Open the eBay doors, HAL

Eight years pass by...

I don't write, I don't phone. Yet it's still here.

The Net never sleeps. The Net never forgets.

So, I suppose

OMHA Abides

OMG

More than two years between posts! To make things worse, the only reason I even got here was that I wanted to check out Task Paper for the Mac, and I find there is a Google Group for users of that software (which is, I'm sorry to say, USEFUL). It would be more useful if one price got me a copy which could be installed and synched on my Macs, office XP machine, and (still thinking about it) iPhone or iTouch [and on that last, I'm waiting to see what comes up at the January 2009 MacExpo].

Anyway,
TheEndIsComign:
- check Google Blog to see if a new entry makes sense @weekly
is now added to my tasks...

Insanity

I am not a soccer fan. I grew up in a soccer town--though they called it football, there--but it didn't seem to take. Locally soccer is a sometime thing, an attraction only to a few diehards who hold out against the pressure of football (in its Canadian and American variants), hockey (Hit Somebody!), and baseball. However, sometime is now, in the middle of the World Cup, or rather, now, immediately after the final game of the World Cup.

There is a very large Italian-origin community here. It's not that most of them were born in Italy, but their parents were, and the success/failure of Canada's immigration and cultural heritage policies means that most of them consider themselves Italians rather than Canadians. So the Italian win was a very big deal here. Driving on the local roads was hazardous, with people leaning out of car windows waving Italian flags, driving open trucks with twenty people on the truck bed all waving flags (and screaming "Azzuuuuuri! Italia!" at the top of their lungs). Downtown in Little Italy was worse, as the party apparently went on until 4 am, with the litter ankle deep or worse--the morning news claims it took 50 trucks to remove it, as much in a few hours as is normally generated in a week.

The Toronto Grand Prix was also running this weekend. Nobody noticed.

Hate literature

Some people want to be funny. They want to be well-like, even loved. But they don't know how to get there, so they fall back on the standard class clown routine - do or say something stupid.

Case in point: a piece of email I just received - never mind from whom - with a picture of some protesters carrying signs reading "We are idiots", "Bomb us next" and "Please kick our asses". The caption for the picture was a variation on a credit card ad: Bus fair [sic] to anit-war [sic] protest - 0.50. Paint and canvas protest signs - $32.00. Asking a retired US Army Sergeant to translate your anti-American slogans - PRICELESS. It's sort of amusing, given that we know the ads, and the concept is ridiculous enough to raise a fleeting smile. I'm anal enough that the spelling mistake and typo put me off.

But the class clown doesn't know when to quit. He adds details - these are dumb Syrians (look more like Pakistanis or Afghanis to me) who can't read Arabic, let alone English and Arab TV networks never showed these signs. Now he's wandering into hate speech territory. Lots of Syrians read Arabic - 77% literacy rate according to the CIA factbook - and given the history of France and Britain in the area during most of the 20th century, English is pretty widespread there too. The signs themselves are clearly photoshopped (see the end of this Snopes.com article for a variation on the technique) so it's no surprise that Arab TV news wouldn't have covered this.

There are lots of real protestors out there. Some of them are poor ignorant S.O.B.'s who are led around by exploitative rabble-rousers. Making fun of them doesn't make them go away, and doesn't really help anyone of this side of the Divide understand the situation any better. Arguably it makes things worse.

It's rather like passing someone a can of gas to help douse a fire. Come to think of it, some of the class clowns I've run into would have thought that was funny too.