And in recent Catholic Church news, possibly relevant to the ongoing discussion between my friend Biff and I in another post’s comments, we have the current Pope lashing out at… atheists: Pope Benedict, in a new encyclical released on Friday, said atheism was responsible for some of the “greatest forms of cruelty and violations of justice” in history. … The… Read more →
Month: November 2007
CoIntelPro Redux
Please allow me to quote a couple of paragraphs from Steven Grant’s Master of the Obvious column for this week–as I’ve mentioned before, this nominally comic book column often does a great job of simply explaining some of Bush’s nasty moves. Well, this week it’s not so much Bush… Jeez, do we have to fight everybody all the time? If… Read more →
My Country Embarrasses Me
For years now I’ve been known to laughingly comment on the fact that you hear all these wacko religious groups opposing Harry Potter, but you never hear anything about groups opposing Pullman‘s His Dark Materials–a series that is also marketed as YA, and that sells if not Rowlingesque numbers, at least very impressive numbers. This is an especially amusing discrepancy… Read more →
Nasty
It should not be possible for a child that small to produce so much vomit. Apparently my hard-earned parenting experience has made me blase about all other possible organic messes, but has not really protected me from child vomit. I mean, I can do what needs to be done, but that stuff is nasty. Back in the diaper days there… Read more →
Smart, curvey women?
A certain high school English teacher of my acquaintance (now retired) famously posited a definite inverse correlation between the intelligence of his female students, and the size of their breasts. Well, science is suggesting that this might have been a false conclusion. It was already known that men find curvy women more attractive and that they live longer. Now research… Read more →
I (heart) public domain
From Japanator: Did you know that right now you can get a handful of Akira Kurosawa films for free? Like, as in legally for free? That’s right! The nice people over at Japan Probe have pointed out that some of the master’s films have fallen into the public domain. Archive.org has them available for download right this second. Among the… Read more →
Am I Getting More Childish?
One of two things is true: either my sense of humour is regressing, or the quality of the humour purveyed by Cracked in the Internet age is much improved from the last time I read the print magazine (approximately 21 years ago). I remember Cracked magazine as an inferior reflection of Mad magazine–itself not known for highly intelligent humour (horrible… Read more →
SurveillanceSaver again
Following up from the recent post on SurveillanceSaver, I saw that very talented writer M. John Harrison had also been playing with it. Just let me quote him: after a bit, the narrative possibilities collapse, the intensity of your gaze subsides & these are just empty corners of the world again. It’s a bit like hitch-hiking & not getting a… Read more →
Fear The Dreadhawk
Offered without comment. Read more →
Massey Lectures 2007: Follow-up
You may recall my lengthy post about attending the first of the 2007 Massey Lectures. I just wanted to point out a couple of things about that: Ideas is currently hosting MP3 versions of the lectures. If you subscribe to the Ideas podcast, you would already have them, but you can download them directly as they appear on the podcast… Read more →
Seam Carving You Can Play With, Plus More
Remember back in August when I was so delighted with the paper and demonstration video on seam carving technology? Well, now I can play with that technology. And so can you. Or, at least, you can if you use the Gimp, since the Liquid Rescale Plugin now puts that algorithm into it. (And why wouldn’t you be using the Gimp… Read more →
Making The Point With Art
I could write a dozen blog posts about living in the surveillance society, and not make the point as clearly as Michael Zoellner did by writing SurveillanceSaver. There’s nothing that will drive home the point that we’re in the midst of omni-surveillance like someone adapting some of the information flowing from that constant surveillance into casual artOK, maybe it’s a… Read more →
Just In Time For Christmas
One of the online fora I am active on included a pointer this week to a blog post showing some interesting Laotian rice wine: (You can see an even bigger version of that photo at the author’s Flickr page.) I’m not opposed to liquor with stuff in it generally–but there is some stuff that probably doesn’t belong in my booze.… Read more →
Maybe There’s A Reason We Associate Wisdom With Age
I’m leaving the title off of this until the end–read it first. Doctor, you say there are no haloes around the streetlights in Paris and what I see is an aberration caused by old age, an affliction I tell you it has taken me all my life to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels, to soften and… Read more →
On cross-border shopping and smuggling
So, during a particularly boring meeting today, I ran the numbers on the recent smuggling effort. I ordered 32 items from Amazon.com and had them shipped to a friend in Boston. Of those, one item is one that for some reason isn’t available from Amazon.ca (and indeed, can’t be ordered from Amazon.com to a Canadian address!), so we’re going to… Read more →
