Ouch!

A good reason to not run naked through the school cafeteria.

Number 29

Ken Dryden's number was raised to the rafters last night (in the Bell Centre, which is unfortunate, but what are you gonna do now that the Forum is a second-rate food court).

For the last week, this has been my desktop background. You can download it from this page, along with a bunch of other vintage NHL player wallpapers.

I used to ride my bike to Dryden's big house in Senneville, when I was a kid, stand there and stare at it. Never saw him there though. Not like Guy Lafleur, who lived not too far away, and who you could catch by the house -- maybe standing out front watering the lawn -- but who I was always too shy to talk to. (Even when my family wound up moving next door to him.)

Welcome back Andy

Andy Riga's gone back to blogging. Maybe he can link to this post and we can set up some kind of endless loop. Like when a mass email triggers a couple of autoresponders, and the lucky account holders return from their holidays to find 27,000 messages.

Yeah, that sounds appealing.

What I was trying to say is, go read his blog.

Blue Marlin in the Bay

This monster, one of the largest heavy-lift ships in the world, is sitting near my house, in St. Margarets Bay, loaded down with two oil rigs.











Photo from the Halifax Chronicle-Herald: http://thechronicleherald.ca/Business/553630.html

I can clearly see it out the window, the superstructures of the rigs hundreds of feet in the air. I first noticed it last night, and had no idea what it was. Looked like a couple of steel towers plunked down in the water in front of our small coastal community, all lit up like a downtown.

Keywords

Why is someone at Canada's Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade googling Duff Conacher of Democracy Watch? Just curious.

Department of Irony

Library time is cancelled at my kids' elementary today because of Literacy Day activities.

I know -- they're doing other reading-related stuff. Still, there's a certain irony, non?

Off the horizon

When I wrote the "On the horizon" post below, I had trouble publishing it. Blogger, in its helpful way, said "There were errors." Eventually I got it published -- and just noticed it got posted about five times!

Four of them have been deleted.

It must have looked like I really thought that was one great post.

Oscar time

Congrats to my good friends (and clients) at the NFB on their 69th Oscar nomination. Pretty impressive indeed.

You can watch a clip from the Oscar-nominated film, The Danish Poet, here.

On the horizon

The more I read, the more I wonder just who would want to buy Vista. Downgraded media? More difficulty in using independent security tools? More bloat than ever? Sign me up!

Hurst and Scarrow profile

My profile of Degrassi: The Next Generation writers James Hurst and Shelley Scarrow is online here. (It's a PDF. You'll have to jump down to Page 15 of the document to read it.)

Art Buchwald is dead

Art Buchwald provided my introduction to American politics. I started reading his collections when I was in Grade 6. It was a bit weird, reading weekly satirical columns on events that had happened a decade earlier (when Carter was in power I was reading Buchwald's take on the Six Day War), but I learned a lot. And laughed too. I still have those cheaply bound paperbacks.

A tip of the hat to my old buddy Jason Medhurst, who, for some reason, passed the first of those Buchwald books on to me. I was hooked right away.

A13

If you're a freelance writer, then you know that you've always got to be looking for a fresh story -- or, at the very least, a fresh angle -- to pitch editors. And you'd better come up with a good, attention-grabbing lead to your query and story too.

So it always takes me by surprise when I see the same old stories repeated over and over and over again. There's a good example on Page A13 of Tuesday's Globe and Mail (I'm catching up). In her health column, Dr. Marla Shapiro informs us that eating moderate amounts of dark chocolate may be good for you! Apparently there's a new study on the subject.

Amazing. Now there's something I had never heard before. What's next? A little red wine is good for heart attack prevention? I can't wait to read about that again.

Over to the right of Shapiro, on the same page, poor André Picard really struggles to eke out a lead. The guy's done great work, and everyone can have an off day. Still, I can't resist quoting the lead: "Gunshot wounds and knife injuries are far less common in real life than in the blood-splattered world of TV and movies."

You don't say. I'll bet there aren't as many talking penguins either.

What's the alternative?

Nova Scotia pork producers are in financial trouble, and are threatening to slaughter their animals if they don't get more government support.

I'm sympathetic -- as one farmer said to me, "I'm not looking to get rich, but it would be nice to actually make some money and not just get my ass kicked all the time." But threatening to slaughter your animals? What exactly are the farmers planning to eventually do with those hogs if they do get government support. Raise them as pets?

Knees up!

Got long legs? Tired of being cramped into airline seats? Want to prevent the s0-and-so in front of you from pushing your tray into your crotch?

Knee defenders to the rescue.










"Knee Defender™ helps you stop reclining airplane seatbacks so your knees won't have to.

Unique, patent pending Knee Defender™ is a truly practical travel accessory. And with its new design, this clever product looks cool, too.

It helps you defend the space you need when confronted by a faceless, determined seat recliner who doesn't care how long your legs are or about anything else that might be "back there".

Full product info here.

Silliest trend: denim connoisseurs.

These days, Mauro is extremely fond of "raw" jeans, made from virgin denim that has never been washed or treated. Four to five days a week, he wears a particular pair of raw jeans. He has been wearing them like this for more than three months and won't even dream of washing them till it's been half a year.

Raw denim is really dark blue and stiff when you first put it on, and in the beginning it tends to bleed onto white sneakers and light-colored couches. But after six months of near-constant wear, Mauro says, the jeans will fit him perfectly and will have faded in all the right places. There will be "whiskering" around his crotch and "honeycombing" behind the knees.

"This jean will be unique to me," Mauro says.

"They kind of show your soul, you know?" says a woman who represents a raw jeans brand.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/16/AR2005081601874_3.html

In those days, there was one wash available – no wash – so you bought your jeans raw and broke them in yourself. You see, back then there was no such thing as industrial laundries, seasonal denim trends or innovative wash techniques. Sounds boring but if you look at what washes are popular these days, they are just poor copies of what used to happen naturally to jeans when you wore them in from raw.

Back in the day, when you began to wear a new pair of jeans, the thick and rigid denim would fold and crease with your body, especially in the groin (cat’s whiskers)and at the back of the knees (honeycomb effect). Where they folded and creased they faded, creating a fading pattern totally unique and personal. The jeans back then were also built to last, so as the jeans naturally aged and became more unique with every wear, they became like a living piece of art, worn and appreciated for years and years.

http://www.imperial.st/rawdenim.html


I'll never go back to washed denim....I think the reason everyone likes the idea of raw denim is because everyone wants to to feel like an individual on this grossly overpopulated planet. We all know that raw denim evolves in a way that is based on the lifestyle of the wearer...this makes it nearly impossible to walk by someone on the street and notice them sporting the same looking jeans...they may look similar...but there will always be some variations....its all about personalization...and raw denim is just a blank canvas for that

http://supertalk.superfuture.com/showthread.php?t=13406&page=2

I guess the "We're not corrupt, we're incompetent" approach wasn't working

A provincial minister flees the scene of an accident. Witnesses follow him home, see him fumbling for his keys, and smell alcohol on his breath. Here's the cellphone video they took.



The police have a report of an accident involving a government vehicle but don't know who was driving it. Six weeks later, news emerges that the driver who ran after the crash was Ernie Fage. The same cabinet member who last year resigned from cabinet over a loan to a potato company leasing farmland from his family. Now, Fage has once again resigned, but hasn't given up his seat.

The police apparently were investigating the accident. But once the police found out who had been driving the vehicle, the investigating officer was not informed. Meanwhile, the transportation minister, Angus MacIsaac, knew about the accident and, in a story in the Halifax Chronicle Herald, was quoted as saying, "I was simply informed by my deputy minister that this inquiry had been made." He also told the premier's chief of staff.

Good enough. Why be curious, eh?

And the chief of staff, Bob Chisholm? Well, he suspected Fage had had too much to drink. But he didn't ask him. And when the premier's communications officer told Chisholm thatFage had assured her it was a minor accident, that was good enough for him. Why be curious? Surely no good can come of it.

Has Premier Rodney MacDonald's faith in these folks wavered, following this brilliant performance? Of course not. The premier is loyal. Maybe not to the people who elected him, but certainly to his cronies. Ernie did "the right thing" apparently, by resigning, and that's good enough from Premier Rodney. Or maybe, after this quote, we should call him The Decider Jr. : "It's my government, I'm the premier, it's my staff."

And his chief of staff? The guy who sat on a potential scandal without informing his boss about it? Rodney stands by him too. The CBC reports that "MacDonald said he's not happy his senior staff didn't tell him all they knew. But he said he wasn't planning to fire Chisholm, saying anyone can make mistakes and describing his right-hand man as well-respected."

Objective and informative?

Here's a handy page from the friendly folks at Bacon's, offering up practical PR advice.

One of the articles is called "The Top Five Ways to Develop an Objective, Informative White Paper."

I'm thinking that maybe one of the top five ways to develop an objective, informative article about the top five ways to develop an objective, informative white paper, is to make sure that when you click on it the link isn't dead.

Story of the day

Talk about setting a good example:

"Two mothers and their 13-year-old daughters were arrested after police say one woman drove her already suspended daughter to school to fight a teenage rival."

Link.

TSN broadband

Nice job on the webcast of the Canada-Russia junior tournament final yesterday, except for the fact that it was hard to log on due to traffic, and that the error message you got proudly broadcast to thousands of Canadians that "Maxiumum" (take a close look at the spelling) capacity had been reached.

Proofreading anyone?

Strangers' lists

I love finding notes and lists -- not mine, but ones written by other people. If I'm at the supermarket and I see a cart with a grocery list in it, I take it. If I borrow a library book and find someone else's printout, showing what else they borrowed along with the book currently in my hands, I read it.

There may be nothing particularly illuminating in the notes and lists, but sometimes there are surprises, and maybe even laughs.

So I've decided to post them as I find them. Here is the most recent.


It's written on a sheet torn from a small, spiral-bound notebook.

Side one reads "Gone to 7:30 movie. Lot owner upstairs. See you later. Louie."

Side two:

Box blue bags
bread
milk
toilet paper
fruit
frozen pizzas
frozen dinners
eggs
(illegible)