Author: Dan Dickinson

In which Dan briefly contemplates buying another TV

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The statistics in this Washington Post article just baffle me:

  • The Pew Center on the States released a study in February showing that for the first time in [American] history, more than one in every 100 adults is in jail or prison
  • According to the Justice Department, 7 million people — or one in every 32 adults — are either incarcerated, on parole or probation or under some other form of state or local supervision
  • Today one in nine young black men is behind bars
  • African Americans now comprise more than half of all prisoners, up from a third three decades ago
  • The U.S. incarceration rate is five to 12 times that of other industrialized countries as well as being the highest in the world

I can offer no insight or perspective. I’m still in shock from that first number.

.:.

The Canadiens held on for a tough win tonight. That game was like a war. The Bruins forced them to play their kind of game, but a superb goalie and a good power play (which finally clicked tonight) was enough to get them the 3-1 series lead.

The Canadiens should finish them off at home Thursday night, and I soooooooo wish I could be in Montreal for it. I wouldn’t even need tickets to the game, I’d be happy just being in the city and absorbing all the energy.

Between work, the NHL playoffs, Hot Docs (which starts Thursday), my assignment and everything else, I’ve kind of forgotten about the Raptors. They’re limping into the playoffs, but will face Orlando in the first round and should have a legitimate shot if they can throw enough big men at Dwight Howard. This is the first time since 2002 that both my teams have made the playoffs in the same year. People…I only have so much attention span!!

[tags]washington post, prison, incarceration, montreal canadiens, boston bruins, toronto raptors[/tags]

Some days it's pretty easy to be an almost-vegetarian

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From today’s Globe and Mail: Ottawa to pay farmers $50-million to slaughter hogs

In an unprecedented move, the federal government plans to pay hog farmers up to $50-million in total to slaughter as many as 150,000 breeding swine.

Farmers will receive $225 for every hog they kill, so long as they agree to wipe out their entire breeding herd and stay out of the hog business for three years. The government hopes the program will reduce a glut on the market that has helped drive down prices.

I understand that farmers tend not to be experts in economics, but any farmer so oblivious to the market in which they operate that they can’t understand “falling price + rising cost of feed = losing money” deserves to go out of business. Of course, this is the classic argument against bailouts, that they reward the stupid and non-competitive; they’re never done for economic reasons, only political. Apparently Big Pork* swings a big stick in Ottawa.

Another point: if we assume the slaughtered pigs are to be sold for meat, farmers and the government might as well brace for another price drop as 10% of the pork supply (and probably not the highest quality pork either, as I don’t think they’ll cull the best pigs) plops into supermarkets all at once. If, on the other hand, the slaughtered pigs aren’t to be sold as meat but simply done away with, that seems overly wasteful. Starving kids around the world and all that. Just give it to some food banks, for chrissakes.

* if there’s not a lobby called “Big Pork” there really ought to be

[tags]pork farmers, pig cull[/tags]

"I put two in his heart, one in his computer."

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We watched Planet Terror, the first part of the Quentin Tarantino / Robert Rodriguez Grindhouse double feature. It was ok. Ridiculous, cartoonish, over-the-top violence and gore, but at least a discernible plot to go with all the silliness.

From what I’ve heard, though, Planet Terror is the better of the two, so I shudder to think how bad Death Proof must be. I don’t think I’ll bother with it. I’m so behind on movie-watching that I might have to impose a “nothing below 50% on Rotten Tomatoes” rule on the PVR.

.:.

The Canadiens won last night’s game in overtime to take a 2-0 series lead into Boston. Tonight’s game was a must-win for Boston, and they did. I figured it was 50-50 going into tonight; Montreal’s the better team, but Boston was playing for their lives.

Next up: game 4 on Tuesday.

[tags]grindhouse, planet terror, death proof, quentin tarantino, robert rodriguez, montreal canadiens, boston bruins, nhl playoffs[/tags]

Would that I could still eat smoked meat

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It’s a very Montreal day: St. Urbain bagels for breakfast, the Canadiens game on TV tonight. Of course, that could be any Saturday, but it’s even better during the playoffs.

.:.

While I sit here and catch up on news and such from the past two days, I’ve been poking through my music inbox and seeing what’s what. I’m a little disappointed in the newest Black Keys disc Attack and Release. Part of what I loved about their previous albums was the lo-fi fuzzy blues; the new one is more advanced musically, but less interesting to me.The new R.E.M. isn’t great, but at least it has some crunch. I don’t mind it so far. (metacritic: black keys | r.e.m.)

Recently it’s stopped making sense to me that the album format even really exists anymore. Albums were really only a convenient format under which to release music; they were just groupings of singles before becoming ends unto themselves. Now that the album is no longer necessary, it’s only a matter of time before the increasing popularity of iTunes, etc. makes the album format irrelevant and we just consume individual songs, like we did 60 years ago.

.:.

We watched the season premiere of 30 Rock. Very funny. My love for Tina Fey (Girlfriend du jour!) is really getting quite alarming. It’s distressing, to be honest with you.

[tags]st-urbain bagels, montreal canadiens, black keys, r.e.m., itunes, 30 rock, tina fey[/tags]

1-0, 9-0, 12-0

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Montreal won game one tonight, and quite easily. They take a 1-0 series lead, having won all nine games against Boston this year, and twelve straight going back to last year. In the nine games played against the Bruins this year, the Canadiens have never trailed, not even for a second. Here’s hoping they can put together three more just like this.

[tags]montreal canadiens, boston bruins[/tags]

Multiple choice

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Earlier today Dan bought a pink Hugo Boss dress shirt. Dan is:

  1. branching out and trying new things;
  2. simply rounding out a shirt rotation for his suits;
  3. gay;
  4. umm…I think a and c may be the same thing;
  5. all of the above.

Earlier today Dan also bought a brown Hugo Boss dress shirt. Dan is:

  1. branching out and trying new things (though slightly less new than that pink business);
  2. simply rounding out a shirt rotation for his suits;
  3. a German fascist;
  4. by pairing a brown shirt with a brown suit and brown shoes, in danger of looking like Mr. Hanky the Christmas Poo;
  5. none of the above.

[tags]hugo boss, dress shirt[/tags]

I wonder how many guitar nerds are buying maps and hiking boots?

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Just for shits and giggles, here are the top ten search engine hits on my blog in the last year:

  1. coniption fit tim adam
  2. protestant whiskey
  3. “______ _______”
  4. this day is bananas
  5. sh735026
  6. “this day is bananas”
  7. upcountry bankrupt
  8. thundercats are go
  9. fucdown
  10. ode to lrc

Those are, in order:

  1. Something Tim pointed me to at ScienceBlogs that asked bloggers to find five search terms that brings up their blog as the first Google hit. This hits my blog first every time, probably because I misspelled “conniption fit”, but that was kind of by design. I guess people at ScienceBlogs must keep testing it, ’cause I keep getting hits for it.
  2. A line from The Wire, maybe one of Jimmy McNulty’s best. A good Irish Catholic/alcoholic/cop, McNulty turns up his nose at the offer of Bushmills from a bartender, replying “That’s Protestant whiskey!”
  3. A friend of mine whose name I’ll not display here. Apparently she’s being stalked. Awesome.
  4. A line from The Office (I tend to put lines from TV shows, songs and movies in the title field of my blog posts…just a habit). Kelly Kapoor sings it (to the tune of the the Gwen Stefani song) on the day she’s put in charge. I assume people search for it because they want the ringtone. That’s a recurring theme here.
  5. According to The Onion, “a Welsh countryside house known as Bron-Yr-Aur, at the rock-grid coordinates SH735026…contains the never-before-heard Jimmy Page riff, hidden for decades in a mythic, impenetrable vault…the planet’s last, best hope for saving rock music.”
  6. See #4.
  7. We bought a bed around the time that UpCountry went bankrupt, and I blogged about the massive problems we had. Apparently others had some issues as well.
  8. A line from the film Juno. I suspect these were also ringtone-seekers.
  9. A word invented, as far as I know, by a former co-worker. We were in a particular situation deemed so bad that he considered it even worse than a fuckup…it was, in fact, a fucdown. Perhaps the missing “k” is meant to indicate even more dischord. I believe that I am the only hit Google finds for “fucdown” (along with the pingback from my brother’s blog, Technorati, etc.) so I think I own this bad boy now.
  10. The title of a Band Of Horses song.

If you want to see messed up, you should see the bottom of the list.

[tags]top ten search results[/tags]

Public Enemies

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The upcoming Michael Mann film (which I would go see simply because it is a Michael Mann film) Public Enemies keeps adding to a stellar cast, the kind of cast that grabs the audience’s attention during the preview. It’s also the kind of cast that makes my wife kinda swoon-y: Johnny Depp, Christian Bale, Billy Crudup and Giovanni Ribisi. Not to mention Marion Cotillard, David Wenham, Lili Taylor and Stephen  Dorff.

2009? I do not care to wait that long.

[tags]public enemies, michael mann[/tags]

Things I realized today

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  • Quickest way to make friends with the neighbourhood homeless guys: take pictures outside at night. Like moths to a flame.
  • I can write a 4-page marketing assignment in one day if I need to, even if I couldn’t possibly care any less about it.
  • Enough people listen to the request show on my old home town’s community access radio show via the web that the server was choppy. Also: requesting Nicole Atkins and The Thermals will probably confuse the locals; they did come hot on the heels of a request for “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” by Poison. Thanks for playing them anyway, Andrew.
  • Seeing the Canadiens finish first in their conference is surreal. The last time this happened was 1989, and I wasn’t even that into hockey yet (it hit me two years later), so it didn’t mean that much. Now, after watching them struggle for so long, it’s just…weird. Nice, but weird. Come Wednesday (or Thursday?) I’ll be so amped up I won’t care about my next marketing assignment.
  • I’d pay somebody $100 if I didn’t have to go to work tomorrow.
  • It may have been 11 degrees somewhere in the city, but down here by the waterfront, t’wasn’t.

[tags]parrsboro, nicole atkins, thermals, canadiens, toronto weather[/tags]