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Archive for October, 2006

NaBloPoMo

October 30th, 2006
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NaBloPoMo

Last year, I tried to participate in NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, and to be honest, although I made good progress on my book, it almost killed me.

So this year, I’m participating in something that I think will be more fun and more manageable, National Blog Posting Month, originally posted at Fussy. The goal is to make a blog post every day for the month of November, and I thought I’d give it a go.

Don’t expect me to make it, and don’t expect all the posts to be giants of Internet literature, but I’m gonna give it a go.

John The Weeb

Happy Hallow-day - It's Finally Here!

October 30th, 2006
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Every year, I wait for the Homestar Runner Hallowe'en cartoon, and this year's is finally out!

If you are already a fan, you know where to go, but if you aren't, it's a great way to be introduced to the site. Here they are, in order:

For those of you who don’t get Homestar Runner, I don’t hold it against you, and offer this bit of Hallowe’en trivia to tide you over until the next blog post … apparently next year, Daylight Savings Time will extend until after Hallowe’en — isn’t that a good idea?

And now … I must go make some witches brew.

John The Weeb

Now I Don’t Want to Call the Internet a Liar…

October 28th, 2006
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nunavut

I have my doubts about this particular banner ad that I just saw.

I went to this page to read about a baseball fan who claims to have caught a ball in 454 games in a row. Off to the side of the page was a banner ad, part of which I have screencaptured for your edification. The ad claims to be showing me pictures of “hot girls in my area”. In this case, they can see that I’m browsing from Canada and they’re showing me some of the hot young ladies nearby who are dying to meet me. In this case, it’s a couple of young ladies from “nearby” Nunavut — Tavani and Whale Cove to be specific.

Now, call me a skeptic, but I have my doubts that the ladies pictured were actually from the communities in question.

I did some checking. Tavani is an old trading post, that doesn’t even show up on the maps anymore. Apparently, they had to drop ballots in for the last election by plane, and they never had any returned. There are no roads to it and no phone exchange. I’m sure that there are some handsome women up there, but I doubt that the lady shown is one of them.

Whale Cove on the other hand, that’s a reasonably sized community by Nunavut standards, coming in at 305 people. Perhaps the lady to the right is one of them, but again, I have my doubts. I’m guessing that if you look like that in Whale Cove Nunavut, you don’t have to cast the net quite so wide when you advertise. I bet you can pretty much have your pick of the crop in Whale Cove.

Obviously, what’s going on here is that the ads are pulling my country and displaying random pictures based on it, pulling from an overall list of communities in the country. I’m not sure why it came up as Nunavut twice from a province / territory perspective, but honestly, that’s not the issue really. I’m not even sure why they bother. Are they thinking that someone from Whale Cove is going to see the ad and think, “Wow! I haven’t seen her around — I’m going to sign up for that dating service and meet her!” Honestly, when there’s 305 people in town, just standing outside and yelling probably works better.

Are they thinking that people will see it and think, “Ooh, poor lonely woman trapped in Nunavut — she’ll log in to check her email and simply melt when she reads about my automobile, 8 snow-free months a year, and ground you can dig with a shovel.”

Man, if these people are actually making money on the Internet, I’m in the wrong business.

John Love, The Weeb

Are You as Big a History Nerd as Me?

October 28th, 2006
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I’ve always been into history. Aside from sci-fi and fantasy, the staples on the bookshelf of the Internet geek, history is the most common type of book you’d find at my house, and my favourites are some little history atlases that I found in a used bookstore that tell history via maps.

As many of you know, I am a devotee of Edward Tufte, the master of presenting information in a visual way, and to me, maps are the perfect medium for presenting historical facts, particularly wars and the effects they have on borders, though perhaps Tufte’s most famous work, Napoleon’s March, is only a map in the way that Beethoven’s Ninth is music.

That’s why I was so pleased when I saw this site, Maps of War. The one I’ve included below shows the history of the middle east, and who ruled it at one point in time. I don’t think that most people reading this will like it as much as I do, but hey, if you don’t, it still serves as insight into what makes me tick.

Here’s a question … how many of the empires who controlled the middle east hadn’t you heard of before?

John The Weeb

Six Word Stories

October 27th, 2006
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On BoingBoing, I read about a Wired article about the concept of the six word story.

According to the wired article:

Hemingway once wrote a story in just six words (”For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”) and is said to have called it his best work.

As a writer who can never finish a story, I love this idea.

The Wired article includes dozens of six word stories written by famous (though not necessarily all good) authors. Some of my favourites from the article include:

Longed for him. Got him. Shit.
- Margaret Atwood

With bloody hands, I say good-bye.
- Frank Miller

It cost too much, staying human.
- Bruce Sterling

Please, this is everything, I swear.
- Orson Scott Card

Thought I was right. I wasn’t.
- Graeme Gibson

Leia: “Baby’s yours.” Luke: “Bad news…”
- Steven Meretzky (I include this one for Chelsea)

There is also a Flickr pool devoted to writing six word story captions, one of which is included as the picture to the right.

I decided to write some myself. Since writing a six word sentence is pretty easy, I figured writing a six word story would be as well. I was wrong.

It’s easy to write a six word sentence that tells a really lame story (One day my car didn’t work). It’s also easy to write something that sounds really cool, but is actually just a saying rather than a story (like “Spanking hurts more than you think”, which is a line I saw on the subway today).

No, a good six word story evokes something, and makes you wonder what the rest of the story was. That’s what’s so great about Hemmingway’s story. Why did they have the baby shoes? Who was the baby they bought them for? Did the baby die? Did the shoes belong to a woman who always wanted a baby but never had one?

I spent a good part of several boring meetings thinking on this. Here’s my story:

Roger loved Robin, but married June.

(Thanks to Sarah for suggesting a better name… Robin is much better than the original Francis.)

John Books, The Weeb

Random Name Love

October 21st, 2006
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Some of the names that have shown up in my spam folder recently. It's clear that they're randomly generated from a dictionary, but I just love them just the same:

  • Signatory L. Tomcat
  • Bemoan J. Thatch
  • Retributive A. Wretchedness
  • Belabor J. Regenerating (Belabor is the first word so far that I didn’t know, but it turns out that I was reading it wrong, I would spell it “belabour”)
  • Gambling Q. Radioisotope
  • Clone R. Perceptual
  • Electronically T. Centimeter
  • Squalor D. Shackling

    • and my favourite:

  • Disadvantage Q. Buckskins

Is there a name in the world that isn’t made better with Q as the middle initial? That’s why my son’s middle name shall be Q-Bert. It would even make up for having the first name Disadvantage.

John The Weeb

Here's Looking at You — In Minute or Less

October 21st, 2006
1 comment

God bless the Internet for stuff like this…

Television Without Pity is the best site for summarizing a TV show (with a bit of snarky attitude), but where do you go to get a summary of a movie?

Here’s three alternatives:

1) Ghostbusters, as an animated gif! Now, some of you might look at the link to the left (Go! Do it!) and think after a few seconds, uh … John, what’s the big deal here? I’ll tell you the big deal — that’s the entire movie, in one graphics file. Not a flash file, not a movie file, one gif file. Some amazing yet pedantic bastard (or maybe a bunch of them) pixelled out ghostbusters, one 256 colour postage stamp frame at a time and layered them all into one animated gif. Fantastic.

2) The Shawshank Redemption, as a 2 minute rap video. Done by JibJab as part of their Great Sketch Experiment, this it’s quite a slick retelling of one of my favourite movies. The guy doing Morgan Freeman is so good that I thought it was Morgan himself.

3) Star Wars, as told via ascii art. Now, to be fair, this one doesn’t seem to be complete, but I am pretty sure that there IS a full version out there somewhere. I just haven’t found it yet. This place gets bonus points though for featuring the Death of Jar Jar.

And my favourite …

4) Casablanca, as told by bunnies in 30 seconds. My third favourite movie, told exquisitely by bunnies. Thank you, Jennifer Shiman, for taking such an odd idea and doing it so well. I hope you become very rich. Check out the rest of the site for more fantastic 30 second bunny movies. The Fight Club and Christmas Story ones in particular are amazing.

Ahh, we’ve come so far technologically. Remember when you would have to actually go out and rent a movie to re-experience it? Man, people who lived back then were suckers.

John Movies, The Weeb

Clearly, Jon Stewart Reads My Blog

October 20th, 2006
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On September 29th, I blogged about a particularly revolting product, Jimmy Dean’s Pancakes and Sausage on a stick. Last night, on the Daily Show, that product was their lead joke.

Obviously, Jon is a fan of Johnrobe. Or maybe one of his writers saw it on Boing Boing like I did. I prefer the former explanation.

John Television, The Weeb

First Album or Best Album?

October 17th, 2006
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How many people can legitimately make the case that the first album they ever bought might also be the best album they ever bought?

I was thinking about this the other day, and I think that I can.

The first album I ever bought (as opposed to taped or borrowed) was Rush’s Moving Pictures, from 1981. I bought it from the Woolco at the Blanford Square Mall outside Woodstock, on cassette. It came in one of those long boxes they used to use for cassettes so people couldn’t shoplift them as easily.

I know people use the expression “and I wore it out I played it so much”, but in this case, it’s true. There’s only ever been two things in life that I obsessed about to the point of destroying them. One was my Lord of the Rings Bashki book (as described previously) and the other was my cassette tape of Moving Pictures.

Some of you kids out there don’t remember when tapes and records had “sides”, but back in my day there was an A side and a B side to your music, and it was a meaningful thing, because it meant that there was a pause, a break in the music where you had to decide whether you were going to flip the record/tape over or quit listening. As a block of music, I would put Side A of Moving Pictures up against any album in the world.

Side A, from memory, was:

Tom Sawyer — The Rush song everyone knows. I’ve heard it thousands of times, learned to play the bass and drum parts, know every word by heart, and yet I still have no clue what it’s about.

Red Barchetta — A sci-fi song about a boy and his car. Given that I was listening to this in my teens as a science fiction geekboy, to say it was aimed at my personal psyche is not an understatement.

YYZ – An instrumental song based around the morse code for YYZ, Toronto’s airport code. Check out this amazing CGI video that someone made, animating Neil Peart’s drumming to this song. If Neil Peart isn’t the best drummer in the world, but he’s probably the best one that’s in a real band. He must be good to inspire someone to do this.

Limelight – My favourite song in the world, by my favourite band, I say without hesitation.

Side B doesn’t suck, but it doesn’t hold a candle to the A side.

When I think about the first album that most people probably bought, I’m sure that it’s meaningful to them, but could a Platinum Blonde or New Kids on the Block album realistically still stand up there as the best album you ever bought? Would you be able to bring it without shame to a “Best album ever made” contest? I could, and I think that’s pretty sweet.

John Love, Music

The Desert Fox

October 16th, 2006
2 comments

Today while walking downstairs to get some nectar (I'm still off the Cold Drinks Machine wagon (or is it on? Dammit, I can never remember)) I heard two people having a disjointed conversation.

You know the type… the kind where you want to jump in and strangle them because they just aren’t talking about the same thing.

This one went along the lines of:

Him: The dude is like 90 years old.

Her: Who is?

Him: Cy.

Her: Who’s that?

Him: The guy who is like 90 years old.

Her: Who is 90 years old?

Him: The dude.

Her: What dude?

Him: Cy.

Her: Who’s Cy?

Him: The dude who’s 90 years old.

Her: Oh, you mean Cy?

Him: Who’s Cy?

John: GAAAH!

It brought back memories, once the fury-shakes were off me. Several years ago, Timmi and I went to the Ex, and were sitting in the food building next to two members of our armed forces, probably there for the day because the Air Show was on. They seemed to be nice people, and treated us to this conversation, which is pretty much verbatim:

Army girl: Hey, do you know Rommel?

Army guy: Rommel?

Army girl: Yeah, Rommel.

Army guy: (thinking hard) Rommel.

Army girl: Yes, Rommel.

Army guy: (still thinking hard) Rommel. Rommel. Hmm.

Army girl: Yes, you know… Rommel?

At this point, I’m getting frustrated, because obviously, she’s got to be talking about Erwin Rommel, the German general from World War 2, also known as The Desert Fox. Now, I know not everyone immediately knows who Erwin Rommel is — you’re not all history nerds like me, but these are people in the military, obviously having a military discussion on their military lunchbreak while wearing civilian napkins so they won’t get stains on their military uniforms.

Army guy: Hmm. Rommel. No, I don’t think so.

Army girl: Come on, you know Rommel.

Army guy: Rommel. Rommel. Nope.

Now I’m fully engaged in the conversation. I want to lean over and say, “She means Erwin Rommel! Clearly she wants to discuss tank tactics with you or something! Surely you must have studied him in army school or something!”

Army girl: Sure you do. ROMMEL.

Army guy: (suddenly realizing) Oh the Desert Fox?

Army girl: No, I mean the guy with the truck.

Army guy: Oh yeah, I know him.

Army girl: Yeah, he’s having a keg party tonight.

Army guy: Cool.

John: GAAAH!

It’s my punishment for eavesdropping, I know.

John General