June 17, 2008

get firefox

Download Day 2008

firefox was already about a dillion times better than internet explorer, and now version 3 is out, so if you haven’t made the switch yet, do it right the fuck now.

then make it even better with add-ons: the ad-blocker (not just pop-ups, all ads, its revolutionary), forecast fox (unobtrusive weather bar), piclens (futuristic picture viewing like minority report), and more.

edit: huzzah!



June 13, 2008

google politics

wow this experiment turned out way better than i thought, easy as 1 2 3

in text form:

search string - site:ndp.ca homeless*
results found: 196
search string - site:liberal.ca homeless*
results found: 66
search string - site:conservative.ca homeless*
results found: 2

search string - site:ndp.ca environment
results found: 2280
search string - site:liberal.ca environment
results found: 1590
search string - site:conservative.ca environment
results found: 1060

search string - site:ndp.ca war
results found: 1190
search string - site:liberal.ca war
results found: 715
search string - site:conservative.ca war
results found: 77

search string - site:ndp.ca gender
results found: 773
search string - site:liberal.ca gender
results found: 563
search string - site:conservative.ca gender
results found: 2

a nice bar graph would do wonders here, but let’s not get carried away.

try it with your own search terms and leave the results in the comments!



May 31, 2008

that’s a big ass graph

yikes: farewell, fair weather

This surge in disasters and attendant costs is yet another reason we need to declare a coordinated war on climate change akin to the wars on drugs and terror. It’s a matter of national security.



May 4, 2008

hacky sack!

yeesh, what a bad post to leave on for that long. but how long ago was rudolph guiliani? seems like ages ago. i feel like i’m tired of the whole election thing, what a carnival it’s become already. i’m just gonna tune in to the thrilling final 2 minutes like it was a basketball game. these have been my feelings toward the election as of late, which you can listen to below:

we think you’re a joke, shove your hope where it don’t shine.
- santogold, “shove it”

Oh, give us your vote
Give us your vote
If you know what’s good for you
- tokyo police club, “your english is good”

complete misinterpretations, both of them, but that’s my favourite kind of interpretation.

“where has andrew been?” you probably didn’t ask, but i’ll give you the answer anyhow. you see, because i’m in the midst of writing my thesis, there’s really nothing exciting for me to talk about unless you’re one of the 7 people, like me, who thinks intermediality is like, totally rad. so i have to wait quite awhile to gather up enough stuff to “report.” it’s like george costanza: “You know if you take everything I’ve ever done in my entire life and condense it down into one day, it looks decent.”

which reminds me, i’m reliving the seinfeld days from start to finish as i fall asleep, so i have some seinfeld theories. like that its the root of self-indulgent reality tv. it was the first show about nothing, but now it seems like every show is about nothing, except it’s called “reality”. seinfeld was scripted of course, and transformed the sitcom genre, but it’s spirit was in the minutia of life in late capitalism, with its urban malaise, petty exchange, semantic bickering, endless repetition, and decadent selfishness. and in the fourth season they make “jerry,” the show-within-a-show starring jerry as his himself (to the third remove), which solidified it. this would have been a great theory had “the real world” not premiered till after this episode, but wikipedia tells me it started in 1992, while the “jerry” subplot wasn’t until 1993. damn. still, i bet the people who came up with “the real world” stole the idea from the spirit of seinfeld, which started in 1989. aanyhoo.

i’ve been spelling that word as “anywho” for the longest time, but “anyhoo” is way better.

i went to vegas a whiles back, bit of an adventure. i only ended up with about a dozen pictures, and half of them were of us drinking tallboys and playing wall-ball in the airport parking lot because our flight was delayed.

there was limited time between waking up mid-afternoon and then getting back on the red bull and booze, so i only managed 2 pictures outside

staring contest, you and me, right now.

the lizard wins, he always does.

and we spent an inordinate amount of time drinking and wrestling before heading out, as we tend to do, in our hotel room (which was awesome at least, at the mgm grand, thanks to craig)

so we didn’t end up seeing cirque to solee or the bellagio or old vegas or anything we planned on doing, but no one really cared. highlight was probably the grand finale on sunday morn: beyond-drunk last-minute craps & hooters buffet followed by rapid packing and jumping in a taxi and passing thru security at the airport at 9am. worst flight of my entire life. “entire” includes the rest of my life too, because there is no possible way, barring any oceanic flight 815 type-disaster, that i will ever experience such a flight of death again. i was praying for a hijacking just to stop the throbbing in my head.

don left (hence the vegas trip), which was sad. three is a good number for peer pressure, because the other two can gang up and harass the other until he or she gives in. it doesn’t work with just two obviously, and anymore than three is ganging up, plus you just leave the whiner behind if you already have three or more people. but with two pressuring one, it’s just the right amount of guilt/pressure. and thus the three amigos were born, so as long as two of us wanted to go out, the third would inevitably join/be dragged along. actually, don was never that third person, he was always on board, which is probably why we loved him. now he’s in australia and having way too much fun, so he’s dead to us!

and i was wrong to say music videos were dying: whoa, fuck. and did you know it was bjork’s birthday today? happy bjorkday.

Listen Now:


 Santogold (feat. Spank Rock) - Shove it: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
 Tokyo Police Club - Your English Is Good: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download


February 6, 2008

good bye, rudy tuesday

yeah i stole that from somewhere, big whoop, you wanna fight about it. i’m still torn between hillary and obama, and i think it comes down to pragmatic rationality (clinton actually having experience with the painfully debilitating bureaucracy of transnational democratic capitalism and maybe having a chance of navigating it) and charismatic hope (obama who might actually inspire people, and not being such an easy target to the republican attack machine). but with regards to the whole race-gender thing, isn’t it great that hillary is in many ways the cold-hearted, rational one (traditionally ‘masculine’ traits) and obama the emotional, irrational one (traditionally ‘feminine’ traits)? either way, whoever wins would be foolish not to pick the other as their running mate. for the sake of the fuckin planet they better run together.

but holy fuck did the world dodge a bullet with giuliani dropping out, that man is a nutbar:


i don’t know the ins and outs of the criminal justice system, but isn’t this a hate crime? i don’t mean just in it’s absurd racism with its characterization of “a perverted people”, but in its shocking depravity? like that is some messed up shit.

and giuliani was considering cheney as a running mate! fuck! cheney is like some sort of unkillable super-villain… in alien versus predator versus cheney, alien mother’s blood might be slightly more acidic than cheney’s, and predator is maybe slightly uglier, but cheney will shoot you right in the fuckin face, man.

so mccain looks to be the republican nomination, and even though he’s all pro-iraq and pro-tax cuts for the rich, i kinda have a soft spot for the dude for being somewhat of a moderate (by republican standards), not being a crazy evangelical (at least not yet), and for giving a frank interview about the military-industrial complex in why we fight.

man i wish canadian politics were this exciting. dion and harper are such a bore fest. and while i think layton is quite dynamic (especially after having met him and watching him in action), he’s not lighting any fires either. there are certainly some advantages to our boring system, in which policy is given more priority than personality (as chomsky says, in the american system, “The elections are run by the same industries that sell toothpaste on television”), in an era of increasing political apathy, we need some new blood in canadian politics. this is no country for old men.



January 29, 2008

best of 2007 again?

a commenter (i should say, “my favouritest commenter ever”) made my list of fav songs into a handy zip file, which is like, y’know, totally rad. here’s some more of my favs, plus the rest, in a handy seeqpod (my fav new website) playlist:


SeeqPod - Playable Search

(did that work? i find it works better in ie than firefox, for some reason)

music videos are a dying art, but some mighty fine death throes in 2007


i get bug nightmares (where as my brother, as some sort of entomologist probably has wet dreams about them), and this freaked the hell out of me


and then things get complex, as they are want to do


2007 was also the year i finally took some people up on their “the wire” promise, and now i’m a megafan. buy the dvds, or download them, just watch it. you live in a city in the 21st century? then yes. and the new season, woo-eee, mcnulty’s on the sauce, omar is righteously pissed, snoop is, well, snoop. feels like history in the making.



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