the blog quebecois

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Also Madam Speaker, you bitch:

The State of the Blog is Strong.

<applause> . . . </applause>

My apologies for the paucity of posts lately. Last week I came down with what I believe was a mild case of food poisoning. Apart from feeling like I'd been hit by a truck and immediately puking up whatever nourishment I could choke down, it wasn't so bad.

The next morning, I woke up feeling great. The knot in my stomach and the chills were gone. I lay there for some minutes, wiggling my toes to confirm my now-restored health. Then I sprang out of bed and fell flat on my face.

I don't know if it was related to my original illness or if it was mere coincidence, but I seemed to have developed an inner-ear infection, with the bonus side-effect of destroying my sense of equilibrium.

It's not that you're dizzy (though there is some of that) but that you seem to have forgotten where to put your feet. You take a step and your foot lands where it shouldn't; you try to catch your balance with your other foot and under or over-compensate; repeat the process; the next thing you know, you're sprinting sideways at 25 mph, heading for an encounter with the wall. This is a journey which invariably ends in tears.

I couldn't even make it across the room without clutching at the furniture to steady myself. If I must look like a stumbling drunk at 10 a.m., I'd prefer getting that way the traditional route; it hurts a lot less when you bang your shins into the coffee table.

Mercifully, most of the infection seems to have gone. I'm still a bit shaky on my feet, and there's some residual dizziness, which makes blogging or doing anything on the computer a chore. I'm slowly getting back to my schedule, the rigors of which would shock and appall the sturdiest men amongst you.

<applause> . . . </applause>

In other news, I've signed up with Kontera Technologies to run their ContentLinks ads. Like Google ads, they detect keywords in the text and tailor the ads to suit; the main difference is that Kontera highlights the words with a double-underline and displays a popup balloon when you roll your cursor over one, as in the picture. (I haven't installed the code yet, but will probably do so later tonight.)

Ordinarily, I wouldn't meet Kontera's criteria -- 500K page views per month -- but Vancouver money-blogger John Chow is offering to sign up low-traffic sites that are a) content-driven and b) in English (though they will consider other languages). I would think that nearly all the Blogging Tories sites would qualify, if anyone's interested. The offer is here.

I apologize in advance to any who find this change unaesthetic or unseemly. I too don't like popup links; but you must admit, these are superior to the type that obscure the page until you close them. These you can avoid by not hovering your mouse over them.

And it would be nice to have an additional revenue stream (or more likely, trickle) for this fine blog.

Hey, I'm not going to get rich (or even close to the $8,545 in ad revenue that John Chow reported last month) doing this, but it would be nice to cover my hosting costs and maybe a chunk of the broadband.

Or my medical bills. Click a link or two and make the cripple dance again.

Steer the silver ball to its target, using the crates to bridge the water. Each level is timed, so the clock is your enemy. Beware the golden ball. Golden ball = death. Also keep an eye out for laser-firing robots.

I'm not exactly sure that there are laser-firing robots in the game, since I haven't been able to make it past the sixth level, but it can't hurt to watch out for them. If they do exist, it's nothing but bad news.

Warning: Sounds and music. You can turn them off with a button (bottom of screen, second from right), but music will come up in the prior title/instruction screen.

In which Almer Gortry's acolytes address skeptics of the Gorspel:

Some people must believe the Mason-Dixon Line runs between our office and Gore’s mansion, Johnson says. No one would call Gore a redneck, but when we uncovered his hypocritical energy use, it somehow made me a sister-dating hillbilly. That’s quite amusing, since Gore and I live in Nashville, less than five miles apart.

In what has been remarked by some * commentators as the equivalent of the Zapruder film this startling screen capture shows Dart B, thrown by Monkey A, at the precise instant that it bursts Bloon C before continuing on to miss all the others. Link.

No, I don't know why they call them "Bloons." I'm guessing that they ran out of money in their development budget, so they couldn't afford the extra "A" and "L." That, or it's a Web 2.0 thing.

Warning: Sound effects.

* Well, me.

A man photoshopped to look like Homer Simpson. Larger picture and a video showing how it was done here.

Warning: Video has music.

Via A Welsh View

I wondered how long it would take. For someone to blame the Virginia Tech shootings on George Bush, that is.

CBC to the rescue. On The National tonight, Elliott Layton, a former (and formerly-respected) anthropologist who studies mass-murders, attributed it to the Iraq War, and its desensitizing nature as compared to the halycon Clinton years (paraphrase mine -- the cheap-ass CBC still cannot find the money in its $900-million taxpayer-funded budget to provide transcripts).

Just a minute, there, Professor. Let's run the numbers, shall we? Leaving aside the outliers of the Clinton-era Columbine shootings (12 killed ) and Bush's Virginia Tech (32 dead at this writing), which totals were exacerbated by timorous and bungled police responses, we can add up the body counts, thanks to this handy-dandy list of school shootings at Wikipedia:

Bush (and Iraq War!) era (2001-present)

Santana: 2 K(illed)
Rocon: 2 K
Red Lake: 7K
Amish: 5 K
Platte: 1 K

For a total of 17 killed.

Clinton era (1993-2000)

Richland: 2 K
Frontier: 3 K
Pearl: 2 K
Heath: 3 K
Jonesboro: 5 K

For a total of 15 killed. But wait. The list doesn't include Kip Kinkel's 1998 rampage in Oregon, with 2 dead (not counting his parents, whom he murdered shortly before killing two of his classmates).

For a total of 17 killed.

Yeah, hell of a correlation there, Professor. You've flunked Elementary Statistics, but you'll always have a place of honor with the CBC. You have spoken the magic words.

Just to reinforce our moral superiority, and/or for giggles, let's compare Canada's record over the same period. Again I'll leave out the similarly-anomalous École Polytechnique Massacre (14 dead, attributable also to inept and confused policework).

Concordia: 4 K
Dawson: 1 K

Wikipedia also doesn't list the Taber, Alberta shooting, a few days after Columbine (1 killed).

For a total of 6 dead. Applying the usual 10:1 ratio of population difference, we would expect the Americans to have 60 fatalities instead of 34. Sweet pacifist Canada is almost twice as violent as the crazed gun-totin' Yanks. Oh, my.

Update: Via SDA, the clip:

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, wow, he's really got nothing tonight. That would not be true. I have the Hillary Dress Up game.

Best of all, once you finish dressing up Hillary, you can copy the wardrobe code and mail it to friends * so that they can see what you've done!

* Please do not mail me with your creations. I've already set up my filters to block any possible permutations of "Hillary," "Dress," and "Up." Thank you for your cooperation.

This is probably one of those ideas that was funnier in the conception than in the flesh; it's still worth a few giggles anyway. It takes a random quote from Friedrich Nietzche and marries it with a random Family Circus cartoon. To see different combinations, refresh the page.

Unfortunately my favorite Nietzsche quote (from Thus Spoke Zarathustra) hasn't yet come up: (link points to a slightly different translation)

Thou goest to women? Take thy whip!

To which Bertrand Russell quipped: Nietzsche seldom went to see women, because he knew that nine out of ten of them could have gotten the whip away from him.

when they decide those compact fluorescent bulbs are also too damned inefficient.

Via b3ta

Inspector Clouseau is on the case:

Federal Liberal Leader Stephane Dion is suggesting the government consider bringing Taliban fighters captured by Canadian soldiers to this country.

He says, "We should find another solution. We may bring them in [sic] Canada. We may keep them under our control in Afghanistan."

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has already rejected the idea of holding Taliban prisoners in Canada.

Bring them here, and let them live among their people. With any luck maybe one of them would do us the favor of sawing Jack Layton's head off. I only worry that that wouldn't stop it from continually yakking.

Leave it to the moonbats at Daily Kos to come up with this weepy eulogy for the Virginia Tech shooter:

Cho lived in shadows, deep and dark. He attended classes at a prestigious University. He was a scholar, a writer.

Not much of one, if this example is any indication. Maybe the diarist was comparing it to her own wretched prose:

I beseech us all; I ask Americans, émigrés, and individuals in every corner of the globe, do not hold your children tighter, lock them up in buildings where there is little genuine affection.

What the hell that means is anyone's guess. To be fair, a lot of the comments were very critical.

Still.

Via Ace of Spades

Arnd Drossel is enclosed in a steel-wire sphere as he walks down a country path between the German towns of Dorsten and Raesfeld on April 11. The artist walked for 300 kilometers (186.41 miles) to draw attention to the many people he said are "out of balance" and in need of "social psychiatric" help.

OK, one comment. His device does seem to have its uses.

Times Online:

Now, in addition to their often murky powers of illumination, low-energy bulbs have been shown to bring another inconvenience in their wake - they disrupt television remote controls.

Scientists have found that the infrared waves given out by some models of the bulbs are almost exactly the same frequency as those from the hand-sets. Sometimes this means the controls fail altogether. On other occasions the channels may be spontaneously switched by the “impostor” rays of the bulbs.

[ . . . ]

Nick Flynn, 46, who runs a project management consul-tancy in Exmouth, Devon, replaced his light bulbs with CFLs two months ago.

Then he discovered the remote control for his 27in Sony flatscreen television had packed up. Flynn sent it to a repair shop, which found nothing wrong but charged him £100 for the check.

He phoned again to tell them the remote control was still not working. It was only then that the guy on the phone said, "Have you recently changed your light bulb?" said Flynn. "Now every time I need to change the channel I pull the plug on the lamp."

Don't do it, they said. You'll screw up the formatting of your page, and for what? Cheap thrills and the acclaim of the masses? Well, formatting be damned: I'm gonna do it, as part of my pledge to bring you the latest and hottest games. Or whatever, especially if it's embeddable.

Now, for the approximately three people on the planet who haven't played computer mah-jongg (the actual game itself is very different, sort of a cross between rummy and dominoes), it isn't exactly rocket science. Remove the tiles by clicking on matching pairs. Any tile that has its right or left edge untouched by other tiles can be selected. So have at 'er.

Warning: Some minor sound effects. I haven't won at it yet, though, so I can't guarantee that clearing the board doesn't serenade you with a blast of trumpets or something.

This photograph by Jason Reed of Reuters appeared in Saturday's National Post, and it made me laugh out loud. (Unfortunately this picture is of somewhat-lower resolution, and I was unable to find a better version.) It shows US Federal Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald (centre) of Scooter Libby and now Conrad Black fame, and what I presume are four members of his office, striding (briskly, one imagines) to a meeting. I think that the intent was to show the hard-charging, incorruptible Officer of the Court and his team on Official Business, and woe betide any pedestrians that get in the way.

What it reminded me of, though, were the late-night ads you see for law firms, where the lawyers (backlit and in soft-focus) snap their heads around in unison to stare into the camera, interspersed with slow-mo shots of them marching manfully (even the women!) through the corridors of power to do battle on your behalf.

Folks, this barely works for me when it's the Pussycat Dolls; and even then it's vaguely risible.

But on the off chance that you're pitching this to the networks, I think it could use some fine-tuning.

So let me put on my Casting Director's hat, which has my name on it and everything.

First, ditch the two frumps on the left. As anyone can tell you, female Department of Justice employees are invariably stunningly-attractive, impeccably-attired, and expert kick-boxers. Those two look like judges at a cat show.

Ditto with the guy immediately to the right of Fitzgerald, the one who looks like David Caruso on a three-day bender. We can hire the real thing if we have to. And what's with the angry-looking man at the far right? Is he trying to use a TV remote?

I could understand that -- if I saw this crew coming down the street at me, I'd be flipping channels, too.