So, it’s St. Patrick’s Day and I’m not in Minneapolis. This is the second year in a row that’s happened, after more than a decade of seeing the Boiled In Lead show at First Avenue every year. And, for reasons which I don’t know if I’m allowed to mention, I suspect that things may be very different next year. Of… Read more →
Author: Mr. McLaren
Wine Tasting (Part I)
Last weekend I lead a wine tasting for people from Trish’s work. 18 people, and 8 different wines. We’ve done this before with people from her office, and most of the people this time were repeats. Since we’ve done this before we decided to get away from the more common varieties and try to illustrate some interesting stuff that’s a… Read more →
I don’t often do this…
..but I thought the ordering here was pretty funny. Apparently the scores were so close that the system had to ask me a tie-breaker. If I were just a little more self-confident I would have answered the tie breaker the other way, and apparently then instantly transformed into Anton Levey. (I wonder what test would return if taken by, oh,… Read more →
Everyone has their fetishes…
The sad truth is that this is like porn for me. You should have seen me handle the traycase on Phases Of The Moon when it arrived… I may have been drooling. Read more →
Something new every day
You learn something new every day. Today, I learned from the Daily Show that sciatic nerve problems arise from too much child molestation. Some recent events in far off lands are suddenly so clear to me… Read more →
Motion Picture Mail
For some reason, I’ve been getting rather a lot of video material in the mail this past couple of weeks. Mostly non-fiction stuff, with one notable exception. And since I’ve been backed up with work and sickness, I haven’t really had a chance to catch up on it. But I thought I could share some of the stuff with you… Read more →
I amuse me
I have a pretty excellent job. In one meeting today I threatened to feed a coworker to the pigs, and he correctly identified it as a Deadwood reference. There would have been much hilarity and cursing, Mr. Wu stylee, except for the presence of one humourless fellow. In another meeting I responded to a particularly dumb statement with “Have you… Read more →
Another shotgun post
Lots of short takes, to get rid of a bunch of things I have bookmarked in my “to blog” folder. * Ken Macleod is one of the most recent wave of bright lights of British science fiction. He’s also possibly even further left than I am. He keeps a blog (named, I might add, for an Oysterband lyric, whether that’s… Read more →
Not dead.
Just working very long hours, and more than a little sick. Mad leftist rants to recommence sometime this week. Read more →
You know, in my mind I’m like 24…
How did I get to be 32? Time definitely seems to be accelerating. I feel like we just moved to Nova Scotia, and in a couple of months it will have been 4 years. Which means I’ve been married for almost 4 years, since that was right before we moved, and I’ve been working for my current company for over… Read more →
Buy This For Me
If anyone happens to run into this product in their travels, snag one for me. I don’t know if I would actually like a stout with this kind of alcohol content, but I am willing to perform the experiment. WorldWide Stout The world’s strongest dark beer. It is brewed using six different yeast strains over seven months and then aged.… Read more →
Short Cuts
Despite the title of this post, there is no complex interconnection between these various stories. (… or is there?) First, there was the announcement about the government’s continued increased funding of the CBC (not “continuning to increase”, just “continuing the last increase”) that Tod Maffin blogged about. (As a CBC employee, you can imagine that Tod is particularly interested.) I’m… Read more →
Not a snowball’s chance in hell
So, I read today on Daily Kos about the election reform bill that Senators Boxer and Clinton have introduced. (A PDF of the full text of the bill is available. There are several things in this bill that just make sense, especially in regards the electronic voting machines (as an aside, I should point out that even with our unique… Read more →
Lion My Ass
Look, I’ve said it before and I’ll probably say it again: ancient temples that were hidden by “natural disasters” should be left well enough alone. However, the modern rational institutions seem to be unable to learn the lessons that Lovecraft tried so hard to teach, and exploration of the undersea temples and city that were recently uncovered by the tsunami… Read more →
Lord Russell, meet Terence
One of the fun new things about moving to WP1.5 is that I can integrate static pages with the blog. I wrote the first such page, which you will see listed over on the right under ‘Pages’, on the weekend, in response to the most common question I get about the blog: What’s up with that blog title? (The second… Read more →
