Les Bonnes Choses

I found today's episode of Q to be actually interesting, as it was about three topics that I find quite interesting: city planning, amateur journalism on social networking sites, and accents. I find accents really neat to listen to and try to mimic. There was a passage of text that I once heard of through a friend of mine in the UWO audiology program. Called The Rainbow Passage, it contains all possible coarticulations in the English language. It seemed like a good tool to use when practicing accents.

The second interview concerned how mainstream journalism has embraced amateur journalism coming from so-called Web 2.0 sites. Twitter, especially, has been featured heavily in the news, as it's been the only way to hear about events like the recent protests in Iran. I'm all for it. It's certainly no replacement for professional journalism, but it means that if someone wants to give and uninformed opinions, they have to associate their name with it. Anonymous comments left on websites are infuriatingly idiodic.

Finally, The The first interview was with some guy who, God bless him, dreams of car-less cities. While I agree that it would be a wonderful ideal to aim for, we kind of shot ourselves in the foot when we spread out all over the continent shortly after arriving here so that we could have a little of what Schoolhouse Rock called "elbow room". Interestingly, in the process, indiginous peoples were concentrated into smaller, more manageable parcels of land euphemistically called reserves where they frequently live 15 or more to a shack here in Canada. Those anonymous commenters I mentioned earlier? Some of them are outraged that our government was sending them hand sanitizer, to, you know, mitigate the effects of H1N1 virus, which moves quite quickly in a shanty of a dozen or more people. See what I mean by idiotic comments? Anyone can see that a $2 bottle of hand sanitizer is clearly more economical than proper housing.