Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens is the modern day Voltaire.  Check him out.

Avi Lewis: ass

I can't believe Avi Lewis is taken seriously. Here he makes a fool of himself interviewing Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Face it, Avi, you're simply ... out in left field: Islamists are a bigger problem than America. And if you take your head out of your ass, you'll realise that America is not what is wrong with the world.

liberals, pork

Liberals eat more pork than Convervatives and NDPers, apparently.  Interesting, the article shies away from the party members' religious affiliations or lifestyle choices.  Maybe those weren't deemed to be statistically significant.  Are the number of vegetarians who are on the left, and the number of orthodox Jews and devout Muslims on the right not a factor?  I ask the question.

Iraq wins Asian Cup

Sectarian violence in Iraq is not inevitable: the Iraqi national soccer team won the Asian Cup this weekend. The team is composed of Shias, Sunnis, Arabs and Kurds. Under Saddam's rule, this team would have been tortured by Saddam Hussein's son Uday should they have produced unsatisfactory performances. There is no way the team would have competed successfully under Saddam's rule. Now, when Iraq is one of the most unstable nations in the world, they won it all. FIFA President Sepp Blatter praised the players on Saturday.

perspective, scale

This is a cool, nerdy and old video. I'm the only nerd who had not seen it until now.

quality goods

I don't want to pick on Chinese companies exclusively, but this post makes me worried.  Sane, accountable, transparent and enforced government regulations save lives: this doesn't seem to be working in China right now.

death of a blog....

... birth of another. I've had the domain for a while now and, being the stubborn, dogmatic person I am, refused to look at canned solutions for blog/CMS/publishing software. I thought I'd design and implement my own to be able to cut my teeth on the latest and greatest web technologies. Well, after reading up on the latest web programming frameworks, i.e. waffling, I've finally uploaded Wordpress. It took me literally 15 minutes to figure out how it works, install it and import all my blogger posts.

creepy

This creeps me out. I don't want to be uncritically anti-Chinese products, but there's some serious accountability problems going on over there. Needless to say, I don't think it's just Chinese products that we need to worry about. I don't drink water from local streams, so I guess I should be skeptical about ALL products. Thanks to this article, I am now paranoid.

e-waste

Today, I think one of the grossest environmental problems is the amount of electronic gadgets we dump into landfills. That stuff is nasty: electronics are full of lead, mercury and other toxic substances. This week's Technology Quarterly in the Globe (how boring am I) is all about the "greening" of the information technology industry. Very substantially, the issue largely avoids the oh so tired flower-power politics of the environment and instead focuses on health, energy saving and the financial benefits of going green.

Anyway, if you're looking to get rid of e-quipment without poisoning land and water for future generations here are some urls for recycling your computer.

www.hp.ca/recycle
www.dell.com/assetrecovery
www.apple.com/environment
www.rebootcanada.ca
www.littlegeeks.org

martyloo

The martyloo.com domain was silently dropped from blogger.com 2 minutes ago (intentionally) and will be used for other purposes... This blog is simply reverting back to http://martyloo.blogspot.com. If you didn't even know I was in possession of martyloo.com, don't worry about it.

fat idiot

It's amazing how some people are taken seriously despite being complete morons: people like Moqtada "Eric Cartman of Iraq" Sadr do not give me hope for peace in the middle east.

kids and guns

Laugh before you cry:
Never mind the gun: it should be a crime to name your kid Bubba.

NYC

I went to New York City last weekend with Lemon. We had a blast. The weather was beautiful, we saw an excellent play (Talk Radio), we went to the Museum of Natural History. We also went to the Museaum of the City of New York where we saw an exhibit on Robert Moses, and another on the Spanish civil war. We walked around a lot: Central Park, Tribeca, the lower east side, the upper west side, Little Italy, Chinatown. We saw a public debate at the New York Public Library between Al Sharpton and Christopher Hitchens. The topic was "God Is Not Great", the title of Hitchens' new book. Sharpton was lame while Hitchens was his usual sarcastic and contrarian self... We did a harbour tour, passed by Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. We also watched HBO live, went to a comedy club, had a few drinks, and I met some co-workers I'd only called, e-mailed or IM'ed.

élections présidentielles

Participation has reached exceptional levels: French peeps are voting en masse for the presidential elections.

Yesterday, I cast my vote and the lineup was insane. I waited an hour and a half to vote. A lady ahead of me in line had her 2 kids with her. This was not a walk in the park: the 4 year old was getting cranky and she breastfed the 6 month old on site in order not lose her spot. That's patriotism.

not the brightest solution

When Lemon pointed out to me that Ontario was banning incandescent light bulbs, I was wondering what our provincial government was smoking. I thought the city's "upgrade your toilet" campaign was weird, but it was voluntary and sort of made sense.

I think I know why this bulb thing is going down.

It has become impossible for politicians to even suggest that electricity should stop being subsidized at current levels. Everyone knows that we're all paying substantially less for electricity than what it really costs: why would we change our consumption habits or buy new technology to limit it? This, despite the August 2003 blackout.

Faced with a difficult political dilemma, what does our government do? Brainwash us and outlaw perfectly good technology. This is completely backwards and idiotic. What they should do is make people pay more for what they use, and let economizing technologies take hold. No brainwashing, no guilt trips, no wasted advertising money.

90 years ago...

Whoever thinks Canada has a history of neutrality and international impotence, check yourself. Today marks the 90th anniversary of the battle of Vimy Ridge, considered to be a turning point in WWI and Canadian history. After that event, the international community looked at Canada in a different light. The Canadian National Vimy Memorial is very eerie and beautiful. It's located in France on the site of the former battle field, and it is officially Canadian territory. The mortar shells have so warped the soil that it now looks like huge grassy mogul hills.

hijab

Recently, a Muslim girl was ejected from a soccer match because she was playing with her hijab. I'm not a fan of the hijab, but preventing hijab wearing girls from playing a sport seems excessive. Many Muslim (and non-muslim) parents take strong issue with their girls playing any sport at all: I think the fact that she's playing, with or without a hijab, is something to be encouraged. The hijab doesn't put any of the other players in danger, which was the rationale for the FIFA anti-headgear rule. I'm not sure if I still agree with the anti-hijab ruling in schools in France.

civet coffee

I bought a paper copy of the Globe and Mail last week. All I really wanted was the Dell advertisement to hopefully get a discount code on a computer for my parents. That didn't work out and today, as a sad consolation, I flipped through Report On Business Magazine. A short paragraph on Indonesian Kopi Luwak coffee caught my eye. Apparently, this variety of coffee is the most expensive in the world. Its production is rather peculiar...

The process is as follows. Our good old friend the Asian Palm Civet (remember S.A.R.S.?), a beast local to where the coffee is grown, eats coffee berries as part of its natural diet and passes the beans through its digestive tract, excreting them partially digested onto the jungle floor. The beans are gathered by locals who sell them at $600 USD per pound. Available at Pusateri's.

Who said Tim Horton's tastes like shit? Really? What KIND of shit?

Soros

Hypocrisy

muzak

There are 2 songs that never cease to be played in elevators, shops and malls all over Toronto:

"Bad Day" by Daniel Powter
"Closing Time" by Semisonic

I absolutely hate these 2 songs and I wish I would never hear them again. That is, however, an impossibility. Have I put unpleasant sounds into your head? Sorry: go and listen to your favorite music to save yourself from meltdown. If you can't remember the songs (because there's no way you haven't heard them), consider yourself lucky.