So that’s what they think of us

by Grant Hamilton

I stumbled across a radio station in Chicago the other day that is looking at adding a homegrown Canadian CBC show to their mix. They experimented with the new show for a week, and asked their listeners to respond on their blog.

The show is Q, which I listen to semi-regularly, and which I thoroughly enjoy (warts and all) and which enjoyed 15 minutes last year when they had an interview kerfuffle with Billy Bob Thornton:

The radio station experimenting with Q is WBEZ.

On their blog, they’ve attracted about 200 comments so far on the trial. Some are in favour, others are not. Many of the commenters seem to be fairly familiar with other CBC Radio shows, like Definitely Not The Opera and The Vinyl Cafe, too.

Tags: , ,

Now I am even MORE excited for Lost. Two days!

by Amy Breen

One of the things I love about the Internet is how people far more industrious (possibly unemployed?) than me take the time and effort to create the coolest things. Video mash ups, songs, short films; you name it, they make it.

Add in some serious fandom, and you’ve got yourself a viral sensation. I see that happening with this video: a real-time look at the crash of Oceanic flight 815.

Wow. I, just … wow. It’s videos like this that remind me why I love Lost so much: the mystery, the connections, the complicated story lines (yes, I like the complicated story lines). And it was actually kind of thrilling to watch what took four seasons to explore unfold in ten minutes.

I couldn’t be more excited for Tuesday!

(and for a refresher on said connections, check out this link, which shows the off-island connections between the characters)

Tags: , , ,

Now grandpa and grandma are sexting?

by Grant Hamilton

It’s not just the kidlets who are sending naughty text messages to and fro, and perhaps getting into trouble with revealing photographs. The AARP reports that senior citizens are getting into the game, too:

When Roger gets to an intimate stage with a woman these days, it usually doesn’t take long until the sexy photos start. His dating partners either request that he send them a suggestive—or downright explicit—photo from his cell phone to theirs, or they just send one themselves, completely unsolicited.

“I’ll say, ‘You have an amazing body. You have amazing breasts,’” he reports. “The next thing you know, you’ll get a picture of a breast,” he says with a hearty laugh.

Roger’s 59. Not old, really … but certainly not the sexting youngins that you always hear scare-stories about.

As Al Tompkin notes, “the line between amusing and creepy is thin.” He also points out the “how-to” guide that accompanies the AARP article, which offers tips on how to do it — and clean up after.

The pros, obviously, are that older adults need lovin’ too — plus even if it does embarrass them and follow them their whole life (the common warning given to sexting teens), well, seniors just don’t have as much to worry about there.

However, seniors may be less likely to be aware of STDs — and therefore more at risk for AIDS, syphilis, etc.

I’m just going to go out on a limb here, and say that this is yet another area in which our moral outrage hasn’t caught up to technology yet.

Tags:

Pint for a pint: Donate blood, get beer

by Grant Hamilton

When I donate beer, I get some juice and a cookie — and an altruistic feeling. But a blood donor clinic in Washington State has such a good offer, it’s almost worth the drive: donate a pint of blood and they’ll give you a coupon for a pint of beer:

Of course, they make you wait a few hours before you can redeem the coupon, which is obviously a good idea, but you have to think this is good marketing for the pub, too — after all, how many people are going to redeem their free coupon and then just leave? I see a night out being based on the concept of a free beer — which then leads to two or three more beers, and probably a platter of grub, too.

(via Daily Dose)

Tags: ,

A year of school lunches

by Grant Hamilton

My mom made me lunches to take to school in a bag. At the time, I thought they were awful. I mean, she would put milk in a canteen for me, then use the same canteen on other days for soup. I neither wanted milk-flavoured soup, nor soup-flavoured milk.

But at least I never had to eat cafeteria food (ok, sometimes I would buy a pizza pop from the cafeteria, and sometimes I would just buy chips and Coke from the convenience store across the street). The famed “mystery meat” and “sloppy joes” of lore just weren’t part of my experience. Partly, I suppose that’s because I went to relatively small schools in relatively small districts, where kids were encouraged to go home for lunch.

At any rate, it’s a pretty common experience for kids to have to eat famously bad cafeteria lunches. Now, a schoolteacher has vowed to eat those same school cafeteria lunches every day in 2010. It costs her $3 a day — but most of her students get it for free, or subsidized at 40 cents. Now, what could you cook for a few hundred people, with that kind of budget?

She calls the picture above “not a bad lunch.” I applaud her.

Check out her blog, called “Fed Up.”

Tags: ,

Brown cars need love too

by Grant Hamilton

When it comes to single-issue blogs, I don’t think you can get more specific than The Brown Car Blog, where Ben Kraal highlights all things automotive and brown.

And yet, somehow, there’s a wide variety. I liked the thoughtfulness of this post, for example, on the 1967 Plymouth Sport Fury’s badge:

Consider this: this badge was designed by hand. It would have been transferred from a drawing to a mold by a toolmaker, by hand. After each badge was mass-produced, in all likelyhood in a factory entirely owned by Chrysler, it would have been painted and polished by hand. Each badge would be applied to each car by hand and not by some double-sided tape but by actual holes in the panel.

They really don’t make them like they used to.

Or, bathe in the wonder that is the factory interior of a Porsche 928:

I can’t say that a brown car would really be “me” (heck, when I last bought a car, I bought the second-cheapest on the lot) but I truly admire some of the stuff that Kraal finds.

(via Coudal)

Tags: , ,

A beer haiku a day

by Grant Hamilton

Please, visit and ponder the wisdom of BeerHaikuDailly.com:

A bit of advice
If you want to drink all day
You must start early

(via Coudal)

Tags: ,

What the hell is wrong with you?

by T. Keith Edmunds

Yes, this rant is American-centric, but the same sentiment applies to Canadians. Look at our political situation. Look at our media websites.

Look at the article. You’ll see what I mean.

What the hell is wrong with you?

Tags:

2029 - the year we stop aging

by T. Keith Edmunds

It’s like something out of a science fiction novel (Robert J. Sawyer’s Rollback, for example). A team of researchers is working on a human longevity project with the goal of being able to reverse aging in humans by the year 2029.

If this is true — and I have no reason to believe that it is not — and these scientists succeed, the implications are mind-blowing.

First, the project:

After nine years of research and collaboration, a group of entrepreneurs and scientists [...] are disclosing their plan “to start saving up to 100,000 lives lost to aging every day, by 2029.” A Longevity Summit in November 2009 [...] brought together a number of researchers on human aging and longevity for a discussion on the state-of-the-art research, the implications of their discoveries, and round table, cross-disciplinary discussions that may lead to new and accelerated results.

It seems straightforward. Stop and reverse aging in humans. As sci-fi as it seems, it would be easy to pooh-pooh the idea and chalk it up to wishful thinking. But it seems that some are taking the potential seriously.

It’s serious enough that members of the Obama Administration consider it to be one of the major global destabilizing forces of the next 25 years.

I guess so! What about food shortages? Over-population? Disease? Without meaning to sound callous, people aren’t dying fast enough to keep the planet healthy as it is. When we stop an additional 100,000 people from dying every day, we’re talking about some explosive population growth.

On the other hand, I’d like to think that maybe two good things could come out of an extended human life:

1. If we knew we’d be around to see the outcomes of our actions, perhaps we’d take better care of our planet. Maybe we’d recycle more, be more conservative in our water use, take more care with the kinds of products we use — that sort of thing.

2. Space exploration! Now we that have people that can live a long time, maybe we can start shipping them out into the farthest reaches of space and get a real start on colonizing space.

If the potential for radically extending the human life exists, there needs to be some serious discussion from the earliest days of what to do with all the extra people…

Tags: ,

Ladies! Chew your way to bigger boobs

by Grant Hamilton

Oh dear. If you believe that chewing gum (ok, gum with a natural herbal component) can increase your bust size, you may also believe, as its makers claim, that it will also improve your circulation, your hair and skin, and reduce your stress while making you look younger (as well as some nsfw help “down there”).

Yes, B2Up Bust-Up gum will do all of this.

Don’t like gum? The company also offers “F-cup cookies.”

Apparently, they contain an herbal extract from southeast Asia called pueraria mirifica, which mimics estrogen.

(Via the Daily Dose of Common Sense, which advised “Save your money, ladies.” Agreed.)

Tags: , ,

How to do television news

by Grant Hamilton

I find Charlie Booker’s column in the Guardian to be somewhat hit-or-miss, but this send-up of television news reports is full-on hit. (Well, it’s maybe a little long — but so are most television news reports.)

It reminds me of a news story I read in the (I think) New York Times a few years ago, which did the same thing, but in text. Just try Googling it, though. I can’t find it for the life of me.

Tags: , , ,

Open your beer with a railroad spike

by Grant Hamilton

I find the online craft sale Etsy to be hit and miss. But user hammeronsteel, a blacksmith from Massachusetts, is a definite hit. I particularly like the twisted-railroad-spike “churchkeys” to open beer bottles.

I carry a bottle-cap pryer on my keychain (it’s from Sweden — thanks Denise!) but I would love to have a gigantic, threatening-looking one made from an enormous steel nail, maybe hanging from a strip of leather in my garage (I don’t currently have a garage, either).

Best of all is the pointy end, if I happen across a really old-school can that has to be punctured. (The one above has the point bent back for safety, but some of them are left extended. I long to find beer in such a can — I think it’s just tomato and pineapple juices these days.)

Churchkeys with twisty handles are $44, plus shipping (I’m guessing they’re a tad heavy, too). You can also get non-twisty ones for $39. The item descriptions are drool-worthy:

Each of these beer defense tools started off as a railroad spike I found while walking tracks. Years of weather and rust have deeply etched their mark into the material itself. After I bring them back to my shop, I heat them to thousands of degrees, and beat them many times with my hammer. After the final clean-up, all the rust is whisked away, and we’re left with a great tool that has a great history.

On another listing, they are given quite the warranty:

These openers comes with a two-generation guarantee: if they fail for any reason during your life, or the lives of your children, I’ll do what I can to make it right. If it fails for your grandkids, maybe they shouldn’t have tried to take it on interstellar travel.

And, why do I always find such great things a month after I tell people that “I don’t know” what I want for Christmas?

Tags: , , ,

RIP Howard Zinn

by Grant Hamilton

Howard Zinn died of a heart attack, says his daughter. I hope his legacy, “A Peoples’ History of the United States” lives on.

Tags: , ,

Greeting cards for people you don’t actually like that much

by Grant Hamilton

I laughed and laughed and laughed while browsing the selection at MeanCards.com, which means you’ll laugh and laugh and laugh when you give them to people whose feelings you either don’t care that much about, or whose friendship you are really secure in keeping.

At just $3 a card, they’re super affordable, and shipping looks pretty reasonable, too (it tested out to about $5 to Manitoba, so load up a few cards, and it’s comparable to buying Hallmark).

Tags: ,

I like simple desktop backgrounds

by Grant Hamilton

And now I have a repository to download them from. Check out SimpleDesktops.com for a selection of highly usable desktop backgrounds, like the one above

Frankly, I just don’t understand how people can use super-realistic futuristic cars, or hot chicks, or movie stills or whatever as a desktop background. How do you find your icons against such a busy backdrop? I much prefer the simple approach.

Tags: ,

Older posts «