The new Canadian Car

March 3, 2005

For the past several weeks, I have been seeing, on average, one-point-something Smart Cars zipping about on Victoria’s streets. They’re different cars every time — all colours: orange, cranberry red, brown, black, grey, black, you name it. I have found this puzzling, and have wondered whether there’s some kind of blitz underway. “Saturate with Smart […]

Read the full article →

What about the tourists?

March 1, 2005

Now that Joseph Heath’s and Andrew Potter’s book, Nation of Rebels : Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture, is readily available in the US (it was originally published by HarperCollins Canada as The Rebel Sell: Why The Culture Can’t Be Jammed), and now that many folks are planning their upcoming summer holidays, I thought I’d quote […]

Read the full article →

Smarm factor blossoming

February 27, 2005

It’s the end of that time of year here: the annual flower count, where Victorianites get to drive the rest of Canada crazy with our smarmy smugness over our mild climate. Last February (2004), residents and other boosters counted 1,877,329,190 flowers. This year, residents counted 4,773,559,217 flowers. And, for the first time in years, I […]

Read the full article →

What are we trying to say with names?

February 27, 2005

Something about names struck me the other day. Looking through xeroxes of a sort of family tree my paternal grandmother had drawn up decades ago, the surnames all struck me as consistently and weirdly heterogeneous, especially when read as a list: Distaff: Lampert, Rixmann, Plocner, Wiesel, Bonn, Welker, May, Crein, Riegel, Walbroels, Zorn, Arndt, Zimmerschith, […]

Read the full article →

Well, that was a msitake

February 23, 2005

There’s a serious bug in this blogging software. As I’ve complained in the past, I can’t use simple html in the posting window, unless I use Internet Explorer. If I try to blog something using any other browser, all my little ‘s are turned into &’s and ;’s, and hyperlinks lie dead on the ground. […]

Read the full article →

Microsystems

February 21, 2005

One of the things I like about using the variant of tagging allowed on Flickr‘s profile pages is indulging in vanity searches, flattering myself when I turn up really cool people who share my interest. I can mentally associate with them for brief micromoments, which is a kind of pointless indulgence, but it’s fun all […]

Read the full article →

Signs of summer coming

February 19, 2005

This morning, as kidlings and self sat around the dining room table pondering questions such as, “An artist wants to completely cover [sic: split infinitive, ack!] a rectangle with identically sized squares which do not overlap and do not extend beyond the edges of the rectangle. If the rectangle is 60 1/2 cm long and […]

Read the full article →

John Berger’s Dispatches

February 18, 2005

I’m having a hard time with language lately. It feels strange because it seems to be blending into an envelope without markers, eluding me with its absence of edge. Guilt over the language-based tasks I’m leaving undone, including (e)mail to friends as well as various official words I need to shoot through the fog, magnifies […]

Read the full article →

How to avoid going up in flames on Valentine’s Day: eat more fish and get a nanotech mattress made in China

February 14, 2005

My [other] alma mater has a new electronically-available alumni magazine called Grad Gazette. Already, two articles caught my eye. First, there’s Old Computers and Toxic Waste, which profiles UBC engineer Monica Danon-Schaffer, who theorises that it’s all those computers in landfills that are causing the unbelievable build up of polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs) — flame […]

Read the full article →

Dresden

February 13, 2005

Among the disturbing news of neo-nazis on the march in Dresden, this article (published the day before the Feb.13th anniversary) presents valuable historical background: The myth of the “innocent art metropolis” that was unprepared and unfairly destroyed was started by the Nazis. They used the horrible images of charred bodies and smoldering ruins as propaganda […]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →