Clean out Canada's mailboxes

Canada Post has an easy service to eliminate junk mail: fill in a form, put it in your mailbox, and Canada Post will put a pretty red dot on your mailbox and refrain from stuffing your box with unread crap. Obviously Canada Post doesn't want to promote this service, as they make a lot of money on it, and they're a "for-profit" government corporation (Margaret Thatcher would be proud). To fill the gap some nice creative types started the Red Dot Campaign to encourage Canadians to reduce waste by eliminating this avalanche of painted pulp. What a beautiful example of citizen activism. I've been printing a few copies of the enrollment form and putting them in the mail room, where people have been snapping them up. Hopefully soon we won't have fifty Best Buy flyers drifting across the floor of the mail room every week.

Print this book

I recently read the novel Roo'd by Joshua Klein: a near-future thriller that explores themes like body modification, poverty, and runaway corporatism. Although I had printed it in nearly invisible double-sided 4-up I was engrossed as I squinted at the pages on the poorly-lit bus. Although it was not without flaws, it ranked in my personal top 5 for the past year, and comes highly recommended, especially for code-heads of a literary bent. I would compare it favourably with Neal Stephenson and William Gibson, with some of the humour of the former and dark characterisations and settings of the latter. The author, a software developer, released the book for free download under a Creative Commons license. I gave the author five bucks, which is a damned sight more than he would have gotten through a publisher. A publisher probably would have made him change the title, though – I guess they're still good for something after all.

Procrastination pays off

I've been wanting to replace my aged Auditron for a whlie – it was great while it lasted but eight years is a long time for technology. I've been somewhat torn between the Squeezebox and the Sonos, and the price of the Sonos (got a grand laying about?) pretty much left me decided – the Squeezebox was it.


Yesterday we took a little road trip south to the Great Satan and I thought I'd pick one up while I was down there. Surprisingly, neither Best Buy nor Circuit City carried them (stupid of me not to check, but impulse buys, like impulse trips, are better left unplanned). So today I went to the website to find out where I could buy one, and discovered there's something better on the way: the Squeezebox is incorporating the best elements of the Sonos in its recently announced Squeezebox Duet.

There's no telling when it'll be in stores, but after waiting four years to listen to OGG and FLAC files without turning on the computer, I'm sure I can wait another few months.

The Whore of Babylon

I've been a fan of Fernando Vallejo since I saw Our Lady of the Assassins. After that I dug into several of his books, and when I ran into La Puta de Babilonia (ISBN 970-37-0326-7) I snapped it up. The opening paragraph gave me a frisson of delight:

La puta, la gran puta, la grandísima puta, la santurrona, la simoníaca, la inquisidora, la torturadora, la falsificadora, la asesina, la fea, la loca, la mala; la del Santo Oficio y el Índice de Libros Prohibidos; la de las Cruzadas y la noche de San Bartolomé; [...] la que reprime a las demás religiones donde manda y exige libertad de culto donde no manda; [...] la corrupta, la hipócrita, la parásita, la zángana; la antisemita, la esclavista, la homofóbica, la misógina; [...] la puta de Babilonia, la impune bimilenaria tiene cuentas pendientes conmigo desde mi infancia y aqui se las voy a cobrar.

My loose, unprofessional translation:

The bitch, the great bitch, the greatest whore, the hypocritically pious, the loan shark, the inquisitor, the torturer, the fabricator, the murderous, the ugly, the crazy, the bad; she of the Holy Office and the Index of Forbidden Books; of the Crusaders and the eve of St. Bartholomew; [...] she who represses other religions where she has power and demands freedom of worship where she does not; [...] the corrupt, the hypocritical, the parasitic, the shiftless; the anti-Semitic, the slave, the homophobic, the misogynist; [...] the whore of Babylon, the unpunished two-thousand-year-old bitch has been screwing with me since my childhood and now it is payback time.

It was highly satisfactory as a polemic, and for a fellow traveler it was enjoyable to sit back and enjoy the outrage of a highly informed, deeply knowledgeable and extremely articulate critic of a vain, useless, and obsolete institution. However, the opposite of love is not outrage: it is indifference, and Vallejo remains in the orbit of the Vatican's dark star, obsessed with the enemy he would destroy. I would prefer to let the RC church hang itself on its own rope, as it seems to be doing a pretty good (if sometimes frustratingly slow) job of it.

Journalism in exile

Jon Talton is a decidedly unhappy journalist. He heaps scorn in the way I only could if I had been practicing it for 27 years (and if I had more talent for it). He writes lovely articles about growth boosterism, poor land-use decisions, and do-nothing politicians. I find it unsurprising that he has a hard time writing for today's neurotic Happy McNews media outlets – it's not the sort of stuff around which real estate agents and car dealers want to hawk their wares. So here's a professional journalist who has to write outside of the mainstream media in order to say what he really thinks... the era of the powerful, relevant newspaper with real opinions is completely, resolutely past.

Jesus Takedown

The NFL is going after churches for copyright infringement for showing the "Super Bowl" on a large-screen TV. As much as I favour the elimination of organized religion, I really wonder what the hell the NFL thinks it is achieving by pissing off their fans this way. Have they learned nothing in the past ten years about pointless copyright enforcement actions which garner bad publicity? This is much like when the ASCAP went after the Girl Scouts for singing songs around the campfire. My hope is that those devout Christians have realized that this "sport" is a vile gladiatorial spectacle with no appropriate role in their lives, and leave them starving.

You see, choosing one's battles unwisely could make one look like a greedy bastard. The Immanuel Bible Church's 200 members are unlikely to fork over cash for a special use permit. The NFL's argument that large groups "shrink TV ratings and can affect advertising revenue" doesn't hold water: what exists there is a counting problem, not a viewership problem. I fully support treating churches like any other business (including taxing the holy fuck out of them), but most people don't feel that way – so the NFL has bought itself some really bad publicity. Hopefully it will prompt some pious souls to sit out this year's mammon-fest.

Quants: powered by VBA

So here's a scary thought: quants, the wiz4rd5 behind our brave new automated markets, write their masterpieces in VBA. That's right, the "unthinkably complex financial instruments" that journalists have been gushing over for the last few years are written in Visual Basic for Applications, Visual Basic's lead-poisoned little brother. [As if Visual Basic isn't dumb enough already.]

William Gibson made the job sound so sexy back in 1997 with Idoru. It's hilarious that in real life they're a bunch of physics nerds with Excel spreadsheets. Knowing this makes me want to ensure my retirement by implanting a thimble-sized piece of gold in my abdomen. I'm constantly astonished that anything, anywhere, ever works at all.

In bed

Ratings for Fox News have followed the GOP into the toilet, and it is with a double-dose of schadenfreude that I present a little gem that illustrates just how blatantly, ridiculously biased Faux News really is, and just how ineffective they have become.

Unfortunately, Fox is just the worst of a bad lot... NBC, owned by GE, is hardly more likely to be a reliably independent voice, and the other conglomerate-owned media are so entwined with conflicting business interests that they couldn't possibly be expected to attempt objectivity – even putting aside the basic conflict of interest coming from paid advertisements. If it is on television and has any consequence, it is certainly biased: journalistic ethics have become a hollow joke. And that goes for you too, PBS.

U2 joins the middle-aged establishment

U2 sold out a long, long time ago. That's healthy, everybody sells out sometime (except maybe Gus Hall) – but there's selling out, and then there is wallowing in middle-aged greed and unabashed contempt for the people who ultimately give them their money, as does U2's manager in an official statement on behalf of the group. I've long since stopped paying to go to their shows, and the discs I bought in the last century sit at the back of the cabinet, tired and irrelevant; but ever humble, Bono believes that U2's music will "last 100 years":

"You know I'm still hungry," said the 45-year-old winner of 14 Grammy awards. "I still want a lot out of music."

a lot... of money. That explains the weird simultaneous push for copyright extension and debt relief: Bono wants the third world wealthy enough to keep him fat on royalties until the next ice age.

Terror montage

In honour of Rudy's flameout, I thought I'd bring back some images from his campaign to become terrorist-in-chief^*. Hope you can still find punters for the speeches, o great mayor.
*^"person who terrorizes or frightens others." terrorist. Dictionary.com. Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1). Random House, Inc. (accessed: January 29, 2008).