the blog quebecois

Pinch Hitter is a well-done little game. You unlock new challenges by completing tasks -- hit a home run; hit ten pitches in a row, etc. You choose a name, team and colors before playing (the game records your achievements so you can continue at the same level at a later time). There's a pale yellow cursor that indicates where your bat meets the ball.

Warning: Typical baseball noises, which you can mute with a button at the bottom of the menu screen. Unfortunately there are some other sfx before you get to that screen, so turn down your speakers if that's a problem.

Sensing a market opportunity, Net Nanny, makers of Net Nanny filtering software, announced this week it will introduce NetNarrow, an English-only product that automatically filters out content that appears to be international. Specifically, the software looks for world datelines and keywords indicative of irrelevant foreign stories, including "Shiite," "post-Apartheid," and "Bob Geldof."

Survey-taker Craig Barker of Brooklyn, New York, said he will be among the first to get NetNarrow. "On the Web, there are so many ways to get news from so many different places, I could really get some fresh insights into what's going on in other countries if I wanted to," he said.. "But I don't want to."

"You'd think these Internet people would know that," Barker added. "I mean, that's why the Internet is called America Online, right? It's supposed to be about America."

You have to wonder about the reading comprehension of people who read a piece on a (now-defunct) site conspicuously named SatireWire.com and jump to conclusions. Hence, this explanation added to the article:

Editor's Note: It seems that after reading this entirely fictional story, some investors/customers of Net Nanny believed the company actually was going to produce NetNarrow software. As a result, Net Nanny asked SatireWire to please assure people that this is not the case. No, really.

You might remember Statetris from a few days ago. Here's your chance to unite the European Union.

When it comes time to place the small principalities or city-states like Monaco, Malta and Andorra (pictured), magnifying glasses will appear over their possible positions. This makes things a bit easier, you betcha.

Warning: Minor sound effects.

I saw this at Gizmodo and couldn't stop laughing. Words otherwise fail me, so I'll just point you to the original article and its commenters.

Warning: Some crude language; also, one of the banner ads recently generated controversy when it appeared on a billboard in New York. (Link SFW.)

TimesOnline:

Walking does more than driving to cause global warming, a leading environmentalist has calculated.

Food production is now so energy-intensive that more carbon is emitted providing a person with enough calories to walk to the shops than a car would emit over the same distance. The climate could benefit if people avoided exercise, ate less and became couch potatoes. Provided, of course, they remembered to switch off the TV rather than leaving it on standby.

The sums were done by Chris Goodall, campaigning author of How to Live a Low-Carbon Life, based on the greenhouse gases created by intensive beef production. "Driving a typical UK car for 3 miles [4.8km] adds about 0.9 kg [2lb] of CO2 to the atmosphere," he said, a calculation based on the Government’s official fuel emission figures. "If you walked instead, it would use about 180 calories. You’d need about 100g of beef to replace those calories, resulting in 3.6kg of emissions, or four times as much as driving.

"The troubling fact is that taking a lot of exercise and then eating a bit more food is not good for the global atmosphere. Eating less and driving to save energy would be better."

How's about you people come up with some semi-coherent positions, and then get back to me. I'll still ignore you, but at least I won't get whiplash trying to reconcile your various arguments.

A clever and very well done animation, about eight minutes long. It's by Blur Studio, a leading computer graphics firm, creator of the Academy Award-nominated Gopher Broke.

Warning: Music and sound effects in both.

Update: Spoilsports. See if I give them any more free publicity.

Update update: You can't keep a good pirate down. See it here, until the lawyers find it, that is.

Toronto Star:

In a move that might make some people scratch their heads, a loosely formed coalition of left-leaning bloggers are trying to band together to form a labour union they hope will help them receive health insurance, conduct collective bargaining or even set professional standards.

The effort is an extension of the blogosphere's growing power and presence, especially within the political realm, and for many, evokes memories of the early labour organization of freelance writers in the early 1980s.

To wield any power as an organized union, you need leverage. This usually involves the withholding of one's labour; sometimes enhanced with some muscle on the picket line. We pause here to giggle at this mental image.

They can't shut down the Internet, and there's no shortage of people willing to replace them. And who is going to be seriously affected if, say, Daily Kos goes off the air?

Not me. The only time I bother to read it is when someone points out something obnoxious or outrageous appearing there. Actually I suspect that a few of the saner adults in the Democrat Party would be happy to see it vanish, too.

It's not exactly an elegant comparison, but I'm reminded of something that happened in Amsterdam in the '80s. The government there provides registered heroin addicts with free heroin and methadone. Nice work if you can get it, but the addicts were concerned about AIDS, which was just breaking out at the time and they wanted free, clean needles. Or they were going to go on strike.

Which would have entailed . . . what? They weren't going to shoot up? You won't be needing those free needles, then.

Sounds like a win-win to me.

The backstory, for what it's worth:

Newly wed to Shunsuke, eldest son of the historied Tsubakikoji family, Reiko suffers the loss of her husband the very next day. Under the cruel and unceasing mockery of the aristocrats, Reiko's common-born blood sets to boil. Clutching the rose Shunsuke gave her to her bosom, Reiko issues a defiant challenge to the house. "I am the widow of the eldest son of the Tsubakikoji family. This house is mine!" ...This is the elegant art of feminine conflict.

A Japanese (what else) game that illustrates the problem of violence against women in computer games. That's okay, though. They're both women, so it's kind of hawt. Wait until they discover spanking.

At the bottom right of the splash screen there's a difficulty slider; below it, a Start Game button will light up. From there, click the button on the right and swipe your mouse across your opponent's face to deliver a blow. Sometimes you can get in a second shot, but you've got to be quick. Defend yourself (somewhat) by clicking on the left button and dragging across to turn your face away from the return slap.

Warning: Music and sound effects.

Note how the "progressives" are warming to the idea. Give them a year or two and it'll become human rights orthodoxy, on par with holy homosexuality:

When same-sex marriage was first raised as a possibility, social conservatives quickly condemned it and said that if it were green-lighted, it would soon lead to polygamy as well -- and turn Canada into Sodom and Gomorrah.

Now that this issue has raised its head, one cannot deny that they were right in a way. But would it really be so bad if polygamy were allowed?

The real problem with that religious sect in Bountiful is that they force young girls into marriage against their will. What is more, dirty old men have sexual relations with underage girls. That, more than the issue of polygamy itself, is the real problem (and sickness) of that community. If anything, the "elders" of that community should not be prosecuted for polygamy, but pedophilia and multiple counts of statutory rape.

Well, they won't be, and all because the BC government is petrified that one of our zany Liberal hack sober and wise judges will find a right to polygamy buried somewhere in our wondrous Charter. And thus it is legal by default.

Do our nominal rulers not understand that these situations are precisely what the Notwithstanding Clause was intended to guard against?

Former US Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg famously commented in a 1963 decision that the "Constitution . . . [is] not a suicide pact."

It appears, though, that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is.

If Hugh Grant arrives, do not attempt to compete with him -- you are no match for his British accent and awkward, fumbling charm.

Should Tom Green appear, leave the area immediately. You want no part in anything that follows for any price.

Warning: Language.

Several of them, actually.

In an eerie bit of synchronicity, I've recently happened across a couple of games featuring angels and devils. This is either happy coincidence or a sign of the End Times.

I've put them both behind the jump because sound is triggered each time they load, which could get annoying while waiting for them to scroll off the front page.

Over the last week or so, my traffic has increased quite a bit -- some days as much as tripled -- without any links from the heavy hitters in the blogosphere. Turns out it was Google tweaking its search algorithm:

One key development that Matt shared with the audience was that underscores in URLs are now (or at least very soon to be) treated as word separators by Google. That's great news, because it historically hasn't been that way. Back in 2005, Matt stated that Google did not view underscores in URLs as word separators. That meant that in a URL like http://www.mysite.com/iphone_review.html Googlebot couldn't "see" the words iphone or review. Instead it read iphone_review as one word. I wouldn't recommend targeting "iphone_review" as a keyword, as I doubt anyone will be including an underscore in their Google query.

So it used to be--until now--that any benefit that you would have gotten by having a keyword-rich URL was negated by the use of underscores separating those words. TypePad and Movable Type blogs were particularly affected by this, as by default, underscores were used instead of hyphens. This new change in the Google algorithm should make bloggers using the TypePad service or the Movable Type blog software (and anyone else using underscores in their URLs) very happy, as I anticipate their Google traffic will be going up.

As indeed it has.

I might be busy for the next few days, catching up on a few things like painting (yuck) and plumbing (yuck squared).

A heartwarming tale of inclusion from the Mainichi Daily News:

Kuroda: Up to now, life has been difficult and I've suffered all kinds of discrimination due to my handicap. But here in Shinjuku Boss Yoshimura treats me just like anyone else, and I'm grateful to him. I can confide with him on anything, and he's very open and understanding. He's been like a father to me.

CTV brought Mike Duffy in yesterday to discuss the Cabinet shakeup. Among those commenting on Gordon O'Connor's removal from Defence were the NDP's Dawn "Big Guns! HUGE GUNS!!!" Black and Opposition Labour critic Denis Coderre. Black's take on things was, as usual, too stupid to merit exploration, but I had greater hopes for Coderre, who exhibits a small, dim, ferretish intelligence twinkling behind his pig-like eyes. He did not disappoint.

At first I thought it a mistake, but then he repeated it a minute later. Coderre's bold retitling of Prime Minister Harper as President Harper is a sure sign that the Liberals have hit upon a strategy that will devastate the Conservatives and restore the rightful rulers of Canada to power. Either that, or they're angling for a spot on Barack Obama's team.

Just when we were starting to worry that the Liberals had no new ideas, they come up with this. It's frightening, it is.

Update: Whoops. M. Coderre (yes, it does seem to be genuine) informs me in the comments that he is indeed the Opposition critic for National Defence. Which is what I initially thought. But then I had to follow my rigorous fact-checking routine -- for which this blog is justly famous -- and went to his site to read this:

He [h]as been appointed as official critic for Labour and Quebec Regional Economic Development. He [h]as also completed with success his Executive MBA from the Ottawa University.

and somehow missed the next sentence:

In January 18, 2007, M. Coderre was appointed as official critic for National Defence.

The hell with this research stuff. I'm going with my gut from now on.

Editor & Publisher:

It was only a couple of people who cheered and they, thankfully, are not among the people who get a say in news play. But obviously news staff shouldn't be cheering or jeering the day's news, particularly as Boardman points out, 'when we have an outside guest in the room.'

They are, however, dispassionate professionals who wouldn't dream of letting their non-existent bias creep into their work. Or so they are constantly assuring us. Fortunately it seems to be quite rare.

Newsbusters:

Joe Scarborough has pulled back the curtain on the liberal bias at MSNBC, describing an incident in which people in its newsroom ceaselessly booed President Bush during a State of the Union address.

Maybe not that rare. I remember vividly a female CBC regional anchor bursting into delighted laughter on-air when the NDP did much better than expected in a provincial election.

Among sports reporters, it's still considered an extreme faux pas to cheer on the home team from the press box. It's nice to see that some corners of the media retain some semblance of integrity.

Worse Than Failure:

Another fun bug caused the enemy AI to do your work for you. A rogue enemy plane would suddenly reject his mother country and start shooting down his own teammates. That is, until his wings fell off the plane since he was firing his guns. Then he'd kamikaze his plane into the ground, which would launch the plane into outer space that the MicroProse executives probably didn't find nearly as funny as I do.

Brand would stress out about defending the game at the weekly meetings, but that didn't mean that he thought concerns about European Air War's progress were unfounded. Facing a mountain of bugs and a project ready for the chopping block, he was relieved when another developer was added to the team, effectively halving the abuse Brand would have to deal with on a weekly basis. We'll call the new developer "Tim."

Tim knew what he was getting into when he came aboard the project. He knew about the bugs, about the budget, and about the impending cancellation of the whole thing. And with the major issues, you'd figure he'd start with any one of them. Maybe the one with the wings falling off whenever guns were fired. Especially considering the game is called "European Air War." If the wings ("air") and guns ("war") come off the plane, the game title should just be reduced to "European," or perhaps "European Wingless Plane Amidst Nazi Battle Simulator." You could start up a game and watch Nazis shoot each others' planes down until yours crashed.

A very funny piece on the development of a PC game, European Air War. (The comments, many by other game programmers, are worth reading too.)

I've played a lot of MicroProse games, but not this one. To my surprise, it's still being sold on Amazon for $20 new, which is pretty amazing for a game released in 1998. There's also a fairly substantial webring for it, with plenty of amateur developers offering skins and scenery add-ons, etc, so I assume they eventually ironed out the bugs.

I'd still like to try it, but not for 20 bucks. This sounds like a mission for Kazaa or eMule.

Via Gadgetopia

I think I know where your melting is coming from, and it ain't from global warming.

Hundreds of naked people formed a "living sculpture" on Switzerland's Aletsch glacier Saturday, hoping to raise awareness about climate change.

The photo shoot by Spencer Tunick, the New York artist famous for his pictures of nude gatherings in public settings worldwide, was designed to draw attention to the effects of global warming on Switzerland's shrinking glaciers.

"The melting of the glaciers is an indisputable sign of global climate change," said the environmental group Greenpeace, which co-organized the event.

Dumbass. Or hundreds of them.

Toronto Star:

Canada is in secret talks with the United States that could lead to the bulk export of water south of the border, Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion charges.

"The pressure coming from our American friends to remove Canadian water to help their problems with the shortage of fresh water is very strong," Dion told a news conference yesterday.

"There is a strong lobby for that. We should be strong to resist that."

Dion rejected the denials of senior government officials and insisted yesterday that he has inside knowledge that "negotiations" are underway.

And his source is unimpeachable: He's been talking to Jean Chretien's imaginary homeless friend.

Via, um, someone who I forget and a commenter at SDA, a doubleheader from City Journal.

Bruce Bawer:

George Orwell would have understood the attraction of privileged young people to the Peace Racket. "Turn-the-other-cheek pacifism," he observed in 1941, "only flourishes among the more prosperous classes, or among workers who have in some way escaped from their own class. The real working class . . . are never really pacifist, because their life teaches them something different. To abjure violence it is necessary to have no experience of it." If so many young Americans have grown up insulated from the realities that Vegetius and Sun Tzu elucidated centuries ago, and are therefore easy marks for the Peace Racket, it’s thanks to the success of the very things the Peace Racket despises above all -- American capitalism and American military preparedness.

John Leo:

At the University of Wisconsin, for example, a black student testified in defense of the faculty speech code, complaining bitterly that a professor had used the word "niggardly" while teaching Chaucer. "I was in tears," she said. "It’s not up to the rest of the class to decide whether my feelings are valid."

I'm just guessing here, but I imagine the phrase "illiterate twat" would surely provoke some major angst on her part. So don't, for God's sakes, use the expression while she's around.

I hate running across these things, because I find them hilarious. I'll vow to only read one or two, and then it's back to more productive work. Fat chance:

I asked him if it had been exposed to water, and the answer was, "What does that matter? I have your waterproof model!"

I was sure I had struck the heart of the issue. It turned out that he was showing it off to his work buddies by throwing the "waterproof" phone into a bucket of water while he was joking around on the phone with the foreman.

I informed him that the phone was not actually waterproof, and that he would have to purchase a new phone due to the fact that our insurance policy did not cover damage from intentional misuse.

He explained that he heard a rumor that if you dry the phone out and replace the battery, they will sometimes continue working. This is sometimes true, so I asked him if the phone had been thoroughly dried.

The answer was yes -- he had put the phone into his clothes dryer with a load of laundry, which we then confirmed as the reason the face plate had broken off. He wanted an insurance replacement for his face plate, and I again informed him that our insurance policy did not cover damage from intentional misuse.

OK, one more:

Me: "So, can you tell me the settings of the DIP switches on the cash register?"
Customer: "DIP switch?"
Me: "Oh, sorry, the small switches located on the backside."
Customer: "Eeeerrr...there are no switches there."
Me: "Oh, yes, there are. Right next to the power cord."
Customer: "No. There are no switches. Not any more!"
Me: (puzzled) "Huh? Not any more? What do you mean?"
Customer: "Well, you know, my collegue told me that these switches might actually be what caused the problem, so I removed them."
Me: "REMOVED THEM??"
Customer: "Yeah, you know, removed them. With a chisel."

The carnage continues here.

The noted warmonger Mark Steyn admits all is lost:

After valiant efforts by American opinion-makers to blame the bridge collapse on Bush, the war in Iraq and global warming, the truth may defy such glib pigeonholing:

Pounded and strained by heavy traffic and weakened by missing bolts and cracking steel, the failed interstate bridge over the Mississippi River also faced a less obvious enemy: Birds, specifically pigeons.

Inspectors began documenting the buildup of pigeon dung on the span near downtown Minneapolis two decades ago.

Experts say the corrosive guano deposited all over the Interstate 35W span's framework helped the steel beams rust faster.

We need to bring the troops back from Iraq to shoot all the birds.

Toronto Star:

Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams and Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion hail from different parties, but they have one thing in common - neither wants to see the re-election of Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

In that spirit - call it "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" - the two Harper foes are talking about meeting next week while Dion is in St. John's to preside over the end-of-summer Liberal caucus retreat.

Dion said in an interview yesterday both leaders' offices were discussing the logistics of such a meeting. Trust, says the Liberal leader, is an issue they're talking about.

"I know that trust is important to the premier of Newfoundland and Labrador," he said.

No he didn't. He said, "i kNOw ThaT tRuST iS IMpoRTAnT tO THe PreMIeR oF nEWfoUNDlAnD anD lABraDOr."

No charge, Steffi. I should write an automatic translator to make this easier.

I thought this was a photoshop, but I wasn't sure until I spotted the Worth1000 watermark. I went to the site but couldn't find the specific competition.

An old southern Baptist country preacher had a teenage son, and it was getting time the boy should give some thought to choosing a profession.

Like many young men, the boy didn't really know what he wanted to do, and he didn't seem too concerned about it.

One day, while the boy was away at school, his father decided to try an experiment. He went into the boy's room and placed on his study table four objects:

A Bible,
A silver dollar,
A bottle of whisky,
A Playboy magazine

"I'll just hide behind the door," the old preacher said to himself, "and when he comes home from school this afternoon, I'll see which object he picks up. If it's the Bible, he's going to be a preacher like me, and what a blessing that would be! If he picks up the dollar, he's going to be a businessman, and that would be okay, too. But if he picks up the bottle, he's going to be a no-good drunkard, and, Lord, what a shame that would be! And worst of all, if he picks up that magazine he's gonna be a skirt-chasin' bum."

The old man waited anxiously, and soon heard his son's footsteps as he entered the house whistling and headed for his room. The boy tossed his books on the bed, and as he turned to leave the room he spotted the objects on the table.

With curiosity in his eye, he walked over to inspect them. Finally, he picked up the Bible and placed it under his arm. He picked up the silver dollar and dropped it into his pocket. He uncorked the bottle and took a big drink while he admired this month's centerfold.

They lay one egg (each year). They put their excrement in one place. They hide their excrement.

Michael Ignatieff, musing on the Atlantic puffin as a possible new animal symbol for the Liberal Party. Really.

Then again, it does sort of look like Alfonso Gagliano.

Via Halls of Macademia

Ok, ok, but I had no choice. That (pun? joke?) has been ricocheting around in my head the last couple of weeks, with me thinking that I'd never have a chance to use it.

Then this.

Call it kismet, call it fate. Who are we to question the Workings of the Universe?