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Only 159 Shopping Days Left!

By Brian Filed in Sidebar Tagged with , July 19th, 2010 @ 11:12 am

The BBC reports that the British department store Selfridge’s will officially roll out its Christmas shopping season this year on AUGUST 2. But American retail chain Toys R Us has them beat with a “Christmas In July” sale that runs this week. (although, as far as I can tell, that’s just a sale and not the start of in-store decorations and other holiday shopping enticements, unlike Selfridge’s) Because nothing says Christmas like a heat wave!

I was at our local mall just yesterday and saw no obvious indications of imminent Santa-fication, but I am willing to bet that they’ll be hanging the garland and the giant snowflakes by the time my birthday rolls around (August 27, for those who are joining us late).

Anti-Social

By Brian Filed in Sidebar, Site Tagged with , , , June 14th, 2010 @ 11:32 am

On Friday, I decided to stop having Facebook scrape and post my blog feed. I just don’t feel like blog posts fit the very ephemeral vibe of FB, and, frankly, it irritates the living crap out of me when people post comments about the blog posts on FB instead of posting them here. I am also annoyed by people who feel the need to crosspost each and every thing they say on their blog on Facebook AND Twitter AND LinkedIn AND whatever other fad-of-the-week social site they just signed up for. Sorry, pals, you’re just not THAT fascinating. And I don’t want to be accused of the same shameless self-promotion.

Also, I don’t really like the idea that everything in the online world has to be seen through the filter of Facebook. It really defeats the sense of exploration that makes going online an interesting endeavor for me and reduces everything to just another commodity to be peddled. Monolithic entities like Facebook and Google and Microsoft are antithetical to the chaotic spirit of the Internet and lessen its real impact by overconcentrating.

I still think it’s a damn shame that Facebook killed personal blogging, but blogging was actually a very imperfect tool for people who were looking for a way to engage in personal interaction. Facebook is similarly very imperfect, but comes a lot closer, as long as you are satisfied with very superficial interaction. From the looks of things, it’s pretty clear that a vast majority of people are really only capable of that vapid communication in the first place. What gets lost on Facebook is the exchange that would happen when someone wrote a thoughtful or moving or infuriating blog post that could trigger comments and counterposts and e-mail and friendships and feuds. Absolutely none of that happens by clicking the “I Like This!” button. Last year around this time, I wrote that I thought there could be a renaissance of personal blogging once all the poseurs and wanna-bes had been sucked into the Facebook vortex, but I haven’t seen it happen. More’s the pity, because I think the people who really fit the blogger mold are still out there and might still have something to say.

Tag, You’re It!

By Brian Filed in Sidebar, Site Tagged with April 21st, 2010 @ 11:43 am

In my copious spare time, usually whilst sitting in the waiting area at Charlotte’s karate studio, I have been making slow but steady progress toward adding tags to all the posts on this site. As of right now, I have completed tagging all the way back to April 1, 2008. The current archive of this site goes back to July, 2007, so I am only about 60% finished, but I did want to point out that you should see quite a few more “Related Posts” start to show up at the bottom of each current post. As I have been working along, it has been very interesting to revisit some of the old posts, remember what was going on in the news or in my life at that moment in time, and see what recurring themes and subjects have been covered the most. The most frequently used tag far and away has been “funny pictures”. I really need to get my act in gear and spin that off into its own site.

Once I finally catch up with the tagging, I’d like to se if I can import some of the older posts from before I switched from Movable Type to WordPress. At the very least, it would be great to have the posts from the first half of 2007 and from 2006. I do have archives of every single post dating back to when I first began using Movable Type, which was around October, 2000 if I recall correctly, but it’s not terribly likely that I’ll ever get everything back online, nor is it necessarily desirable.

Follow-up: World’s Shortest Man

By Brian Filed in Links, Misc, News, Sidebar Tagged with , March 16th, 2010 @ 1:49 pm

Just the other day I posted about a young man from Nepal who was trying to get into the Guinness Book of World Records as the shortest man in the world. He’s only 22 inches tall, compared to the 29-inch tall He Pingping of China, who is the current record holder.

Well, WAS the current record holder, because he died on Saturday at the age of 21.

Of course, this puts me back in the Number Two position, but I hear one of those little people from TLC might edge me out in the next round of competition.

Top Ten Overdone Stories Of The Week

By Brian Filed in Sidebar Tagged with March 11th, 2010 @ 11:26 am
  1. boobcheese
  2. tickle fights
  3. child actor suicides
  4. Betty White
  5. Zombie Farrah Fawcett
  6. Canadian pissing habits
  7. that milkaholic Lindsay
  8. ChatRoulette
  9. whatever half-assed thing Google did this week
  10. out-of-control Toyotas

Observe The Snow, It Fornicates

By Brian Filed in Sidebar Tagged with , , , , , February 23rd, 2010 @ 1:33 pm

Dear Harvey, Pete, Barry, Kevin, and every other weathermonkey on Boston-area TV: Enough is enough. The fucking blizzard was THIRTY-TWO YEARS AGO. It’s time to stop trotting out the same blurry videotape of cars stuck on Rt. 128 that is older than some of the people who are actually on your broadcast, just so we can remember what Harvey looked like with hair. We’re having a slightly-below-average snowfall so far this winter, including the “Snore-easter” that missed us a couple of weeks ago, so any mention of the Blizzard of 78 this season is totally gratuitous anyway. It’s time to relegate the legend to wherever things like Harvey’s hair have gone to its reward.

And to Bob Costas, Al Michaels, Dick Ebersol, and pretty much everyone else who works at NBC: the same goes for the motherfucking “Miracle On Ice”. It’s one thing for Mike Eruzione to make his entire career milking it to death, and maybe even Al gets a free pass for putting it on his resume, but otherwise STFU. There will never be another “miracle” hockey team because the whole Olympic hockey competition is basically an NHL round-robin tournament, so let’s agree it was an amazing upset moment, like 1969 was for the Mets> and the Jets, and move on to more exciting things like those smokin’ hot curling chicks.

Follow-up: I’ll Take Menhaden

By Brian Filed in Science, Sidebar Tagged with , , February 10th, 2010 @ 11:14 am

I recently posted about the use of menhaden in making fish oil dietary supplements and the potential risk that poses to the entire Atlantic Ocean ecosystem. One of the alternatives to using menhaden for omega-3 supplements is algae oil, because algae is the primary diet of the menhaden and is actually the source of all that omega-3 in the first place. Algae oil also seems to be poised to take off as a source of biodiesel, so maybe in the future you can fill up your car AND reduce your cholesterol at the same time…but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Meanwhile, the other primary commercial use for menhaden is to be ground up and turned into fish meal, which is then fed to farm-raised fish (because, after all, the sea is a hungry place), continuing to keep pressure on the fishing stock. Now, a research arm of the U.S. Department of Agriculture is looking at using genetically-modified barley protein as an alternative to menhaden in farm fisheries. The researchers believe that the barley could be sold at half the price of conventional fish meal. Also, a second derivative of the barley called beta-glucan also has potential health benefits.

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