Double standard

This isn't the stuff that's been weighing heavily on my mind (that'll come in a day or two), but I do have a question.

Why is what an NDP candidate did at a summer camp twelve years ago relevant to the election, what a Liberal candidate did in the 70s relevant to the election, but something Stephen Harper did five years ago, while he was leader of the Opposition, completely irrelevant?

I must not be nearly as enlightened on elections as the Conservatives' spokesman.

--Ryan

For all your Canadian election needs...

(This blog continues to attract the best and brightest, or at least those who are able to search their job title in Google, see comments on the previous story.)

Warren Kinsella is a former strategist for Jean Chretien, and he's written a few books I'd like to read sometime.

He's also blogging about the current campaign, and despite his background (and his initial support for Dion as Liberal leader), he's doing a good, seemingly unbiased job of it.

There's not much else to it at the moment, so only pay him a visit if you're looking for the kind of insightful political analysis I often promise and never deliver.

--Ryan

P.S.: Expect more soon. Lately I've been thinking too much, and that's seldom a good thing.

What I'm watching

(I wrote another post yesterday, but it's still travelling the long path between Youtube and Blogger.)

New television season (to the extent television still runs in seasons) + two elections = Ryan spending a lot more time than usual in front of the television.

This begets the question - what is on that television screen when I'm in front of it.

When it comes to regular prime-time TV shows, the only new entry is Billable Hours, a dark comedy set it a Toronto law firm. I discovered it by accident this summer, and am anxiously awaiting the new season. I'll also be watching (when I remember they're on), returning shows The Office, Scrubs, and Corner Gas (which unfortunately seems to run against Billable Hours).

I haven't heard of any new shows that strike my fancy this year, but maybe that'll change.

The rest of my watching (minus Kitchener Ranger games) is somehow related to the news/political sphere. TVO's The Agenda is a great show that I seem to remember I was convinced to watch by a professor last year. Each night from Monday to Friday, Steve Paikin spends a commercial-free hour (it is TVO, after all), talking to a panel of experts about...well, almost anything. Just looking at the most recent and upcoming show topics, we've got shows on fatherhood, left-wing Canadian politics, hip hop and young black culture, and the Arctic. Past subjects have ranged from conspiracy theories to the influence of Bobby Orr on the sport of hockey.

I've also been watching CTV National News (with Lloyd Robertson and a SNAZZY REVAMPED GRAPHICS PACKAGE~!) every night, because I have to for a class assignment. Since I also try to watch The National once in a while, I've found myself watching two national newscasts some nights. It's actually quite startling to see the media bias at work - it's not overt like FOX News in the US, but CBC makes a much bigger deal out of any bad news for the Conservative party, while CTV downplays it as much as possible. (Trying not to pick sides, but it *seems* like CBC does the better job as far as getting the whole story.)

Although I'll be watching the debates (first one tonight), I refuse to watch American coverage of the American election. The true news outlets seem more focused on issues that don't really mean anything, leaving any true analysis to the likes of Jon Stewart and David Letterman.

On a semi-related note, American political hosts and pundits seem to all be cut from the same cloth. Canadians, on the other hand, have people like Mike Duffy (appearance-wise, the exact antithesis of what you'd put on television), Craig Oliver (not quite as bad, but legally blind), and Steve Paikin (a young, eager type who looks like what I imagine Alex Trebek did when he was young, working in Canada, and not a robot). Plus we have a wide array of people like Chantal Hebert and Jean Pelletier, who you would never see on American networks simply because of their accents. Kind of nice that Canadian television can still put things like looks and voices aside when intelligence is present.

--Ryan

Google Ads

Is it a blow to Yahoo's ego?  Maybe!
We now go to Google for details:



--
D. Phillips

Thank God!

The LHC is down. We will not all be sucked into oblivian on October 21st... Instead, the Large Hadron Collider will likely destroy us all as early as late February.

--

D. Phillips

A milestone

Yesterday, the scaffolding in front of St. Andrew's Church on Darling Street was taken down.

For the first time in nearly a year and a half, students/pedestrians can once again use the sidewalk to walk down that stretch of Darling (and presumbably the street to park).

I've done it a few times now, but it still feels weird. It's like I've never walked on that sidewalk before, even though I did for nearly an entire school year.

--Ryan

If you can read this, I'm not Prime Minister of Canada

Toronto-area Conservative candidate Chris Reid has been dropped from the ballot after a Liberal blogger found some not-so-nice things Reid said on his own blog. In his blog, Reid advocated that Canadians should have the right to carry concealed handguns, among other things.

The story here isn't the emergence of bloggers as the main source of finding dirt on politicians, or the Conservatives' willingness to hire ultra-right-wingers, or anything to do with guns. The story is Reid's idiocy in leaving that site online, for others to find.

I can guarantee you that if I ever run for public office, the moment I decide to do so, this blog will be taken down, and I'll figure out how to remove Google caches and the like. And I say that while believing that I have never written anything in here that would be politically damaging.

Well done, Chris Reid. You might not have taken your clothes off in front of underage teenagers, joked about the deaths of eighteen Canadians from listeriosis under your watch, or insinuated that Aboriginal protesters were drunk, but before any of those stories became news, they couldn't have been found with a quick Google search.

--Ryan

Sean and Mimi's Awkward Adventures

I can't even remember the last time I felt the urge to plug a webcomic... But I think this one deserves it. Sean and Mimi's Awkward Adventures seems to be made by a couple (probably in art school) who have created alter-egos of two children in love.

Sometimes perverse and a bit explicit in nature, the artwork seems to be always just as adorable as the example below. What made me decide it was worth the plug? The micro-blog posts from the artists below the comic.

"You Shoulda Seen The Other... Bear"

Ha! Comedy gold!

--
D. Phillips

Wow

I don't know what else to say.

The first-annual Brantford International Jazz Festival blew away my wildest expectations. The music was fantastic, the crowds were big, the downtown actually looked like a real city and not like Brantford...I could go on, but I'll start with a picture.



That would be Luis Mario Ochoa, leader of the Luis Mario Ochoa Quintet. His Afro-Cuban-style jazz was one of my personal highlights on the day - made all the better by his futile attempts to get the crowd to join him in a call-and-response of sorts...only in Spanish.

Other favourites...the Darcy Hepner Jazz Orchestra kicked things off with a big band-style bang...the Young Divas were very good at their type of jazz, as was Johannes Linstead - neither are exactly my cup of tea, but that much talent made it bearable...the local stage featured great performances from Quintessential and Denis Rondeau + Just Friends, among others...I didn't get too much of a chance to check out the youth stage, but what I saw there was pretty good...full review coming in the October 1 edition of the Sputnik, space allowing.

But the atmosphere? Incredible. I've never seen downtown Brantford like that - hundreds of people packing Harmony Square and roaming down Dalhousie Street between the stages. This is exactly what Brantford needs, so congratulations to Frank Di Felice and his team for pulling it off.

--Ryan

(P.S. There was no jazz flute. There was, however, a jazz accordion.)

Who wants to hear Mr. Burgundy play some jazz flute?

(Twelve hours of thought and *that's* the best jazz-related subject I could come up with.)

This Saturday, from noon until 6 PM, Harmony Square will be rocking with the first-ever Brantford Jazz Festival.

Check it out!

--Ryan

Modern Playgrounds

In my youth, a playground was a place where you could be active without thinking of it as a form of exercise. Perhaps that's why I think "working out" is such a chore now. Thankfully, the future generation will be burly body-builders... Brantford city workers have installed the next-gen playgrounds in our area.

Look at this fine piece of machinery!

Ha ha! No, not me. I meant the piece of machinery that they're passing off as a playground.

The fun here comes in the arm movements. You push your arm out, and then you pull them back in! Whee!

If you find your upper body is strong enough, you should switch it up with something good for your gastrocnemius muscles. In this playground game, we push our bodies out, and let them fall back in. Caution though! Don't fall back in too hard; this machine can be extremely dangerous for people with short legs. (Say... People under the age of twelve?)

This device is a more conventional take on the stair-master. Your arms and legs slide back and forth, as if you were gliding on cross-country skis. Another person can stand opposite you, adding additional fun to this game as you move in time with each other.

Reminds me of the teeter-totter from my day, where one kid would hold the other kid up while he'd cry, but instead one kid will move too quickly for the other to safely get off.

That's not the only risk in this device. Notice how close that bar gets to my head?

And again, if I were any shorter, I wouldn't be able to use this! Somehow, I don't see many children being six feet tall.

This was by far my least favourite machine. I lift my legs, and when they feel too heavy, I lower them... Then I do it again. Ya-hoo!

This one was actually fun. All you do is swing on it, but there's something about your centre of gravity on this thing that makes you feel like your alpine skiing! Look at the smile on Candice's face! And yet, once again, if she were shorter she wouldn't be able to ride it...

This is the final machine. Yes, we've done arm exercises already, but this one's different. As you pull your arms down, your body is lifted up. Do you feel the burn? I do.

So, that's my report on children's parks. And yes, in all seriousness, I did pull a couple of muscles while trying some of these playground accessories out.

--

D. Phillips

Yet Another Piece of Internet Trash

I just found out that Google Video lets you search by how often a video is posted in a blog. You can even find out what was the most blogged-about video on any given date.

That lead me to this, which I thought I'd share.

This video is so often blogged about recently due to... Well, come on! And so, for that unnamed yet obvious reason, it has become yet another one of those Internet jokes that you're not in on.

Shameful of me to post, I know, but I thought it was adorable.

Tune in next time (in about an hour), when I'll be posting something on the local children's playgrounds in Brantford.

--

D. Phillips

Please sir, can I have some Moore?

I still haven't figured out how to add other blogs to that right-hand column. I'm sure it's not that difficult, I'll get to it eventually.

And the first I add - if it's still running - will be Comfortable and Furious, penned by one Matthew Moore (hence the subject).

Comfortable and Furious is apparently an old gag from Conan O'Brien, but I like it because it's the closest I've ever seen to a rhyme for Supernatural Superserious.

As for Matthew Moore...what can I say about Matthew Moore? Well, he's a crazy socialist commie pinko beatnik. He's also a big fan of the Blue Jays, politics, and television. You know, the things I'd talk about (well, two out of three) if I ever actually talked about something, rather than my normal ramblings of nothing or link that will waste your time.

What's more, this is one of the few blogs he links to in his list - putting me in the company of men like Rick Mercer, Paul Wells, and Mike Wilner. And for that reason alone, I'm returning the favour.

--Ryan

P.S. "Poopin' Puffin" has yet to take off. I should put a copyright on it or something.

What's news?

There's an election coming up.

Two, in fact.

And the economy's volatile.

Hurricanes are all over the place.

The Toronto Blue Jays are trying to pull off their most improbably playoff appearance since 1989.

In other words, there's a lot going on.

For the news media, this is a good thing - they don't have to create news on their own, others are doing it for them.

But something's about to become very applicable, and it's something that might have never occurred to you - there's always the same amount of news.

Think about it. Newspapers are roughly the same size from day to day, newscasts are always 30 or 60 minutes long. It takes a huge event to change this - the last two times the KW Record produced a special edition, for example, were 9/11 and Pearl Harbour.

So we've created what's known as the news cycle, the idea that no matter what, there always has to be *something* going on.

The scary part? People know how to take advantage of this.

If you want people to hear about your news, if you want the publicity that comes from media coverage, you wait until a slow spot in the news cycle to release it. Case in point, Marvel Comics' decision to kill off Captain American a couple of years ago. It doesn't seem like something that would even make most newscasts, let alone be considered a big story...but Marvel dropped this bombshell when the news cycle was at its slowest, and I remember the local CTV station not only running a story on it, but running it before the first commercial break.

There's a flipside to this, of course. If someone *doesn't* want people to notice their news for whatever reason, they're well served to release it when the news cycle is at its busiest - as it will be from now through the American election. Something that might ordinarily be front page news will be bumped to the back, while something that would ordinarily be buried deep within the paper won't make it in at all.

So my plea to you: for the next two months, pay attention to the news. And not just the big stuff (although it is important), also the little things that people are hoping to have slip through undetected.

--Ryan

Cows stay in Chicago

I want to try something different today.

Today is, of course, September 11th. I'm going to toss out a few phrases, and you try to guess what year's September 11th they're describing.

"a devestating explosion"

"the terrific blast"

"clouds of smoke billowed into the sky"

"neighbouring buildings collapsed"

Well that's easy, isn't it? Ryan must be talking about the events of 2001, right?

Wrong.

The year is 1908, the city is Brantford.

Crews are replacing a natural gas main on Colborne St., and a careless smoker accidentily ignites fumes in front of the Theatorium.

The explosion immediately destroyed the Theatorium, and five other nearby buildings collapsed in short order. Amazingly, only two people died.

You can read today's Expositor story on this event (the inspiration for this post) here.

--Ryan

(P.S. If you're wondering about the title, the Great Chicago Fire was caused by a cow. This one wasn't.)

Is xkcd shitty today?

Isn't that what we all must ask ourselves?

Well, ask no more! With this website (which is rss syndicated every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday), you can be told whether or not xkcd is shitty on any given day.

Here's a snapshot of my Google Reader page:

Hmm. I see a pattern.

(For those of you who don't know, I am a big xkcd fan. That said, you have to give credit where credit is due... Someone obviously went through a lot of trouble for this. Undoubtedly, JUST to piss me off. That rat bastard.)

--

D. Phillips

I don't understand particle physics...

...but if the world is sucked up by a black hole tomorrow, apparently they're to blame.

You see, the Large Hadron Collider (wiki) will be switched on tomorrow, for the first time.

What does the Large Hadron Collider do? Well, to the best of my understanding, it collides hadrons. Large ones.

In less obvious terms, it shoots protons at other protons. I think.

And apparently if something goes wrong, it could create a black hole.

I have to admit, I like this end-of-the-world crisis a lot better than the ones based on the Mayan calendar or the X-Files or what have you, mainly because it has nothing to do with an arbitrarily chosen date, it's chosen because of something that's actually going to happen.

Of course, the first collision isn't taking place until October 21st - so I don't understand why this could kill us all tomorrow.

But if I'm wrong, I'll eat my words.

Or I would, if I were alive. But I wouldn't be.

This is what we call a 'win-win' scenario.

--Ryan

A man should not be judged by his Gmail spam folder alone

I'm really wondering about that one where Obama was endorsed by a groundhog - did it really happen, or is it actually the same as the rest of my spam, only a lot more subtle?

--Ryan

Confessions of a teenage grocery clerk

As I've mentioned here before, I spent most of the summer working at a Food Basics grocery store. While we didn't end up going out on strike (we got a new contract where retroactive pay basically meant I made more per hour in 2007 than in 2008), I did learn a few things, which I will share here.

The big story of the summer was the lemon juice shortage.

What's that?

You never heard of the lemon juice shortage?

Well, yeah. It was kind of weird.

I started work in the first week of May. We had lemon juice. Lots of it, in fact (we had been building a display for, as with most of our displays, no particular reason). By maybe May 20th, the display was starting to shrink, and we were starting to notice that although we'd been ordering plenty more lemon juice, it hadn't been coming in. And not only that, the other brand had been empty for a while, hadn't it?

By late June, all our normal lemon juice was gone, and I was directing customers to the imported aisle as our last remaining bastion of lemon juice. It was at this time that I learned from one customer how serious the problem was - we were the fourth store she'd been to - and that the problem stemmed from some trouble they were having in making the concentrate.

By mid-July, we were out of *all* lemon juice, and there was nothing we could do about it. Another week or two passed and it was affecting foodservice distributors, apparently outages were expected through September.

But then, in my last week of work, lemon juice re-appeared. And the story ended.

I also spent a disturbing amount of my work time looking at signs on displays. A few years ago, a display of kitchen cleaner bore a 'Kitchener Cleaner, $0.97' sign for well over a month without anybody seeming to notice.

There was nothing quite that good this summer, although I did see signs for "Nestle Sundays" (sundaes) and - my personal favourite - "Tropical Groove Drinks". The drinks are actually branded as Tropical Grove.

Sticking with the Tropical Grove, they win my award for 'best repackaging'. Once upon a time, their drinks came in 12-packs of little glass bottles. A little over a year ago, they downsized to 9-packs, still glass. Sometime in the past year, they changed that to nine plastic bottles - worse for the environment, but a lot less likely to break and cause a big mess.

The runner-up in that category would be the makers of Tang drink mix, for cutting their cases (the ones that contain the boxes that get sold in the store) in half, from 48 boxes to 24. Nobody buys Tang, so this was much appreciated.

I also learned that I go to the same school as the girlfriend of my store's weekend Frito-Lay merchandiser. This isn't particularly exciting, but I felt like I needed at least one more item.

--Ryan

P.S. A new school year, two elections in the next two months, the end of the baseball season, and Google Chrome? I can guarantee that the stuff that doesn't really interest anybody (such as the above) will be kept to a minimum for the next while.

Re: Chrome (for wlu students)

Only the newest release of Java, it appears, will work with Chrome. As of yet, this patch (or whatever it may be) is available in beta here.

Until you get this latest release, our beloved WLU won't be too Chrome-happy. (I already got one warning email saying "don't use it". Phooie on them!) WebCT will work with Chrome just as well as anything after this is done.

Sure, that annoying pop-up says that brick-a-brack about "Safari version 3.0.x us not supported", but you can ignore it. (After all, you're not using Safari, so it obviously doesn't apply to you.)

People who don't go to Laurier probably won't understand this specific issue, but if you have any Java issues with Chrome, hopefully this has helped you.

--

D. Phillips

Chrome

So, Google just released it's own browser, Google Chrome.

It took an hour of getting used to, but I'm enjoying it. I'd rave about how I plan on enjoying it's features, and what I think should be changed of it, but first you should see it for yourself.

I (used to) use Firefox, and my girlfriend (used to) use Explorer. This is our compromize.

There are two things that are bugging me. (Three, if you include the lack of a built in spellcheck.) Neither are about the pseudo-advanced convinience features unique to the program. Application shortcuts are handy, and the Incognito Mode is brilliant... it's the simple all-browsers-have-this things.

First off, the automatic-feed-finder is a bookmark button (always visible, if you have it; not just visible when feeds are available like in Firefox) instead of the friendly rss icon that comes and goes when appropriet in the address bar.

Second, the bookmarks are better than Explorer of Firefox... but so what? They should be better! Google has things like Google Notebook, which it uses in the Google Toolbar for it's own unique bookmarking system, accessible to all computers using the account. Why isn't their browser using that system?

Both of those features, I expect, will change as it leaves Beta in the upcoming months. Well done, Google.

I wonder what Mozilla makes of this.

--

D. Phillips

I agree with the sentiment, if not the exact words used to convey the message

The pitfalls of live TV (contains coarse language, viewer discretion is advised):



You'd think being a FOX News reporter at an ultra-left-wing protest, they'd have had better sense than to go on live. Unless of course their goal was to make themselves out to be the victims of unfair prejudice.

--Ryan