Archive for the ‘Snark!’ Category
December 21st, 2009 | 
Author: And why it truly sucked.
I can’t say it any better than cowmix, who submitted this to Slashdot this afternoon:
“When TPM came out ten years ago, its utter crappiness shocked me to the core and wounded a entire generation of geeks. My inner child had been abused and betrayed. I moped around, talking to no one, for almost two weeks. I couldn’t bring myself to see #2 or #3, whatever they were called. Now, a decade later, comes Star Wars: The Phantom Menace Review, the ultimate, seven-part, seventy minute analysis of this mother of all train wrecks. Not only does it nail how the film blows, but tells us why. Time, apparently, does not heal all wounds.”
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FutureShop is Canada’s rough equivalent of Circuit City and they’re not a bad store as far as having commission-based sales people goes.
This morning I got an email advertising an online-only sale that starts tonight after the physics stores close and I thought I’d have a peek. Oh, look! They’re finally selling Sigma camera lenses! I’ve been keeping my eyes open for a decent macro lens for my DSLR that didn’t cost the moon, so I had a peek. Unfortunately, whomever is doing the item descriptions does NOT understand photographic terminology:
If you eat, you need to see this movie. The food production reality in North America is nothing close to the myth that the industry spends so much time, effort and money to maintain. It’s all about the allmighty dollar and almost no thought whatsoever is given to nutrition any more.
Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma) and Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation) provide much of the commentary to this look at industrial food production in the US. I’d like to claim that things are different in Canada, but I’d be lying. Factory farms are far more factory than farm and you can imagine the quality of “food” that comes out of them.
OK, enough’s enough:
- Vancouver police purchase a sound weapon, claiming that they only want to use it as a “loudspeaker”
- Assorted Vancouver-area municipalities pass by-laws allowing the cops to barge into private homes and remove protest signs from windows
- Now, Canada Customs is screening visitors to the country on their views of the Owelympics:
(CBC’s) As It Happens radio show covers the story of Amy Goodman’s recent’ border crossing into Canada. Goodman — host of the US public radio show Democracy Now! — was coming to Canada to give a speech at a library, and Canadian border guards questioned her intensely about the subject of her talk, even reading her notes for her speech. They were fishing for something, but Goodman couldn’t figure out what, until the guards asked her outright whether she was planning on talking about the upcoming Canadian Olympic Games. When she assured them that she hadn’t been, they eventually released her (it had been a 75 minute detention) but stamped a control-order in her passport giving her only 24 hours’ stay in Canada.
Just when I think that the minority-rule Conservative government has hit the bottom, they dig the hole a bit deeper:
The Harper government is training its guns on a diplomat whistleblower who says Canada was complicit in the torture of captured Afghan prisoners, trying to undermine Richard Colvin’s credibility as pressure builds to hold a public inquiry into the matter.
Excellent. I don’t normally go looking for approval, but according to the BBC, I have something else going for me:
In contrast to those annoying happy types, miserable people are better at decision-making and less gullible, his experiments showed.