the blog quebecois

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I'm ba-a-a-a-ck!

That was quite the adventure. The biggest obstacle, as usual, was my own stupidity. When it came time to select the hosting package I opted without thinking for a Microsoft Business account. I have nothing against Microsoft software, mind you; but Movable Type's (MT) documentation, which I perhaps should have glanced at before starting all this, would reveal that it was meant to run on Unix/Linux servers. You can rig it up to run under Windows Server 2003, but there's about two pages' worth of file renaming, configuration and other platform-specific details.

By the time I got all that sorted out, my FTP evaluation program would have expired. So I checked to see if I could revert to a Unix setup -- unfortunately, the host's policy is to allow a package change only once every 30 days.

But the good folks (Seriously -- go buy something from them now. I don't care if you don't have a computer. Nor do they.) at 1&1, when apprised of this circumstance, arranged to switch me back to a Linux package at the earliest opportunity, in five days. (I don't know anything about the mechanics of managing large server farms, but I'm guessing that there are inflexible administrative tasks that must be run on a weekly or monthly basis before individual accounts can be updated.)

The five days I didn't mind so much, as I had a number of other things to take care of.

Installing MT is actually fairly easy once you understand its directory structure and which files have to be modified for read/write permissions.

I must say that it went brilliantly, apart from the fact that I couldn't make it publish anything.

Bruce from Autonomous Source, working on the valid presumption that I didn't know what the hell I was doing, emailed Sunday morning to offer to help me out.

If I didn't know better, I'd have thought he was dissing my 1337 h4x0rz skillz! I fired back:

I'll have you know that I'm an expert at installing Movable Type, Sir. I've done it no less than three times this weekend. It's getting it to run that's a bit of a problem.

What's been happening (and may also be responsible for the error message I posted) is that it isn't properly initializing. The main admin screens are of vers. 3.3., but the templates that load are from my old setup (along with all my previous posts). I think I figured it out last night, and one of the moderators at MT's forum agrees that it's probably what's happening.

It seems that the MySQL database wasn't wiped out when the new account started, and so MT thinks it's performing an upgrade rather than a whole new install.

That's the latest theory, anyway. I'll re-re-re-reinstall it this afternoon, this time taking care to kill the database first and hope that MT hooks up with a new one (hey, I've got 50 of them to spare, so one of them's bound to work).

If later on this evening you hear a loud noise, worry not -- it'll just be me, shooting my computer.

So here we are. It'll take me a few days to figure out all the gears and widgets, but I should be back to my blazing blogging pace soon.

Disconnect the wires leading from the battery or the trigger/timer to the detonator. The battery will look like a battery; the timer is the part that's counting down. Be careful: This is the trickiest part of the bomb – and where it's most likely to be booby-trapped (the whole red wire/blue wire thing comes into play here). And for God's sake, don't fuss over the process in order to make the timer stop at something clever like 0-0-7.

I thought it would be worth linking to this story at Wired, just in case you happen to run across one. Sure, it might have been built by North Korea, in which case you're pretty safe, but the recyclers won't take it unless you break it up and sort it.

Sheik Jassem al-Mutawah 'splains the difference between men and women.

Warning: It's in Arabic, but you can turn down the sound and read the subtitles. Also, some of the banner ads might be marginally NSFW. Be sure to tune in next week, when the Sheik discusses boobies.

As my personal spokesrobot explains, I am much too busy to post tonight.

At least I think that's what she's saying. I'm still saving up for the English-language module.

Actually:

Actroid DER2 is a guide robot created by Kokoro Company, Ltd., a Sanrio Group company. The robot was unveiled at Sanrio headquarters in Tokyo on October 4, 2006.

She's quite impressive. The hands are a bit blocky, or maybe she's just practicing her karate moves.

Warning: Besides the robot-inflected Japanese, there's a good deal of incidental noise -- from, I assume, people gathered round. Or from . . . other robots (shudder).

Oh dear. I seem to have been "fired" by the Blogging Tories. Whatever shall I do now?

Yesterday I sent off what I thought would be a routine request to Stephen Taylor, one of the administrators of the group:

Hello, Stephen.

I've recently rebuilt my site and updated my software. I still appear on the BT blogroll, but my position in it doesn't change upward to reflect new posts.

Also, my new feed is here:

http://blogquebecois.com/atom.xml

I was making it into the aggregator for awhile, but not for the last month or so.

Pierre

Here's what I got back:

Pierre,

try pinging the blogroll when you have new posts. You can do this by
going to this address:
http://www.blogrolling.com/ping.phtml

Erm, no. That's what the blogroll is supposed to do. Unless someone's blocking it, of course.

As for the aggregator, it's difficult to filter out posts that have nothing to do with Canadian politics so I've opted for non-inclusion of your blog in the aggregator. I'll bend if you get the Canadian politics posts to over 50%. Sorry.

Cheers,
Stephen

Oh, piss off. I'll write what I like.

And I've just "fired" your stupid blogroll.

The irony of all this is that I was recruited to the Blogging Tories by none other than Taylor himself. Here he is from June 18, 2005:

have you ever considered joining the Blogging Tories? http://www.bloggingtories.ca/

If you'd like to, you can do so here:
http://www.bloggingtories.ca/join.php

We'd be thrilled to have you.

Cheers,
Stephen Taylor

Lest you think I was at the time cranking out lengthy political treatises and that I've radically changed my focus since, I went through my archives (not all of them are up yet) and looked at the posts in the days leading up to Taylor's invitation. Of the previous 15, most were of videos/jokes/whatever that wouldn't look at all out of place from what I'm doing now. Indeed, the mix is typical of what I've been doing since about the early part of 2004.

There were only three posts in that number that had any discernable political content. Two were essentially one-line comments on Karla Homolka and the Supreme Court's Chaoulli decision. The third was on Live Aid organizers Bob Geldof and Bono.

Not a lot of Canadian content there. But if Taylor was under the impression that I was some slumbering incarnation of Andrew Coyne waiting for his touch to wake, my first Blogging Tories post surely would have disabused him of that notion. Aroooo!

Off topic (I know, I know), I have to share this video (Warning: audio) of a German woman who has just received a rejection on her bid to join the Blogging Tories:

So you see? Germans do have a sense of humor. That leaves Stephen Taylor alone with his grim affliction.

Update: Never mind! (See 13th comment -- I get an error when I try to link it.)

Child Toilet costume is a very funny kids Halloween costume. A Child toilet costume is also perfect for every potty mouth kid. Use as a modern day Dunce cap. Young boys love this silly Toilet bowl Halloween costume. One size fits most kids size 7-12.

Years later, you'll be paying for a psychiatrist to pry these happy memories out of your shattered mind. I hope they have that on the warning label.

OK, we've kissed and made up, and I remain a loyal member of the Blogging Tories.
Stephen Taylor has figured out a way to draw a feed from this site whenever I class a post as political in nature. So now I can wax poetic about whatever I like without clogging up the BT aggregator -- at the same time, it encourages me to include more political content. Each post that appears there doubles or triples my usual traffic.

Oh, and someone go tell McClelland to wipe the smirk off his face. It might freeze like that, which would be unfortunate. He's not a handsome man to begin with.

I've seen this before. It's the work of computer artist Peter Stanick. Start here and click the picture (sometimes you're limited to a specific region of the screen) to continue.

It's an apparently endless (although some elements repeat) stream of Pop Art iconography, New York streetscenes, fake ads, glamorous women (Warning: Some are topless or scantily-dressed, so it's NSFW. No music or sound, though.)

Colorful, stylish, unapologetically sexist: What's not to like?

I was flipping through some old magazines prior to throwing them out putting them into a neat pile for the recyclers when I ran across a small article (it was on one of those gossipy-what's-happening pages with four or five items) in the June 2005 issue in the now-defunct Saturday Night.

It was about the worst foreign affairs minister Canada's ever had, at least in my memory: Lloyd (Soft Power) Axworthy, and some of his favorite internet bookmarks.

Let's see. The BBC; the UN; the New York Times. No shockers, those.

Oh, and what's this?

I've just discovered the blog site Daily Kos, having become one of their subjects. It certainly seems to touch a lot of nerves in a lot of different places. Maybe we should rethink our foreign policy and get on the blog system. [What for the love of God this means is anybody's guess. -- ed.] It's a whole new network, a very potent and surprising kind of experience.

If you were wondering what inspired the mighty Kos himself to write about Axworthy, it was the incredibly juvenile, taunting "open letter" that he had penned in the Winnipeg Free Press to US Sec. of State Condoleezza Rice. My considerably less flattering take on it is here.

Did anybody else notice (Officially Screwed did) that when Stephen Harper a few days ago accused the majority of the Liberal leadership candidates of being anti-Israel, the immediate, furious denials were as if he had accused them of anti-semitism?

Bob Rae, for one, was quick to note that his wife and children were Jewish.

That's all well and good; but Harper wasn't denouncing you for not having a Jewish wife and children. He was pointing out that your party has consistently demonstrated an anti-Israel bias. (To be fair to Rae, he did break with his former party in 2002 over its virulently anti-Israel positions.)

Whatever could have caused Harper to reach that conclusion? Aaron Goldstein has a nice roundup of statements by Liberals that might have misled him.

Here's our boy, Lloyd:

[Scott Brison] doesn’t really understand what Liberal foreign policy is about. He’s almost at the forefront of a very small group of nations [Brison is a nation? -- ed.] who say whatever Israel does is right . . . We’re becoming part of the problem, not part of the solution.

It's long been a truism of the left that being anti-Israel does not mean being anti-Jewish. That's certainly the pose that the Daily Kos tries to maintain.

The hysterical reaction of Liberals pinned with the first of those labels might indicate otherwise.

I leave it for the reader to judge. Here's a pastoral essay by one of Kos's diarists, "Imagine A World Without Israel":

We could bring down the Wall, send prisoners home, and families could be reunited.

We could dismantle checkpoints, open crossings, and pull down barbed wire fences.

There would be no more settlements or armed settlers because the people would be united.

We could replant trees and olive groves and rebuild battered cities.

No more suicide bombers or sniper fire, and no more dead civilians.

Give or take a few million Jews, I'd wager.

Sometimes it's a bit more explicit, as in this entry, hurriedly rewritten, but not before Little Green Footballs got a screencap:

Israel is showing the entire world why the Iranian President was absolutely right to suggest that Israel cease being a sovereign state as is.

So does Lloyd Axworthy embrace Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's proposal to extirpate Israel from the face of the earth? Dunno. But his preferred choice of reading material raises a few questions. It also casts a bit more illumination on this curious little story.

An entertaining little game. Click on the arrows to steer the ants to their correct targets. (Leaves, bugs and grubs must be delivered to separate tree trunks.) Things get hectic soon enough.

Warning: Music and sound effects.

Speaking of whom, I found this at Bourque last night:

Note the top headline. I think we are owed an explanation. Especially from Mark.

Globe and Mail:

OTTAWA -- Opposition Liberals have demanded an apology from Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay for apparently referring to his former romantic partner, Liberal MP Belinda Stronach, as a dog during a nasty Question Period in the House of Commons yesterday.

The incident occurred as Environment Minister Rona Ambrose was defending her new clean-air program from Liberal accusations that it does nothing concrete for the environment.

Liberal MP David McGuinty taunted Mr. MacKay, suggesting that if the Conservatives do not care about the health of people, they should care about the health of animals. Mr. McGuinty demanded to know: "Don't you care about your dog?"

Mr. MacKay, who dated Ms. Stronach when she was a Conservative, heckled back: "You already have her."

Tsk. I can think of many more-descriptive ways to describe Miss Stronach: "vapid clotheshorse"; "the dilettante debutante"; "high-functioning moron" immediately come to mind. Or my favorite: "Tie Domi's blowup doll."

Nevertheless, brevity is the soul of wit, so "dog" takes the day.

I watched in astonishment this afternoon as Mike Duffy Live devoted its entire hour to this ginned-up "scandal." Particularly amusing were the outraged women, like Craig Oliver, Scott Reid, and the odious David McGuinty. Between them all I don't think they could grow a pair. And we ain't talkin' tits.

I guarantee this is the strangest video you're going to see this week -- nay, this decade. It's from some kind of Japanese game show where contestants attempt to shout out tongue-twisters.

Failure is not an option. Warning: Violence, albeit of a humorous nature. When it happens to someone else, that is.

I once heard or read somewhere that Sheila Copps, if she hadn't entered politics, would have gone on to become a star journalist (she worked briefly for the Hamilton Spectator and Ottawa Citizen), earning "in the six figures."

Really? In Canada? In print journalism?

I can think of maybe a few who make that much, but they'd all be opinion columnists, not journalists. Copps, who does now write a column for the Sun chain brings to it extensive knowledge of government, but her insights into it are nothing that a dozen others couldn't offer; and she has at best a rather pedestrian writing touch.

She does have, though, the one indispensable requirement for a budding journalist: A blithe disregard for facts.

Here she is on Garth Turner:

He blogged away daily on what was going on in caucus. His e-mail list was huge. He used the web to openly criticize his leader, calling Harper a clone of U.S. President George Bush [. . .]

To which Turner posted this rebuttal:

This description of Stephen Harper was offered on this web site in a comment by a visitor. In the melee of the last few days it has been attributed to me. In fact, Craig Oliver did so today during CTV’s “Question Period” and Sheila Copps did it again in her Sun Media column of this date.

Be aware that I never wrote those words, nor would I. I do not view Stephen Harper that way, and if I did then I would have had no place whatsoever in the Conservative caucus. Harper is his own man, and is doing his best for Canada.

I've never been a fan of "scratching" -- the practice of sampling beats and melodies off a manually-controlled turntable. Too often it is just this godawful skritcha-skritcha that doesn't add anything to a song. Except, well, that godawful skritcha-skritcha.

There are artists that transcend the genre, though, like Fatboy Slim (I'm not sure if he works with turntables much, but he certainly uses loops and samples) who rummage around in the old toolbox and manage to assemble something fresh and new. I was so impressed by his backing music on a Mercedes-Benz commercial that I went out of my way to find out what it was. Me praise "Praise You." Warning: Embedded video/audio.

Also these guys. I'm not sure of their name (the video is titled only Scratch masters), but they move seamlessly from jazz to Dixie to Brazilian samba to the blues, all without apparently changing records. That must be one hell of a K-Tel compilation package.

Bonus: They are (sort of) choreographed! Who says that white boys can't shuck 'n' jive like The Commodores?

The day before yesterday, while helping on a homework assignment, I noticed I could speak perfectly in rhyme. Rhyme was a context I hadn’t considered. A poem isn’t singing and it isn’t regular talking. But for some reason the context is just different enough from normal speech that my brain handled it fine.

Jack be nimble, Jack be quick.
Jack jumped over the candlestick.

I repeated it dozens of times, partly because I could. It was effortless, even though it was similar to regular speech. I enjoyed repeating it, hearing the sound of my own voice working almost flawlessly. I longed for that sound, and the memory of normal speech. Perhaps the rhyme took me back to my own childhood too. Or maybe it’s just plain catchy. I enjoyed repeating it more than I should have. Then something happened.

My brain remapped.

My speech returned.

Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, has been suffering for the last year and a half with something called Spasmodic Dysphonia. It rendered him incapable of everyday speech. (Oddly, it didn't prevent him from making public speeches, or singing. This resembles, in a way, some people like country star Mel Tillis, who has a severe stutter that entirely disappears when he's onstage.) He has found that speaking in rhyme for a short while enables him, at least temporarily, to speak normally.

He explains it better than I can on his excellent blog.

Here's a neat (if pointless) effect that's been going around. Copy the code in italics and paste it into the address bar of your browser (the part that currently reads "http://blogquebecois.com" -- erase that first), or follow these steps:

1. Highlight the JavaScript below.
2. Press the Ctrl + C keys together, and repeat with
3. Alt + D
4. Ctrl + V
5. Press Enter

javascript:R=0; x1=.1; y1=.05; x2=.25; y2=.24; x3=1.6; y3=.24; x4=300; y4=200; x5=300; y5=200; DI=document.getElementsByTagName("img"); DIL=DI.length; function A(){for(i=0; i-DIL; i++){DIS=DI[ i ].style; DIS.position='absolute'; DIS.left=(Math.sin(R*x1+i*x2+x3)*x4+x5)+"px"; DIS.top=(Math.cos(R*y1+i*y2+y3)*y4+y5)+"px"}R++}setInterval('A()',5); void(0);

It works better on pages with more pictures on them, and takes place at the top of the screen, so you might have to scroll up to see it. Refreshing the page or going elsewhere will return things to normal. Some people report that it doesn't work with Firefox browsers.

awaits the first person to identify this common object.

¹Void where prohibited.²

Reuters:

National paper Kommersant carried a letter from Vologda's deputy chief of regional hunting resources management, Sergei Starostin, which accuses hunt organizers of plying a captive bear named "Mitrofan" with vodka-drenched honey and then forcing him from a cage to be shot by Spain's King Juan Carlos.

"His majesty Juan Carlos killed Mitrofan with a single shot," Starostin wrote in his letter.

Russian hunt organizers are not complete strangers to such tactics. Keen hunter and former Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev had trouble with his aim in his later years. Some of the animals he liked to stalk were either tied to trees or plied with booze.

OK, Yeltsin was the drunk tied to the tree. It still wasn't an easy shot. You could ask Brezhnev about it.

Halloween's coming up, so what better time to examine the dearly departed amongst us?

I don't believe in ghosts myself, but the picture at left is rather eerie. It's claimed that the man behind the woman is her deceased husband. Could be. It could also be some random doofus who wandered into the frame. Or a very strange hat.

There's another, even more ominous face in the picture. Look at the trees above the red truck or SUV at the left.

I had to shrink the photo to fit my format, so it isn't so clear. Go here to see the original and some other apparitions.

If you dare.

Because I know you can't get enough of the Halloween links, and also because I couldn't find anything else today, I present K-Mart's Haunted House. The idea being that by providing your email address, K-Mart can bombard you 'til the end of time with spam. Well, the joke's on them. You only have to give your address if you want to save your place in the game. Which you may or may not want to do.

I haven't played enough of the game to determine if it's worth getting K-Mart spam for, but it seems well enough done and suitable for kids. There's music and some sound effects, but you can kill it with the speaker button at the lower right of the screen.

. . . of the Liberal party. ♪♪

Sorry this page takes so long to load -- that's what happens when you're using cutting-edge Flash technology.

And yes, I am aware that (Black)Jack! Layton and Belinda Stronach are not running for the Liberal Party leadership, but it was brought to my attention that I was behind on my MDLRR (Minimum Daily Layton Ridicule Requirement). And I needed a woman for the "Alice the maid" slot, and I didn't think anyone would recognize Martha Hall Findlay.

It would have been easier to work with bigger pictures, but I have a limited amount of screen real-estate available. You can add the wandering eyes to any picture on your computer or at a specific URL. Go here.

Philipp Lenssen adds a Web 2.0 gloss to the romance comic.

I'm never going to cushion-dive for loose change again:

Perfectly camouflaged and lightning fast, Ghastly Ghoul Blasts thru the bottom of chair to stand 6’3” tall. They’ll never see it coming and this ones guaranteed to drop them. Includes, chair, ghoul, mech & pneumatic pkg.

Probably a bit late to pick it up for your Halloween party; at $2700 (and this is one of the cheaper effects -- others are over 10K with accessories) it's more intended for the commercial market, anyway.

More expensive creepiness here.

already has a new job. (Warning: Audio. Also, YouTube's been a bit flaky tonight.)