A flashback from 1973 

It's that time of year again - ritual squash mutilation... 

Ebert vs Black

From an email exchange of Roger Ebert and Conrad Black:

"In the light of these facts, and the many kindnesses David Radler and I showered on you, your proletarian posturing on behalf of those threatening to strike the Sun-Times and your base ingratitude are very tiresome."

"Dear Conrad,
One of the things I have always admired about you, and that sets you aside from the general run of proprietors, is that you so articulately and amusingly say exactly what is on your mind."

The Republican Outline for Election Day :: Tilting at Windmills

Alarmingly credible post on the consequences of Republican skullduggery and election day malfeasance. It seems very 19th century - like a return to rotten boroughs and vote-payments. There was an interesting series of passages in a book by David Liss I read over the summer - A Spectacle of Corruption of Paper - about the manipulation of voters in 1720s England that mirror this. Depressing really, especially when you think of the UN sending teams of election officials (mostly Americans) to other countries to inspect and certify their elections. Makes you wonder about whether the US would pass muster.

Slate.com had a thorough article on the failure of electronic voting machines, as well as the Nation and a host of blogs.

Jules Verne's nursery :: The Star

Inco grows 50,000 subterranean seedlings a season of red pine and jack pine more than a kilometre down the 2.3-kilometre mine shaft... After three months of germination, the 5-inch pellets and seedlings are then brought up to the surface and planted on and around Inco property to fulfill its obligation to re-claim the barren land after years of wear and tear from mining, smelting and refining. Another 200,000 seedlings are also grown annually in the greenhouse operated year-round at Copper Cliff.

...It turns out that a steamy mine is a perfect environment for tree growing. For starters there's a constant humidity and geothermal heat of 25C year-round. "The underground nursery works because there is an ambient rock temperature, it's warm and you don't have to heat a greenhouse in cold weather in Sudbury. And it makes good sense because the facility is available so there's no added cost at Creighton," explains Taylor.

Fertilizer, electricity and water are pumped in at minimal cost compared to the expense of heating a regular greenhouse through the sub-zero winters, he says. The underground forest of baby trees is Y-shaped and fairly narrow at 10 feet wide and 600 feet long with fertilizer and water storage tanks at the wide end. It needs 2,000 litres of both water and fertilizer per day, so the tanks are on timers. To get things going it requires 30 1,000-watt light bulbs to give it the artificial effect of sunlight, which stay on 24 hours a day the first week, then 18 on and 6 off for three weeks and then 12 on and off — just like outdoors — the rest of the time.

Believe :: The Gadflyer

The piece speaks for itself - of course, I'm not American, so it doesn't effect me.

Cartoon Tennis Heroes!

That certainly calls for a Bam! Ka-Pow! BOOM!

A useful push service :: maisonneuve's MediaScout

If you're interested in Canadian news or rather a Canadian-centric view of the world news, sign up for MediaScout - a very useful service that collects and analyzes the top headlines from the big 6 news sources and evaluates their differing spins on major issues of the day.

Toronto Outdoor Rink Open Schedule

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished.

So parent's church is sending a container of items for a Grenada Relief Project (after Hurricane Ivan hit the island this autumn, about two-thirds of Grenada's 90,000 people have been left without shelter). See: http://www.grenadaemergency.com/photo.html orhttp://www.spiceisland.info/ or http://www.hvuc.ca/#grenada for details.
Among the items requested are:
* Cotton shirts - short sleeves, cotton tee or golf shirts
* Jeans - outgrown, used.
* Shoes - athletic styles. * All sizes welcome.
My parents thought that it was likely I could donate some of this. When they mentioned it, I figured that most of my sports playing friends have excess T-shirts lying around (hell, I still have some ofsaa '92 shirts in my closet) - so I emailed / phoned around, and collected roughly three carloads of used clothes.

Anyway, so having running around the city for a couple days, people donated roughly three carloads of clothing. Which is great.

What isn't so great is that my car was broken into as someone thought the fullbags and boxes contained something valuable. That said, they didn't consider the used clothes to be too valuable, so they dumped them all on the sidewalk, meaning that the donations will still end up going to Grenada, but still... Anyway, it turns out that most of the window repair places are closed on weekends (which seems asinine to me, but what do I know about business practices?) and the repair will be >$100 - or roughly $100 more than the thief obtained from their "smash and grab." Jackass.

Why the US Spends so Much on Drugs :: The New Yorker

Or - who's really to blame? The drug companies, the doctors, the HMOs, the patients, patent law or our perceptions?

Best QA ever? :: collision detection

And see here for more details. Alas, I'm posting from work again.

View from the Track and Tower hiking trail in Algonquin, Oct. 2004 

collision detection: Whales can't sue

This is one of the best blogs on the net - and here's why - an article about whales suing GWB and Donald Rumsfield.

Awesome, although apparently dismissed.

How to Disappear

Cool article.

John Stewart on Crossfire

John Stewart takes Tucker Carlson and the other guy on Crossfire out to the woodshed and kicks their ass on what their role is regarding the public discourse.

What Nash did on summer vacation

Ah, sports interviews. Always amusing. Here's a pro athlete who publicly condemned the Iraq invasion and what do you ask him about?

SI.com: A lot of players seem to chew gum on the court. Do you?
SN: I don't chew gum.
SI.com: Why not?
SN: You don't get to swallow it. It's kind of a waste of time.
SI.com: Solid reasoning.

The Greatest Travesty :: andrewcoyne.com

Usually I find Andrew Coyne annoyingly neo-conservative and condescending, but I think his column today is dead-on - so much so that I can't help but quote from it as he put it better than I could: http://andrewcoyne.com/archives/003948.php

It is a travesty of our past the CBC is offering us: a celebration of ignorance, a salute to mediocrity. Search in vain for our greatest names: for George Brown, the man who, more than any other -- yes, even Macdonald -- was responsible for Confederation; for Champlain and Frontenac and d’Iberville, for Baldwin and La Fontaine, for D’Arcy McGee and George-Étienne Cartier, for Clifford Sifton and C. D. Howe. Apparently there wasn’t room: not if it meant leaving off William Shatner, or “Winnipeg radio personality” Hal Anderson, or Mary Maxwell, wife of the founder of the Bahá’i faith.

I know, I know. We’re trying to make history fresh, get the kids interested. “Forget musty textbooks about the fur trade,” the CBC website burbles, “or droning lectures about the FLQ crisis. The Greatest Canadian makes Canadian history come alive and learning fun.” But what, in fact, are they learning? That Canada, in effect, has no history, that everything happened at the same time, that all achievements are of equal weight and all opinions of equal value.

Canadian history does not need to be made “fun.” The exploration, conquest and development of Canada is one of the greatest stories ever told, a tale of heroism and adventure, full of rude, passionate, and sometimes violent individuals with an extraordinary appetite for life. If, in the service of a particular ideology, it has been reduced to an orderly series of public works projects, that is hardly remedied by turning it into a parody of Canadian Idol.

A final point: How can this be said to represent the nation’s choice of “Greatest Canadian” when it isn’t even being shown in French?

The Minesing Swamp 

Canadian Canoe Routes :: Ferris Buller Technique

Self-explanatory, but entertaining views on escaping the cubicle for canoe.