If you aren’t reading John Leavitt and co.’s fun Time 2 Travel tumblr, you should. This was my contribution.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Recently, the whole “Nice Guy” topic came up again, well after the initial post had become a thing of legend. Many people jumped in on the new discussion, but it always seems like the same people respond in the same way. The phrase, “Yes, they’re being jerks, but they’ve got a point…” keeps getting bandied about in these conversations, with one user posting an old joke about the supposed underlying truth behind the complaints that Nice Guys have. As I am not yet an accomplished disembowler of bad ideas, I thought I might take a practice run at this one…anyone else want to join me behind the cut?

continue reading "For the Dim Bulbs Out There"

So far:

• Chuck Norris
• TaleSpin
• Abiogenesis
• True Story Swear to God
• Final Fantasy XIII
• Hetalia: Axis Powers
• Gorgeous George
• Ex nihilo
• Costa Concordia disaster
• List of unusual deaths (I sometimes read this when I’m bored)
• Adolfo Tapia
• List of websites participating in January 18 SOPA protests (d’oh!)
• Sliders

One clear lesson from this event is that I can kind of live without Wikipedia, which may run counter to the stated goal.

Also: If you try visiting any of Wikipedia’s pages, you’ll notice the article appears in full for about half a second before the standard blackout message appears, without redirecting to a new page.  That would suggest the blackout is being implemented with client-side scripting, and that I could probably override the whole thing with GreaseMonkey.  But that’s too much work just to check who replaced Jerry McConnell in the last season, or whether the guy on Sliders was even named  “Jerry McConnell.”

So today Wikipedia and Reddit and WordPress and a bunch of other sites have all “gone dark” for 24 hours to protest SOPA. They’re right to do so and if you’re one of my American readers, you should make sure you voice your opposition to the bill. Not least because it would be exceptionally easy for me to get SOPA-blacklisted. After all, I am foreign (from an American perspective), and I make use of an exceptional amount of copyrighted material.1 That it might be fair use is besides the point: SOPA does not discriminate. Why, I could be SOPA-blacklisted just for embedding this awesome tribute video to La Parka, who as we all know is the greatest wrestler of all time (as well as a brilliant political pundit).

Now, granted, if La Parka were President23 he would just hit Jim DeMint with a chair and do a little dance and then SOPA would fail, because that is what La Parka does. But since La Parka is not President, it is instead up to you American readers to put down your RC Colas4 and get up and make yourselves heard. Although you probably shouldn’t hit Jim DeMint with a chair. I suspect that would not turn out well, and you probably wouldn’t even get to do the little dance.

1. Ironically, the reason I swore to forever host myself on a Canadian server was so that I could avoid unfair takedowns under the DMCA. American copyright law on the internet: It never stops getting worse! [↩]
2. Having found a way to get past the natural born citizenship requirement, of course. [↩]
3. NOT THAT THIS STOPPED SECRET KENYAN MUSLIM PRESIDENT BARRY SOETERO!!!!!!11!!!1!!!one! [↩]
4. Or whatever Americans drink. [↩]

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

The most recent XKCD strip is, for Canadians, shockingly old hat.

Because Canadians have had access to No Name since 1978. Randall Munroe is quite correct when he asserts that he would “build brand identity overnight,” because that is exactly what happened with No Name – it was immensely successful for Loblaws when they introduced it and essentially made the chain into the foremost premium supermarket in Ontario and Quebec (and No Frills, their value grocery chain, into the foremost value grocery store in the region), and No Name is known throughout Canada as being decent value-for-money when it comes to staple goods like flour.

Granted, No Name processed foods are mostly terrible. (Although their ketchup chips are the only brand of ketchup chips I like. Oh, yes – ketchup-flavoured potato chips are a thing in Canada. You may not have known this. Along with Shreddies and Coffee Crisp bars, they are some of the most requested and desired foods by ex-pat Canadians.)

In short: there is nothing the internet can come up with that real life has not come up with already. It’s just that people think they are being original. There’s probably a Christmas specials alignment chart somewhere on the walls at Lascaux.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

My “Villain” entrant in Torontoist’s 2011 Heroes and Villains is sort of a repeat.

Victorians Smiling is one of Retronaut’s older posts (nearly a year and a half at this point), but I still like it greatly, because it serves as a reminder to me that history is not the cold, sterile thing we often imagine it to be. We do have a tendency to imagine the past as staid – not least, I think, because frozen images connote a certain formality in that part of our monkey brains which equates stillness with seriousness. (In twenty years or so, people are going to start thinking hippies were uptight, just because it’ll all be pictures of dead hippies and the boomers will mostly be dead and won’t be able to say “no, it wasn’t like that at all, we were the generation of love and peace and so on.”)

But I like the post mostly for this picture:

If only because you know that one of them must have farted.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.