Month: August 2008

These are even more wrong than gummi lighthouses…

Update: Even more Hannah Montana gummi wrongness here.

This is the final weekend of the Canadian National Exhibition here in Accordion City, which means that it’s the last chance for most locals to get the wonderfully deep-fried, sugar coated, bad-for-you but oh-so-tasty Tiny Tom Donuts. I’ve loved these ever since I started going to the CNE as a kid, not just for the donuts themselves, but also for watching them getting made on their assembly line:

You’ve probably heard reports of the “Obama $3 bills” being passed around by Republican supporters in which Barack Obama is wearing an Arab headdress.

It’s meant to insinuate that he’s a Muslim, secret or otherwise, and apparently they’re all plotting to bring about the destruction of America.

(I remember there being some kind of commandment that says not to bear false witness against your neighbor. Since the Republican Party are purportedly big on the Ten Commandments, maybe that one has recently been repealed.)

In keeping with their inability to fight back against Republican campaign tricks, the Democrats’ response has been rather lame: a couple of statements expressing disappointment in this cheesy tactic. I thought I’d do them a favor and teach them a thing or two about winning a war of memes by creating this template for a bill featuring John McCain. Better still, I don’t have to tell any lies.

So, Democrats, take this idea and run with it: the “McCain Keating $5 bill”:

I didn’t have much time to whip this up and I’m not a graphic artist by trade, so if you can do better, by all means, please feel free to improve upon my work and spread it around.

Keating Five?

You know, as in the Savings and Loan Crisis, which cost the American taxpayer about $125 billion (and in late ’80s/early ’90s dollars).

See McCainKeatingFive.com, AZCentral.com’s writeup of McCain’s involvement with the Keating Five, the Wikipedia entry for “Keating Five” and the Phoenix New Times article titled McCain: The Most Reprehensible of the Keating Five.

If you ever meet someone who’s not sure of the difference, you can always use this picture as a visual aid:

Click the chart to see a larger version.
Chart courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.

Last night, I attended a presentation where the latest beta version of the upcoming Microsoft browser, Internet Explorer 8, was shown to us. At the end of the dinner, we attendees were presented with USB keys containing installers for the browser so we could take it for a spin:

Over at Global Nerdy, I review its most-snickered-about feature, InPrivate Browsing, which lets you surf the web without leaving a trail on your own computer. For obvious reasons, the tech press — and let’s face it, me — like to refer to it by the colloquial name of “Porn Mode”.

If you’re interested in this sort of thing, go check out my article!

If you’re ever in Tokyo, you need to observe the scramble crossing in Shibuya. It’s pretty fascinating.

Tomorrow at 11 a.m., the intersection at Yonge and Dundas streets will become a scramble crossing (or as some of you urban and traffic engineer types might call it, a Barnes Dance or “exclusive pedestrian phase”). That means that at a certain point in the traffic light cycle, all vehicular traffic in any direction must stop, and pedestrians can use the entire intersection to cross it any way they like, including diagonally. I work a short bike ride away from this intersection and might pop by to take some photos.

For more on scramble crossings, see the Wikipedia entry for “Pedestrian Scramble”.