If you’re looking to set yourself apart as a gay-friendly city, you couldn’t do much better that this recent initiative in Montreal. Local Pride organizers have teamed up with the official Tourism Montreal organization and Gay.com to search for “Queer of the Year” in the city:
Submit a video to their site, vote on your favourite queer, and the winner will get $4,000 in prizes — after the five finalists battle it out during Pride Week in Montreal.
Happy birthday, us!
Yes, although the snippet on the side of the blog says that Absurd Intellectual was proudly established in ‘aught-eight, there were really only a couple of late-December posts before the blog really got underway in January. Yes, it was a New Year’s resolution, and I’m proud to have kept it — three to five posts a day, every day, just things that I find interesting and would like to share or comment on.
But what next? That’s partly up to you.
I am soliciting opinions on how best to serve the readers of Absurd Intellectual. What do you like best, here? What could be improved? What should be dropped? I’ve already heard from readers who miss “Cheese of the Week”, so I’m going to get back into that very soon. But what else?
Would you like more videos? Some short stories? Politics? Humour? Celebrity gossip? Music?
How about the design? Sure, we need a logo (we’re working on it), but from a reader’s perspective, would you like bigger pictures? Wider, full-screen videos? More colour? Different colours?
Is commenting easy? Too difficult? Too hard to get a conversation going?
I’m toying with the idea of allowing regular commenters the ability to write posts or suggest content. Would you like more voices on the blog?
Please comment below. Your feedback will have a direct influence on this blog’s direction over the next 12 months. As always, if you’re a first-time commenter, your comment will be held for moderation, but so long as you use the same email address, we’ll trust you forever after that.
And we don’t spam — use a fake email address if you like, I never look at ‘em.
Every comment with constructive criticism that we get below will qualify for a FREE piece of Absurd Intellectual swag. If I know you in real-life, I’ll give it to you (when I get them made). Otherwise, I’ll have to contact you somehow and ask for a mailing address.
No, I don’t know what it is yet — it might be a mix CD, or a pen-with-logo, or maybe even a T-shirt or a hat. Partly, it depends on how many comments I get and therefore how much I can afford. But it will be something real-world. Free. Mailed to you, if you need it. And all you have to is comment.
I laughed — and then I entered. Wired magazine’s “Gadget Lab” blog is running a cute contest. As the world holds its bated breath for the impending release of an Apple tablet-style computer (alleged to be coming soon, but no official word from Apple), Gadget Lab is planning to give one away.
But they’re not going to give it away until next year. To win, all you need to do is predict how many stories Wired.com will publish about the Apple tablet during all of 2010.
I assume that they’ll just do a count of all the stories that mention “Apple tablet”, so that would include rumours and predictions, as well as the inevitable MacWorld coverage, perhaps some technical benchmarks, and all the tangential stuff, too (end-of-year roundups, etc.).
There’s only 365 days in a year, but I could see there being many more stories than that. Frankly, I guessed 1,025 (I was going to pick 1,024, but I figured that was too geeky and risked a tie).
Go here to enter. They don’t say you have to be American — or even North American, so that was nice.
Wired author Evan Ratliff is, as they say, “on the lam.” He has vanished himself:
Starting August 15, I will try to stay hidden for 30 days. Not even my closest friends or my editors will know where I am. I’ll remain in the US and will be online regularly. I will continue to use social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, and I’ll make cell phone calls. I’ll generally stay in the kind of social environment I like to live in (no hiding in a cabin in Montana), and I’ll keep track of my pursuers, searching constantly for news about myself.
There are a couple of caveats (don’t contact his family, don’t physically harm him, etc.) but mostly it sounds like a fun stunt. After all, it’s a pretty common fantasy to just disappear, move, start over … perhaps by faking your own death, as seen in the lengthy feature Ratliff wrote about the subject in Wired:
Perhaps the most infamous recent faked death attempt, that of Indiana money manager Marcus Schrenker, involved a plan equally daring and bizarre. Accused of financial mismanagement, Schrenker, an amateur pilot, climbed into his Piper single-engine and set a flight plan for Destin, Florida. Flying over northern Alabama at 24,000 feet, he made a sequence of increasingly desperate radio calls to the nearest control tower, announcing that he had run into turbulence; that his “windshield was spider-cracking”; that the shattered glass had cut his neck; that he was “bleeding profusely” and “graying out.” He then pointed the autopilot toward the Gulf of Mexico and bailed out with a parachute over Harpersville, Alabama. After landing, he made his way to a motorcycle he had stashed at a local self-storage unit.
Unfortunately for Schrenker, when two Navy F-15 pilots caught up with the still-airborne Piper, they noted that the plane was in fine shape — except for the open pilot’s side door and empty cockpit.
When I read about Ratliff going on the lam — and basically crowdsourcing any attempt to find him by publicizing it in the magazine, I immediately remembered the start of the Graham Greene novel “Brighton Rock.” In it, a character named Hale is employed by a British newspaper to wander around seaside resort towns, hiding business cards that are worth ten shillings if people return them to the paper. And, if they’re the first to stop and challenge him (his location, schedule and description, including his distinctive hat, are published daily in the paper) they’re entitled to the big prize of ten guineas.
It’s based on a real circulation promotion done by British newspapers for years, known as Lobby Lud, after the first one, or Chalkie White, after a recent one.
They work in a similar way to the hunt for Evan Ratliff: find him before Sept. 15, take his picture, and say the password: “Fluke”. You’ll get a code-word in response that you can email to his editor in exchange for the prize and an interview with the magazine.
Sounds like a blast!
And, honestly, sounds like a circulation promotion that newspapers could revive, especially here in North America. Why not send a reporter to a different place every, say, Saturday? Posing as a tourist, they could get plenty of info about a small town or neighbourhood — certainly enough to write a feature-style piece on it. Quotes over the phone and photos can be obtained later in the week. The piece can run in the next Saturday’s paper, along with info about that day’s targeted location.
