Archive for January, 2005

Halifax: Worse Than Death?

Wednesday, January 19th, 2005

Apparently George Washington thought so, as a 229 year-old letter which is about to be auctioned proves:
In the four-page letter dated May 9, 1776, he said the Loyalists detested their time in Halifax and preferred to die than to stay in the city.
Fortunately, the city has improved greatly since the old days. Why, just ask [...]

Banjos playing through the broken glass

Tuesday, January 18th, 2005

OK, time to unload some stuff from the hump of hate.
Remember when I was openly mocking Alabama earlier? Well, they are trying to make me angrier: Roy Moore choice of GOP voters.
Roy Moore’s defiance of a court order cost him the state’s highest judicial office. But his fame as the Ten Commandments judge could [...]

Weird spam attack

Tuesday, January 18th, 2005

Well, the blog has been getting a ton of weird spam lately.
I say “weird” because, unlike the normal comment spam, these posts have no links in their bodies, nor are the posters entering a URI to some casino or “pharmacy”. Instead they are anonymous comments that have no linkage at all, and contain what are [...]

5500!

Friday, January 14th, 2005

According to an article in the Telegraph (which I got via Daily Kos), there have been 5500 desertions from the US military around the Iraq War. The implication of the article is that these deserters have come to Canada.
How have I not heard of this, if it’s true? The media has covered a couple of [...]

Another small glimpse of hope

Friday, January 14th, 2005

You may recall quite a lot of earlier discussion here (start here and follow links backwards for other posts) about Cobb Country, GA, and their “evolution is just a theory” sticker on textbooks.
Well, the case has been settled in federal court, and with a result that gives me another small bit of hope. Here’s a [...]

You mean they didn’t find any?

Wednesday, January 12th, 2005

I was going to comment on this CNN article, but I think Brian Wood has said everything I was going to say, and probably more succinctly at his LJ:
wtf?
U.S. ends search for WMD in Iraq
“The search ended almost two years after President Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq, citing concerns that Saddam Hussein was building [...]

Automatic face morphing

Tuesday, January 11th, 2005

During an interminable meeting today, I was playing with the St. Andrews Face Morpher, a tool that lets you take an uploaded face image and apply various transform to it for interesting results.
For example, this is an image of my friend Alex that I yanked off his photography site:

Now, here is what the Face Morpher [...]

I love the Internets

Tuesday, January 11th, 2005

Oh my God.
Please go and see “Query Letters I Love”, a blog dedicated to the public mockery of real Hollywood script queries from wannabe screenwriters.
Here’s a sample bit:
Micro Management is about evil midgets who take over Titan Industries, a United States defense contractor and missile manufacturer, and attempt to use the missiles to blow [...]

Can I have a little more me in the monitor?

Monday, January 10th, 2005

A couple of years ago I found a list of 99 questions on Jonathan Carroll’s site, which he hadn’t answered, in defiance of typical blog-meme style. Unlike most of these lists, I liked this one, and I’ve kept a copy of the questions around as something to look at “when I get time”. Well, [...]

Stamping Butterflies

Friday, January 7th, 2005

So, about a month ago the Guardian ran a short review of Jon Courtenay Grimwood’s new novel, Stamping Butterflies. I’m glad they did, because it had somehow escaped my notice that the book was out–sometimes that happens with UK-original hardcovers, as my coverage of what’s new there is weaker than in North America–and [...]

Do you know the word ‘crapweasel’, Tom?

Friday, January 7th, 2005

So, let’s look at the latest Delay news.
First, the other shoe has already started dropping with regards to that little moment of optimism I had the other day. While it is true that “the Delay rule” was revoked, apparently the Republicans still managed to push through ethics changes that will make future probes much more [...]

Bill “McCarthy” Gates

Friday, January 7th, 2005

So, Bill Gates apparently thinks that people with different notions of intellectual property from him are commies. This kind of bounces off of me, since as a Canadian I am considered a crypto-communist by most Americans anyway, and as a leftist NDP I’m considered a bit of a communist by lots of Canadians too, but [...]

Loo-seeeee

Thursday, January 6th, 2005

I literally do not know what to make of this piece from the Washington Post via Gibson:
LEXINGTON, Ky. — The Lexington Herald-Leader featured a prominent clarification on its front page yesterday, apologizing for the newspaper’s failures in covering the 1960s civil rights movement.

“It has come to the editor’s attention that the Herald-Leader neglected [...]

The Long Tail

Thursday, January 6th, 2005

If you missed Chris Anderson’s great article The Long Tail, you should definitely take a minute or two to go back and read it. It’s about… well… let’s say it’s about the market effects of massively big potential customer bases for items of niche interest. The examples are drawn from practical retail things like bookstores, [...]

The Sherlock Holmes Society of London…

Wednesday, January 5th, 2005

Has a review of the New Annotated Holmes that I just bought, and it’s positively glowing.
The most exciting news for me though, is that there is to be a matching edition of the longer works later this year.
The website of The Sherlock Holmes Society of London

‘The biggest thing for years’–well, The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes [...]