The Redhead arrives tomorrow morning, and on New Year's Day, we'll be flying to attend the wedding of my friends Ashley and Chris out in Canmore, Alberta. This means that posting will be a little lighter than usual until Monday.

By the way, The Redhead figures quite prominently in this article that appears in the current issue of Harvard magazine. Please note that they got a crucial fact wrong: her personal blog is written in her spare time, not her work time.

My sister Eileen has no idea where her two-year old son Aidan learned the answer to the question "What comes after 'dot'?" (62K QuickTime movie)

I saw these posters on almost every lamppost and telephone pole on Queen Street West on Boxing Day:



The Chinese glyph in the poster is for the word "love".

"Asian Speed Dating in a Bubble Tea Cafe" sounds like a good title for an album or a novel, doesn't it?

This Tuesday's Carnival of the Canucks will be hosted at Jim "BlogsCanada" Elve's blog, Officially Unofficial. If you have any suggestions for what should go in, be sure to drop him a line!

For more details about what the Carnival, see this entry.

Richard at Just a Gwai Lo linked to my earlier entry about what makes a date a date and linked to an entry in the blog Oblivio which the author goes on a date only to discover that it isn't a date.

Sometimes the opposite happens, and I offer this story as proof.

(I've also been told by a number of people that my Worst Date Ever stories have given them hope. If hope can spring from a train wreck, this story should inspire you to pick up the phone/fire up the instant messenger software and ask that guy or girl out.)

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The scene: A cold clear night in November 1992 at Cafe Max, Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Our protagonist is easing quite nicely into his second year in his second incarnation as an undergrad at Crazy Go Nuts University.

This was a friendly date. I'd asked to kiss her after the Hallowe'en party, but she had to politely decline. She had a boyfriend who went to another university and wanted to maintain the relationship despite the fact that he was all the way over there, I was right here, and probably smarter, more charming, better-looking and Crazy Go Nuts University's best damn DJ, ever. In spite of this, she'd agreed to go out on a getting-to-know-you kind of dinner outing.

I paid for everything and expected nothing but pleasant conversation and a goodbye hug at her door at the end of the evening, which makes me either an old-fashioned gentleman, a complete sucker, or possibly both. I decided to take a pragmatic view of the whole affair:

• A non-date with a pretty girl is better than an evening at home watching Star Trek:The Next Generation
• If I impress her, perhaps she can introduce me to her friends (deVilla maxim #12: Cute girls have cute friends)
• A non-date is still a good practice run for the "real thing", where one can sharpen one's skill without risk. Kind of like the holodeck from the aforementioned Star Trek:The Next Generation, at least when the safety protocols are working.

Things were going quite well. The "your back story first, then mine" conversation flowed freely with no uncomfortable silences and the food was excellent. If this were a real date, I thought, this would be the best date I've ever had..

After dinner, we took a nice long walk through Kingston's quiet but quaint streets back to campus, where we descended into the basement pub known as Alfie's to catch the Rheostatics show. We sat near the back, drinking in each performance and saving any conversation for lulls between numbers.

A few numbers into the first set, she leaned in and whispered into my ear: "I thought I should tell you that I've changed my mind. This isn't a platonic date."

It took a couple of seconds for this to register, and when it did, it was like a Bruce Lee kick to the head. In a good way, that is, if such a thing is possible.

Well, I'll have to invite her to my birthday party, I thought, followed by Wait...birthday...what time is it?

I looked at my watch. 12:03 a.m.. November 5th.

"Hey," I said. "I just turned twenty-five."

"Happy birthday."

She leaned in, and we had our first kiss.

Sometimes it turns around.

It reads like something straight out of John Hughes' teen coming-of-age movies from the 80s: unpopular geek gets voted valedictorian as a joke and uses the opportunity to chastise his class.

From one high school nerd to another: Nicely done!

Found via this MetaFilter post: In Defense of Scrooge, in which poor Ebenezer is viewed in a sympathetic, almost heroic, light: facing off againts freeloaders, advocate of population control, and victim of a home invasion -- nay, terrorists! -- from the spirit world. Funny stuff, and Canadian Content to boot!

My favourite part of the article is are this little aside about the difference between right and left:

During the night, our Mr Scrooge is taken hostage by three kitchen-poster terrorists (admittedly dead terrorists, but cutbacks are upon us and we all must make do, &tc). Two of them look suspiciously well-fed. Perennially Indignant Cappuccino Crusaders have been, it seems, always with us, which leads me to paraphrase a conversation between P.J O'Rourke and another journalist:

"How come whenever something upsets the Left you see immediate marches and parades and rallies with signs already printed and rhyming slogans already composed, whereas when something upsets the Right you see three letters in the National Post?

"We have jobs."

"It's funny," as the mobsters on The Simpsons would say, "because it's true."

Equally amusing is this bit from the comments, in which a blog entry of a WTO protester is quoted. It mirrors the complaints that some of the liberal arts students at Crazy Go Nuts University, who saw themselves as progressives (especially those at the main paper, the Queen's Journal had with the engineers, whom they saw as dangerous conservatives making serious inroads with student government, organizations and conferences:

that is a problem with the left, that while we have meeting after meeting to decide what we are going to meet about, the right wakes up, decides to screw over a bunch of poor people, does it, then goes to sizzler.

My two-year-old nephew Aidan is a genius at identifying the various engines and train cars from the television show Thomas the Tank Engine, but sometimes misidentifies people from their photographs. Recently, he saw a picture of financial bigwig Sherry Cooper (Executive Vice President of the BMO Financial Group and Chief Economist for BMO Nesbitt Burns) and exclaimed "Yoya!". "Yoya" is the way he pronounces "Lola", which is the Filipino word for "Grandma". Ms. Cooper and Mom look nothing alike, but they have very similar hairdos.

Last week, Aidan's nanny Marvie was reading the paper when he walked up to her, pointed to a picture and yelled "Joey!". Thanks to the accordion, my appearance in the paper is hardly an unexpected event. Marvie turned over the paper, expecting to see a photo of me playing the accordion at a club or on the street but instead saw a photo of Uday Hussein.

Yeesh.



I think he automatically associates facial hair with me. Of any family members in Canada, immediate and extended, only Dad and I are capable of growing a decent beard, and Dad prefers to keep clean-shaven.

For the record, I have never assisted an Iraqi dictator, I have never tortured any Iraqis, and I look like this:

On the evening of Christmas Day, after my sister and brother-in-law had taken their kids home and I'd finished helping Mom clean up the dining room and kitchen, I left my parents' house in the 'burbs and returned downtown to attend a gathering at Deenster's and Chris' place. Among the attendees was my friend (and former OpenCola coworker) Kate, and I was telling her about The Redhead's upcoming visit.

Me: The night she visits, we're going to Kalendar and then go catch a movie.

Kate: Which one?

Me: I think we'll go see Big Fish. We're both interested in seeing it, and it looks promising.

Kate: Tim Burton's usually a pretty good bet. Dinner and a movie, wow!

Me: Maybe even a cocktail at Lobby afterwards. At any rate, it'll be a proper date. Even though nobody seems to actually date anymore, I'm still a big fan. I remember reading an article about how "hanging out" or "hooking up" has replaced dating, but I like dating better.

Kate: So do I.

Rich: So what makes a date a date, say rather than going out with a bunch of friends?

Kate: You have to call it a date.

Me: Yeah, I think you actually have to say "I would like to go out with you on a date."

Rich: So it's the declaration that makes it a date?

Kate: Yes. It's like the military. You have to declare a war, otherwise it's just a police action.

Family tradition is for us to have a Christmas gathering for the extended family a couple of days after Christmas, and this year is no exception. It'll be all aunts, uncles, cousins and close family friends at my parents' place tonight, gathered for dinner, followed by a gift exchange and then...the jam-and-karaoke session. Mom and cousin Anna will take turns on the piano, uncle Jorge will break out his acoustic guitar and amp, cousin Kara will bring her flute, brother-in-law Richard and sister Eileen will try the new Yamaha keyboard I got them for Christmas and I'll be playing you-know-what. That will probably be followed by karaoke. True to Asian stereotype, Mom has not one, but two karaoke devices, both capable of displaying lyrics on a video monitor.

(Also true to Asian strereotype, I have a karaoke machine in my house; I inherited mom's old karaoke box. It's so old that it takes eight-track cassettes.)

Of course, the point of this posting is to announce that tonight's main course is one of my favoutire dishes, lengua. That's beef tongue in mushroom sauce. Mmm...tongue...

In response to my last posting, a reader asked if I had "some wacky story in the spirit of your blog" in which the True Spirit of Christmas is featured.

My answer: Yes.

It will never be turned into a Family Channel special or one of those cloying-yet-charming ads by the Mormons, but if someone ever comes up with a show called A Very Extreme Christmas, it might fit in.

(Yup, it's a repeat from last year and I pointed to it recently, but the blog's picked up a whole new readership over the past month, due in part to this cute redhead.)

This is from last year (with a little polishing up), but it's worth repeating.

While I do believe that some traditions should be put to rest, I also believe that a lot of tradition-bashers are poor-impulse-control cases. Having abandones any actual tradition or culture of their own, they fill the void with a couple of Utne Reader platitudes, a mild revulsion for anything even vaguely Judeo-Christian, even if it aligns with their beliefs, a pro-pot slant and a half-formed belief in eye-for-eye karmic payback.

Standing for almost nothing, they tend to fall for just about anything.

Chris Baldwin's summed it up pretty handily -- and perhaps unintentionally -- in a Bruno comic from last year:



To borrow the line about Klansmen and Martin Luther King Day: C'mon, Bruno, how hardcore a secularist must you be to not want a day off?

Of course, those of us who celebrate Christmas would argue the exact opposite: here we took a beautiful Christian holdiay and destroyed it through corportization and "We're white, we're straight, we're sorry!" guilt.

(There's a Randroid who would take another tack and say "here we took a beautiful commerical holiday and destroyed it in usual religious fashion." Haven't we developed some kind of Ayn Rand repellent yet?)

In the end, I believe that intent counts.

I'm certain there is no malice, no implicit "convert or die" message and no forcing of one's beliefs on others when someone wishes someone else a Happy Chanukah, Eid, Diwali, Kwanzaa, Saturnalia, Tet or even Festivus, the actions of certain vicious zealots notwithstanding. Balanced minds do not see any implied Hitler overtones at Oktoberfest nor Hirohito/Tojo insinuations at the sushi house, and neither do they see the Crusades in Christmas.

When people say "Merry Christmas", most of them are really saying "Happy Holidays, and I'm celebrating them Christmas-style. You do your thing, and I'll do mine. Come by for drinks."

That what I'm really saying, anyways.

No matter what you believe, enjoy the break from the hustle and bustle of 21st century life. Be nice to each other. Hug someone you love.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Racism/Sexism/Homophobia is a nasty three-headed rottweiler that's been beaten with a rubber hose and hasn't been fed for days, which is why one always gets bitten when approaching it. This is why more critical accounts of the origins of Kwanzaa are hard to come by: there doesn't seem to be a way to publish one without being accused of hanging with the pillowcases-as-hats crowd.

In this post, I wrote:

My own feeling is that although Kwanzaa's roots are pretty dubious, but I'm still looking for a non-drooling-right source to corroborate the evidence gathered against it.

Kathy "Relapsed Catholic" Shaidle, who wrote a controversial Kwanzaa poem, came through for me, providing me with two articles that don't come from what I refer to as the "drooling right".

(I find FrontPage too "drooling right", just as I find IndyMedia too "loopy left". My own political leanings are along the lines of Eric S. Raymond, who wrote: "Liberals, by and large, are fools" and "Conservatives, by and large, are villains".)

The first is The Truth About Kwanzaa, written by an African-American woman.

If the Christian focus of the previous link bothers you -- although I'll bet that a Buddhist one wouldn't -- there's a Telegraph editorial that expresses some doubt about its authenticity, along with some remarking on how you can't say "Merry Christmas" anymore.

I've mentioned it before, but I do it again: here's Tony Pierce (who's a black hipster from L.A.) on Kwanzaa. I also found this Dartmouth Review piece.

Thanks, Kathy, for the links!

If you want to discuss Kwanzaa further, feel free to make a comment. I'll be on and off the computer all this week.

In this post, I reported -- in reference to the YULBloggers -- that YUL is the airport code for Montreal's Mirabel airport. Aaron informs me that YUL is actually the code for Pierre Elliott Trudeau (formerly Dorval) airport, and YMX is the code for Mirabel.

As you may have guessed, I never fly to Montreal -- I either drive or take the train.

I managed to forget to add one link, so here it is. Striding Cloud makes the same observation that I did while watching The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King: the "Riders of Rohan vs. the Elephants" battle scene feels like an homage (or, if you're more cynical, a rip-off) of the "Snowspeeders vs. the Imperial Walkers" battle scene from Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. I was half-expecting Eowyn to yell out "Use your tow cables and go for their legs!" The Legolas bits in that battle were pure Luke Skywalker -- so much that George Lucas should be in tears, exclaiming "Finally someone steals an idea from me!".

However, I couldn't figure out the sense of deja vu that I got when he slid down the elephant's trunk in his classic "Sk8r Elf" style until I read Striding Cloud's post: it's the same thing Fred Flintstone does in the title sequence for The Flintstones! If only Legolas screamed "Yabba-Dabba-Doo!" while doing it...

In this post, I made a reference to "Boston's Deepest Blogger". The problem is, I originally didn't link to the right blog. The error has been corrected, but let me state for the record that Jay "Makeoutcity" McCarthy is Boston's Deepest Blogger.

The title of Boston's Cutest Blogger goes to The Redhead, of course.

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Once again, my thanks to David "Ranting and Roaring" Janes for organizing the Carnival, and to all the Canadian bloggers for providing me with such rich linking material.

It would appear that the Carnival has a logo:



David's also provided a schedule for the next few Carnivals:

• Next Tuesday, December 30th: Jim Elve of BlogsCanada, the definitive listing of Canadian blogs, takes the reins.
• Richard at Just a Gwai Lo mans the Epiphany shift on Tuesday, January 6th.
• Michael at Discount Blogger's run is on Tuesday, January 13th.

Send them links!

And finally, the last part of my contribution to Carnival of the Canucks. Hope all these links give you lots of reading and entertainment over the holidays!

Damn, that Matt Goyer is one righteous dude. He interviewed at both Amazon and Microsoft and got job offers from both! Even better, he took notes!

(He took the offer from Microsoft. Congrats, Matt!)

Speaking of righteous dudes, here's Gideon Strauss, whose blogger convivium I attended last Saturday (and forgot about the time, which means I've have to catch up with Sean and Keitha at Ashley's and Chris' wedding in Canmore). I've mentioned before about how he likes to ask The Big Questions, one of which is "Why do you get up in the morning?".

Ghost of a Flea points out...egad...another William Shatner album?!

Anne Galloway of Purse Lip Square Jaw writes about machines never forgetting.

And finally: Shame on the Liberal Party for trying to shut down a blog that makes fun of Federal Liberal Party Leader and Not-So-Honourable Prime Minister Paul Martin.

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I'd like to thank David Janes for inviting me to write this installment of Carnival of the Canucks. It was an honour and a privilege!

Be on the lookout for next week's edition, hosted by Jim "Blogs Canada/Officially Unofficial" Elve!

Her name is Raymi, and yes, she is a minx. Not safe for work, because she has a predilection for posting pictures of herself, many of which are saucy shots of her in various states of undress. Strangely enough, I discovered her blog by way of L.A. blogger Tony Pierce. The current page (there don't seem to be any permalinks) has a photo -- and I remind you, not safe for work -- that I'm certain Ray and Roast Beef from Achewood would appreciate.

What would Brian Boitano blog? My best guess is that if Brian Boitano had a blog, it would be rather like 2xy.org, better known as The Goluboy Chronicles. "Fresh and frooty" in every sense of the phrase, Goluboy (Russian slang for "gay") is as visually mish-mashed as Times Square, Picadilly Circus or Shibuya, but just as info-dense. In addition to daily entries, there are also a good number of music and movie reviews that I often go by.

Mention The Hebrew Hammer, and suddenly, he's everywhere! While at a Christmas party for Tucows' Marketing, Product Management and Research and Innovation (The! Best! Department! Ever!) departments, I made mention of The Hebrew Hammer to Greg Frank, who was looking for some Chanukah viewing for a quiet December 25th. I also mentioned it to The Redhead, who'd never heard of it, either. But Marc "Weissblogg" Weisblott, who rants so well, has, and uses it as a launching point for ranting about "Jewsploitation" -- the Jewish version of Blaxploitation, as in Shaft Super Fly et al.. There are no permalinks on his blog, but this rant is the top story as I write this. Just read the whole page; he's a mensch, and it's all good.

(A little note: if they ever invent "Flipsploitation", I'm hoping for a role similar to Huggy Bear from Starsky and Hutch. When we played "Starsky and Hutch" as kids, I was the only one who wanted to be Huggy -- he was cooler than Starsky and Hutch combined.)

"A" from The Meatriarchy seems to be a bit down on Accordion City: he says that this description of Portland, Oregon reminds him of our fair city. I get the feeling that what would make A happy might make me miserable, and since I'm the damn mayor of Accordion City, I shall invoke my powers and say "Hey buddy, there's the door..."

I've never had a client tell me "You are very rude...I hope you burn in Hell", but Eva has. Eva has great stories from the world of customer support.

Where would we be without hastily scribbled notes on serviettes? First of all, a "serviette" is Brit/Canuck English for what others may call a "napkin". Now that we've got that out of the way, you may not realize the number of ideas that were born on a serviette -- the Laffer curve (a cornerstone of conservative economics), the lyrics for several pop and rock songs and the El Torrito spec, which made CD-ROMs that PCs could boot from, to name a few. Now Michael O'Connor Clarke, in his blog, Uninstalled (formerly I Love Me, Vol. I) shows us serviettes that make the whole planning process easier.

Roland Tanglao: Tech news maven, Blogware reseller, all-round cool guy. I finally got a chance to meet him at BloggerCon!

A media whore like me never forgets his first interview, and mine was with David Akin. It was over cans of Guiness in our hotel room at the Luxor Hotel in Vegas, where he was interviewed me about a VB-based video slurping-and-stremaing project that I worked on with Chris Cummer. He suggested we make up hacker names for the interview (this was for an article on the DefCon conference), and I went by "Rice Cube". Heh.

David has an interesting report on the popularity of Apple in Tokyo and one on how it's harder to get a job at an Apple Store than it is to get into Stanford. He also a posting about how Canadians would rather pay for WiFi by the hour than by the day, according to a study by Decima Research. My fellow Canadians, that is just crazy talk.

Speaking of WiFi and blogging, be sure to check out WIFLblog!

Whether or not you agree with the war effort, you've got to say that this guy's generosity is nothing short of amazing. A filet mignon on a flaming sword to you, sir, and to The Blog Quebecois for pointing it out!

Breakfast never looked so pretty! Aaron Straup Cope's This is Aaronland features a gorgeous photo illustrating what he learned about breakfast from the Italians.

If you are a lover of pop and rock, add Overheard at the Bar to your daily reading right now!

If the relationship between culture and technology, especially internet technology, is of interest to you, Paul Kelly's As We Know It should be part of your daily reading.

And last, but not least for this entry, let me tell you about Accordion City's supreme photoblogger, Rannie "PhotoJunkie" Turingan and his incredibly cool Advent calendar. I was supposed to submit something, but things have been a little bit crazy at work lately. Perhaps next year?

Next: the last installment of my contribution to Carnival of the Canucks!

I need to run away from the computers for a bit, but there are a few more links left, which will be covered in the remaining two (Bob and Doug Mackenzie managed to enumerate only 8 of the 12 days of Christmas) entries. Stay tuned!

For you non-Canuckleheads, a "two-four" is the Canadian colloquial term for a case of beer, which holds 24 bottles.

One thing that bothered me as a teenager growing up in the 1980s was what Douglas "Generation X" Coupland later called "legislated nostalgia". Simply put, it's being made to feel nostalgic for someone else's past, and in the eighties, we were having the sixties marketed very strongly to us. The Boomers derided us as the "nowhere generation", while at the same time, many of them froze themselves in time, maintained a permanent semi-adolescent state and soaked up any opportunity that the "Thirteenth Gen" could've used. They ended up raising self-indulgent children with poor impulse control, a few of whom I had the misfortune of dating.

(Speaking of children with poor impulse control, have you seen these dolls that Blork Blog points out?)

(By the way, "south-east Asian", a.k.a. "oriental", and "hippie" are almost contradictions in terms, which is one argument for multiculturalism -- we're pretty much Grateful Dead-proof and perhaps your last, best hope against the patchouli-reeking rabble.)

Anyhow, for those of you, who like me chanted "Bring me the head of Jerry Garcia!", who preferred DM to CSNY, there's Boomer Deathwatch, a site devoted to the watching boomers bite it. Schadenfreude at its finest.

Boomer Deathwatch is run by Rick McGinnis and Kathy Shaidle (yup, Ms. Relapsed Catholic herself), both of whom I met at David Janes' warblogger/conservative blogger party in the spring.

Speaking of David Janes, check out his home office. That's a pretty sweet collection of gear. Maybe we should have some kind of local blogger post-fest where people blog photos of their computer desks.

(By the way, David helped launch The Carnival of the Canucks.)

I'm a slow but passable reader of French, but Karl's blog helps keep me sharp, and his blogging, like mine, is a mish-mash of geek and life. This week, he attempted animal haiku and talked about how XFN is a big, steaming pile of merde.

Richard, the "gwai lo" in Just a Gwai Lo (that's "white guy" in Cantonese) asks if low-carb means low-taste. Nope: it's low-fat that means low-taste. The taste downside to the Atkins diet is that without bread, rice or pasta, there's not much to sop up the juices and sauces of your meal. He's another daily read of mine.

Operating system humour. Chris Cummer at ob.blog found this on Slashdot:

Microsoft: Where do you want to go today?
Apple: Where do you want to go tomorrow?
Linux: Are you guys coming or what?

Although Guile and I disgree about Freddy vs. Jason, (I hated it, he thought it was Citzen Kane), he's come up with some good advice for those of you who have yet to see Return of the King. When Guile isn't involved in kinky creamed-corn-wrestling with the lovely Chun Li, he writes some bang-on summaries of what's been happening on Survivor: Pearl Islands.

Yes, I've met him, and as a matter of fact, he does glow in the dark. When Gamma Fodder isn't studying noo-cue-lar physics, he's hanging around my neck of Accordion City and writing some pretty funny stuff. In one of those "it's a small world" coincidences, he's a friend of Rob "King Floyd" MacDougall, with whom I wrote for the humour paper Golden Words at Crazy Go Nuts University. Rob's Canadian, but he lives somewhere in the Boston area, like this cute girl I know.

(Look, it's my blog, and I can get all Redhead-sappy if I want to.)

Like Gamma Fodder, Relapsed Catholic is not afraid to handle hot material. We agree to disagree much of the time, especially in areas where immigrants are concerned -- I'm an immigrant, and sometimes she's of the "Ever since my family came to Canada, we've had nothing but crap from immigrants!" school. I have to admit that we sometimes agree, and that her Don Cherry-meets-Don Rickles approach to religion, politics and pop culture is fascinating. Agree or disagree, she always makes for an engaging read.

Kathy recently wrote a poem poking fun at Kwanzaa, which has been described as a phony holiday created by a criminal by her and Jewish World Review (Tony Pierce, who's black and left-leaning, also thinks of Kwanzaa as fake or at least fake-ish).

And then it hit the AOL fan. If freedom-of-speech and racism issues are your cup of political tea, you should take a peek.

My own feeling is that although Kwanzaa's roots are pretty dubious, but I'm still looking for a non-drooling-right source to corroborate the evidence gathered against it. However, there is a precedent for the meaning of holidays to be supplanted -- take Christmas being moved to knock out Saturnalia (and alas, maybe Spendmas knocking out Christmas) -- and instilling more of a "Yes, we're black and we should be proud" spirit, while realizing all the while that what holds us together as humans far outshines the differences. You know, like that little dream of Dr. King's.

Of course, that may be a long time coming.

Boss Ross, thinks that the boss of a certain special lady friend of mine misses the point about public participation in ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the people who oversee the assignment of domain names (such as drinkyourownpee.com) and numbers (which all those nice domain names translate to). If the minutae of internet governance isn't your cup of tea, there's Ross' entry on his quitting smoking, a must-read if you're trying to quit the vile weed.

Elliot Noss, He Who Reigns Above Us All at Tucows also has a blog, and if internet governance is your bag, you should read his article on the recent WSIS meeting in Geneva.

My former coworker at OpenCola, Gary Lawrence Murphy, is a programmer, musician and expert observational chronicler. He writes about an anti-RIAA guerilla stickering campaign -- one that I believe BoingBoing (co-edited by Canadian expat Cory Doctorow) hasn't yet blogged it -- that's pretty cool.

Politics always makes for strong emotions and strong statements, and Deenster (who also worked with me at OpenCola) has a posting about her own experience with anger in the Israel/Palestine debate in her charming blog, Pony.

My one-stop checkpoint for things about the internet and juggling information is Circadian Shift. Jen Vetterli is a tireless aggregator of this sort of information, and as someone who works in the research and innovation wing of a company that helps make the Internet go, I find it incredibly useful.

Tony Gill,who runs Gill Advisors and has a business blog, in thinking about the parallels between the internet and coffee houses and the proposed replacement for the World Trade Center, writes:

Today, as in years gone by, freedom is not in the tallest structures in the world, but in small coffee shops on street corners where people gather to exchange information and ideas, to read a newspaper or magazine, or to connect to the Internet with laptop computers or wireless handheld devices to check their email and, perhaps, post notes to their websites on a Saturday morning.

Abnu is a Canadian working for an American company in Toronto (the most roundabout description since the tag line for the movie Victor Victroria). Naming and branding is his line of work, so he's got something to say about the naming of "Operation Red Dawn", in which one Saddam Hussein Al-Tikrit was captured.

Never mind "A Boy Named Sue", here's a girl named Bill! Bill's one of the YULBloggers (a Montreal blogging social group) I met this September, and her blog, Geekward Ho is one of my regular reads. Her blog currently has a number of good Christmas jokes and some observations about what she learned over a three-day period.

My favourite right-wing canuck, Colby Cosh, wrote the best summary of The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King ever:

Hey, have you guys heard about this Return of the King movie? It's pretty darn good! It's about these Irish midgets who save the world! You should check it out!

I can't talk about Canadian Blogs without mentioning BlogsCanada and its directory of Canadian blogs and their monthly listing of top Canadian blogs. Jim Elve, one of the people behind BlogsCanada also has a blog, Officially Unofficial. He recently got a scoop that hasn't received enough attention -- a two-part interview with Hossein "Hoder" Derakhshan, a Toronto-based blogger, who blogs in both Persian and English, fights the good fight against censorship (and especially for the freedom of his native Iran) and is running for Iranian parliament.

Jim will be hosting next week's Carnival of the Canucks and gets bonus points from me for being that rarest of breeds: the Canadian accordion player.

The award for Most Idealistic Canadian Blog has to go to Dave Pollard's How to Save the World, wherein he sets out to do just that. Also of interest are two recent postings, What Keeps Executives Awake at Night, in which he looks at "the usual" solutions to business problems versus his approach, and Are You a Closet Canadian?, which points to a great test to see if your attitudes are generally more Canadian (trending towards "idealism and autonomy") or American (in the "status and security" area, trending towards "exlcusion and intensity").

I cannot praise Steph "Sniffles" Troeth's blog, Dandruff, enough. I love her writing and observations, and had a chance to meet her along with a number of YULBloggers (YUL is the airport code for Montreal's Mirabel airport) in September. A notable recent entry: The Relationship Quagmire, in which she comments on the inadequacies of XFN (XHTML Friends Network), a computer-readable way of documenting relationships between people.

(I am of the opinion that having computer programmers design social software is dangerously similar to having deaf people design violins. The previous sentence also gives me an excuse to sneak in a link to Seb's Open Research, which is also a Canadian blog. Clever, no?)

Here's hoping that Happygirl's Christmas wishes come true. But really, Happygirl, I think you should wish for better than "A date with a non-boring non-ugly guy who is slightly normal." I think I fit at least 66% of the bill, but as regualr readers may have deduced, my dance card is full.

G'day, eh?!, and welcome to this week's edition of Carnival of the Canucks! This week's theme, seeing as we're two days away from Christmas and since the Carnival is all about notable entries in Canadian blogs both notorious and unheard-of, is The Twelve Days of Christmas, as performed by the two greatest guardians of Canadian Culture, Bob and Doug Mackenzie.

For those of you not familiar with the Mackenzie brothers' rendition of the carol, their gifts were:

• Eight comic books
• Seven packs of smokes
• Six packs of two-fours
• Five golden toques
• Four pounds of back bacon (for you Americans: this is what Canadians call "Canadian bacon")
• Three french toasts
• Two turtlenecks
• And a beer in a tree

And now, the first set of links...

"The horror...the horror...": Brett Lamb tells funny stories of his experiences as a shopping mall Santa Claus.

Packing tips! I'm flying with The Redhead to attend the wedding of my friends Ashley Bristowe and Chris Turner in the amazingly scenic little town of Canmore, Alberta. Thankfully, Eva at EastrernBlog has illustrated the proper way to pack my stylin' Boss suit.

It took Boston's deepest blogger to point me to one Adam Yoshida, who by his writing is a super-patriot. By super-patriot, I am using the MAD magazine definition, which is "someone who loves his country while hating 94% of it". He has a great polemic about what's wrong with Canada (not enough like the US, which in turn is not enough like Palpatine's Empire) called The Northern Abyss (PDF link), wonders why Howard Dean took so many damned Marxist courses and why his family keeps such a low profile and starts his latest blog entry with:

The US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals is more than just a liberal court. It is an active enemy cell, a disloyal institution which has taken the side of America’s enemies in the War on Terror.

He's the new Ed Anger!

From the West Coast... Tim Bray has some lovely photos of his neck of the woods, the west coast, and also presents his notes on Quicksilver, the first of a trilogy by Neal Stephenson (whom I met recently).

More stuff soon...keep watching this space!

Today's the last day you can submit anything for Carnival of the Canucks. One last time: if you know of any interesting Canada-based blogs or blog postings from Canadian blogs, please let me know either in the comments or email me. My edition of Carnival of the Canucks will appear tomorrow morning, after which the torch will be passed to Jim "BlogsCanada" Elve for next Tuesday.

Be sure to take a look at last week's Carnival, which was hosted by the music blog Switching to Glide.

Well, sort of.

OSDN (Open Source Developer Network), the parent company of the geeky website Slashdot (as well as FreshMeat, SourceForge and Linux.com) now has a branded dating service "powered by Match.com". Here's the ad:



(I like to think that I'm flexible when it comes to dating, but 18 - 35 is a pretty wide range, even for me.)

There you go, Slashdotters -- put on a (relatively) clean t-shirt, brush up on your romantic 1337speak, and prepare your best lies for your personal profile! ("I enjoy long moonlit romantic walks...")

Recommended Reading

Sex Tips for Geeks by sexy libertarian (cough, cough, cough), firearms enthusiast and open source advocate Eric S. Raymond. I have these horrible visions of him narrating the text of this work while simultaneously being the other participant in the Paris Hilton video (safe for work, it's a newspaper article titled A Culture Gorging on Porn).