Hate to sound like a grouch, but I kinda miss the old days.

[EDIT] Upon reflection, I think that's what the old days are for.

Maybe all this nostalgia business is just a function of life.

New Favourite: The Story of Stuff Project

Here's a link to the official site.

Herbal. Fucking Herbal. Not goddamn 'errbal'.

And in other news...

At least throw it like you mean it.

Wikileaks: Internet Supermen.

And then there's this:

ROOKIE: Now I'd like to ask you some questions about X.

ASSANGE: I don't want to talk about X. That's not why I agreed to participate in this interview.

ROOKIE: Alright, I understand and really, there is a lot more about you and your work that I'm sure everyone wants to hear about.

ASSANGE: Great, I'm glad we can move on.

ROOKIE: So tell me more about X.

Cool little stop motion advertisement.

Gaz Metro A Natural Evolution from La Moustache on Vimeo.

Although I'll be honest, I'm having a hard time drawing a connection between scribbling in chalk on a building and what appears to be the promotion of some kind of 'clean/[generic hippy buzzword]/responsible' energy agenda.

[EDIT]

I get it now. If you your energy is provided by this company, you may notice that you can scribble chalk over the exterior of buildings at night. This is useful for those who are in the business of making quaint little adds in stop motion for power companies.

So at the end of the day, this is an ad for the company that did the ad for the power company.

I change my mind; I resent this ad.

Consequently, though once this entry was filed simply under 'ART', it now also answers to 'RANT'.

Can someone please forward me the memo I seem to have missed.

I believe it might have said something along the lines of:

"All blogs hosted on this service are to deal, exclusively, in the affairs of new families. Moreover, it is preferable that they be authored by bored housebound individuals with little better to report on than their own domestic affairs. Examples of acceptable topics for discussion include, but are not limited to: Kyle's soccer game on Saturday; the recent family trip to ______; your woeful poetry; Summer's geography assignment; your new job at_____ ;Kip's new teeth; the recent and regrettable death of the family pet, etc."

Having only recently discovered the "Next Blog>>" button, I thought I might have a bit of a perv on what other randomly selected blogs were doing. Much to my dismay, the next sixteen consecutive blogs all were authored by people who seemed to be interested in little more than gloating about the unparalleled awesomeness of their own private affairs.


I don't quite understand what compels people to publish all this information. After all of the alarmist reporting on online predators and identity thieft, why are people so willing to 'give it all up' without a thought directed to how easy it is for that information to be used against their interests.


I can certainly appreciate that these people may have plenty of reasons to be proud about what they have achieved for themselves. Yet, it must be understood that some measure of self-restraint needs to be exercised, particularly in circumstances where there is a disclosure of information concerning a third party, and that third party is unaware of such disclosure, or of the possible risk that such disclosure invites.


I think it would be appropriate for personal blogs, or at least those dealing with domestic affairs, to be kept private; not because of the shameless voyeurism they seem to encourage but because there are a great many people who literally need to have it explained to them that when they have a public blog called "The Doe Family Blog" and mum complains about Kyle's soccer game on the weekend at the such and such school soccer fields, mum probably doesn't realise just how much information she has disclosed.


I really have spent more time on this than I should have. This isn't a new problem, and it certainly should have already been addressed. Nevertheless, in my work I have developed a certain awareness of what some individuals are capable of.


The tragedy is that very little would need to be done to negate the potential risk these people unknowingly expose themselves to on a daily basis.

Road Rules.

I’m not a crazy person.

For the record, I know what you are supposed to think of people who say things like that. I am also familiar with the legal analogy in character evidence, but I assure you, I'm really not a nutter. Perhaps the force with which this assertion is brought does little more than undermine my standing. Perhaps value judgments are better saved for later.

Nevertheless, I do appreciate that the sum of my idiosyncrasies place me somewhere a little left of centre, but that isn’t necessarily symptomatic of some underlying mental health drama (or so I’ll have you believe).

That being said, I really don’t get the dilemma people have with not applying the rules of the road to footpaths. It really doesn’t seem all that unreasonable. The reason I feel compelled to take such a defensive stance is that not that long ago, maybe a week or so, there was an incident. This was the second of its sort.

How our paths came to cross really doesn’t matter all that much. It was in the morning and I was on my way to work and presumably, she was too. Both of us headphones on and were more or less on autopilot.

Traffic on the path was a little heavy, so to bring some sense of order to the scrum I was trying to navigate, I did my best to stick to the left. As soon as I was aware of the fact that I was on a collision course with this woman I cut further to the left. At the same time, so did she. So further left I went. With little more than a few inches between us, and with one foot in the gutter, I looked at her, confused and mumbled something about 'road rules'.

Now I can accept that most people will giggle, shrug and move on. I did that last time and it worked fine. That is how people generally should respond to something that is mildly frustrating, but of such minor significance that further consideration would be unwarranted.

Yet, something that happens a couple of times can easily happen a few times, and before you know it, you can cite several incidents. Next thing you know, it’s a pandemic. People in gutters everywhere. People with families. In the gutter.

So I mumble something about road rules.

I suppose she didn’t get what I was trying to say. The way she responded would imply as much. Both of us had, by this point, removed our headphones and she looked like she didn’t know what she wanted to do with her hands; they were briefly perched on her hips but now hung idly from her shoulders.

I went about briefly explaining the rationale behind my statement; that people, like cars generally move around a little more efficiently if they know where they need to be, with respect to all the other cars/people heading in the other direction.

This woman. She looks at me, with the sort of expression you would reserve for your nemesis.

“What are you saying? I’m as big as a car?” She demands.

“What?” I may have even sworn under my breath in disbelief.

“Are you saying that you can’t just get out of my way?”

This quote originally came from an article I found at neatorama.

The image and others like it can be found over at the Boston Big Picture.

And yes, it's true; they were among the most serious studies out there.

WHY

Goddammit. Somebody put down money for this. Money that could have sustained my booze and discretionary spending for weeks. It doesn't even matter whether this the finished product; whether it was just a couple of bored actors pissing their time against the wall. It cost money to make that abomination, and I damn well demand that someone be held accountable for it.

I know that this all amounts to little more than a shout in the street, but for Christ's sake. Really? Somebody vetted this, and paid for it?

[CITATION NEEDED]

How the hell is this acceptable reporting?

Without any reference to the manner in which this material was received how are we to see it as little more than an exercise in scaremongering? It's unprofessional and incredibly irresponsible reporting.

"Because we love you, man..."

It really frustrates me to see people who just don't seem to appreciate another person's right to self determination.

This particular group however, goes way beyond that. These fuckers scare the shit outta me.