(Source: GraphJam)
Books that changed things
Mighty Girl’s blog post Eight Books That Changed Things For Me got me thinking. Thinking, really, less about what books have changed things for me than whether it was far too embarrassing to publish such a list. So many of them are shallow and rather silly. But what the hey. In rough chronological order: 1. […]
Lore Sjöberg on World of Warcraft
I don’t play WoW (Civilization’s always been my timesucking computer game). But Lore does: World of Warcraft‘s developers have mastered the unholy art of in-game bribery. They have discovered that players will do any number of stupid, tedious things in order to earn perks that have no effect on the game. Just this week I’ve […]
Book: The Ghost Map
I just listened to the unabridged audiobook of Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map: The story of London’s most terrifying epidemic, and how it changed cities, science and the modern world. It is the summer of 1854. Cholera has seized London with unprecedented intensity. A metropolis of more than 2 million people, London is just emerging […]
Yessssss!
It’s a jetpack! The Martin jet pack can, in theory, fly an average-sized pilot about 30 miles in 30 minutes on a full 5-gallon (19-litre) tank of petrol. (BBC) A mighty dorky-looking and range-limited jetpack, but hey. The 21st century owes us jetpacks, and it’s a start.
On being Canadian
Some random quotes on Canadianness… Quotation of the Day for June 22, 2008 “Canadians and Americans are indistinguishable. The only way to tell them apart is to make this statement to a Canadian.” – Alan Abel, American, writer for the (Canadian) National Post, quoting (he believes) from “Canajan Eh?” which he read back in the […]
Ripple (in memory of Jerry Garcia)
The summer Jerry Garcia died, I was working at a daycamp in a conservation area outside Stouffville. Once each session some of the kids slept over at camp. I was in charge of organizing and supervising these little adventures, which was a blast but also exhausting since — as it was a daycamp — the […]
When you consider something like death
Quotation of the Day for April 7, 2008 “When you consider something like death, after which (there being no news flash to the contrary) we may well go out like a candle flame, then it probably doesn’t matter if we try too hard, are awkward sometimes, care for one another too deeply, are excessively curious […]
If you haven’t already–
Go give iTunes and Joss your $5.97:
Dusk, defined
Dusk, defined Originally uploaded by morecoffeeplease. I was amused by these signs (there was more than one of them) in a North Vancouver park’s parking lot. Since they’ve told us the gate will be locked at 9pm, both bullet points are entirely superfluous. Informative, though.
A snorkel, a bucket, a kid, an afternoon
A snorkel, a bucket, a kid Originally uploaded by morecoffeeplease. It’s just a bucket. There’s nothing in there to keep one’s attention for hours and hours on several successive days. Or so I would have thought. Kids are so strange.
Progress!
Day 2: West wall Originally uploaded by morecoffeeplease. We apparently made the appropriate obeisances to the kitchen gods, because some otherwise massively overbooked installers — they are all massively overbooked, it seems — had a cancellation and were able to take on our kitchen immediately. (Pause here for heavenly chorus accompanied by trumpets and fireworks) […]
Of record collections and cabinetry
Quotation of the Day for June 30, 2008 “It’s no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently or if your favorite films wouldn’t even speak to each other if they met at a party.” – Nick Hornby Back a million years ago when my record collection kept to […]
Larval kitchen
Kitchens, at least, ours, have a larval form, in which they appear in vast numbers (159, to be exact) of bags and boxes:
Can’t get much shorter than that without LOLspeak
LIT 101 CLASS IN THREE LINES OR LESS. 1984 WINSTON: Don’t tell the Party, but sex is way better than totalitarianism. EVERYONE: Surprise! We’re the Party. WINSTON: Oh, rats. They’re all pretty good — I’ll only quote the one, but The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Paradise Lost are also excellent.
What can evolution tell us about one-night stands?
According to the BBC and a bunch of other coverage of a study published in Human Nature, it tells us that women aren’t as likely as are men to enjoy a one-night stand: Just under half of women who answered the internet poll, published in the journal “Human Nature”, said they felt it had been […]
Peter Pan
Peter Pan Originally uploaded by morecoffeeplease. M’s first dance recital. We were a little nervous, since she hadn’t done such a thing before and only recently ceased bursting into tears at the sight of large crowds, but she did excellently as a “Lost Kid”. Costumes! Makeup (which I had to go buy, as I don’t […]
Cool wand!
(via the lovely Melle) A GenX call to arms against Millenials. One need look no further than the local newsstand to see the favoritism the Millennials have received. Whereas Generation X was routinely denigrated by the press, the Millennials have been compared to World War II’s Greatest Generation. In Robert Strauss and Neil Howe’s Millennials […]
That’s how the light gets in
I took my dad to the Leonard Cohen concert on Sunday. Ah, Leonard. My officemate flew to Halifax a few weeks ago to see him, and before she left the two of us attempted to explain this mild insanity to a Romanian colleague: Romanian colleague: So this guy’s in his seventies? Us: Yeah. RC: And […]