(This article was cross-posted to Global Nerdy.)
Boing Boing points to the story of Blinky, the two-headed calf, who was euthanized yesterday.
My co-workers at Tucows and I couldn’t help but notice that Blinky bore a rather uncanny resemblance to our corporate logo:
Here’s the latest news item I could find on the case of Alexandra Flanagan, who’s been missing for over a month, courtesy of the Barrie Examiner:
Friends and family members of missing Barrie woman Alexandra Flanagan are leaving no stone unturned in their search to find their loved one. Most recently, they set up a booth at Kempenfest to get the word out to a mass audience about the fact she has still not been found.
“Still no activity with her bank accounts,” said long-time friend Darlene Pestill, who helped staff the booth over the weekend. “We’ve been organizing search efforts almost every day. We won’t stop our efforts until we find her.”
Pestill said many people stopped by the booth to ask questions about Flanagan, take an information flyer, or offer their support.
“One good thing is that some people who didn’t know about the fact she is missing, now do. Being here at Kempenfest has helped to get the word out even more,” she said.
Flanagan has been missing a month. She was last spoken to on July 7, and has had no contact with friends or family since.
Wendy Flanagan, the mother of the missing girl, said no solid tips came in at Kempenfest, despite the well-meaning efforts.
“We just want to find out one way or the other. I’m really at a total loss as to what has happened to her. We’ve got posters all over the place – somebody has to have seen her,” she said. “People need to know she has never done this before; it is totally out of character.”
She added that although it has been reported in the news that there were sightings of Flanagan in Toronto, none of the leads have yet panned out and she isn’t confident that the people who called in actually saw her daughter.
“Nobody who knows her personally has seen or heard from her. Absolutely nobody,” she said. “I’m no further ahead about where she is than I was a month ago when she first went missing.”
Police are continuing their investigation into the case.
For more details about what is known about Alex’s disappearance, see:
(This article was cross-posted to Global Nerdy.)
Take a look at this article from China View, the English-language site run by China’s official Xinhua News Agency and pay particular attention to the accompanying photo:
Click the screenshot to see it at full size.
What’s happening here? I’ll let Computerworld explain:
The article, which appeared on China’s official Xinhua News Agency’s English news site on Monday, displays text about a new genetic discovery relating to MS, attributed to “agencies.” Alongside is an x-ray rendering of the diminutive brain of the cartoon character Homer Simpson, attributed as a “file photo.”
This isn’t the first time Chinese media has fallen prey to satire presented to an English-language audience. In 2002, the Beijing Evening News (Beijing Wan Bao) picked up an article from humor site The Onion, stating that the U.S. Congress had threatened to move out of the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., unless the building were upgraded to include a retractable dome. The newspaper also ran a drawing The Onion had published of the fictional new roof design.
Both online and print media in China routinely use photos downloaded or scanned from other sources without proper attribution or copyright permission.
I can understand how it’s possible that someone at China View might not known enough North American cultural folderol under their belt to recognize Homer Simpson, but wouldn’t whoever incuded the x-ray image have thought that it looked a little odd? I suppose it’s possible that he or she thought it was a diagram in the style of Asian electronics instruction manuals, which are full of cartoony characters.
Evon Reid, who was called the “Ghetto Dude” in a mis-forwarded email from the Ontario government. Photo taken from his Facebook page.
It’s insult added to injury: not only did poor Evon Reid find out that he wasn’t accepted for a job by way of an accidental email forwarding, he was referred to in the email as a “ghetto dude”.
“This is the ghetto dude that I spoke to before,” said the email written by Aileen Siu, who works in the Ontario government cabinet office as an acting team leader in cabinet office hiring, which was meant to be forwarded to a job-search colleague.
There’s a mish-mash of issues brought up by this gaffe, including:
[Cross-posted to my technical blog, Global Nerdy]
Sometimes I write a blog entry just for the sake of getting a funny title out there. This is one of those times, thanks to this report: Nigerian pupils browse porn on donated laptops.
(With apologies to the fine people at the One Laptop Per Child project)
This blog got mentioned in a list accompanying an article in today’s Globe and Mail titled It’s not the blogs I hate, it’s their fans. In the article, Ivor Tossell talks about blogging’s image problems on its (contested) tenth anniversary, summing it up with:
People want the same thing from blogs that they want from every other print outlet: a good read. There are plenty that provide, and the sooner that blogging triumphalism is history, the sooner “blog” will stop being an unfairly loaded word. As someone wiser than me once said, it’s not the band I hate. It’s their fans.
As for Ivor’s summary of this blog, it’s:
A nice guy, an interesting life, a good writer: exactly what a first-person blog should be. Engaging and sometimes touching, but never overwrought.
Thanks for the mention, Ivor! (I’m sure I’ve been overwrought on this blog at least once, though.)
In one of those coincidences that happen more often than we like to think, the comments for the aforementioned article have thus far are related to another current story about blogging. As I write this, there are two comments made in response to that article:
(Somebody better tell Brad that sometimes people quote things that come from even farther back in time. For instance, consider the saying “An eye for eye, a tooth for a tooth” saying? That’s, like, at least 200 times older than Sloan’s Coax Me.)
These sorts of comments are one reason why a number of people don’t allow comments in their blogs — some people don’t want to deal with the aggravation. In a short piece about what makes a blog a blog, Dave Winer says that it’s the fact that it’s your unedited voice and not the use of comments (which he says detract from your voice), and Joel Spolsky has written an article in which he agrees.
(I agree with the bit about a blog being your voice, but not Dave’s contention that the voice should necessarily be unedited. Having met — and dated — people incapable of doing so, I can assure you that self-editing is a virtue whose value has been severely underestimated. While the lack of that inner editor makes for some entertaining stories, self-editing and self-restraint are graces that people could stand to practice a little more.)
Before I got into blogging, I had been a street musician for a couple of years, and before that, a DJ at a campus pub for five. Handling unruly commenters is child’s play compared to the sort of people-managing I had to do with those other two hobbies. Often, the bravado that a detractor will show from the safety of his or her keyboard — especially one who does so anonymously — evaporates in a face-to-face encounter.
Hence there are comments on this blog. I handle commenters in a manner similar to what Lisa Williams calls “The Living Room Doctrine”: if I’ll allow it in my living room, I’ll allow it in the comments section of my blog. The system’s worked quite well for almost six years, and so I’ll keep it running that way.
Here’s something that many (but not all) of you regular Accordion Guy readers might not find familiar — it’s five minutes from an NBC News broadcast from July 4th, 1972:
Some interesting differences between the nightly news 35 years ago and today:
Here’s another difference between then and now that has less to do with the newscast and more about politics back then. Listen carefully to the report from San Clemente by reporter Richard Valeriani: he says that the Democrats are meeting in Miami Beach to choose a candidate for the elections.
What’s so weird about that? It’s that 1972 was an election year. American elections take place near the beginning of November. It’s the start of July at the time of the broadcast. That means that the campaigning would last no longer than four months. That’s quite unlike the current situation.
In case you’re not up to speed on your recent U.S. history, the 1972 presidential elections were a disaster for the Democrats. Ted Kennedy would’ve been a contender, but as I like to say, “that’s water under the bridge”. Ed Muskie was the was mainstream democratic favourite until he cried like a chick during the primaries. Grassroots-boosted George McGovern got the nomination and in the end, they lost by over 23% in the popular vote.
1972 U.S. Presidential Election results by state. Click the map to see it at full size on its original page.
(Check out the pie charts on the map above — note the difference between the electoral vote and the popular vote.)
I must admit that my earliest introduction to that particular election was in the late seventies, from reading back issues of MAD magazine.