Category: Etc

We Are All Earthlings by Sesame Street, on YouTube.

At the risk of distracting any other Canadians from the upcoming U.S. election I thought I’d share this great project, Vote for Environment, that has poll stats for every riding and will give you strategic advice on how to defeat the Conservative government in the upcoming election (the Canadian election). You just put in your postal code and it gives you a recommendation.

My Riding’s Stats

Unfortunately my current riding is utterly pwned by the Bloc Quebecois (seperatist party) candidate Gilles Duceppe, who just happens to be the beloved golden-boy leader of basically the entire sovereigntist movement these days. Vote for Environment was on to this, so they told me to vote with my heart because my vote can’t possibly affect the number of Conservatives in government (though one more bloc rep isn’t so bad, they vote progressive on almost all issues anyway, its just the pesky not wanting to be in Canada that bugs me about them).

My favorite part is seeing the rest of the stats for my riding, the Green party are ahead of the Liberals and the NDP have more than 5x the predicted votes of the Conservatives. If this neighborhood was representative of the whole country I’d feel pretty safe (thanks for ruining everything, western Canada!).

(Thanks, Mira)

An amazing and explosively hilarious skit about the Conservative government’s cuts/reorganization of cultural funding from the perspective of French people in Quebec. Some of it depends on knowing the intricacies of Joual (Quebecois French) but if you follow the subtitles I think it probably plays pretty well anyway.

Click the image above to see the video at YouTube.

(Thanks Tim)

Peta released a new PR campaign yesterday directed at Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream (emphasis mine):

Burlington, Vt. – This morning, PETA dispatched a letter to Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, cofounders of ice cream icon Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Inc., urging them to replace the cow’s milk in their products with human breast milk. PETA’s request comes in the wake of news reports that a Swiss restaurant owner will begin purchasing breast milk from nursing mothers and substituting breast milk for 75 percent of the cow’s milk in the food he serves. PETA points out to Cohen and Greenfield that such a move on their part would lessen the suffering of dairy cows and their babies on factory farms and benefit human health at the same time.

“The fact that human adults consume huge quantities of dairy products made from milk that was meant for a baby cow just doesn’t make sense,” says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. “Everyone knows that ‘the breast is best,’ so Ben & Jerry’s could do consumers and cows a big favor by making the switch to breast milk.”

As usual PETA is messing with us to get across a rhetorical point, and as usual all the dumbasses in the world think it’s serious (it was apparrently very poorly recieved on Montreal AM talk radio, which doesn’t surprise me too much).

As a start, this is a refreshing change from their more gruesome campaigns that compare horrible human on human violence from the news (serial killers, maniacs who go on killing sprees, the holocaust) to the human on animal violence that goes on every day in the factory farming system. On another level though it does an amazing job of being a real live satire of itself, and in the process clarifying what it is that PETA is aiming for with these press releases: inflammatory demands that are obviously ridiculous but intended to make people reconsider the “normal” things they do that are actually weird and violent towards animals.

By asking people to consider drinking human milk as part of their regular diet PETA forces us to think about the whole idea of drinking milk after infancy, which is undeniably unnatural and strange even if you enjoy and depend on it. Why won’t you drink human milk? It was designed by nature just for you, unlike cows milk. The only reasonable answer is that it would be uncomfortable and disruptive on the lives of the lactating human females, which just points to the ridiculousness of doing it to cows who can’t even protest their treatment.

To add to the lark, both the tone and the content of the press release seem to directly reference Jonathan Swift’s classic work of satire “A Modest Proposal“, in which he encourages the poor of Ireland to sell their excess babies as meat to the rich to solve two problems at once. Both works draw on a similar cannibalism theme and present an outrageous solution designed to make the reader consider the various relationships at play in a new light.

Obviously you’d have to be stupid to think that Swift was being serious when publishing an argument promoting eating babies, but you’re head is pretty far up your ass if you think PETA actually wants human milk to become a normal product for consumption.

(Thanks for the link, Chris)

The scariest part is that almost 5% of them were return visitors. Sorry to dissapoint.

(On Notice Board by me, Chris Hart, James and Arthur)

Great article on CBC.ca about the provincial government’s moronic purchasing practices around software. When they make a purchasing decision, they are required to accept bids from varoius parties and have to weigh them before deciding, but there is a loophole stating that in the absence of any other options they are allowed to just make the purchase from the sole contractor.

Now, this might make sense when there actually is no competition, but they’ve been invoking the loophole as an excuse to buy Windows Vista without even considering other options. Not only could they instead be buying Apple computers (which are completely comparable and have great service available) but it completely disregards the fact that they could buy NOTHING and just install Linux. They complain about lack of service and support for Linux, but there are tons of reliable companies offering support for Linux in all its forms, and you only need to pay for the support when you need it, rather than paying for every copy of the software on the assumption that you might need support (i.e. Windows, where most users will never get support from Microsoft but rather from the IT employees that the government is already paying!).

This is of course made worse by the fact that buying Microsoft products not only enslaves Quebec’s tech infrastructure to a U.S. corporation, it deprives local and international organizations that support and develop Linux from having a chance. If Quebec is serious about independence and solidarity they need to seriously rethink their attitudes about how the knowledge society/economy is going to play out.

Ignoring everything but the entrenched corporate players makes them seem blind and intellectually lazy. Think about it Quebec, you’d love it!

(Thanks to Lloyd Budd for the link)

Was randomly targeted with an IRC direct message by someone who didn’t have a firm grasp of English and wanted to know what ‘due date’ meant. After puzzling out that they actually just didn’t understand ‘due date’, I explained the concept to their satisfaction.

This of course made me ask where the person should have checked instead of bugging random IRC people who happen to be english, so I checked Wikipedia. Lo and behold, there was a page about it, but only defining ‘due date’ in terms of pregnancy (which I hadn’t even considered). Luckily it’s Wikipedia so I just added a more robust definition: Due Date @ Wikipedia.

Best part: Getting to make a wiki link to the page about ‘homework’, which apparently needs more citations ;)