Just reactivated my Facebook profile, which I “deactivated” in September. Everything’s still there — where it’ll be forever: all of our moments and memories and Scrabulous scores owned by Facebook ’till long after we’re gone. It still doesn’t suit me but it’s impractical and countersocial not to be on Facebook. I kept wondering if people were wondering. We’ll see how [...]
general
With all the newspaper stuff happening I wanted to write something along those lines, like, “Citizen Journalism: Your Civic Duty,” or something lame like that. I was going to recommend PodCamp London (not lame) coming up in April, tip my hat to the encouraging progress the London Free Press is making (with people there starting to appreciate citizen journalists a little [...]
Time has an entertaining list of the 50 Worst Cars of All Time.
We’re way past “canary in the mineshaft” stuff, this kind of bad news from the auto industry is the miner in the mineshaft. From the AP story in the Globe and Mail (via Gordon), GM’s October sales dropped slightly by 45%; Ford and Chrysler “weren’t far behind.” Or to put it in perspective: If GM’s sales were adjusted for [...]
Canadian comedy comes through again. Two Quebec radio hosts prank-called Sarah Palin pretending to be French President Nicolas Sarkozy. I literally spit a mouthful of coffee out at the start when she thought she was talking to Fake Nicolas Sarkozy but it was only Fake Nick’s assistant. “Oh, it’s not him yet,” she said to her own assistant, “I [...]
There’s a good article in The Atlantic by Steven Pinker about swearing on TV. Here’s what the man says: I noted that over time, taboo words relinquish their literal meanings and retain only a coloring of emotion, and then just an ability to arouse attention. This progression explains why many speakers are unaware that sucker, sucks, [...]
B Frank | Thinking Alive is a kind of ‘living book.’ Although this is essentially a personal endeavour to keep the love of learning alive, it also a social enterprise with important public intentions. In concrete terms I began conceiving it in 2000 when the tech bubble collapsed, I started taking this project seriously in 2001 and it has continued to evolve as I searched for ways [...]
If there was ever a moment in my lifetime that called for appropriately executed obscenity, it’s now. This isn’t just an attempt to raise eyebrows, it’s a carefully aimed shot in the jaw. We’re surrounded by problems caused by stupidity and intensified by fucking obscene stupidity, and I’ve had enough. I’ve tried talking and writing temperately [...]
There’s a lot of stuff available online — too much, really — but I’m going to focus on two biggies that everybody will have to adopt within a few years or else get left behind. These are roughly at the stage email was at 10 to 15 years ago.
There could be no higher praise for a band than to say they’ve revitalized my love of rock & roll, which is exactly what My Morning Jacket did. I don’t even normally like the term ‘rock & roll’ for chrissakes, but here I am using it thanks to their show Saturday night in Detroit: I went and [...]
