My recent favourite from the CBC news comments

From the comments on this story: Pride House: Safe Haven at the Games. CBC Comments: Be All The Gay You Want. (tm)

Seriously, I think this hilarious comment aside, do people just have a button they press that generates their comment for them, something like "blah blah my tax dollars blah blah"? Like Ignorant News Site Commenter Mad Libs? ALSO: Why do these people even READ CBC News? Shouldn't they be reading, I don't know, the Redneck Times? (I was going to write the name of a real newspaper, say a local one known for its redneck readership, but I decided to take the high road and avoid potential lawsuits. So just pretend I wrote... well, you know.)

I'm offended that my tax dollars are constantly spent on junk mail about family values and environmental action plans that involve BURYING POLLUTION UNDERGROUND. I should leave an articulate comment on a news site, that is sure to bring about the change I want to see in the world. That, or write a blog post.

Sometimes i love science

CBC News - Fist bump can pound out flu transmission

it IS civilized to queue.

Banned in Beijing: a really interesting list of things China is banning/doing to get ready for the Olympics. Some of them are downright absurd, like this:

"The Chinese have been known to elbow their way into stores and onto buses, instead of lining up. But last year, city officials launched a 'civilized behaviour' campaign to teach Beijing's 15 million people to form a queue.

The 11th of every month - picked because the two digits in the number 11 resemble two people lining up - has been designated a Queuing Day, during which time thousands of volunteers flood Beijing's streets to help residents practise lining up.

The campaign slogan reminds people that 'It's civilized to queue, it's glorious to be polite.'"

And some of them are actually quite sad, like the street team eliminating bad English on signs. I think Westerners LOVE bad English--it makes us feel amused, and superior.

in which I perpetuate the liberal media bias

I'm really proud that abortion rights activist Dr. Henry Morgentaler has been given the Order of Canada. Yay Canada. Now let's make some smart copyright-related decisions, shall we?

My favourite thing that happened yesterday

Government buffing Prentice's Wikipedia entry via kwout

It made me laugh, and by "laugh," I mean, "snort derisively." Don't these people understand the Internet? Don't they know they will be caught, and punished, or at least, ridiculed? Wikipedia's vengeance is swift.

Also, I discovered this service, kwout, that lets you take these kind of pretty screenshots and add them to your blog. I would have just "kwouted" something from my own blog, and then added it to my blog, but that seems a little pointless, even for me.

Kids today

Handy "information" about today's youth, from McSweeney's: Youth Culture Findings.

Also, CBC News reports Texas man trying to cash $360-billion cheque arrested. My favourite part goes, "In addition to forgery, Fuller has been charged with unlawfully carrying a weapon and possessing marijuana."

Although my glasses and my nerdiness are linked

Nerdiness not linked to glasses, study says! Thanks, Science!

Unforseen advantages; also, the environmental sustainability of drug users

An Alderman in Chicago is trying to convince the city council to ban tiny plastic bags used for selling drugs. The Health Committee chairman adds, ""We need to use every measure that we possibly can to stop [drug addiction] because it is destroying our kids." I admire the "thinking outside the box" that clearly went on here, but there remains one fundamental problem:

1. This will not, in any way, prevent drug dealers from selling drugs.

HOWEVER, this could still be an advantage as it might encourage drug dealers to use more environmentally friendly means to distribute their products. After all, plastic never disintegrates, and I bet the majority of crack cocaine addicts aren't recycling theirs (and indeed, may not even know what day to put out their recycling for curbside pick-up). This could be an opportunity for some creative re-use, or at least use of more sustainable materials! Possible alternatives to tiny plastic bags: packets made of aluminum foil or paper; the little plastic cases that those tiny memory chips for digital cameras come in; small Tupperware containers (these could be re-used as they are dishwasher-safe); tiny sachets made from salvaged industrial fabric (once emptied of heroin, these could be filled with potpourri and used as drawer/closet fresheners!); film cannisters.

Think about it.
I am filing this one under: "Great ideas."

I have a case of the Mondays

I know I should be suspicious of google, especially since they now own pretty much all the information in the world, including the archives of this blog + my personal e-mail, but it's hard to be mean about a company that just announced free phone numbers and voicemail for homeless people in San Francisco.

Ya know? They're undermining my corporate rage.

sometimes (read: every day) the news just makes me depressed

Holy Moley: There have been four school shootings in the States in the past week.

In another news link pilfered from jezebel, a female Kansas basketball ref was not allowed to referee a boys' game. Because she's a woman. "That would be putting a woman in a position of authority over boys, [her officiating partner] was told — a scenario that was contrary to beliefs at St. Mary’s Academy." Uh huh.

You know what's contrary to my beliefs? Stupid-ass policies like that.

This cheered me up by 5% though: Business coalition opposes harsh copyright reform. They're just doing it because they're cpaitalists, but I'll take what I can get.

What's up with today, today? I feel like I haven't slept in a week. Bottles of water can only do so much, you know? I need it to be the weekend, so I can go to IKEA and the farmer's market. Plus, I can only sleep on Fridays and Saturdays, so I look forward to that all week.

OH NOES!

Lol. In the continuing writers' strike, American network CBS is buying the rights to the Canadian cop show Flashpoint. That's hilarious. You know they're getting desperate when they start having to buy Canadian TV. I'm pretty patriotic, but Canadian TV is dismal. Except, apparently, Degrassi (which I've never seen but I know a whole generation of Canadians are pretty attached to).

Some news that hurts my heart

To follow up on earlier reports about His Dark Materials, it has now been banned indefinitely by the Halton Catholic School Board. This is the first time a book has ever been banned in the board. And--this is my favourite part--"The three titles will not be made available to students upon request and will be 'stored at the central board office for the time being.'" Better pile them up--it's easier to burn them that way.

(Actually, I learned from Matthew Battles' Library: An Unquiet History that books don't burn as well as you might think--they're too dense. So instead of piling them randomly, they should probably be stacked in a kind of house-of-cards structure, with the pages splayed apart for maximum oxygen exposure. Maybe if I have time later I'll build an example out of MY books and post pictures online for reference. Probably not, though, since that would go against pretty much everything I believe about the world.)

To quote the article linked above:

"The trouble is that all too often in human history, churches and priesthoods have set themselves up to rule people's lives in the name of some invisible god (and they're all invisible, because they don't exist) -- and done terrible damage," Pullman writes on his website.

"In the name of their god, they have burned, hanged, tortured, maimed, robbed, violated, and enslaved millions of their fellow creatures, and done so with the happy conviction that they were doing the will of God, and they would go to Heaven for it."

I'm not claiming to have a monopoly on the interpretation of this book or any other, but I think this is the crux of the issue: Philip Pullman may be an atheist, but I don't think his books are actually about religion at all, they're about the dysfunction that can result from letting religion (or any other social force) drive us to be intolerant or hateful or controlling of other people. His books are about the corruption of power, and I think the fact that it's religious power is almost incidential. I don't think books should ever be banned, but it's worse when a book is banned based on what (I think) is a misinterpretation of its message. I promise not to go on about this endlessly, but I do think we have to remember that we don't live in a world without censorship, and we can't afford to grow complacent about what we are allowed to read.

The end. I'm going to immediately change the subject.

Earlier: And not all Christians do

Because WETNESS is the essence of BEAUTY.

One of my biggest advertising pet peeves is the completely fake science that is always used in ads for moisturizers, shampoos, etc. (Or I should say, it used to be one of my greatest advertising pet peeves, until I stopped watching TV more than a year ago! I'M FREE!) They show these totally hokey "diagrams" of the "cells" being "regenerated," but the whole schtick has about as much scientific accuracy as any other cartoon you see on TV. I buy shampoo and moisturizer based on the same criteria as everyone else: 1. does it make my hair/skin look OK? 2. does it smell like something delicious that you would want to eat? I don't want my decision-making clouded by false or irrelevant information. So I was happy to read this article in the UK's Times: "Skin cream science is branded as ‘waffle’".

Leading cosmetics companies are making claims about the rejuvenating properties of their best-selling products that are scientifically incomprehensible and insult customers’ intelligence, pharmacists say.

Debunking fake advertising science: Hot. Using the word "Waffle" in a headline: even hotter.

Also from the "ridiculous advertising campaigns" department, anti-fur organizations are warning consumers that major retailers are incorrectly labeling real fur as 'faux.' This is not only sneaky and ironic, it's also illegal. Oh, and stupid. So, just to recap: Sneaky, ironic, illegal, and stupid.

Links I stole from BoingBoing

From the Wacky News desk: Homeless man found living in elaborate underground home. This guy dug a 200-square-foot underground residence beneath Fresno. I can't even begin to explain to you how awesome that is. There is a slideshow of pictures.

According to Metafilter, the woman who does the announcements on the London Undergound has been fired for her blog in which she made up snarky fake Tube announcements. (Thanks to the news furor around this, the website is temporarily unavailable--bandwidth issues no doubt.) I like "Passengers are reminded that a smile is actually a friendship signal and not a sign of weakness," personally.

Morning work schedule.

Every morning, I have to read the education-related news and send some of it out to my colleagues (if it's related to the work our branch does, which is technology stuff). This is called "environmental scanning" since "morning news checking and reading and sending" sounds silly. This means that approximately 3.5 times a week on average, I read an editorial about how ALBERTA TEACHERS ARE AN EXPLOITATIVE, WHINY BURDEN ON TAXPAYERS and THEY ONLY WORK 50 HOURS A YEAR and THEY ALREADY GET PAID MORE THAN EVERYONE ELSE IN THE WORLD and TEACHING CHILDREN IS EASY DON'T YOU KNOW THAT and YOU KNOW WHAT'S EVEN WORSE THAN UNIONS? TEACHERS' UNIONS! and so on in the EDMONTON SUN. And then I spend the next ten minutes fuming at my desk and WRITING THINGS IN ALL-CAPS.

No job should make you read the Edmonton Sun. It's inhumane. It is an affront to my liberal democratic values and a painful reminder that the province where I live is not the place I imagine it to be.

In fact, since Metro came to Edmonton (one of those free daily papers that is funded by advertising and contains news items such as "PARIS HILTON LIKES KITTENS, SAYS INSIDE SOURCE"), the Edmonton Sun has been giving out free papers downtown as an effort to compete, I think, and gain new readers. Except these attempts always backfire with me. Not only will I not read the Edmonton Sun for free, I would not read it if THEY PAID ME $5. I would read it for $10 though, I'm not crazy. But then I would make fun of it on my blog.

And not all Christians do

I was wondering how long it would take for the kinds of Christians who like to ban books to set their sights on The Golden Compass. And now it's happened, albeit in a Catholic jurisdiction. (Although it hasn't been banned, just temporarily removed from shelves while it's under review.) (As adamantly anti-book-banning as I am, I have to admit that when you're talking about religious schools, the waters get murkier. Although why they bought the book in the first place is a bit of a mystery. But making kids ask librarians for books--like PORN? Why bother?)

It's so ironic that the movie, which apparently dispenses with a lot of the anti-religious material from the series, is what is raising the books' profile enough for them to get banned.

I understand the sentiment behind wanting not to have a book like The Golden Compass in a Catholic school library. What I will never understand is the notion that people (children?) are so flexible and vulnerable in their beliefs that being exposed to something they don't agree with will--what? convert them? cause them to break down in tears? Destroy their lives? Exposure to what we don't believe in helps us to understand what we do believe in. And if a book can change your mind, then maybe you didn't really believe it in the first place. I firmly believe that reading a book that infuriates you is a helpful and illustrative exercise. In fact, there were things about His Dark Materials that infuriated me, but it would never occur to me that because of that, I should try to prevent others from reading it. I guess that's because I'm at ease in the post-modern world.

[PS. I love the part of the article that goes, "Two other books in the trilogy by British author Philip Pullman have also been removed as a precaution." Good move! I think while you're getting rid of the first book, you should also consider the third one, in which humanity declares war on God. Just as a precaution.]

Same bat-channel

Facebook turns its users into endorsers [NY Times]. I'm not sure if this new Facebook advertising scheme is going to be completely evil or, uh, less than completely evil. It launches tonight, so we'll see what happens, one way or the other. I am so, so opposed to the pervasiveness of advertising, and yet I always get almost-won-over by these arguments about it: "We're just telling you about things you will really want to know! It's not advertising if you can use the information!" Well, yes, it is. And yet.

Speaking of things that are less than completely evil, this week I discovered Better World Books, which sells new and used books. You know what I love even more than normal bookstores? Bookstores with carbon-neutral shipping that donate some of their money to literacy non-profits. That's profits for non-profits--I haven't given up on capitalism completely, yet.

Saving the world is tiring. On Thursday, I am going to serve dinner to homeless people at the Mustard Seed Street Church. This is something I don't do very often, and last night I remembered why: because carrying 6 kg each of frozen mixed veggies and perogies, a giant box of Oreo cookies, and a 5-kg toupie ham (plus, to be fair, some groceries for myself) home on the LRT is exhausting and sore-making. I woke up at 6 am, took some Tylenol and turned on my heating pad, and went back to sleep. Then I woke up again at 7:25 and realized I still had to go to work, even if I WAS still tired and in pain. There's nothing worse than waking up, feeling like you want to die, and realizing that no one else cares.

I'm having a crazy day at work. My supervisor is ill, so I seem to be basically running the whole province of Alberta. Fortunately, I am doing a pretty good job, so it's unlikely you'll notice any service disruptions.

From The Onion: 14 American Apparel Models Freed In Daring Midnight Raid

14 American Apparel Models Freed In Daring Midnight Raid | The Onion - America's Finest News Source

"There were girls lying everywhere—draped over furniture, sprawled spread-eagled in the corner, and huddled close like animals," FBI Special Agent Curtis Froman, who oversaw the raid, said at a press conference. "Many of them had been given nothing more than a pair of tube socks or men's briefs to wear."

Ugh!!!

Ghah. US conservatives block cancer vaccine for girls. A vaccine against HPV is blocked in four US states because it could encourage promiscuity. This is definitely how the brains of 17-year-olds work: "Hmmm... before I was waiting to have sex until I was married, because I was afraid of getting human papillomavirus. But now that I've been vaccinated, I'm going to go sleep with the first motorcycle enthusiast I can find. And disrespect my parents!" Just to clarify: these law-makers would rather let women die of cancer than risk sending any remotely pro-sex (or, more accurately, anti-cancer) message.

Sigh. The term "wacky news" is far too flippant to apply to this story. I should make a new tag: "crazy, depressing news."

the world is giving me a headache today:

USDA Backs Production of Rice With Human Genes. [From the Washington Post.]

"Ventria has developed three varieties of rice, each endowed with a different human gene that makes the plants produce one of three human proteins. Two of them -- lactoferrin and lysozyme -- are bacteria-fighting compounds found in breast milk and saliva. ...

Deeter said production in plants is far cheaper than other methods, which should help make the therapy affordable in the developing world, where severe diarrhea kills 2 million children each year."