The joy of New Year’s is that it’s the most obviously arbitrary of holidays (as opposed to all the rest which are less obviously arbitrary), but that’s also its downfall. People always complain that New Year’s Eve always has too much pressure to have fun and not enough fun. That’s probably true. Nevertheless, we are …
Monthly Archives: December 2008
Housecleaning
I’ve done a little housecleaning in the links bar. I deleted everything that hasn’t been updated in 6 months or more. If the blogs or sites come back to life, I’ll put them back. Of course I also added some new things. –The Montreal Sound Map is part of an internet phenomenon around acoustic …
Criminalization of Chemistry
Annalee at io9 posted a story about a Saskatchewan university student arrested for having a chemistry lab at home. What’s most disturbing to me is that a few years earlier, Saskatchewan police evacuated a Salvation Army community centre after finding chemicals for a darkroom. One interesting and unfortunate side effect of the consumer-electronicsification and digitization …
Ready to Fight Back, Only Too Late
Despite my vegetarianism, one of my favorite attractions at the Minnesota State Fair (which, if you don’t know, is the best state fair in the world) was always the bad taxidermy. Although I would say bizarre is a better term for it, Carrie and I passed by a barber on Liège while walking around the …
A Brief Commercial Phenomenology of Christmas
Two Christmas posts on a blog by a lapsed Jew. Something must be wrong. Let’s pretend this one is about Boxing Day. Now that I live in Canada and American secular holidays like Thanksgiving and the 4th of July aren’t in effect for the people around me, Christmas is probably the quietest day of the …
Continue reading “A Brief Commercial Phenomenology of Christmas”
Christmas Wakeup
2007 ended so fast that we didn’t manage to mail out our Christmas letter, something we’d just started doing a few years earlier. 2008 went faster for me but the brakes are on this week as I try to bring the locomotive force of my life to a brief resting point. This year we’re getting …
Possibly the meanest thing I’ve read about Michael Ignatieff
is right here. As winter break moves gently in my direction, I hope to install a year-end, Project Censored Top-5 or Top-10 stories I wished I’d blogged about at the time for 2008. In the meantime, it’s 1-liners. I’ve got defences to prep and meetings to attend and a football game to return to.