the blog quebecois

The BBC recently ran an article on phobias and invited readers to write in describing their own. No garden-variety fears of bugs or heights here:

Since I was little I have always had a fear of buttons - not buttons on clothes but loose ones that are either on the floor or if I am rummaging around in a drawer and come across one I freak out and can't even touch it. I have since met two other people that have the same phobia - at least I am not the only one.

Your next bag of pork rinds could prove to be a crazy cacophony of colorful crunchy crisps.

Then again, maybe not. Excessive consumption of pork rinds apparently causes color-blindness.

I don't think Stephen Harper gets due credit for his wit, which is dry and deadly accurate and funny in a way that contrasts very well with the blustery bonhomie of certain politicians (who shall not be named).

When Belinda Stronach defected to the Liberals, one reason she gave was that Harper didn't understand the "complexity" of Canada. Harper quipped that he hadn't noticed that "complexity was Belinda's strong suit."

Like the old saying goes, never bring a pinheaded dilettante to a knife fight.

So I had Mike Duffy's show on, and he played a clip of today's debate in the House of Commons with NDP bore-vivant Pat Martin nattering on about -- what else? -- David Emerson. It went something like "Blah blah blah blah Canadians outraged blah blah blah seducing Emerson."

Canadian Press picks it up from there:

Harper got off the best one-liner of the day when he made a self-mocking joke about his cold persona after being accused of seducing Emerson.

"I don't think I've ever been accused of seducing anyone, even my wife," he said, glancing up into the gallery opposite at Laureen and the Harper children, Ben and Rachel.

"I see there's some agreement in the gallery," the prime minister added when the roars of laughter had died down.

You would think that the CBC -- if only to ingratiate itself with the new boss, who is going to be around a lot longer than the CBC hopes -- would have found the room to include the 10-second clip in The National tonight. But no. That might interfere with its predetermined narrative of Stephen Harper as a soulless, right-wing robot.

Maybe I'm being too harsh. The CBC, after all, has brought us beloved comic icons like Rick Mercer and the Royal Canadian Air Farce, so it could be that it just doesn't understand humor.

Carrie Lukas in National Review Online:

For years, the only way that a university could inoculate itself from Title IX litigation was to have athletic participation mirror enrollment. In other words, if 58 percent of students were women, then 58 percent of athletes had to be women. Universities trying to meet this criterion struggled to attract female athletes. But, all too often, they resorted to the surefire method of balancing the equation: eliminating men's teams. More than 90 universities cut men's track and field, and more than 20 cancelled wrestling.

If similar standards were applied to academic departments, university biology and accounting programs would be forced to try desperately to attract young men to the major. But if they fell short, they could opt to expel women to make the numbers balance. Engineering programs would face the inverse problem: attracting women and cutting men.

Gender warriors may be willing to take this deal. Feminists hardly celebrate that women gravitate toward majors like education that lead to lower-paying jobs after graduation. They may embrace a policy that pushes women toward more prestigious careers. But if academic departments are fair game, then why shouldn't similar standards be applied to enrollment?

If Title IX were applied to enrollment, schools would face the uncomfortable proposition of trying to attract more men or artificially reduce women's enrollment to reach the magic proportional balance. To achieve enrollment parity today, more than one million women would have to be expelled from colleges and universities around the country.

Harry at Chase Me, Ladies notes that relief is galloping across the horizon: (Warning: "Man-in-street" interviews)

Given that most Social Studies curricula these days is an unrelieved bitchfest of how The Man done po' po' Womyn wrong, you'd think that the term would have been slightly familiar. Or maybe they're just tuned it out entirely.

You won't be surprised to learn that the cameraman and interviewer are the ones who got in trouble for their little experiment. Story here.

I've never seen any of the Die Hard movies. I was surprised to find that the franchise dates back to this 1924 silent version, complete with tinkly piano accompaniment. I wish I knew what Bruce Willis's beauty secrets are. He certainly looks good for a 106-year-old man, doesn't he?

It's Christmas, 1924, and young Manhattanite John McClane visits olde Los Angeles towne to see his wife and enjoy yultide splendor. However, a few ne'er-do-wells have plans of their own, and C4.

Via Cynical-C Blog

Ananova:

A German has been ordered to stop laughing out loud in the woods after joggers complained he was disturbing the peace.

Accountant Joachim Bahrenfeld, 54, from Datteln said he goes to the woods after work and at weekends to have a good belly laugh.

"It's part of living for me, like eating, drinking and breathing. I feel much better when I laugh, it's freeing and healthy," he said.

But he now faces a �4,000 fine or six months jail if he laughs out loud again after a jogger successfully took him to court saying he was disturbing the peace.

Which reminded me of this story from last year:

A German man has been arrested after a marriage guidance counsellor advised him to run around naked shouting at trees.

Dieter Braun, 43, from Recklinghausen said the stress release technique had worked perfectly until he was arrested.

He told police that venting his anger on the trees had stopped him shouting at his wife.

"If I didn't go to the woods and scream at the trees then my marriage would probably be over," he said.

He added taking his clothes off at the same time made him feel more relaxed.

"For me it's a type of relaxation therapy. Feeling the breeze on my naked skin really calms me down."

But local police said other visitors to the forest did not find his behaviour relaxing and have now charged him with causing a public nuisance.

I was wondering if these two, if deployed in the forest at the same time, could cancel each other out, not unlike noise-cancelling headphones that inject a sound wave of opposite polarity to any detected ambient noise.

Or maybe we would have to more precisely calibrate the Germans -- a shouting/whispering pair here or a laughing/weeping pair there.

To investigate this, I will need:

a) some Germans (preferably the not-naked type), and;

b) some forest.

I look upon it as my sacred duty to the planet. If we can't keep Germans out of the forest, at least we can stop them from scaring the animals.

... here I am at Camp Jihad-a.

Two hours. Two hours I spent thinking up that freaking title, and I don't care if you don't think it's funny. Two hours. (If you don't get the reference, it's to a popular novelty song of the 60's, variously credited to Allan Sherman or Spike Jones.)

Anyway, I see that this is making the rounds again. Some people seem to be under the impression that it's new; in fact it dates back to March of 2004.

I wasn't surprised to read it at the time: It squared with other accounts I'd seen, usually buried so far in the newspaper that you'd have to be reading the escort agency ads to stumble upon them.

Not that I would be reading the escort agency ads. OK, I might have. Merely out of curiousity.

What did surprise me was where this was printed -- in the reflexively anti-American British magazine, the Guardian:

Tracked down to his remote village in south-eastern Afghanistan, Naqibullah has memories of Guantanamo that are almost identical to Asadullah's. Prison life was good, he said shyly, nervous to be receiving a foreigner to his family's mud-fortress home.

The food in the camp was delicious, the teaching was excellent, and his warders were kind. "Americans are good people, they were always friendly, I don't have anything against them," he said. "If my father didn't need me, I would want to live in America."

Asadullah is even more sure of this. "Americans are great people, better than anyone else," he said, when found at his elder brother's tiny fruit and nut shop in a muddy backstreet of Kabul. "Americans are polite and friendly when you speak to them. They are not rude like Afghans. If I could be anywhere, I would be in America. I would like to be a doctor, an engineer - or an American soldier."

Note: I forgot that the site requires free registration. It's nothing too onerous, though. Just a valid email address, password and country is required.

Miramax Films is auctioning off various props and costumes on eBay, with 100% of the proceeds going to charity. They do have some neat stuff, like weapons from The Gangs of New York. Those are going for $100+. If you're more on a budget, you might be interested in [pictured] document folders carried at some point by Meg Ryan in Kate and Leopold. (Yet another movie I haven't seen.)

You're thinking -- sure, they're probably stunt folders or something that they picked up at Office Depot. No, Sir! They come with a Certificate of Authenticity, so that is your guarantee that Meg Ryan at least held them -- however briefly -- in her hot little movie star hands. And you can't just walk off with treasures like that. Unless you're willing to trump the current bid of $0.99.

Though I would easily pay twice that for a phone call where she reprised her faux-orgasm scene from When Harry Met Sally.

So go on, have a look. Bidding ends on many of the items in a day or two -- if you're into collecting movie memorabilia, there are more than a few bargains to be had.

Toronto Star:

More details, meanwhile, are emerging about [biker Wayne] Kellestine, who relished playing the role of a dangerous man.

The 56-year-old loved to pose in front of his collection of Nazi memorabilia in his rundown farmhouse, near Dutton, about a 20-minute drive from where police discovered the bodies of eight Toronto-area members of the Bandidos motorcycle gang on the weekend.

"His reputation is being an absolute renegade," said someone from the area who knows him well. "A dangerous, dangerous guy. He's always had that reputation."

I can't see where they'd get that impression. Look at that impish twinkle in his eye!

hidden in the dashboard
the unseen mechanized eye
under surveillance

bauhaus

But now through the magic of the internets the travel patterns of taxicabs in San Francisco are yours for the mere price of a mouse click.

Enter the Exploratorium, an arts and sciences museum:

The Exploratorium is involved in a multi-year project to explore alternate views of the Bay Area's infrastructure. Entitled Invisible Dynamics, the project hopes to reveal radically surprising and inspiring views of the systems interconnecting the communities of the Bay. We are already familiar with the dominant street-map view of our city. This project will reveal other ways of seeing our environment, such as the view of the sewer infrastructure; the flow of water; the commercial activity of boats, trucks and planes; or the ecological activities of the marshes and wetlands surrounding the bay.

Yellow Cab has all its taxis equipped with GPS trackers and has allowed the Exploratorium access to its dispatch feed (with certain identifying data removed for privacy reasons). One result is the Cabspotter, which shows real-time taxi traffic in San Francisco. (I assume the long sweeping curve at the bottom right is the Golden Gate Bridge and approaches -- but I'm just guessing on this, as I've never been there.)

It's all very interesting. For about five minutes.

It's just an overview of what can be done, though. The FAQ page suggests other, more specialized projects; if you have experience writing to API* and Flash** applications, the Exploratorium will give you access to its database.

* API = a common computer acronym, standing for "American Petroleum Institute."

** Flash = something about showing your peepee, I think. It is San Francisco, after all.

Or is that title redundant?

We begin our tour with "Katako," which refers to the ancient Shinto tradition of knocking out heel wedges of a woman's shoe. Time it incorrectly and the woman will become "otoshi," or "horizontal," which is normally a promising development, if not for the fact that the woman would likely get up and beat you to death with what's left of her shoe.

OK, I made that part up. Be advised that there's (quite jazzy) music and sfx and no way to turn it off, so turn down your speakers if you must.

This one is is even more inscrutable. You are the pink, friendly bear. Collect the children by moving near them (using your mouse). The brown bear will cause the children to run off in fright.

Silly children! The dangerous bear is you! When you have five or more of them clinging to you, click anywhere on the game screen. The pink bear will discard his mask, revealing . . . an evil robot! The children will run off in fright! But you collect points! And then you put on your pink bear-mask and go hunting for more!

Music, etc.

4. I am dismayed at the huge number of hurtful and hateful posts that have been posted subsequent to mine, and the many more that have been sent to me personally. It has certainly been enlightening.

Lisa
Mother, small business owner, PTA member, teacher, community volunteer, good Samaritan, good neighbor, and mortal.

Good grief.

A bust of, allegedly, Arnold Schwarzenegger. I say allegedly because the inherent limitations of Lego-based portraiture leave it open to some interpretation. I think it more resembles Richard Nixon, myself. Or Abraham Lincoln.

Photo by Philip Greenspun. Full-size image here.

It'd be easy to do this in stop-motion animation; to do it unaided by human hands is remarkable. It's a robotic chair that falls apart and then reassembles itself.

As ever the sceptical type, I checked into the people behind the scenes and they seem eminently qualified. Raffaello D'Andrea, the leader of the bunch, has a c.v. longer than my arm in fields like electrical engineering and robotics.

In addition, he's currently at Cornell University, where another team of researchers developed a self-replicating robot. I blogged about it last year. (The link to a video seems to be timing out at the moment, so you might want to give it a try later.)

Some other projects he's worked on here.

(Some sound effects.)

we're leaving together
but still it's farewell
and maybe we'll come back
to earth, who can tell

europe

You might recall a rather cheesy 80s hit, The Final Countdown, by the Swedish band Europe. Or you might not. Either way, this is the worst version of it you will ever hear, performed by some godawful band at a country fair or something. At least the audience seems to be digging it.

Actually I can't tell if she's wearing a merkin or not. Wrong angle and all that.

Yahoo:

BERLIN (AFP) - Germany blasted British tabloid The Sun for printing what were billed to be pictures of Chancellor Angela Merkel changing into her bathing suit.

"You can assume that the chancellor of course has an interest in resting when she is on vacation, spending time with her husband, relaxing and not being constantly exposed to the voyeuristic gaze of lurking photographers," deputy government spokesman Thomas Steg told reporters when asked about the pictures.

"But she decided quickly not to take legal action. She said the public judgment here in Germany of the publication of these photographs in British media is so clear that it is enough for her."

The offending images, first published in the top-selling Sun on Monday, showed a woman from behind with her buttocks partly exposed with the headline "I'm Big in the Bumdestag" in a pun on the Bundestag lower house of parliament.

Of course, I would never publish such scandalous material on this fine blog. I'll bet Matt Drudge would, though. (Warning: NSFW.) Cheeky lad!

Wonder what our "progressive" friends at rabble.ca are thinking about the deaths of four Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan on Saturday?

Oh, about what you'd expect:

Hey is this some of the FREEDOM that YOU'all are trying to ship over to those little brown people, hoss.

Well I got news for you--4 dead and 2200 to go--

and I hope 'they die and die like flies' as Nina Simone might say...

Comment by "Fear-ah," who is apparently disappointed by the pace of Taliban success. So get on over there and show 'em how it's done.

Chickenhawk.

Via Angry in the GWN

This blog would like to go on record that putting human hair control products on a bird is not a good idea. The feathers of birds are complex structures that will not benefit from a dollop of Li'l Harlot's Stylin' Gel and a spritz of Iron Woman Head Fixative.

And all of this in a pathetic bid for Internet traffic. (You want pathetic traffic, I got you covered.)

Maybe I'm misreading the picture. It could be that they just stuck some pieces of an old wig on it with some Krazy Glue.™ That would be okay, I guess.

Oh my. Deprive our solicitous media of the opportunity to tap dance on the coffins of slain soldiers, will you? Judging by the pissing and moaning I've been hearing all day about it (The CBC couldn't find anyone besides the Minister of Defence who agreed with the government's decision. Huh! Fancy that!), that's exactly what they had intended to do.

Ottawa Citizen:

Liberal defence critic Ujjal Dosanjh blamed Mr. Harper for the decision to bar the media from CFB Trenton, calling it "absolutely un-Canadian."

Mr. Dosanjh accused the Conservatives of adopting the same tactics as the Bush administration -- keeping images of the death of Canadians in Afghanistan out of the public consciousness so they won't undermine public support for the mission, the way U.S. support for the Iraq mission has waned.

Well, whaddya know? Dosanjh got it half-right, for a change. Right policy, wrong Bush.

Seattle Times:

The Pentagon has banned the media from taking pictures of military caskets returning from war since 1991, citing concern for the privacy of grieving families and friends of the dead soldiers. The Bush administration issued a stern reminder of that policy in March 2003, shortly before the war in Iraq began.

In 1996, the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., upheld the ban after media outlets and some other organizations sued to have it lifted. Citing the need to reduce the hardship and protect the privacy of grieving families, the court held that the ban did not violate First Amendment guarantees of freedom of speech and of the press.

The National Military Family Association, one of the largest military-advocacy groups, supports the policy. "The families that we've heard from are more interested in their privacy and would hope that people would be sensitive to them in their time of loss," said Kathy Moakler, deputy director of government relations for the organization.

Censorship of these types of images is nothing new; showing their war dead was proscribed by all Allied governments in World Wars I and II. Soldiers' remains were mainly in those times buried overseas, so the issue of photographing returning caskets didn't come up. Had it, I doubt that newsmen of the day would have been terribly upset over prohibiting the practice -- unlike some of the opportunistic hyenas of today, at least they realized that they were on the same side:

A war of the half-truth, fought against a total lie.*

(* Apologies to Arthur Koestler, whom I paraphrase, being unable to find the exact quote.)

Hey, that's the name, and I'm sticking to it.

It's a point-and-click murder mystery
and it seems quite well done. I can't report on it more deeply than that, because I was unable to make it out of the first room.

Warning: Music and dialogue on the load and intro screens.

Awwww. Warning: Embedded audio.

Google has released SketchUp, a free 3D modelling application. In comparison to other software of the type, it's very easy to use. It'd be ideal for sketching out additions to your house (or a whole new one) or landscaping or designing or . . . well, whatever else comes to mind.

You can upload your images to the 3D Warehouse (from where I got the design at left) or import them into Google Earth.

It's only available for Windows now, but a Mac version is promised soon. Minimum requirements:

* Microsoft Windows - 2000, XP Home or Professional Editions
* 600 MHz Pentium� III processor
* 128 MB RAM
* 80 MB of available hard-disk space
* Video card that is 100% OpenGL compliant
* Windows compatible pointing device
* Microsoft� Internet Explorer 6.0 or higher
* Windows� Media Player or QuickTime 5.0 and web browser for multimedia tutorial.

You can download it here.

but what can a poor boy do
except to sing for a rock 'n' roll band
'cause in sleepy london town
there's just no place for a

rolling stones

Reuters:

Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards suffered a concussion in Fiji, a band spokeswoman said on Saturday. Media reports said he had fallen from a coconut tree and was recovering in New Zealand.

Richards, 62, was treated locally and then flown to a hospital outside of Fiji as a precaution, Rolling Stones spokeswoman Fran Curtis said.

Curtis said Richards suffered a mild concussion earlier in the week. She said she did not know how it happened. He was still hospitalized on Saturday.

The New Zealand Sunday Star Times reported that Richards, who had been on vacation at a luxury resort in Fiji, was being treated in a hospital in Auckland and that he was mobile and had not had surgery.

It quoted Dr. Uzzal Kanti Dhar, of Suva Private Hospital in Fiji, where Richards was first treated, as saying, "I understand he climbed a coconut tree and fell from the tree and got injured."