Types of Horrible People 

Da Vinci knew a horrible person when he saw one.

Not long ago in Toronto, there was an amber alert issued for a missing child who, sadly, was found dead hours later. The Toronto Police had to issue a warning to the public to not call 911 with complaints, because there were people who actually called 911 to complain that the alert from their phones of the girl's disappearance woke them. In response to this nugget, Scott Gilmore wrote a piece in Maclean's titled, "You are horrible people." It was widely shared, no doubt because people recognized others in the post.

Yet there are many more horrible people omitted which I would like to add.
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I left Twitter for a week and you won’t believe what happened next 

This is what happens when you unplug yourself from a single app

After the New Zealand Mosque attack, amid thoughts and prayers and the horror and the agony and the unity there was of course the bilious spew of the Internet but in even weirder and weirder ways. For context: a young woman of colour wearing a Bernie Sanders campaign t-shirt, was recorded righteously confronting Chelsea Clinton at a memorial ceremony for those who died in New Zealand, and saying that Clinton had used the kind of language against Muslims that led to such attacks on Muslims. What were those words? Ms Clinton had “retweeted” a comment that went something like, while criticism of Israel may be valid, we most push back from any antisemitism, which was in itself a retort to the only female Muslim representative who had commented on another tweet about “it being all about the money” (paraphrasing) — “it” being the suggestion that American Jews who contributed to any lobby for a foreign country (namely Israel) was questionably close to unpatriotic behaviour (or something? This rabbit hole is deep and weird). So to recap, Clinton’s stance on antisemitism was seen as an attack on an American Muslim woman which was somehow to blame for violence against Muslims everywhere so she shouldn’t attend memorials in the names of those who perished due to her words (which, by the way she did not utter nor type but reposted as an implied agreement of sentiment). This, of course, was a colossal exaggeration and wholly unnecessary especially as Clinton is a known supporter of immigrants and immigration and women of all faiths and races. Then some people righteously, on Twitter, defended Chelsea Clinton which led others, on Twitter to fire back that it was so predictable that the perceived worst victim of a shooting of almost 50 Muslims by a racist in a foreign country was an affluent white woman in New York.

I probably did injustice to the entire fustercluck of Twitter outrage that has led to some very nasty confrontations in real life. Yet, it was this debacle that led me to delete the Twitter app on my phone. Not my account mind you, just the application on my personal phone. I’ve been on Twitter for over a decade (member since 2008). I’ve learned of the death of every major artist, entertainer or politician over that decade via Twitter. It was my second most used phone app after e-mail. Now, I’ve spent the entire week away from Twitter and this is what happened: Read more »

The Hibernator's Handbook 

This is exactly the kind of thing I want to avoid

2017 didn’t end well for me. In fact, I began the holiday season looking up from my belly and ended the year looking down at it. Less than a week before Christmas, I was riding hard, standing on the pedals, when one of my bike’s crank arms gave way beneath me. Luckily, my ribs broke my fall. I spent the entirety of Christmas trying not to move, but now more than anything I have to try to move which is a tricky business when I’ve decided under no circumstances should I go outside.

Having no bike to ride as transport and with the temperatures well in the crispy -20 to -30s I began to feel a hibernation coming on. If bears and other beasties can do it, why can’t I? I’m old enough to not be drawn out by any kind “cold shaming” that accuses you of not being Canadian if you can’t face the cold. I have nothing to prove. I recently rode a bike 30 minutes across town in -23°C just to go skating for another 30 minutes then ride another 30 minutes back again. Did I mention the temperature? Did I mention the blistering wind as violent as any shark attack? Did I mention the difficulty tying my skates after all my fingers had frozen then broken off? I ride throughout the winter devising stratagems and tactics such as doubling of socks and gloves while employing a variety of balaclavas, scarves and hats in such a combination that not even I know where my face begins or ends. No, I have nothing to prove and it now seems appropriate to withdraw from the world and enter a prolonged state of torpor.
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Objects in Mirror 

What a year, huh? What’s the warning from our side view mirrors? “Objects in mirror may be closer than they appear.” That’s how looking back at a year feels to me. It’s funny how things that you thought happened last year was really two or three years ago. Stuff that happened this year seems further back somehow. Maybe because it was kinda crappy. Except maybe the Olympics - which also seems crappy in retrospect.


obligatory year in review graphic

How about those Sochi Olympics? Those crazy Russians. Remember that one thing messed up in the opening ceremonies but we didn’t care because a police choir sang Daft Punk’s Get Lucky with Russian accents. Crazy. Remember how good the Canadian athletes were? Remember that insane comeback by the Canadian women’s hockey team? Remember when that Cossack beat Pussy Riot with a whip? You don’t see that everyday. Then again, this was a government that made promoting gay stuff illegal. Not even the Pope is against gay folks anymore. Hey Vlad, you can’t stop a gay party, because a gay party just don’t stop (see above Daft Punk reference)! Then the whole annexing Crimea thing? Crazy Russians. Read more »

The Cruelest Month 

image via Boston Globe

I've heard that November is the cruelest month. This year, a span of a week in April has been beyond cruel, landing somewhere around vicious. Wars and time shook off more than a few mortal coils. When Roger Ebert succumbed, it prompted Dick Cavett to muse, "Why isn't ever Dick Cheney?" It may never be it seems, as the former vice president watched Margaret Thatcher put to ground. Then Jonathan Winters faded from light and bowed out. Still no sign of Cheney's demise. Also with no sign of Spring in sight, we buttoned our top button and slung our scarves and leaned to the wind. The wind blew back when two bombs killed three and wounded hundreds in Boston. Poison powder was sent to two US senators, a judge and the president of the United States. A fertilizer plant explosion blew a hole in the heart of Texas killing 14 and injuring over 200 people. Simultaneous car bombs blasted away 30 or more lives in Baghdad and when you weren't looking the Syrian civil war worsened. You wouldn't blame someone for waxing poetic for the time when news had to be printed on paper and delivered the next morning. You couldn't turn it off. The "feed" of information was gluttonous and spewed forth bile with fierce purpose. As though the Universe was trying to teach us all a lesson.
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Armisen and Brownstein

The ardently platonic Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein, photo by Gabriele Stabile for the New Yorker

I like thinking of Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen as the new Nichols & May of our time though this New Yorker piece on “Portlandia”, their largely improvised comedy program on IFC, never mentions it. Maybe there is no connection. The comedy is certainly different. Satire isn't new but this manner of maintaining a satirical edge with a balance of guile and affection is something rarer. Even stranger, these two comedian/musician/actor/writers are as hip as anyone they make fun of (probably hipper). Still, they manage to retain their own hipness. How? Anything goes in this topsy-turvy, insidey-outsidey world. It is more art than science, me thinks.

“...what Freud called the narcissism of small differences”

We can all recognize the unbearably hip, or as Elvis Costello sang, the tragically hip. It's more difficult to recognize your own excursion into hipster territory, accidental or affected. That's the geography Armisen & Brownstein negotiate so successfully. (See? Armisen & Brownstein. It's already catching on.) It's really well articulated by Talbot in this article as “...what Freud called the narcissism of small differences: the need to distinguish oneself by minute shadings and to insist, with outsized militancy, on the importance of those shadings.”. That's what makes the comedy universal. While Portland may be HQ for Pacific Northwest hipsters, it's the same narcissism of 19th century's Vanity Fair or of pointy toed shod dandys of London, or of a tuque-in-the-summer and heavily tattooed (or "inked") doofus of Queen Street West in Toronto. The penultimate expression of the show is the sketch where a chin-bearded fixie riding dude claims everything "is so over".

I laugh, despite seeing myself in some of that satire. If you can laugh at yourself, that would mean you have at least one redeeming quality, right?

There and Back 

Commercial for EF International Language Centers

It's so odd to travel so far so easily. Air travel must be one of the most powerful forces in our modern world. Spreading people, ideas, commerce and viruses faster than ever in our history. I work for a company that not only uses a powerful video conferencing system, we also sell it. I'll even go on record about how surprisingly convincing it is to sit in front of a television talking to a video of someone and feel that somehow, you're in the same room. As sophisticated as that is, it doesn't really replace being there, shaking a hand or breaking bread with other people. I guess it's not meant as a kind of simulcrum but the idea is it'll replace phone conversations at some point. But it won't replace flight, driving, traveling to be somewhere else.
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Compartmental 

Barry Michaels and Phil Stutz ask their clients to visualize being completely destroyed by falling into the sun and being shot back back out as a powerful beam of light. I imagine it like this solar storm captured by NASA.

One of the stories which caught my attention is about something that I’ve either read, heard or seen a lot lately is really about compartmentalization. The Rabiolab podcast called Me, Myself, and Muse talks about how some authors have dealt with their writer blocks. One way, that seems surprisingly common has been for the artist to make deals with their creativity. Put another way, their creativity isn’t a personal trait or a talent, or even another part of themselves but another person entirely. This idea, of course, goes back to the ancient Greeks and the goddess Muse (those Greeks, is their anything they didn’t think up?) The modern version of this probably has a fancy schmancy psychological term that I’ll call compartmentalization.
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Hello, I'm a Mac 

A few years ago I was driving home from a late night hockey game. At that hour, the streets near Spadina Road and Dupont (for non-Torontonians, North of Bloor, Spadina Avenue becomes Spadina Road) are pretty much abandoned, except for this Asian guy I see riding his bicycle loaded with overstuffed bags (like a scene straight out of Beijing, this guy is riding a bicycle completely overloaded like Juan Valdes' mule, after midnight in January — I see him every week). That's beside the point.

My real point is, on this particular night, I realized what a huge cliché I was. There I was, wearing, what I like to think of as a very hip, vintage racing jacket (Johnson outboard motor sports in metallic gold - very 1970s), a "trucker-style" baseball cap (which, in truth, I only wear after hockey because I need to cover my head but don't want to wear a wool tuque), listening to what was then a huge Moby hit (mix of dance/house/pop/electronic - verification needed), and driving a Volkswagen Golf GT (2.0L, totally kicks the ass of anything else in it's class). It's like I just walked out of marketer's hand book.

There you have it. I'm an over-educated Mac user, who works as a designer in the "tech-sector", drives a VW Golf, wears vintage duds (ironically or otherwise), drinks French-press fair-trade coffee, listens to popular yet progressive music, prefers galleries and museums over monster truck rallies, prefers pubs over bars, only drinks locally brewed beers, chooses organically raised beef, local produce when possible, performs some level of physical activity 2-3 times a week and believes mistakenly, beyond the shadow of a doubt that I am a unique individual.

This Mac-vs-PC Infographic however, begs to differ. Not only does it reinforce every PC vs Mac cliché, it drives home the point that Mac users see themselves as unique and different but really are just all the same. Of course, there's a slight problem here. The graphic is the result of a questionnaire from a Web site where almost 25% of respondents didn't even identify themselves as either a Mac or PC type person. So you're really focusing on a subset of a subset; only 75% of people that use Hunch.com identify themselves with their computer of choice. As a caveat, I've tried hunch.com before and found it pretty useless. It reminded me of the Seinfeld episode where Kramer starts taking Movieline calls only to ask callers in a robotic voice, "why don't you just tell me what movie you'd like to see?" when he can't decipher their push button prompts.

In the end, I don't think this shows the difference between PC and Mac users as much as the difference between Mac users and everyone else. Only 10% of respondents said they were Mac people and really PC users are made up of users of Microsoft, HP, Dell, Sony etc. (though that's not shown). Mac users typically work in fields of creative media such as art & design, music, film, and writing because either the device lends itself to those applications or it is marketed that way. People who work in those fields probably do tend to be more liberal or have particular tastes. The keyword is "tends". I believe the difference between my "tendency" to do something and my likelihood, while not fundamentally huge, is still an important distinction. Despite the adage that you can't judge a book by its cover, it turns out you probably can judge a user by their MacBook.

IBM's Wilson 

Alex Trebec spots Wilson $5000 and his competitors applaud his ineffectual effort.

Image of IBM's first and less successful attempt at an artificial intelligent agent appearing on Jeopardy.

Who says "print" is dead?*

Is it just me or does Portland remind you of Seattle?

*Okay, technically, "Boing Boing" is a blog not print and just to go all nerd on your Pacific Northwestern ass here is the list of publications (not counting sky writing, sand writing or phone books) mentioned:
The New Yorker
McSweeney's
Mother Jones
Spin
Paste
Dwell
New York Times
New York Observer
Washington Post
Wall Street Journal
Boing Boing
The Portland Mercury
The Seattle Stranger
SF Weekly
The Harvard Lampoon
Mad Magazine
Cathy
Family Circus
Calvin and Hobbes
The Boston Globe
The Washington Blade
The Bible
The Portland Monthly

The only ones I hadn't heard of were Paste and The Washington Blade but my question is, "What, no Village Voice? No Utne Reader? No Harpers? No The Atlantic Monthly? No Lapham's Quarterly?"

Other than that it's practically like a dinner party at my lunch table.

Cameo Within a Chameleon 

From Peter Theatre

What exactly is going on here?

Some time ago I saw this trailer for the film "Rango". Dumb name. Apparently it concerns a chameleon with an identity crisis. Perhaps a pet lizard escaped into the wild? Who knows? The trailer doesn't give much away. Yet I noticed said lizard was voiced by Johnny Depp. A lizard wearing a floppy hat and a Hawaiian shirt, walking in the desert. Kind of like that film based on the work of Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, when Depp portrayed Thompson's alter ego (or a caricature of him at least). Then, in a slashing cut, there it is, the adorable mutt, Rango is flung head long into an oncoming red caddy coupe, driven by a thin necked fellow in a floppy hat and Hawaiian shirt, just like in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Is this a pop-culture nod to Depp's work? To Thompson's? Or is it just a throwaway created by an animator who noticed the resemblance and made the connection? Are they messing with our heads? Why did I even notice it?

The word "chameleon" is derived from the Greek, "khamai", meaning ‘on the ground’.

The word "cameo" from the medieval Latin, "cammaeus", thought to mean "engraved gem", or not. It's disputed.

Ok, I really thought there would be a stronger connection there. Nope. Cameo, chameleon? Though I think maybe the film makers thought there was a connection. Maybe they even think cameo, chameleon and camouflage share the same root. To be honest, that's what I thought, but it just isn't so.

It's a Man's World 

Image via Everyday I Show

It's a man's world. Despite all that's changed in the last 25 years. It remains a man's world, though I might venture it is an emasculated, de-sexed, indecisive man to which this world belongs. Perhaps in reality, it's a eunuch's world, and if you read the fine print, he's just renting it.

At some point, I don't know when, in parallel to "man-scaping" and shaped eye-brows, there was a movement to re-assert manliness. Of course, institutions such as Esquire and Playboy continued and may lay claim to such a movement, but speaking for myself, I think there was just a critical mass of men becoming a certain age. An age where boyishness is boorish, when you notice a white hair in your beard, when you've realized that you're not going to become the man you wish you'd be (or that perhaps your father ever/never was) by mere osmosis. It will take some effort. You see in your closet the cast-offs of your youth. You look around your work place and see your place in it. You look in the mirror and see a stranger. To that end, you reject the platonic boyfriend within, you turn your back on the impish, merry pranksters of film, and you sucker punch the inadequate, incompetent, impotent fool of man portrayed with such guile and hucksterism on every billboard, magazine, television ad, radio spot, bus vinyl appliqué, Web banner pop-up and poster screwed above a urinal. You decide to fight age with exercise and knowledge, no longer compromise on the tools of that war, cleanse your body of artificiality, wash out the hair dyes, let your hair grow where it grows, quash blemishes with the fact that you simply don't care, assert yourself into your city, insert yourself back into your life, ignore the petty, push over the fence-sitters and focus on the impenetrable forces that make this world suck while simultaneously bear-hugging all that is good and right. Then, apparently, you make a Web site and visit your nearest haberdasher.
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This Is Your Grandfather’s iPad

Aug. 6 (Bloomberg) -- Hikosaburo Yasuda says he knows a trend when he sees one and plans to buy Apple Inc.’s iPad to keep up with junior members in his computer club. Yasuda is 95.

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People City

"it's very nice, to live in People City, yes, it's very nice… in People City" I'm not sure I would see/hear this and think, "Damn! People City sounds pretty sweet. I think I'll move there." In fact, I'm pretty sure no station sign-on, sign-off song ever convinced anyone to move anywhere.

The Tedium is the Message

I realize I use this blog as a sort of calendar blotter. I mark things I've done in this space then I return to it to see what I was doing. The only trouble is I've replaced it with the sort of micro-notes that have become de rigueur of Web 2.0 (or if not rigorous then at least ubiquitous). I post 140 character arguments and posits on Twitter or briefer still, single digit entries at daytum.com. I'm sure it's all done now. The tedium of the medium is the message.

Now I've even resorted to punnery. So it is that my entries have been infrequent and limited and not so thoughtful. Perhaps it is a bad time to write. I'm just back from hockey, my hands still stink of my gloves, and I've just pounded back a beer to help me sleep and two Advil to help me get up (if that makes sense). All together, it has been a topsy-turvy day. For some reason I was fighting afternoon drowsiness really badly today. Two coffees, a candy bar and cold water splashed on my face achieved nothing. When I did head home, I rode my bike like an old drunk. I almost toppled off at least twice and then one of my pedals came off. I put the old pedal in my pocket like an amputated limb and tried riding without it. That didn't work. Eventually I stopped and jammed the thing back on. I rode home as if in a dream with the cold tearing up my eyes and burning my ears. When I finally did get home, I immediately collapsed on the couch. A nap to offset the sleep deficit. It would seem I'm chronically in debt to my dreams.

The Polarized Express

This explains a lot. Really. It explains why I didn't like The Polar Express and why I don't like Stephen Harper. The Uncanny Valley.

People may be feeling more warm and fuzzy about our near (now nearer) human Prime Minister, but I just can't shake the feeling. For those of you, such as Robert Zemeckis, who are unfamiliar with the term, "uncanny valley" or "zombie valley" (which is apparently full of frothy mouthed Conservatives) I've provided this excellent and instructive quote for your benefit.

In 1978, the Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori noticed something interesting: The more humanlike his robots became, the more people were attracted to them, but only up to a point. If an android become too realistic and lifelike, suddenly people were repelled and disgusted.

The problem, Mori realized, is in the nature of how we identify with robots. When an android, such as R2-D2 or C-3PO, barely looks human, we cut it a lot of slack. It seems cute. We don't care that it's only 50 percent humanlike. But when a robot becomes 99 percent lifelike-- so close that it's almost real-- we focus on the missing 1 percent. We notice the slightly slack skin, the absence of a truly human glitter in the eyes. The once-cute robot now looks like an animated corpse. Our warm feelings, which had been rising the more vivid the robot became, abruptly plunge downward. Mori called this plunge "the Uncanny Valley," the paradoxical point at which a simulation of life becomes so good it's bad.

from The Undead Zone, by Clive Thompson, Slate.com

Infinite Jester

David Foster Wallace - via Consumat
Slate.com's Audio Book Club take an hour to discuss David Foster Wallace's influential door stopper, "Infinite Jest".

Hear it here (runs 59 mins): Click Here to Listen

Opposing Forces

THIS is the opposite of THIS.

All part of Life's Rich Pageant/Tapestry/Thingamajig.

The Illustrated Man

via This Magazine

A friend just sent me this brilliant book, The Shatner Show which documents 76 images/illustrations/portraits by various artists inspired by the man hisself. This is exactly why "we stand on guard for thee".