Also officially on The List: The Salvation Army. (Note to self–remember this for the next time someone starts off on “faith-based initiatives” and public funding.)
Category: Aside
Aside
Today’s recursion giggle: a concept map of concept maps.
Aside
While our family has several Christmas traditions, and these are very meaningful to me, there is also one Christmas tradition that is mine alone, and it brings me a great amount of pleasure. Every year, early in December, the people from Scrumptious Delights have a booth in Halifax as part of one of the Christmas craft shows. Every year, I visit them and buy one of their “Victorian Dark” Christmas cakes. It comes wrapped in a brandy-soaked cheesecloth, then cling wrap, then foil, then a lovely plastic packaging. I ration it out over as many days as I can–usually about five. If you dislike a good fruitcake, that’s fine with me–more for me. If you think fruitcake is a joke, then you have just never had one this good. I just had my second piece. So very, very good. I am leaving out one embarrassing part of this story.
Aside
I’m glad I wasn’t trying to drive home last week. Especially since my normal routing takes me through the Cobequid Pass at night. On the up side, I missed the normal post-snow power outage (which the girl apparently weathered with no trouble), which means I also skipped the several hours of impotent rage and ranting about privatization that usually accompanies that.
Aside
I expect lots of things from webcomics, but I don’t usually expect to be stopped utterly in my tracks by a one-off strip. Damn.
Aside
Well, I guess I’m done shopping at Home Depot. How will I survive with only Piercy’s, Kent, Rona, and dozens of smaller stores?
Aside
And, like clockwork, the CRTC comes out with another decision that favours corporations over the public. What do you expect when the regulatory body is made up of former corporate insiders?
Aside
The details of the story might not be all I am hoping for, but seeing a headline that says “Cheney and Gonzales Indicted for Prisoner Abuse” is certainly a step in the right direction. Let’s hope it’s one of the first pebbles in an avalanche.
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.
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.)
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.
Aside
You may also remember my pleasant surprise at how much I enjoyed Titan’s first collection of Nemi strips. I’ve been reading the strips online fairly religiously since. The second collection of strips also showed up today, and I’m quite looking forward to going through it to see which, if any, of the strips collected in this volume will be new to me. Apparently the ones in Metro are a sanitized subset of what’s in the collections. There’s a preview of 24 strips from the collection (use the cursor keys to navigate the set) at Titan’s site.
Aside
You may recall me marvelling at some of the images from Berni Wrightson’s Frankenstein portfolio. Well, today I picked up Dark Horse’s new big, beautiful hardcover edition of Frankenstein that’s lavishly illustrated with Wrightson’s images. It is a thing of beauty, and a steal at a $30 retail. There’s a preview online that gives you a sense of both the illustrations and the text design/layout.
Aside
You remember when I was making fun of the headline: “Another prisoner mistakenly released in N.S.“? Well, today’s top stories includes this choice headline “Halifax police mistakenly release man before court appearance”. Handsome devil, isn’t he?
Apparently I am living in Keystone.
