The infographic below is from the current issue of The Atlantic and shows a set of quantifiable changes in the United States between 2000 and 2008. Click it to see it at full size:
Month: January 2009
The temperatures predicted for later this week in Accordion City don’t look terribly promising:
As a point of reference for my American readers, –11 degrees C, the average daytime temperature over these 5 days, is 12 degrees F. –18 degrees C, the average nighttime temperature over these 5 days, is 0 degrees F.
There is something that can help, but unfortunately, it’s not available in Canada. I’m talking about Bob Evans biscuits and gravy, complete with sausage gravy dispenser:
Why, oh why, don’t our 7-11 stores stock this stuff? I love biscuits and gravy. If it were socially acceptable (that is, if The Missus would let me), I’d spend my day sitting in a tub of it.
CP24 reporter George Lagogianes is reporting from the protests outside the Israeli Consulate near Bloor and Avenue Road. He keeps alternating between calling it “the Israeli Consulate” and “the Jewish Consulate”. For his benefit, I now present a quick primer:
- An Israeli is a citizen of the country of Israel.
- A Jew is a member of the Jewish ethnoreligious group.
While Israel is a Jewish nation-state and three-quarters of Israel is Jewish, not all Jews are Israelis. According to Wikipedia, there are about as many Jews in the United States as there are in Israel.
Here’s a Venn diagram that should simplify matters:
Calling it “the Jewish Consulate” is like referring to the American Consulate as “the Christian Consulate” or the Indian Consulate as “the Hindu Consulate”. People at the homegrown TV news station of one of the world’s most multicultural cities should know better.
This article was updated on May 11, 2009 in response to a request from attorneys for Edward Gorey’s estate. They were actually pretty cool; instead of a full takedown notice, they said I could keep up to 10% of the content of the book in the article and state that permission to reproduce said excerpts has been provided by the Edward Gorey Charitable Trust.
I knew that Shel Silverstein published different works aimed for “kid” and “adult” audiences, but I had no idea that Edward Gorey did the same – at least not until I saw The Recently Deflowered Girl. It’s a 1965 parody of etiquette books that seems quaint now, but must’ve seemed racy back in those days when Playboy was where you got not just the pictures of nude women, but good advice on stereos and cocktails.
Someone on LiveJournal published scans from the book this week. Since its posting, it got popular and the account – and hence the scans of the book – were deleted. I copied the images before that happened, and — with the permission of Edward Gorey’s estate’s lawyers, I’ve been allowed to publish a selection of the pages from the book for your enjoyment.
Present-day pop culture likes to portray Asian men, a category of which I am a member, as effete and unmasculine. Oddly enough, The Recently Deflowered Girl bucked this trend in that ten percent of the book’s deflowerings were carried out by Chinese men, the most-cited ethnicity in the book. I thought it only fitting that I post those two deflowerings. To my horny Asian brothers, this one’s for you, and as we like to say: Everybody Wang Chung tonight!
Click on any of the scans below to see them at full size:
For some reason, this photo-comic in which “Mr. Miyagi” (played by Pat Morita in the Karate Kid movies) gives mad props to Barack Obama amuses me to no end. I decided to enhance it by adding a caption to the bottom":
Categories
What’s on these Presidents’ Minds
Click the photo to see it at full size.
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Help Daniela!
Pictured above are Daniela and her three children: Daniela (age 9), Brandon (age 6) and Evelyn (age 4). Daniela and her family are in a difficult situation, and David Armano (VP Experience Design at Critical Mass, a Chicago-based marketing and design agency) is trying to rally some help for her.
Daniela is a Romanian immigrant who divorced her husband after years of physical abuse. Her youngest daughter Evelyn has Down Syndrome. She makes very little money cleaning houses and lost her house when her mortgage went unpaid.
David and his family have taken Daniela and her family into their home. They’re trying to get her an apartment through a fundraising drive. The goal is to collect at least US$5,000 so that she doesn’t have to worry about rent or a deposit while trying to improve her situation.
Here’s a photo taken inside David’s garage that shows everything that Daniela owns in the world:
David wrote in his blog post about about Daniela that he understand that getting donations in these tough economic times is difficult. In spite of that, he’s asking people to make donate even just a little money to help Daniela out.
I would argue that in times like this, it’s even more important to make an effort to perform acts of kindness. Pulling together and helping each other, especially those of us who are most vulnerable, is how we’ll all ride out the Credit Crunch. As Douglas Rushkoff wrote in his essay Riding Out the Credit Collapse:
The more we are willing to do for each other on our own terms and for compensation that doesn’t necessarily involve the until-recently-almighty dollar, the less vulnerable we are to the movements of markets that, quite frankly, have nothing to do with us.
As of my writing this, David’s campaign has raised over $9,000 for Daniela. Even though he’s raised nearly twice the target amount for Daniela, I would still suggest that you make a donation if you can. $5,000 isn’t going to last very long, and with three kids, Daniela will have expenses other than rent to worry about.
To make a donation to Daniela’s fund, click here to see David Armano’s blog article.
[Thanks to Jay Goldman, whose Twitter message led me to David Armano’s blog.]