Labour Day Gallimaufry

I note that unlike most North Americans, I understand the roots of Labour Day. And while what I do has no relationship to organized labour, I do find something bitterly ironic about taking a day off to celebrate the standard work week (among other things) when I am regularly working some hours almost every week night to accommodate Australian coworkers, and multiple mornings to accommodate Israeli colleagues.

I’ll still take it though.

And, now, some thoroughly miscellaneous links:

• Visual aids can be very helpful in understanding the terms “fiscal conservative” and “tax and spend liberal”.
• Did you perhaps think the whole mortgage crisis wave had crested? Just because a news cycle ends, doesn’t mean a story goes away.
• I’m just going to go out on a limb here and say that if 1 in 100 of your population are in jail, then you’re doing it wrong. An early warning sign of this might be if you can seriously talk about a “prison industry”.
• You know why having giant government databases of personal information is a bad idea? Aside from the whole Big Brother thing where governments can’t be trusted to have your best interests at heart, and completely do not understand the Eternal Value of Privacy, there’s also the whole sheer incompetence thing where government agencies can’t be trusted to actually keep the data safe.
• Speaking of Big Brother, it’s not going to be governments, it’s going to be the total surveillance society. Have a bit of a play with Surveillance Saver (developer’s site) for example–we’re at the point now where it’s so common we can make art from it.
• Hiphop’s dirty little secret: “The great fallacy at the center of this thesis is that the cultural explosion that occurred when rock began carried such a heady charge because it was about overturning societal norms. In fact, the music was reinforcing orthodoxies that are as old as mankind.”
• Why yes, I am totally going to go and replay Planescape: Torment now with honking big screens. It was my favourite Black Isle game even at very low resolutions.
• My former roommate and I once really, really, really, got a lot of comedy out of the idea of someone getting a small business loan in order to buy a calf, raise it, and sell it. This “the one cow” joke was a source of endless drunken comedy for us. (We did once literally drive a girl to storm out of the bar because she thought we were taking the piss out all hardworking farmer types, but this just made the whole thing funnier.) Now, it appears that this isn’t just a really funny student business model, it’s actually a sustainable living solution. Not just the “one cow”, but the “one tiny cow”.
• Emily both kind of freaks me out, and also makes me think of Little Heroes.
• Visual aids can be very helpful in understanding complex life values issues.
• Think you can’t top “Remember the story about the pit bull cloner who is suspected by many of being the same woman who kidnapped a Mormon missionary 30 years ago to be her sex slave? Well, she is now suspected of plotting a burglary in Tennessee to procure funds for an artificial horse leg.” for bizarre real news? How about “2 men and 2 suicides; but both had the same transplanted heart – and the same widow“? It’s no BBQ sauce bandit, but it’s pretty good.
• I for one welcome our new radioactive fungal overlords.
• Stephen Harper is a bad man, part 10032434: Sending Canadian troops to be trained by Blackwater. Bad idea.
• I am a fan of the successful pastiche. Even in webcomic form.
• Need a new flash game to kill some time at work? How about 121 of them?
• Visual aids can be very helpful in understanding the complex world of digital rights.
• If Future Shop still bothered to actually, you know, stock any CDs, I would totally sticker the ones on the Torture Playlist.
• It appears the Conspiracy of Benevolent Surrealists has struck again.

Enjoy Labour Day!