BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Floyd inflatable pig is recovered: “Floyd inflatable pig is recovered”
Seems Roger’s pig got the urge to fly off, but it’s been returned. Not quite intact, however.
At last: a chance to re-use my photo of Roger’s inflatable pig from Calgary in June…
Get out of the road if you want to grow old.
Bay of Fundy Blog: “Fundy fossil takes a walk….”
Terri has a story about Dr. Laing Ferguson’s Arthropleura fossil — whose tracks adorned the walls of what was then called PEG when I worked there in the mid-1990s — going home to Joggins.
CBC News | “Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke dies at 90″
Clarke will be best-remembered for 2001: A Space Odyssey, based on his short-story The Sentinel, but he wasn’t just a writer of science fiction; he also wrote many science articles and invented something called the satellite. Yes, the geo-stationary orbiting kind that makes television and modern meteorology possible. Not too shabby. He was also an early adopter of technology, using something called electronic mail to correspond from Sri Lanka with 2010: Odyssey Two director Peter Hyams in the early 1980s.
CBC News | “English Patient director Anthony Minghella dies after surgery”
Minghella, director of Cold Mountain, Jim Henson’s The Storyteller and, of course, The English Patient, was 54.
Two eras come to a close.
Evangelist takes credit for film crackdown: “A well-known evangelical crusader is claiming credit for the federal government’s move to deny tax credits to TV and film productions that contain graphic sex and violence or other offensive content.”
Televangelists like Charles McVety qualify as offensive content, don’t they? I wouldn’t dream of censoring them, though: they have every right to be offensive.
This is more nonsense from the people that brought us moral indignation and outrage as their best response to jazz in the 1930s, Elvis’ pelvic gyrations in the 1950s, and purple Teletubbies in the 1990s.
McVety goes on to say:
It’s fitting with conservative values, and I think that’s why Canadians voted for a Conservative government.
Please. If Canadians had voted for a Conservative government, Liberals, NDP and Bloq members wouldn’t out-number Tories in Parliament, would they? In fact, more than 63% of Canadians didn’t vote for the Conservatives in 2006, so it might be more accurate to say that most Canadians don’t value Conservatives…
What the federal election results from 2006 showed was that Canadians didn’t want a repeat of the Chrétien government’s Québec-referendum advertising scandal (and, by extension, Paul Martin).
If McVety’s radical evangelical agenda actually reflected Canadians’ wishes we wouldn’t have Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day and Justice Minister Rob Nicholson going to such lengths to distance themselves from McVety, who represents exactly what so many Canadians expected from the Reform Alliance Progressive Conservative Party of Canada.
Parents are more than smart enough decide for themselves when to turn off their TVs, or whether to bring their children to see films like Young People Fucking. They certainly don’t need self-appointed moral authorities like McVety and their delicate sensibilities to tell them what they should — and what they shouldn’t be allowed — to think.
Update: March 4, 2008
As a follow-up, this appeared on Canada.com today:
No censorship threat in Bill C-10: Verner: “‘We are far from censorship here. We are just putting forward an intention from our government and (from) the former Liberal government just to make sure that we will take fiscal measure to make sure that the Canadian taxpayers’ money won’t fund extreme violence, child pornography or something like that,’ Verner said at a press conference.”
Of course, there’s no need to address these issues with Bill C-10; there’s existing legislation for that. So why do we need the changes to the tax rebate structure introduced by C-10?
Further, when asked if C-10 was influenced by McVety, Minister Verner issued the following non-denial:
I never met with that guy and there’s no meeting scheduled in my agenda…
which says precisely nothing about McVety’s influence.
From the Daring Fireball post on Wired’s story on 37signals:
Long profile by Andrew Park in the March issue. Pretty good overall, but there’s an awful lot of ginned-up conflict. E.g. the last paragraph contains the sentence: ‘Call it arrogance or idealism, but they would rather fail than adapt,’ and suggests they’re somehow losing customers due to their emphasis on simplicity above all else.”
Doesn’t seem so “ginned-up” from here. Count me among the lost customers.
37signals have earned their success. They get an awful lot right in their apps, from lack of data lock-in to an admirable overall level of intuitiveness.
So why have I given up on them after trying to use Basecamp for nearly 3 years?
A big reason would be that “vetoing customer requests” is standard operating procedure at 37signals. Don’t take my word for it: it says so on page 62 of Getting Real:
Don’t worry about tracking and saving each request that comes in. Let your customers be your memory. If it’s really worth remembering, they’ll remind you until you can’t forget.
Or until they go away because they have better things to do.
It’s fine with me that DHH would say “fuck you” to this, but he doesn’t get to do that and have my money.
For people looking for something, um, less simple than Basecamp (on Mac OS X) take a look at OmniPlan, recently upgraded to version 1.5.
RickMercer: Science: 21st century menace: in which Rick Mercer speaks truth…
The Street: “Mac Owners Are Snobs”
So, according to this article,
Mac owners are more likely:
- to be perfectionists
- to use notebooks
- to use teeth whitening products
- to drive station wagons
- to pay for downloaded music
- to go to Starbucks
- care about “green” products and the environment
- to own a hybrid car
- and last but not least … to buy 5 pairs of sneakers in a year
So there.
(Via TUAW.)
Hand-wringing About American Culture - Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge?: —New York Times
…she first got the idea for this book back in 2001, on 9/11.
Walking home to her Upper East Side apartment, she said, overwhelmed and confused, she stopped at a bar. As she sipped her bloody mary, she quietly listened to two men, neatly dressed in suits. For a second she thought they were going to compare that day’s horrifying attack to the Japanese bombing in 1941 that blew America into World War II:
‘This is just like Pearl Harbor,’ one of the men said.
The other asked, ‘What is Pearl Harbor?’
‘That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the Vietnam War,’ the first man replied.”
That’s chilling.
(Via Digg.)
5min - Penn & Teller: How to Do the Saw Trick - Video: breaking the magician’s code.
