at an angle it was never meant to go -- well, you would be wrong). I reinstalled the video drivers with no effect.

Then I remembered that XP has something called "recover points," by which you can restore a working copy of the system if something goes wrong. I was under the impression that it was done automatically, 'cause, like, that's what the documentation says. Since my software seemed pretty stable and the only hardware I had installed on the machine was a second hard drive, I never thought of manually creating one. Guess I should have.

About the only thing left to try was reinstalling Windows. I hate doing that, because it takes a long time and if it fails you're truly hooped. I did it often enough with Windows 98, though, so I found the install disk and put it in the drive to learn to my horror that XP (or at least this particular eMachines distro) doesn't allow for a non-destructive install -- it wipes the C drive first.

So I finally figured out how to force it to boot into Safe mode and spent the next few hours copying files to my D drive. Fortunately for my irreplacable collection of midget porn porn illegally downloaded music irreplacable files, I had enough room.

I took a deep breath and started the install, which took surprisingly little time. And what do you know, my video problems went away. As did my FTP program and some other things I forgot to copy.

Could have been worse, much worse. Looking on the bright side, my browser now works flawlessly, too.

I don't know why I didn't think of this before. The Video of the Week! And I've still got four other days to play with!

This is actually quite useful for me. One of the real problems I've got is coming up with titles for posts. I've held off on posting some items for days because I couldn't think of suitable titles. With Friday Film Fest; Game of the Week; and now Video of the Week, I can just dump them into those categories and walk away, my conscience (and sanity) unperturbed, sort of.

All this innovation has left no time for searching out interesting videos to show you, so I'll simply reprise this offering from a couple of weeks ago. Actually, it's been recut to intersperse clips of the band, so it's more like a conventional music video now, improving it, by my lights.

The band, Group Sounds, has a page here. They seem to be a fairly hot property, or so I glean from their press kit, partying with the likes of Simon Le Bon and

Jessica Simpson, with a sizeable entourage of bubbly blond clones but minus hubby Nick Lachey, also partied within splashing distance of the bare-arsed rocker after dining at nearby Vento with friends.

Simon Le Bon? Jessica Simpson? You scoff -- but hey, it's more impressive than the guest list for my last party.

the claim is on you
the sights are on me
so what do you do
that's guaranteed?

ac/dc

Steve Maich last week in Macleans:

Will blogs fundamentally change the media business, or any business for that matter? Well, did do-it-yourself wine kits change the wine industry? Think about all the homemade plonk you've had to drink over the years. Sure, everybody thinks the merlot they stirred up in a plastic bucket in their basement tastes fantastic. But try selling it.

An interesting piece, throwing a bit of cold water on the bl0guphoria (If I may coin a word: I googled it [using an "o" instead of "0"] and turned up one reference, which appears to be a dead link. So I claim it for my own.) that seems to be ramping up again. No, bl0gs are not going to displace the MSM, not for a very long time, if ever. That doesn't mean that things aren't changing.

Perhaps tellingly, Maich's tagline:

Read Steve Maich's weblog, All Business

Hedging our bets, are we?

Following the money is always instructive, and serious amounts of it are being sloshed around.

From Instapundit:

Julie Roehm has more than $2 billion to spend this year, and the way she's been spending it worries executives at News Corp., the Washington Post Co., and virtually every other media company on the planet. As Chrysler's director of marketing communications, Roehm, 34, oversees a budget that Advertising Age ranks as the sixth-largest pool of ad dollars in the nation. . . .

Roehm rarely misses a chance to talk about how delighted she is with online advertising. Last year she spent 10% of the budget online; this year she is allotting closer to 18%; next year, she says, she will allocate more than 20%. Do the math: In 2006 roughly $400 million of Chrysler's money that used to go into TV, newspaper, and magazine ads will be spent on the Internet. Says Roehm: "I hate to sound like such a marketing geek, but we like to fish where the fish are."

Most of that won't be going to bl0gs, of course; there are plenty of places on the Internet that attract way more eyeballs than even the biggest bl0ggers. But just in case:

Hey, Julie! Over on the left! 20 bucks and it's yours! Discount for two or more months!

As Steve H. notes at Hog On Ice:

Matt Drudge gets about 8.2 million uniques...per DAY. That is a staggering amount of traffic. If you put up a single Amazon link on a site like that, you will make an excellent living, even if you do nothing else. Let's compare Drudge's traffic to a Big Blogger's traffic. Glenn Reynolds gets 120,000 hits per day. And of course, as all bloggers know, a lot of that traffic should be discounted, because it comes from search engine accidents.

Not my traffic, of course. Only 14% of it is from people (or possibly horses) interested in man/horse encounters of the intimate kind. Judging by my email, my readers instead seem to be intensely interested in automotive products.

Hey, Julie!

Technically, it's crochet, not macrame, but I couldn't resist the alliteration. It's the work of German artist Patricia Waller; more of which here. What does it all Mean, you ask? This guy knows:

The artist's crochet sculptures are initially disturbing. However, they usually play a double role and are hidden. They are a background system of signs and charades that cannot always be interpreted satisfactorily. But Patricia Waller always ensures that her audience is given visual experiences full of relish and ambition. "With all of my work, I try to create new and different forms of perception and levels of association for the beholder by interventions and altered forms of presentation..." she states.

So there. These are rather playful -- others have a darker edge.

I checked my referral logs this morning to see who'd dropped by overnight. It isn't usually a lengthy read -- about 15 or 20 hits. One name jumped out at me, though. Could it be that Foundation? I clicked through on it. It was. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

This could mean only one thing -- that I was soon going to be the wealthiest bl0gger in the world! I phoned up my boss and told him exactly what I thought about him and then I started pricing out private jets.

While waiting for quotes, I decided to see what had piqued Bill 'n' Mel (as I now call her)'s interest in yours truly, and looked at the page they'd landed on.

Cancel the jets. I never pegged Bill as a Garfield kinda guy, but if he is, this sort of insensitive treatment isn't going to make him my new rich friend.

In some serendipitous fashion, however, it ties in nicely with the post I was working on last night, the Bl0g Of The Week:

Formerly named I Read The Comics So You Don't Have To; now it's called The Comics Curmudgeon:

My personal curmudgeonly opinion is that the less said about the 75th anniversary Blondie mutual wank-a-thon, the better, but I feel compelled to drag Saturday’s Garfield out to help illustrate why comics characters drawn by different artists shouldn’t be put in close proximity to one another. Because I’ve been reading Garfield pretty much since I achieved rudimentary literacy, but it wasn’t until I saw Jon next to Dagwood that I realized that OH MY GOD HE HAS NO NOSE! I MEAN, LOOK AT HIM! HIS ENORMOUS, BULBOUS EYES ARE JUST SITTING DIRECTLY ABOVE HIS UPPER LIP! SWEET JESUS CHRIST THAT’S CREEPY! I’m sure the architects of this huge crossoverfest were looking to instill a sense of “warm and fuzzy” in their readers; for me, anyway, they got “aesthetically unsettled” instead.

A very worthwhile (and time-saving: remember -- he reads the comics so you don't have to) bl0g. You'll get more genuine laughs from his (and his commenters) commentary than you will from a month's worth of Sally Forth and For Better Or For Worse.

This week we have a trio revolving around those perennial favorites, sex and violence.

Which will prevail in a battle between a machine gun and an authentic samurai sword?

The machine gun, fool. (It wasn't exactly a fair fight, as the sword was fixed in place and didn't get any whacks at the gun.) This video shows the blade fracturing almost instantly; when you see it replayed in super slow-motion, though, it survives numerous hits before breaking.

This is a well-acted and filmed comic piece about an unfortunate mixup in birth-control pills.

The comedian Andy Dick was last seen in Canada in April of this year, when his contract to do two nights at an Edmonton comedy club was cancelled after the first night when some patrons complained about his act. Well, color us surprised -- Dick (hee!), one of the comics featured in the movie The Aristocrats, is notoriously raunchy, and likes to play with his penis onstage, among other things.

Here he is in action at a celebrity roast for Pamela Anderson. Very funny. No nudity, but it's probably not safe for work.

You've seen those clips on TV where people have set up hundreds of thousands of dominoes and then send them toppling in a spectacular display? I've always thought that something like that would make a good computer game. You could incorporate effects and Rube Goldberg devices that wouldn't be possible in the real world, with the aim of solving puzzles, or "combat" against another player (trying to disrupt his arrangements while blocking him from doing the same to you), or just building big, artistic patterns. Sure, it's kind of pointless, but so's Tetris when you think about it.

Maybe somebody's already done it -- if not, some game developer can run with the idea. No charge. In the meantime, I'll have to make do with this.

Note: it might just be my computer, but the game takes awhile to load, just presenting a blank screen for 30-40 seconds. It's on a Japanese page, but the controls are displayed in English. And if you're at work, you might want to turn down your speakers, because it sho' don't sound like no spreadsheet.

stands like a statue
becomes part of the machine

the who

b3ta is hosting a bunch of animated gifs and Photoshops showing images from computer games put into real-life situations. There's a lot (48 pages, last I looked) of them and not all are safe for work, so proceed with caution.

Some of you might have seen this:

British tourists have left the residents of one charming Austrian village effing and blinding by constantly stealing the signs for their oddly-named village.

While British visitors are finding it hilarious, the residents of F---ing are failing to see the funny side, The Sunday Telegraph newspaper reported.

Only one kind of crimimal ever stalks the sleepy 32-house village near Salzburg on the German border -- cheeky British tourists armed with a sense of humour and a screwdriver.

But the local authorities are hitting back and with the signs now set in concrete, police chief Kommandant Schmidtberger is on the lookout.

"We will not stand for the F---ing signs being removed," the officer told the broadsheet.

"It may be very amusing for you British, but F---ing is simply F---ing to us. What is this big F---ing joke? It is puerile."

Exactly. We have avoided linking to this story until now, because, as you know, we are above sniggering schoolboy humor such as that.

We much prefer sniggering schoolboy humor such as this.

The National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. has a very nice website, well worth exploring. There's a kids page on which I found this neat Collage Machine. It's very easy to use; if you're truly lazy, just click on the "Auto" button at the bottom and create a random (but still editable) image, like the one at right. I think it'd be an ideal way to generate sidebar art for a bl0g. But that's just me. There's no capability to save or print it, so you'd have to do an Alt-Print Screen and paste it into a paint program.

Speaking of which, ArtRage is a free painting program. It doesn't have the full editing and image manipulation tools of Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro, but that's the way the designers intended it:

ArtRage was designed to work like a painting simulation rather than a standard digital painting application. While there were some difficult decisions that went in to the design, the eventual result reflects what we wanted to do with the app, which was reflect real world painting tools.

ArtRage is meant to be a canvas, with some tools. It�s meant for playing around with paint, experimenting and exploring, and ultimately having fun. We certainly didn�t intend it as a replacement for any other package, and that decision let us make some pretty important changes to the workflow that helped the package become accessible to anyone. At the same time, those changes also removed some tools that were inappropriate to the package but may have been expected by some users.

The picture on the left is a good example of what it can do. Click here for full-size. (You can use a mouse to draw; but if you have one, a graphics tablet is ideal.)

Windows and Mac downloads here.

i haven't slept a single night in over a month
and not even once did you start to make sense to me
well maybe i'm a little bit slow, or just consistently inconsistent
she said, unpredictability's my responsibility, baby

hot hot heat

Victoria, B.C. is at least in appearance the most "British" of Canadian cities in its architecture and manners. Such as most of the hotels and bed-and-breakfasts featuring High Tea, though you might have to tippy-toe through the serried ranks of crystal-meth junkies for your fix of scones and clotted cream. Whatever that is.

As it happens, it's also the home of Hot Hot Heat, looking like refugees from some 1968 Carnaby Street thrift-shop. But boy, do they carry it off: not just because the lead singer dresses like some neo-Edwardian dandy, but because they bring impeccable pop smarts and Ray Davies/Elvis Costello-class wordplay to the mix.

"Middle of Nowhere" I've heard maybe a couple of times on the radio, and it got minimal rotation on MuchMusic (Canada's MTV), but I think it's one of the best videos that I've seen in the last year. A very smart, very good band.

Go here and scroll down a bit to click on it. If you let the video run, you'll also get the equally excellent "Goodnight, Goodnight"; then some interesting studio clips; then some not-so-interesting backstage stuff.

The title refers to two types of visual phenomena.

Academy Award-winning filmmaker Errol Morris (The Fog of War; The Thin Blue Line) illustrates the latter with a short experimental (at least I assume that it wasn't the finished product) film.

As me explaining technical things is too often like hearing poetry translated from Italian by an ape, I'll let Mr. Morris speak for himself :

I was asked by Quaker Oats to direct an advertising campaign for a "new weight control" oatmeal. What better way to discuss weight than through an examination of self-image - how we see ourselves? Ames's room uses that idea literally and metaphorically. Think of it not as an optical illusion but as an illustration of subjective experience. [. . .]

Clearly, our visual experience of the world is based on the two-dimensional images formed on our retinas. We have no "direct" experience of three dimensions. The retinal image produced by the Ames's room (itself, a trapezoidal solid) is no different from the retinal image produced by a rectangular room, and so, we are fooled. (Even though I know the room is trapezoidal, I can't force myself to see it that way. I have a clear predisposition to see it as rectangular, except when I move to the left or right of the one, specific vantage point, and the illusion vanishes.)

Film clip here. Warning: music.

Via grow-a-brain