This guitar does not lie

This house, a few doors away from mine, has been awaiting demolition for almost as long as I've lived here. It was apparently a crackhouse, and in such disrepair that it was deemed unfit for habitation and boarded up a couple of years ago.

The lot beside it, that the digger is on, has been vacant even longer: since about 1996 or 1997, according to a neighbour. Both plots are now owned by the same people, who plan to build a pair of two-story houses on them. This fits in with the ongoing gentrification of my street, which I must confess to being a part of.

Via boingboing. Some true groaners in here.

Thanks to Project Wonderful, I started reading another webcomic, an Aussie one called Eat Me. Highlights so far:

Zombie Jesus

Dance along with Captain Jack

Some times he's just a fucking jerk

Toxins in plastic 'feminise boys' - the possibility of genetic abnormalities aside, I'm not entirely convinced this is a bad thing.

This started as a response to rfmcdpei's post about personal style, but sort of took on a life of its own.

My personal sense of style is what I'd call pragmatically geeky - t-shirts (mostly by webcomics artists), cargo pants (gotta love all those pockets, even if I don't remember what's in which one), work socks, and Blundstones (or occasionally Doc Martens.)

At one point (early this decade) I did make a conscious effort to pull together a "chic geek" look, which sat nicely with my job at a King & Spadina internet consultancy and Fast Company-reading social crowd. It felt like a bit of a pretense, though, and once I started working from home (around the time of the dot-bomb implosion - pure coincidence, not that I didn't see it coming) the urge to play dress-up went away. (I also packed on a few pounds around the midriff since then, so most of it doesn't actually fit anymore.) Prior to that I had a basic preppy look going on - Gap/Brooks Bros khakis, button-down shirts, that sort of thing - which was partly wife 1.0's influence, and partly the 'business casual' environment that I was working in, where I couldn't get away with the jeans and band t-shirt/granddad shirt look that I'd favoured up to that point. (My Edinburgh peeps may remember that look from my Perpetual Undergrad days.)

I actually have a number of shirts (as distinct from t-shirts) in the closet but tend not to dress up often. When I do it's usually khakis and a funky shirt, and maybe a jacket if the weather dictates. Whenever I put on a suit (which these days is basically for weddings and funerals, and recently more of the latter than the former), I look damn fine in it, but always feel like a kid playing dress-up. Three years of school uniforms also gave me an allergy to any kind of (non-chosen) conformity.

I would probably indulge myself in a sharper sense of personal style if I cared more about it, but I'm basically too lazy to put the effort into it, no-one would see it since I work from home (h'm, is that the style equivalent of not cooking for just yourself?), and it'll get covered in cat hair anyway. If I started spending anywhere it would probably be shoes - I've always liked Chelsea boots (hence the Blunnies, and lust for a pair of RM Williams), probably because I'm a child of the 60s (and my sister M informs me I had a pair of Beatle boots when I was about 3, which I don't recall), and I also lust after some of John Fluevog's creations, I've no idea why.

I know I've not being posting here much of late. It's not that there aren't things happening; there's been a fair bit of going on over the summer, I just never get around posting about it. I even compose a number of posts in my head, but they never make it to keyboard.

Herewith, then, a summary of recent highs and lows:

- since May, I've had a New Corporate Overlord, who I shall not name in print, but they make computers, mp3 players and phones brought to you by the letter "i". Further details in a later post.

- in June abigor and I acquired new wheels, just in time to whip out to Brampton when my Mum had a heart attack, a mild stroke, and an inexplicable shortness breath - three hospital stays over about 5 weeks. She's mostly recovered from all this, though the stroke has left some of her vision blurred. The shortness of breath and chest pains appear to be related to CO2 levels and are relieved by breathing into a paper bag.

- on Canada Day we took the New Beastie for a road trip to Parry Sound to meet up with artemiselani and her mother and sibs, who were driving from Winnipeg to Toronto en route to Scotland. We kidnapped artemiselani for the drove back to Toronto and had a visit with her after she got back from Scotland at the end of the month. We also a Monforte Dairy subscription, which basically means we're helping build a small (and relatively local) business and getting paid in artisanal cheese.

- August was relatively low-key, other than practising with my fiddle group for a gig at a street party in September, which went OK overall but personally I sucked. (By sucked, I mean did not play to my own satisfaction.)

- September: We started looking at starting renos on the house, discovered it was going to cost a lot more than we expected, and started the (irritatingly lengthy, as it's turned out) process of extending our mortgage to cover some of the costs.

- October: work trip to California to NCO HQ, to spend some time with my team-mates, and a visit from my brother B over Thanksgiving.

There's also some ongoing stuff, like wondering when the hell my dad is going to give up trying to fix the stairlift that's been broken for the last 6 months and get a new one installed so my mother can actually get up and down stairs without taking five minutes to do it one step at a time. I've basically given up asking when it's going to happen; Mum would like a new one but she's not going to put her foot down and make it happen, so she's basically part of the problem.

And that about wraps it up. Time I went to fiddle class. Laters, peeps.

For tamago23: The blueberry muffin was adopted as the official muffin of the state of Minnesota in 1988.

A review of the original Macintosh, first published in the LA TImes on January 21st, 1984.

I just used the unix "lpr" command for the first time in...probably almost 15 years.

I may now have to hook speakers up to the Mac mini that the printer's connected to, and have it play a lineprinter noise when it prints.

The fine folks at Conservapedia (Which is, I guess, like Wikipedia but without all that nasty Liberal bias the keeps creeping in) are talking about a Conservative Bible Project, which would be a new translation of the Bible without (as you might expect) all that awful liberal bias that keeps creeping in.

Apparently one benefit is that "liberals will oppose this effort, but they will have to read the Bible to criticize this, and that will open their minds". Because obviously people who have read the bible and accept it as the one and only true word of gawd have more open minds than liberals who only believe what their proohets of political correctness tell them.

Another reason for doing this is that "The committee in charge of updating the bestselling version, the NIV, is dominated by professors and higher-educated participants who can be expected to be liberal and feminist in outlook." (No conservative bias there, of course; only liberals can be biased.) Because of course all those professors who've dedicated their lives to studying ancient Greek and Hebrew in order to be able to better understand the source documents for the Bible can't have anything of value to add to the discourse. Even though the Conservative Bible Project also recognizes that "Christianity introduced powerful new concepts that even the Greek and Hebrew were inadequate to express, but modern conservative language can express well." So, um, Christ said things 200 years that weren't written properly because his Greaak and Hebrew speaking audience didn't understand him properly, but 21st Conservatives can rectify that?

They'll also be eliminating all the socialism that's been stuck in there over time ("Socialistic terminology permeates English translations of the Bible, without justification. This improperly encourages the "social justice" movement among Christians.") and "explaining the numerous economic parables with their full free-market meaning". Because Christ kicked the money-leners out of the temples for not paying rent on time, I suppose? And as for the long tradition of readings of scripture that suggest that maybe all men and women should be considered equals, that's just liberal bias dating back a few centuries, right?

Conservatives: funny and frightening; frequently simultaneously.

Barack Obama has said he will end the ban on gay people serving openly in the military. Granted, I'm sure this partly a recognition of the fact that the US military can't afford to kick out or rejected people who are otherwise good soldiers, and it's hardly a validation of that Nobel Prize, but it's definitely a step in the right direction.

BBC NEWS | Americas | Obama to end military gay policy

Antonia Zerbisas reports in the the Star that starting today, anti-choice crusaders are running a mockingly named "40 days for life" campaign targeting abortion clinics.

The Toronto clinics they'll be attacking are:

Women's Care Clinic
960 Lawrence Ave
(Lawrence Ave. & Dufferin Street)
Toronto, ON

And

Cabbagetown Women's Clinic
302 Gerrard St. East
(Gerrard & Parliament intersection)

I'm not sure what to do about this: part of me thinks bullets and bombs; part of me thinks coffee laced with laxatives, part of me is thinking a silent counterprotest. Regardless, I think these fuckers need to be intimidated off the streets and back in the 19th century churches they belong in. Their freedom of religioulous expression does not trump a woman's right to medical care.

Today's a double anniversary for me and abigor: 8 years that we've been together, and 2 years since we married. And not only we do still like each other, we actually still love each other. Yay, us!

Labour day BBQ chez ma souer. About to settle down eat, only two hours later than planned :-)

but my, will we eat! Between my sister, her mother-in-law, and and abigor, there is no shortage of the tasty and nutritious.

Today's xkcd, with math geek tea splutter warning.

Beloit College's Class of 2013 mindset is now online.

High-speed footage of a great white clearing air while seal-hunting. Impressive.

The science of zombie attacks.

Via Auntie Beeb: the man who pioneered electric guitar and multitrack recording has gone on to the the Great Gig in the Sky. I'm sure he and Leo Fender will have lots to talk about.

Via tamago23: Every Saturday Morning is a blog written by a woman who escorts at an abortion clinic in Kentucky where, every Saturday morning, between 30 and 60 antichoicers turn up to interfere with women's rights to make their own choices. Some of the quotes in there make me feel that antichoicers are the ultimate pro-choice argument.

I have a very strong and visceral reaction to these people. I'm a peaceful, easy going kinda guy, but antichoicers make me glad I don't own weapons, because seriously? I'd be in there thinning the gene pool as a public service. Not so much a grim reaper, more a very cheerful one. "Do you believe in god? Would you like to meet him? How about NOW?"

On a slightly less malevolent level, I did once see a quartet of antichoicers outside East York General, and after getting past my initial fury at the sight of them, considered taking them a nice warm thermos of coffee. Laced with laxatives, of course. (We were driving past; had I been on foot...well. Probably as well I wasn't.) Then they could make that difficult moral choice between soiling themselves for Jeebus, and running to the den of sin and iniquity that is EY General to use the loo.

I'm assuming they were local, which also makes me wonder whether they'd accept medical treatment there, or would they prefer to die en route to a hospital somewhere in Ontario that doesn't provide abortion services. And if they did, once they were in there, would they change their mind of they were told "the doctor will be with you shortly, she's just finished performing an emergency abortion..."

Today's the first garbage collection in Toronto for six weeks, after a strike that lasted all through July.

It's interesting looking out the window at the volumes being put out by the houses around us. abigor and I don't usually fill our bin more than half-way in a fortnight (Toronto alternates garbage and recycling collections each week), and most of that is non-recyclable packaging. So even with 6 weeks between collections, we just filled our bin. We have one extra bag on the curb, because while unpacking a closet to get into the attic I discovered the plastic wrapping from the mattress in the guest room which we hadn't disposed of yet.

The family of three on our left has put out their bin and about four or five bags; the neighbour to our right, who lives on her own, has put out two bags. The house next to her, which houses two guys, has two bins and seven bags, though none of them look particularly full.

We also have separate collections for organic waste. Most of ours has gone into the composter, which I'd been meaning to reboot anyway, so the strike helped motivate my into doing that. The majority of our green bin waste is cat litter, which apparently the city's composting facilities can take. Consequently we also have six week's worth of used cat litter awaiting collection. (Stinky!) None of our immediate neighbours appear to have green bins out; I guess it ended up in the regular garbage instead as I know they don't compost.

All that to say? I dunno, just observations.

Possibly the most interesting talk so far @ futureruby has little to do with Ruby: we're talking biological programming. See http://openwetware.org, http://biobricks.org/, and diybio.org.

iGEM: International Genetically Engineered Machines competition sponsored by MIT. Another example: a team in Austin programming e coli to be light sensitive, to do (for example) edge detection.

Ppower and responsibility: you can make (e.g.) Polio virus @ home today, for not much.


Atwood's Oryx and Crake looking less like SF every day.

Via calum: The Dallas-Fort Worth police marked the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots by raiding a gay bar and beating up patrons, leaving one in hospital with a potentially life-threatening brain injury. Their defence? The men in the bar made "advances" on them. Because, y'know, all us faggots love a man in uniform.

The link above contains more details, updates, and email addresses for Fort Worth's councillors and mayors. I suggest writing. The Fort Worth police have also identified the officers involved.

I spent most of yesterday taking this fan off the bedroom ceiling:



And replacing it with this one:



It was a bit of a bitch to install, but the phrase "vast improvement" comes to mind.

A French study has found that some of the "inert" materials in Roundup are toxic to humans even at low concentrations. "Inert" in this context means it doesn't kill weeds; apparently effects on other organisms aren't relevant. Manufacturers aren't required to disclose the inert ingredients in their products.

Used in yards, farms and parks throughout the world, Roundup has long been a top-selling weed killer. But now researchers have found that one of Roundup’s inert ingredients can kill human cells, particularly embryonic, placental and umbilical cord cells.

The new findings intensify a debate about so-called “inerts” — the solvents, preservatives, surfactants and other substances that manufacturers add to pesticides. Nearly 4,000 inert ingredients are approved for use by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
:
One specific inert ingredient, polyethoxylated tallowamine, or POEA, was more deadly to human embryonic, placental and umbilical cord cells than the herbicide itself – a finding the researchers call “astonishing.”
:
The term “inert ingredient” is often misleading, according to Caroline Cox, research director of the Center for Environmental Health, an Oakland-based environmental organization. Federal law classifies all pesticide ingredients that don’t harm pests as “inert,” she said. Inert compounds, therefore, aren’t necessarily biologically or toxicologically harmless – they simply don’t kill insects or weeds.

More details over at Environmental Health News