Les Bonnes Choses

I was just on kijiji looking for a big bulky something that we really don't need cluttering up our kitchen when we're trying to declutter our most amazingly cluttered house in preparation for listing it with the real estate agent. Fortunately, it was not to be found - here, Toronto or Chicago. While on Kijiji, I found the following ad (spelling corrected):

One large room for rent in a 3-bedroom apartment, south facing balcony. Hydro, water ,TV cable & internet cable included. Share washroom with a girl, it will be available on May 1st.2009.

I'm not sure if it's a result of studying things like discourse comprehension, where one often sees incredibly strange and contrived phrases constructed to prove a particular point, but I habitually search for multiple interpretations of much of what I read. I found the above ad amusing when read in the context of the stereotype of women preening forever in the washroom. I imagine the current occupant's roommate just couldn't hold it in until May.

Before I gear up in my traffic-cone-orange motorcycle jacket, I have time for a couple quick thoughts.
First, I've been increasingly interested in (read: obsessed with) that traffic meter. For cities like Montreal, QC and Stevens Point, WI, I can guess who it might be a-knockin' at my blag's door. However, it's not foolproof. First, it doesn't always get the city correct. I believe I have had some visitors from Toronto and Ottawa that showed up as being from London (I speculate that it might be the fault of Rogers who might be doing some kind of caching trickery or something). Second, if you were to click the link to see the Top London Blogs, this morning you would see a blog called Walking Through Africa (which appropriately enough is a photographic chronicle of the blogger's travels through Africa) close to the top when this list is sorted by relevance. To be clear, by relevance, they mean it to indicate "...how interesting a blog is to people in a particular city ... if [there are] many blog entries about [the] local town or city, you'll probably find [the] blog close to the top of this list." And this is perhaps where the confusion stems from. London, Ontario is not to be found anywhere in Africa. It seems unlikely to me that much about London can be said when one is talking about Africa.

Perhaps all this talk of London, Ontario will allow me to vault to the top of the list.

Speaking of Africa, how about those Somali pirates? The BBC had an online poll this morning that asked How can pirates be stopped? Clearly, they are unaware that ninjas are the perfect foil to the pirate.

I'm suspending my blog posts for the foreseeable future.

Fortunately, I seldom plan past the end of the week, which is when I'll be marking some assignments that will hopefully not cause me to cringe. Thus, the foreseeable future may be upon us sooner than you might think.

I also really hope that things go well for K and me. I had originally written 'K and I' and was about to explain that 'K' was an initial, whereas 'I' was being used as a pronoun to refer to myself, but then I realized that it would have been ungrammatical, thereby saving me the extra effort of having to issue a clarification. Except that I then went ahead and wrote about it.

Oh, I did want to announce that I am now up to 2 lost friends reclaimed via the internet. The first was Vivian. Sitting on our picture shelf at the top of the stairs is a photo of me, Bill Hodgetts and Nicole Anderson, on the day of our graduation. I knew that Nicole had gone off to grad school at Mac after that, but previous efforts to track her down via the email addresses on her publications were for naught. Fortunately, she saw a comment of mine on the facebook group dedicated to critiquing the abysmal state of research funding in Canada and contacted me. Fait accompli!

See, nobody out there gives me feedback except for good old K, and maybe the odd nudge from C (I have taken to using initials because that's what K does, though in my line of work, when people are referred to by their initials, it's usually because they have brain damage). As a result, that's who's calling the shots. However, I'm going to try to swing the topic around to a proto-rant that's been forming in my head. I think you'll find it flows nicely, though.

A bunch of whiners have recently petitioned Ottawa to try to get their hands on some Can-con funds for internet media. As the argument goes, there is such a fund to ensure that Canadian music and TV gets produced, so why not require ISPs to pony up some cash to fund Canadian-made content that appears on the internet? Please allow me to outline why I think that's a stupid idea:

• Canadian media producers have repeatedly demonstrated an inability to produce anything that people might want to watch. Our niche seems to be derivative works from the Anne of Green Gables mythology and Just For Laughs specials.


• Who exactly would qualify for this money? I'm Canadian. I'm writing original content to appear on the internet. I'd never see a dime. This fund would just get tacked on to your monthly internet bill and either get frittered away by some bureacracy, or else fund Wind up my Backside: the Flash game


• Most damningly, we all know that the internet is really just a vehicle to deliver porn. A Wall Street Journal piece reported that 69% (yes, this was the real figure) of all paid sites were porn related. How much of this porn was created in Canada? Like, zero. And you know why? Because it's too bloody cold. Regardless of how well funded it may be, Canada will never be a porn superpower as long as we have to contend with goosebumps and shrinkage for 8 months of the year.

QED.

I was reading this article on Wired the other day, which was timely because it touches on a number of things that bug me about North America.

I tried to find some clips of the 1950's future of transportation spots that I think coincide nicely with where it really started to get out of hand. Disney seems to have been pretty diligent at keeping them off youtube. Some marketers got the funny idea in their heads that people would just love to take a nice long ride in their convertible to their nice suburban home in a quiet neighbourhood of well-manicured lawns. Urban planners must have seen these films because they went kind of nuts designing sprawling cities with miles of concrete to link all these neighbourhoods. (North America was born on the notion of land ownership - much to the chagrin of the aboriginal people who lived here before us - which I think is why we use land so inefficiently). So from about midway through 20th century, North America has been designed around the car. Most people are effectively obligated to own a car because there's no other practical way to get to work, do groceries for your family, etc. (it takes me 40 minutes by bus to get from home to the school; it takes me 25 minutes door-to-door by bike).

And so our economy revolves around the automobile in so many ways: oil is a big one, and we'll even go to war for it; 1 in 7 jobs are tied to the automobile industry; every kilometer of asphalt has to be maintained with taxpayer dollars as do the sewers and water delivery pipes that follow all those roads to newly developed suburbs. Not only do sewers crumble, but water pipes are not actually water tight, and I learned from a former neighbour who worked with a regional utilities managing company that something like 25% of the water pumped in from the lakes actually leaks out into the ground as it flows through those pipes: longer pipes mean more leakage.

So I'm somewhat ambivalent about the situation that car manufacturers find themselves in lately. On one hand, unless cities were radically redesigned, we're still screwed without them. On the other hand, for the reasons I outlined above, I think 'good riddance'. That's why I want my own planet. I think this one is a do-over.

A request has been made for me to hurry up and get on with writing another blog entry. However, as I just got back from an intimate little conference in Niagara Falls, formerly the Honeymoon Capital of the World, but now the Schlock Capital of the World, I haven't had much time to reflect on the sorts of issues that allow me to deliver the kind of hard-hitting pieces to which you have become accustomed.

So I thought I'd take advantage of my lack of direction and make this a little exercise in creativity. I decided to pick my topic by selecting an article from Wikipedia using the random article link. So, without further ado, I present to you my thoughts on ...

Ingolfiella longipes

Hmm. I can't say much about it, aside what we can all read from the wikipedia page. It turns out I'm not really as good at this as I thought I might be. It took me a couple passes to read the name though. That species name looks alot like long-pipes. Really, this fun-loving crustacean has a name that could be a character from a Harry Potter novel or something. Ingelfella Longpipes, that quirky defense against the dark arts instructor, who's always fumbling about his magical pockets for his tin of tobacco.

I don't think I'll try this exercise again.

...for anyone left standing with a AAA credit rating.
I was just reading an article in Slate about how Sirius XM satellite radio is in a very bad place. I agree with the author: considering the ubiquity of portable music players like the iPod, satellite radio is pretty lame. The author talked about getting out of the satellite business and just market their programming over the internet. Okay, maybe. But what about those 7 satellites they have floating up there? If they're up to the task, snapping those things up in a fire sale to offer satellite internet access would be sweet.

Okay, it's a half-baked idea, but more than once have I left an idea in a half-baked state, and someone else comes along a few years later, throws it in the oven at 350° and makes a mint. It's irritating.

I just edited my first Wikipedia page. Okay, maybe edit is too strong of a word. I corrected the improper use of the word 'their' (when the author meant 'there' -- one of my pet peeves.). But it was really easy to do. I could see how someone with an anal-retentive streak like mine could get hooked on editing wikipedia pages. I don't know the stupid syntax - wiki uses its own markup, which gets converted into HTML so that people don't have to learn HTML. Of course, I know HTML, so you can probably see the perverseness in my learning wiki markup. And that's why I won't become a compulsive wiki editor, so you can cancel that intervention you were planning.