From the Grope and Flail: MySpace a dangerous place for teens, authorities warn. In other news, so are shopping malls, playgrounds, schools, cars and the stretch of sidewalk directly under cranes lifting pianos and/or safes. Best to keep them indoors and away from the windows. Actually, just chain them to the floor. That’s your best bet.
After reading the comments in that Globe story, I’m reminded why my parents belong in some kind of hall of fame.
Since Nellie’s sick, we’ve been laying low this weekend, which means we’ve watched lots of movies & recorded TV. Actually, because of her faux-OCD, Nellie’s holed up on the couch right now with the kleenex, her laptop and some downloaded Veronica Mars. But we’ve also watched:
.:.
I don’t get companies who treat their email address like a fax line. It’s not something you just check once a week, people. It’s a personal communication channel. You know, like a tel-e-phone? Catch up.
.:.
CBGB called us tonight from the pub around the corner and asked us to join. Since we hadn’t gotten off our asses all day, and since Nellie was feeling better, we did. They’d just left a chocolate-making class we gave CB for her birthday, and had loads of their own handiwork with them. We had chocolate-covered strawberries and truffles over pints of beer and nachos. Somehow it came up that they’d never seen Swingers (money, baby!) so we came back here to watch it. Then CB spilled tea on herself and we made her watch Family Business, which scandalized her. So not a good night for her.
.:.
And now: the NBA all-star skills competition. God bless the PVR.
I despise Plaxo. It was a bad idea when it was called Infotriever, and it’s still a bad idea.
The difference between chocolate with 70% cocoa and chocolate with 85% cocoa is substantial. And not just math-wise. 85% tastes…powdery. 70% tastes smooth. Ladies and gentlemen, I think I’ve found the sweet spot. So to speak.
I was so busy today I didn’t have a chance to write about Gmail chat. I seem to be one of the few people I know who had it enabled this morning; GB was the only other person I heard from who had it. It’s pretty sweet…opens the little chat window right there in the screen, in the right whitespace.
You can pop the chat layer out to a bigger standalone window, go ‘off the record’ so that nothing gets saved in the chat history, and it saves the history right in gmail to be searched along with everything else.
Fun. And good for people at work whose proxy server kills some IM clients.
The Superbowl happened. Yawn. The Superbowl ads were on. More yawning. Not that I’m a big football fan anyway, but I used to watch the Superbowl. Now it’s just too…staged. It’s no longer a sporting event; it’s a circus with a football game attached.
I tried watching the first few episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm on DVD, but I just couldn’t get into it. It’s like watching an episode of Seinfeld with all the Jerry, Elaine and Kramer bits cut out. Same character, same neuroses, same whining. I couldn’t even finish the disc. Just sent it back. I’d probably have preferred to watch the Superbowl…
I really, seriously hope that this is a joke. Or just a wildly overstated artist’s impression. I’ll be living a few blocks from the intended landing zone of this alien monstrosity, so I don’t relish the idea of getting a neon sunburn after every northerly neighbourhood stroll.
BlogTO: equally freaked.
A few months ago I read that CBS would be broadcasting all the March Madness games online for free. Yesterday pc sent me the URL. God help worker productivity around the continent.
I think I’ll miss Selection Sunday as we’ll be on our way to (or wandering around) New York, but the papers the next day should be filled with coverage. I remember flying into Kansas City a few years ago on Selection Sunday; the next morning USA Today (not my choice; it’s what was outside my hotel room door) had a special March Madness section. I was in heaven. Actually, I was in Kansas City, but the pullout made it bearable.
Ah, Canadian politics. You can cut the hypocrisy with a knife.
Gmail is adding some cool new stuff. My GoogleTalk sessions are stored in the gmail history, and now they plan to embed GoogleTalk directly within Gmail itself.
There’s certainly no shortage of news about the Danish cartoons, but I found this article in The Guardian very interesting.
Muslim protesters infuriated by cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad raised the diplomatic stakes last night as Iran’s best-selling newspaper announced it would retaliate by running images satirising the Holocaust.
I think this is an excellent idea. Here’s why: it uses reason rather than violence to make a point. Granted, it may be an intended as an exercise in petty revenge rather than a thought-out appeal for empathy, but let’s give everyone the benefit of the doubt and assume it’s the latter. Of course, on seeing such a cartoon in the Hamshari daily, any reasonable person would say, “That’s absurd, of course the holocaust happened, there’s loads of evidential proof, the Jews of Europe didn’t just up and move to Uruguay, etc., etc.” Said reasonable person would then wonder to themselves how any newspaper could publish something so offensive to so many people. And, of course, it would then dawn on this reasonable person that they’ve just described the very situation that Muslims found themselves in when they saw offensive caricatures of one of their holy figures, and the reasonable person would admit their own hypocrisy and shortcomings and realize the error of the Danish cartoonist.
This assumes, of course, that everyone is reasonable. 🙂 But unreasonable folks certainly aren’t going to respond well to the torching of embassies and placards about killing either, so why not try to change minds with reason and intelligence rather than armed mobs? The only thing this violence has achieved is to give some people (who don’t like Islam much to begin with) an excuse to point fingers and call names…like these fine folks who Antonia Zerbisias calls out.
OK, back to work.
Skirl | Dan Dickinson 