Deonandia resident villain Darth Vadum appeared on Faux News’s “The O’Reilly Factor” last night. Here’s the clip.
If you’re curious about what O’Liely may have looked like as a devil child, check this out:
Meanwhile, the Other Ray sends us this article about John McCain’s record. And not to appear too biased, here’s a discussion of how the Veep debate was unfair to conservatives.
Further to my earlier post about the Ninja Cat, the Other Ray sends us this video. Apparently, if you understand American Sign Language, it’s quite interesting. I don’t, so I have no idea what’s going on. But I’m here to share. So that’s what I’m doing.
But a more eerie video is the send-up by SNL. Weird how I can no longer tell the difference between the real Sarah Palin and her parody played by Tina Fey:
Speaking of the debate, legendary journalist Robert Fisk pipes up about the Veepers’ inability to use appropriate language with respect to the Israel question.
And Andrew Sullivan has this discrepancy between what Sarah Palin said suring the Veep debate, and what she said while running for governor of Alaska.
Meanwhile, film critic Roger Ebert pipes in with his take on the Veep debate, strictly from the perspective of a cinema buff.
If I’ve not yet mentioned it, those of us in Canada can now registered our phone numbers with the national Do Not Call List!
Our Antipodal man “Amphibious” sends us the following trivia question: which is the only country not to print its name on its postal stamps? If you know, include it in the comments below.
Don’t forget to vote in the poll to the right. So far, our results mirror those in the official polls, with Obama beating McCain at just above 50% of votes.
I’d meant to try to be fair and post something bad about Obama. I found this, apparently proof that Obama stole a speech from Deval Patrick:
Certainly, the low brows at the Western Standard Blogs have been salivating over this “discovery”. But, it turns out, Deval Patrick and Barack Obama had the same campaign manager, so it’s perfectly understandable that the latter would take cues from the former. Furthermore, it turns out that he had tacit approval to use the words. So who knows.
I will say this, though. To my American friends: you must understand that Canada is essentially to the Left of pretty much every political movement in the USA. If Barack Obama were Canadian, his policies would resemble more those of the Right-leaning Conservative party than those of our Left-of-centre parties. Thus, I find it strange that Conservative voices here are so anti-Obama.
The most glaring issue with which Obama and the US Democracts agree with Canadian Conservative thought is the war in Afghanistan. I think it’s useful to read Eric Margolis’s latest column, in which he argues convincingly for everyone to get the frack out of Afghanistan:
“The current war is not really about al-Qaida and “terrorism,” but about opening a secure corridor through Pashtun tribal territory to export the oil and gas riches of the Caspian Basin to the West. Canada and the rest of NATO have no business being pipeline protection troops. Canada’s military intervention in Afghanistan has jeopardized its national security by putting it on the map as an anti-Muslim nation joined at the hip with Bush and his ruinous policies… As the great Benjamin Franklin said, ‘there is no good war, and no bad peace.’”
Remember stories about Sarah Palin’s email being hacked? Well, why not read it?
And here’s a nice documentary about the wilds of Guyana, where I am off to again next month:
Now here’s a bit of retardedness. That bastion of reasoned thought, the Western Standard Blogs (I hope you sense the sarcasm) republished a snippet from the National Review, which stated:
“The four major agencies tracking Earth’s temperature, including NASA’s Goddard Institute, report that the Earth cooled 0.7 degree Celsius in 2007, the fastest decline in the age of instrumentation, putting us back to where the Earth was in 1930. The climate is changing, but not in the direction Al Gore thinks.”
On the face of it, this seems like strong evidence that the Climate Change deniers might finally have some science to back up their ideology and dogma. But, as one reader, “Fact Check”, wrote:
“So the Western Standard reports that the National Review says that some business magazine claims that NASA says the earth is cooling fast and down to 1903 levels. Sound like the right-wing global warming deniers version of the telephone game? Perhaps it is.”
“The year 2007 tied for second warmest in the period of instrumental data, behind the record warmth of 2005, in the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) analysis. 2007 tied 1998, which had leapt a remarkable 0.2°C above the prior record with the help of the ‘El Niño of the century’. The unusual warmth in 2007 is noteworthy because it occurs at a time when solar irradiance is at a minimum and the equatorial Pacific Ocean is in the cool phase of its natural El Niño-La Niña cycle.”
What a surprise. A right wing, pro-business publication blatantly misrepresents published data. Another right wing, pro-business website reprints the misrepresentation. A series of right wing, pro-business blogs amplify the lie in the fabled “echo chamber” of conservative online repetition. And even when the error of their propagation has been shown to them, they refuse to accept the fiction of their claim. Unbelievable.
In other news, I got to meet former Premier David Peterson last week, when he dropped by Ottawa to push the glory of the University of Toronto at one of their swanky alumni affairs. Here’s me and a friend (Julia) enjoying the free goodies:
Man, I’m looking old and fat these days. Peterson gave an excellent speech about how wonderful and perfect my alma mater is. (All university Chancellors give the same speech, after all). Here he is, courtesy of the U of T alumni office:
Funny thing is, he actually said: “25% of all Ontario high school graduates who go to University, go to the University of Toronto.”
I then muttered to Julia: “Yeah, but that means that 75% don’t go to the University of Toronto. How is that good?”
Sometimes being a numbers guy sucks the fun out of things.
Hey, remember that anthology of crime fiction set in Toronto, called Toronto Noir? The one that includes my short story, “Midnight Shift”? I just found a couple of interesting references to it. Don Gillmor does a standard review for The Walrushere. And something called “The Rap Sheet” has a fairly scathing commentary about the book here –complete with the head-slapping caveat that the writer hasn’t even read the book yet!
The reviewer refers to the book’s authors list as a bunch of “mostly unknown writers (even by Canadian standards).” That seems to be his main objection to the anthology’s very existence. (I’ve found the same article at a place called The Thrilling Detective Blog, by Kevin Burton Smith, so I assume he’s the author of the piece.)
To be fair, his contention is accurate. No one outside of my family knows who the heck I am –and sometimes even they forget! Also, with the exception of Andrew Pyper, I’d never heard of any of the other contributors. Frankly, the average schmuck has probably never heard of Mr. Pyper, either. It surely doesn’t mean he’s not a good writer. Nor does it mean that the anthology is not a strong one. (I haven’t read the entire thing, but I can attest with all modesty aside that my entry was the weakest of the lot –there are some really interesting stories in this volume, and I wish I’d done a better of job of meeting their standard.)
But then the reviewer goes on to list a litany of contenders he would have preferred –none of whom I’ve heard of, either. John McFetridge? Michael Blair? J.D. Carpenter? Mary Jane Maffini? Rosemary Aubert? John Swan? Marc Strange? Giles Blunt? Who are these people? I’ve never heard their names before.
My ignorance of these names probably says more about my unfamiliarity with the supposed who’s who of the Canadian mystery writing scene than it does about any fame or achievement these men and women might have achieved. After all, I’m just a silly scientist who writes books on the side. The hierarchical world of writing is alien to me; it’s a party to which I’m largely uninvited.
McFetridge, Blair, et al –indeed, maybe even Mr Burton Smith himself– are probably excellent crime writers. I don’t know. I’ve never read them. It doesn’t mean I’m going to dismiss an anthology made by them simply because their names are unfamiliar to me.
It reminds me of another anthology I was part of many years ago: North Of Infinity, a collection of Canadian science fiction. (There’s a blog about the evolving series here.) One reviewer complained that we were all a bunch of unknowns –which was true! But here’s the rub: one of us, a fellow named Robert J. Sawyer, went on to become one of the most celebrated science fiction writers in the world, winning both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, SF’s greatest honours. So you can never tell. All writers start out as unknowns.
The lesson is this: in terms of fiction writers in Canada, pretty much anyone who’s not Margaret Atwood, Robert Sawyer or Rohinton Mistry is an unknown. To suggest that one list of unknowns is preferable to another list of unknowns because –wait for it– they are less unknown to you and your friends is, I must say, more confusing than my poor monkey brain can handle.
It’s yet one more reason I detest being a writer in Canada. The fragile egos are far too abundant here.
Has anyone not seen David Letterman’s Global Warming rant? No? Check it out here.
In other news, they can now “print” concrete shapes. This is a bit of a revolution in cheap construction. If the technology remains open source, we may see a bit of a decline in housing prices worldwide as the construction cost also declines. Reminds me of some clever concepts in science fiction, among them the mobile plastics factory in Kim Stanley Robinson’s epic and brilliant Red Mars. The factory allowed the first colonists on Mars to build any device, structure or shape they could imagine. Seems we’re almost there.
What else have I got for you today? Well, courtesy of Andoo, here’s the best Star Trek-Brokeback Mountainparody I’ve yet seen:
“Sarah Palin is pleased that her daughter ‘made the decision’—on her own—to keep the baby… But Sarah Palin doesn’t believe that other girls should be able to make their own decisions. Sarah Palin believes that abortion should be illegal in almost every instance—including rape and incest. So Bristol Palin is being celebrated for making a choice that Sarah Palin would like to take away from all other American women. Apparently, today’s GOP believes that choice is a special right reserved for the wayward daughters of Republican-elected officials.”
“Oh America. You sad, stupid, spoiled bitch. You wasted . gilded heffer marching on the killing floor with a bible up your ass and a twinkle in you somniferent eye. You stupid stupid nation. Look how far afield psychoworld you’ve taken us.
How did we get here? How did we go from a 680 billion dollar surplus and the top moral standing in the world, to record-setting national debt and the ire/suspicion of the rest of the globe? How did we get from a tough, but semi-permeable hierarchy into a deadset Barbell economy? What happened to the middle class? You fat, stupid, spoiled bitch. What in the fuck did you do…?”
And if you haven’t caught the excellent Hillary/Palin sketch on SNL, you can see it on Antonia Zerbisias’s blog.
Big news this week was the start-up of the Large Hadron Collider by CERN in Switzerland. For those not in the know, CERN is the European Organization for Nuclear Research, and are responsible for pretty much inventing the World Wide Web.
Back when I was an undergrad physics student at the University of Toronto, my good buddy Good Ol’ Nojjy Boy (now a Canadian diplomat) once roared in laughter after cracking open one of our new physics textbooks.
“What?” I asked.
“Look!” he cried. “There’s a particle called a HARD-ON!”
Clearly, Nojjy Boy was suffering from lack of sleep. The particle he had discovered was in fact a hadron, which is a collection of quarks bound together into known forms, like photons or neutrons. And this past week, CERN finally started up the LHC, after 25 years of construction. This is a hallmark moment in the history of science, comparable in some ways to the detonation of the first atomic implosive.
Prior to that experiment 6 decades ago, there was some concern that the test itself would ignite the Earth’s atmosphere and bring all life on this planet to a gruesome death. Similarly, some people were concerned that the LHC would create quantum black holes that would consume the Earth.
Well, the LHC’s first true experiments are still weeks away, so I suppose quantum collapsars could still be created there. Fans of Larry Niven’s stories will be familiar with quantum black holes. In one story, “The Hole Man“, a quantum collapsar is discovered in an ancient Martian laboratory; when released, it begins consuming both Mars and, soon, the Earth. It would devour both worlds in about a thousand years, at which point it might be visible to the naked eye –assuming any naked eyes were still around to see it.
In the David Brin novel, Earth, aliens fire a quantum black hole into the Earth (which was the actual source of the famous Tunguska explosion), and it’s not discovered till centuries later. Another of Niven’s stories, “The Borderland of Sol“, also plows this topic.
Well, the world is supposed to come to an end in 3-4 years anyway, so why not this way?
I plucked that one from one of Andoo’s links, specifically The 6 Quirkiest Memes of 2008. On that list, as well, was a follow-up to a video I’d posted here months ago, the test of the quadrupedal robot Big Dog:
Continuing with the world media’s “All Palin, All The Time” policy, Brother Bhash sends us the Evil Beet’s special Palin page.
Lastly, a bit of self-pluggery. I’ll be speaking tomorrow (Monday) night at the bar called “1848” on the campus of the University of Ottawa, on the topic of “the Global Burden of HIV/AIDS”. Come one, come all. Festivities begin at 6:30pm. The importance of the venue is that one can have alcohol, which always makes listening to me all the more palatable.
The interwebs are a funny place, no? Strange memes emerge, gather global fame amongst an almost invisble subculture of millions, then disappear back into the ooze from whence they came. Some linger, some fester. Others go mainstream. I love bumping into global memes that I’d never heard of before.
Case in point: Raptor Jesus. As it says in the Urban Dictionary: “Nowhere in the bible does it say that jesus isn’t a raptor.”
The Raptor Jesus phenomenon is, as the Encyclopaedia Dramatica explains it, the trend of photoshopping a velociraptor’s head onto the body of Jesus. Why? Why not? This site even shows us how to worship Raptor Jesus. And some people really have too much time on their hands (well, moderately more than me, in any case) as is demonstrated in this history of Raptor Jesus.
What to make of all this? I dunno. I’d make a joke about Dodo Vishnu, but we Hindus already have Ganesh:
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