One of those youtube posts

Quick, dirty, and oh so twistedly funny.



Hat-tip to Fark.

One of those dry posts

Once again, a fun evening spent indoors looking at the curvey multicoloured bar on the CBC. Some short takes on the Quebec election:

• The CBC's political analyst lady from McGill was one of the sharper talking heads i can recall ever hearing from on these sorts of broadcasts. That hair, though, Jesus. Maybe it was because I was watching it on a wall-sized screen (don't ask), but my God, that thing probably had a riding of its own.

• Conventional psephological wisdom is that in first-past-the-post elections, the closer the three-way race, the more the translation between vote share and seat share gets distorted. I was half expecting that we'd have one of those fun results where the party that wins the most seats came second, or even third, in the popular vote. I bet the various PR campaigners, especially here in Ontario, were licking their chops in anticipation of this outcome. Instead, thanks to flukey geography, the three big parties wound up very close to perfectly proportional results.

• Because the ADQ crept up from third into second, defying the pundits and pollsters, it's safe to guess that a fair number of would-be ADQ votes actually wound up tactically parked, some with the PQ, probably a fair few more parked with the Liberals. Even Stephen Harper, ordinarily cut from adéquiste cloth, was throwing bones to Charest precisely because he saw the choice as being a Liberal/PQ binary split. Considering that the next election will be pegged as the ADQ show right from the outset, expect a fair number of these tactical votes to shift to the ADQ column. It is this fact that should scare the willies out of the Quebec Liberals. They might reassure themselves that they've hit bottom, but beware, there's still more room downstairs.

• Mario Dumont's wife: proof that being a career politician won't help the genetic fitness of your offspring.

• I see the potential for the federalist/separatist chasm morphing into a new divide in Quebec politics, between those who hold a civic-oriented, non-ethnic vision of the Quebec state, and those who see its core purpose as being a "homeland" for this nation Bas-Canadien, surrounded and under siege by anglos and darkies and so on. The ADQ has laid claim to the latter, and they're welcome to it. The real risk is for the Liberals to chase after them, much the same way Boisclair did with his whole me-too-ing on the face veil issue. Instead, they should jettison that festering ethnic-nationalist element altogether from their party. The province of Quebec is a multi-ethnic polity in which the nation Bas-Canadien happens to comprise a majority of the population and contributes substantially to the province's unique character. The protections of the Charter and numeric influence of the pur-laine ensure that their existence as a distinct culture is not in doubt either now or in the future. But to link Quebec's drive towards being empowered differently from the rest of Canada to this ethnic factor is inexcusable. This is political ground that the Liberals, both federal and provincial, need to vacate.

• Interesting, albeit unsurprising, how of the three leaders only Charest put part of his acceptance speech in English. Based on where the Liberals lost ground, never before in the modern era have we've seen a Quebec government so beholden to the anglo vote, proportionately speaking.
  

• We haven't heard the last from Québec solidaire. Now that the PQ is a wounded animal, expect the hardcore lefties to lose their incentive to stay on-side. Next time I think a seat in East Montreal would be a reasonable bet.

• Charest got Florid0wned. Or, to draw a more obscure parallel, John Reynolds-in-West-Vanc0wned.

• Once again, CBC's election coverage wins the beauty pageant. CTV, SRC and TVA's graphics still can't stand up to the CBC's toolbox, which has been kicking around in pretty much identical form since 2004. Curious to see if the CG stakes will get upped even more for the next federal election.
  

• Tee-hee. Andrew Coyne said "statist morass" on The National. Gotta admire him for wearing his ideology on his sleeve. And for being entertaining. That said, even Chantale Hébert was oddly charming tonight. Dogs and cats, sleeping together, etc.
  

• Oddly enough, I called this election outcome, sort of, back in the leadup to the 1998 election for a social studies project. Grade 11 Tom noticed the two-terms on, two-off pattern and enshrined it in a construction paper prediction years before the pundits rattled it off in the context of this election. Go me.
  

Tsunami early warning system

Taking a second shot at it.

After a cold Sunday, we hit 21 and sunny this afternoon. Another high of 20 expected tomorrow, with POP below 1/3.

Those strike me as skirt-generating conditions. Hurry, hemlines, evacuate to higher ground.

God bless Feschuk

The continuing riddle surrounding that lumbering useless contraption that passed for Paul Martin's communications team was how the hell they figured out how to suppress Scott Feschuk's genius. My current theory involves an IV drip, some relatively complex pharmacology, and a rubber ball gag.

Latest piece of evidence: Feschuk finishes Jim Flaherty's sentences.

Pet peeve

It's St. Patrick's Day, St. Paddy's Day, or if you're feeling really hurried, St. Pat's.

It is not, under any circumstances, St. Patty's Day.

St. Patty's Day would be an ideal name for the day in which one celebrated the life and times of a freckled character from Peanuts. It would be an ideal name for the day in which one celebrated the sacrosanct gift from God that is the beef burger. It would be an ideal day for engaging in "patty-cake".

It is not, however, an appropriate name for the Saint's feast day co-opted by attention-starved Irish Americans and the alcohol industry that we engage in today.

Born too late

Undoubtedly, a relatively large number of articles from The Onion are funny. However, there is a considerably smaller pool of them that are not only funny but, for lack of a better term, profound. Today I was reminded of this trusty old chestnut, in which the writers quite presciently forecasted a looming "retro crisis," in which the continually-shrinking temporal gap between events and the nostalgic echoes they engender could result in the dreaded "futurified recursion loop." While the article didn't get too specific about what form this conflagration could take, I have a suspicion it might involve us crashing into Kelsey Grammer over and over again.

While I spotted no skirts today (see preceding posts) I did spot what I believe is the first genuine intrusion of my middle-school era across the retro threshold and into the main front of mass-market-backed commercialized nostalgia. Another one of those MuchMusic flip-bys that had previously reintroduced me to Avril Lavigne's thighs this time resulted in me watching the latest production by an outfit known as hellogoodbye. Wikipedia informs me that their name is a reference to "the general transience of opportunities." I think their name is a reference to the general shortage of names that haven't been taken already.

Anyway, the video in question will be reproduced below, as including YouTube clips spices up the visual impact of the blog and breaks up blocks of text.


Now, pathfinding tendrils of '90s nostalgia have been creeping into our era for some time now. MC Hammer pretty much had a retro incubation period of about seven years, tops--driving up and down your town's main street pumping "2 Legit 2 Quit" from your pickup truck definately had ironic cachet by around 1999. His hip hop colleague Snow managed to do one better, timing his comeback album to exactly coincide with that moment that a new release from "that Informer guy" would tug on our heartstrings, although I gather his prison sentence had something to do with that, too. I don't want to even have to mention Dustin Diamond, so I won't.

But I think this video marks the '90s's Wedding Singer moment. There's a cross-the-board referencing of the early '90s--the hobbies, the fashion, and so on. There's the direct linkage between the band in question and the childhood era that they would have found themselves in at that time. There's also the complete lack of wink-wink nudge-nudge. This is key, I think--retro in the purest sense isn't at all self-conscious or apologetic about its origins. It just uses visual cues to set a broader tone as innocuously as possible.

Perhaps more interestingly of all is the phenomena of time-collapse. The video openly anchors itself in the summer of 1991, and certain aspects of it do tend to match that quite nicely--neon T-shirts, Ray-Ban sunglasses, twisty straws, and even, broadly speaking, the electronic pop genre as a whole. But pogs are definately anachronistic to this period; while the game dates back to the '30s in Hawaii, some of the more unusual Googling of my internetting career confirms my personal suspicions that the pog craze was distinctly tied to the 1994-1995 period, or in other words they're about four years early. The keytars are a nice touch--nice to know someone other than the Doodlebops are making use of them--but I think there's a bit of historical revisionism at play here, too, as I reckon the keytar was good and dead by '91. It's like a special fictional '90s has been created which blends together all sorts of catchy images without real regard for historical accuracy, per se.

The even more thought-provoking part is that hellogoodbye were probably too young to be going to overnight camp in 1991. (Lead singer Forrest Kline is apparently 22 at the moment.) Throw in the fact that their target audience is even younger--back in 1991 they were probably more worried about not wetting the bed--and I think the plot thickens considerably as to the whole appeal of this retro thing. You might think that retro is aimed, first and foremost, and those who lived through it the first time. Not so. I think it's aimed at those who were just a shade too young to have lived through it the first time. It's as if deep down we all wish we had been born five years earlier, that we'd been some sort of cooler older cousin. There's this mild pathological myth we tell ourselves about our childhoods, somehow coaxing our birthdates back a few years and retroactively maturing our perspectives.

My age cohort is just as guilty of this sin, I think. There's a heavy dose of Degrassi nostalgia linked to we early-'80s children, for instance, even though its honestly a bit of a stretch for some of us to claim Snake and Joey Jeremiah and the gang as true contemporaries. We might reflexively look back at Cobain as the Jesus of our generation, without doing the cold hard math and calculating how old we were when he did himself in. (JFK-style, I can still remember where I was when I heard the news, but it's revisionism of the worst sort to think that this event through our entire grade into some sort of state of paralyzed mourning. That was a privilege for the older kids.)

This little pattern might help clear up the whole pog mystery, as that likely was a part of the band's childhood which got caught in the shuffle when the whole video was timeshifted the requisite five years back. It also explains why no real premium was placed on historical accuracy: the 18-year-olds calling in requests to see hellogoodbye aren't likely to realize that the relationship between pogs and Ray-Bans is akin to the relationship between cave men and dinosaurs.

Postscript: For reasons I'm not quite solid on, I also get an odd Napoleon Dynamite vibe from the video. Now there's a movie that did something which was in many ways even weirder, namely play fast and loose with the concept of era altogether. Production design clearly dates huge chunks of that movie back to the near past, and yet other elements clearly set it in the present, and I get the overall sense that you're honestly not supposed to worry too much about that, or just chuckle about how backwards rural Idaho is. In writing this, I was also reminded of Donnie Darko, which also has a fairly unusual relationship with the year 1988 which eschews easy categorization.

Rain stopped play

The delightfully chipper CBC weather lady informs me that not one but three pesky fronts moved through Hamilton today, bringing a not-altogether-unpleasant showery fog that pretty much sat over town for the entire day. The major metereological impact she didn't mention is that this pretty much killed the great leg unveiling I was predicting in the previous post.

Ah well. Shit happens.

Important annual landmark date

This afternoon at 4pm, the temperature slid above 11 degrees Celsius for the first time all year, accompanied by a 22 km/h breeze from the southwest and 76% relative humidity.

In accordance with the laws of the universe, that means that tomorrow morning a great many of the young females of the Hamilton area will reach into their closets and pull out the skirts that had heretofore been off-duty for the winter. Like a pent up dam of skin-covering-behaviour breaking open, the year's most pleasant, yet subtly eerie, example of groupthink will be upon us.

Past precedent suggests that there may well be a retreat from exposed leg the day after tomorrow, as in such matters there's an inevitable tendency towards overly optimistic assessments of the true degree of springiness outside. A few nasty drafts shall in all likelihood make clear to the fair sex that we're not quite into June yet, and so Thursday could well be business as usual.

Nonetheless, my fellow gentlemen, we still have tomorrow. A quick review of our discreet oogling skills in the mirror before bed tonight might be advisable in order to shake off some of the cobwebs.

Best of luck to you all.

"A vote for me is a vote for sex. Someday."

The Internet is a strange place. One minute, you're reading about something entirely erudite and respectable while not exactly pulse-quickening: comparative politics in the Nordic context. The next minute, you click a link, and you're on the personal homepage of Jyrki J.J. Kasvi, a Member of Parliament in Finland representing the Green Party. Jyrki blogs, specializes in information society-related policy-making, and sees fit to offer his website in Finnish, Swedish, English and, uh, Klingon.

Jyrki's up for re-election later this week. Allow me to extend my heartiest Qapla'.

(and yes, before you ask, I had to look up how to spell Qapla'. There's hope for me yet.)

New favourite website

Well, who knows how long it will retain that honour. But it's provided a good half hour of entertainment thus far.

As Stephen Colbert once said, "reality has a well-known liberal bias." It would appear American conservative Andy Schlafly has caught onto this fact, and in protest of what he views as the liberal "mob" obscuring the truth on Wikipedia, he has launched Conservapedia.

There's an excellent article in today's Toronto Star interviewing this guy, and, entertainingly enough, getting commentary from Tom Flanagan, quite possibly the source of all evil in Canada. You can also get a fairly good gist of Conservapedia's version of reality by reading what it has to say on, say, Homosexuality, or Bill Clinton, or even its somewhat offbeat take on subjects like the French Revolution.

Confessions of a virtual stoolie

The facebook profiles for our friends Cassandra Reno and Sam MacRoberts are no more. It's possible they decided to end their facebook use as rapidly as they began it. Alternately, it's possible the smiting hand of the facebook gods responded to my pressing of the snitch button.

Cabinet material?

In honour of today's elections in Northern Ireland, more proof that that godforsaken corner of the island seems to be uniquely blessed by inhabitants with contentious relationships with reality.

Roboflirt

Cassandra Reno is 24 and lives in Toronto. I've never met the girl, but facebook informs me that she likes "shopping, photography, daiquiris, the beach and my itty bitty bikini" She's a fan of Hemingway and Entourage. Enjoys Mexican food. Oh, and she's absolutely gorgeous.

One last thing: she, out of the blue, wants to be my friend.

This is clearly a situation where my well-honed "too good to be true" reflex bailed me out. Someone like Cassandra Reno can't exist. So, deploying my maximum Occam powers, I can safely conclude she probably doesn't.

Well, there's more to it than that. There's the fact that we have absolutely no mutual contacts, interests or organizations... clearly the "add" request came out of some sort of search of the master database. And there's the small matter that every single one of the people who have recieved add requests and then blessed dear Cassandra with official "friend" status have last names that start with A and B. And that we've all been pulled from a collection of Canadian facebook networks, seemingly randomly. And that nobody has listed Cassandra as a friend from college, work or what have you--one honest chump at least deigned to give her the status of "facebook friend," while everyone else apparently saw the pretty lady and punched "add," no further questions.

Cassandra, in fact, shares a lot in common with Sam MacRoberts, who asked for my virtual acquaintance a day earlier. She's only 19, and hails from Aurora, just up the road from Toronto. But she shares Cassandra's mysteriousness, and most of all, her predeliction for befriending people on an alphabetical basis. Mind you, Sam's managed to chug her way through more of the alphabet, still sticking dutifully to Canadian networks only. It's almost as if she was keen to make friends with a certain demographic or something.

So, before I say any more, allow me to offer a few words to both these fine ladies. You're pretty and friendly-sounding and thus far I've seen no indication that you wouldn't be worth getting to know. Cassandra, I'd love to discuss whether you prefer Hemingway's shorter stuff or have an appetite for Grapes of Wrath in all its glory. Sam, you say that your relationship status is "complicated." Is there anything I can do to help straighten that out? So if either of you girls are reading this, drop me a line. I'd love to chat, and apologize profusely for what's coming next.

See, far be it for me to be rude or anything, it's just I think you guys are, well, several lines of automated PHP script.

Obviously, detailed demographic data is gold in the information economy. Pair it with targeted advertising and you have the reason that the founders of Google probably spend every second weekend rolling pricey call girls in high-grade cocaine, chicken drumstick-style.

And as sources of electronic goodness go, Facebook is far and away at the head of the class--unlike, say, myspace pages or Flickr accounts, you're getting clear indications that each entry corresponds with a living, breathing human being. Not only are there email addresses guaranteed to be in working order and checked frequently, but, depending on the openness of your subject, you've got all manner of fun information that you could harvest and cross-reference into some sort of massive database: dates of birth, hobbies, addresses, political opinions. Facebook accounts are also disproportionately drawn from an ideal demographics for consumer spending: college-educated and under 35, with comparatively few tight-fisted grannies watering down its commercial usefulness. And because personal names can serve as a delightful Rosetta stone in the field of information management, opening up opportunities to cross-reference, Facebook data is even more useful when acquired for use in concert with all the sorts of other databases flying out there--filling in the gaps over at MasterCard so they'll know when I turn 30 and can call me to offer a new savings plan, or letting MoneyTree calculate how much variation there is between my credit rating and that of my friends, or providing some context for Shoppers Drug Mart as to why I keep buying so much hair gel and condoms, or ensuring the direct mail people don't send me appeals to donate money to causes that will likely go ignored.

For the man in the basement somewhere who I suspect is steering Cassandra and Sam across the internets, hoovering up information, there's a veritable jackpot to be won, provided he can find buyers for his databases. And I'm sure he will.

I've been pretty steadfastly cynical of the paranoid nellies out there who are convinced that Google and Microsoft will use their data collection powers to overthrow human civilization. By and large, I believe Facebook when they swear up and down that they mean well with what they collect. But I don't think in coming years the major corporations will be the real troublemakers as this sort of data management gets more and more lucrative. I think it'll be the black economy: effectively the sort of people who spam penis-enlargement drugs today, with a few upgrades. Said information will get "laundered," merged, and recompiled, moving up through progressively less-sketchy tiers, until the likes of Google and Microsoft do buy it, for millions of dollars a pop, from entirely respectable Silicon Valley sorts.

And while legitimate businesses may not sully themselves with the extraction of this information, they'll certainly take of advantage of them after the fact. Imagine, if you will, logging on to the internet at the public library down the street, logged-in to no accounts, free from cookies. And based on what you punch into the search box, what sites you visit, and where geographically you're accessing the web from, Google's massive wheels are crunching all the while, narrowing down its list of potentials until they figure, within 80% certainty 19 times out of 20, that you're well, you (or maybe the guy from across the neighborhood who watches the same TV shows, but probably not). And that because your girlfriend's birthday is coming up in two weeks, you should see ads for things it figures she'd like and it figures you can afford. Knowing you're online, but not at your usual IP address, telemarketers around the world are signalled that you are likely not at home, and no wasteful calls are made at this time. Meanwhile, when you are noticed reading about vacations to Antigua, a signal is sent to a direct mail company to send vacation brochure to both your address and that of some of your friends... maybe they'll bring up how much they were thinking about getting away for spring break the next time you meet.

Orwellian terror? Not quite. But still a little creepy. And probably only five years away, thanks to the hard work of people like Cassandra and Sam.

Looking for "Cochrane, Zefram"

The various research proposals linked-to on this site have been an invaluable weapon in my three-day-long battle against insomnia. It might just be a product of the late hour, but I think I've convinced myself that I comprehend most of it. Well, "ponderomotive forces" required a Wiki run. But solar shields at Lagrange points? Psssh. Easy stuff.