Aside

I’m normally not much for ordered lists, and especially not ordered lists of “favourites”. I tend to break things down into relatively low resolution buckets and am happy with that. For instance, with music I tend to assign a song to one of {Awesome, Good, OK, Tolerable, Terrible, OH MY GOD MAKE IT STOP} and stop there. There’s not a lot of reason to try to assign comparative rankings among Awesome songs–they’re all worth listening to, pretty much at any time, and the ranking would be a function of my mood, what I’ve listened to lately, etc, and thus would be so constantly changing as to be useless.

That being said, it occurred to me earlier this week, that I have a ready answer to “What’s your all-time favourite song?”, and that answer hasn’t changed at all in over half a decade now. And second place has been locked for just as long. After that there’s just a bunch of Awesome songs, though.

Me & Julio: Day One

by  on  in Food and Drink

So, I’m currently trapped in Boston, on a schedule of essentially 9 consecutive days (yes, including the weekend) of all-day meetings. Since I recently discovered that there’s a ridiculously well-stocked liquor store very close to the Boston office–and when I say ridiculously, I mean thousands of different varieties of beers; I still haven’t even seen the entire stock–I have decided… Read more →

Darwinist Dating

by  on  in One-and-done

Manipulation and self-interest suffused relations between the sexes even when gentlemen strode the earth; a few pages of Edith Wharton should disabuse any doubters on that score. The lengthy article on modern dating, Love in the Time of Darwinism, at City Journal raised several reaction in me while I was reading it. The only thing I reacted positively to was… Read more →

Aside

So, if someone told me I would enjoy reading a short fiction piece entitled Talking To God, I would be skeptical. If they told me it was found on a site entitled “The Ragged Trousered Philosopher“, I might be more inclined to believe them. And I would have been right to do so. Good piece. And I intend to explore the site more fully. (And, to look into the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists as well–the snippets of that at the site, about the Causes of Poverty, are quite interesting.)

And so it begins

by  on  in Political

So, on the one hand we have Harper making speeches about how this isn’t the time for Conservatives to be ideological, and how they need to govern “for all the people”… Conservatives must put ideology aside as they prepare to weather looming economic challenges facing the country, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said Thursday. … Harper told Conservatives they must be… Read more →

Completely Unrelated Items

by  on  in Linkapalooza

Continuing on the theme of my being impressed by the kind of madness that is constructive (this dates back to at least the first time I found out about Korczak Ziolkowski), let us take a moment to reflect upon the kind of person who could build the Underground Fortress. I am weirdly attracted to the idea. It panders to both… Read more →

Uncommon Madness and the Altoids Of Soap

by  on  in Storytime

Have I talked about Dr. Bronner’s here before? My searches say not, but I remember expounding upon it recently–although it might have been at my poker game. If you don’t know Dr. Bronner’s, I’m not even sure where to start trying to explain it. The short version is this: my shower contains a bottle of liquid peppermint soapIt’s easy to… Read more →

Good idea, let’s lower the bar.

by  on  in Head-Explodes

And now, from the “dumbest thing I’ve read today” file: Bournemouth Council, which has the Latin motto Pulchritudo et Salubritas – beauty and health – has listed 19 terms it no longer considers acceptable for use. They include ad hoc, bona fide, status quo, vice versa and even via. Its list of alternatives includes ‘for this special purpose’, in place… Read more →

This might be a naive question, but…

by  on  in Political

You know all the noise from the right about Obama’s plan to make US income tax more progressive? (Which, sanity forces me to note, amounts to “return them to Clinton era levels”.) In the midst of all the arguments about who should be paying what share of the costs, why is there no big loud discussion about corporate tax rates?… Read more →

Good Thing I Have A Supply Laid In

by  on  in Food and Drink

The news appears to be disturbing… Whisky-loving Maritimers face a crisis of the spirit High global demand for single-malt Scotch puts Nova Scotia at risk of running out of key brands, draining the rest of the East Coast dry HALIFAX — The province may be named for Scotland, but that’s not enough to bump Nova Scotia up the queue as… Read more →

Adding Some Character

by  on  in General

When I finally gave in to Jobs and switched from my series of non-Apple mp3 players to the iPod I wanted to give mine some character. Ironically, one of the primary reasons I switched was all the third-party stuff that was available for the iPod, so it was easy to start looking into ways to “trick it out”. My first… Read more →

Five For Friday

by  on  in Music

And now, an unthemed mix of music for a Friday. We’ll start off with a selection from the typically great new Oysterband album. This probably isn’t “the single” for most people, but since I’m getting quite comfortable in my self-selected role of aging and cranky progressive type, it appeals. I saw this live earlier this year…on a cannonball run from… Read more →

Aside

I’m glad I stayed up to hear Obama’s speech. I do have one unresolved question for California at this point: what the hell is up with Proposition H8? California? Hello? You’re letting me down over there.

Aside

I believe I just heard around 52% of Americans and THE ENTIRE REST OF THE WORLD breath a huge sigh of relief.

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Canada
This work by Chris McLaren is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Canada.