perhaps the most significant event of this, or indeed any, decade
Tuesday, December 11th, 2007It’s the Major Organ Trailer.
It’s the Major Organ Trailer.
I could use a Thumbthing. I have been known to fall asleep reading in bed, with my thumb jammed in the spine of a book. Waking up hours later, my thumb is aching and decidedly tobleroneform …
(via)
… you think that you’d want to start a band called The Tortfeasors, with stage names derived from precedents: Hedley Byrne, Rivtow Marine, Junior Books, Donoghue Stevenson, Lambert V. Lastoplex …
Then you realise that would be a bad idea. On every level. Not least that I wouldn’t know what to do in (or with) a band.
I’m resitting the legal part of my PPE for the PEO next Saturday. Was somewhat taken aback when I heard I’d failed it first time, but now studying again, and seeing my notes and sample answers from last time — what, if anything, was I thinking?
One of the side effects of Catherine’s Library Quest is that she digs through the sale books. She’s found a library getting rid of National Geographics for 25¢. September 1969’s issue, published when I was less than a season old, has a great and hilariously dated article The Coming Revolution in Transportation. It’s all hovercraft and personal transport pods (though none less than the Federal Highways Administration’s The Rambler cautions don’t blame the future when we read this article).
My favourite prognosis from the article is this one, on electric cars:
Electric cars should be common within a decade. They will be “pure” electrics, if batteries become lighter, more powerful, and longer lasting; otherwise, “dual-mode” vehicles—battery-powered in town but propelled by gasoline engines on cross-country trips.
It took just a little longer than this, and it sure wasn’t GM who brought the first ones to market, despite this picture of a hybrid Opel from 1969:

I played some tunes tuned down to eBEG♯B. I like it; extreme plunky tones.
I saw the most obscene markup in indigo this evening: the Linux Format OpenOffice.org special edition was priced at a hefty $34.95. This costs £10 in the UK.
The thing is, UK prices are quoted tax-inclusive. The ten quid you see is the ten quid you pay. Not so in Canada. In the most boneheaded move ever, our prices don’t include tax, so that $34.95 really costs you $39.84 (in Ontario, at least).
According to Google, £10 is $20.53. Indigo’s markup is almost 100%
Just got an e-mail which signs off, “Thanks and have a great.”
I’m listening to “Skiffle - The Best Of”, and it’s interesting to see what pre-rock British artists did with folk, gospel and trad jazz tunes on the cusp of the 1960s.
It clearly came out of the Trad boom (to which my father is still very much attached) - not just because folks like Barber and Colyer played both styles - but there are weird echoes of rockabilly. In a way, it was a short-lived answer to the US “folk scare” of the time.
Some of it’s quite quaint and dated now. The faux American accents, untrained by constant US TV exposure are hilarious, hovering somewhere between New Orleans and Brooklyn. Lonnie Donegan’s is especially funny - “this man, he was thoisty” he sings in “Being Me A Little Water, Sylvie”.
Micro-wind turbines often increase CO2, says study | Environment | The Guardian
The Building Research Establishment Trust, which advises the government and private sector, has found that in built-up towns and cities weak winds and turbulence mean turbines are likely to add to, not subtract from, a home’s carbon footprint.
Don’t be tempted to clean the foam pads on your Etymotic ear phones with anything vaguely solvent like. They will never be quite the same again.
definitely worth it: The Canadian DMCA: What You Can Do.
Bullfrog Power are going to stop issuing their own bills, and go through the local utility. Though I understand it is a bunch cheaper to get Toronto Hydro to do it, I’ll miss getting my bills with a stamp affixed.
Hmm, now that I have a smart meter, does that mean I can access the metering information? Bullfrog doesn’t do time-of-use (yet), but the stats would delight this nerd.
I’m going to play the blogger’s best of the year game differently this year, but I need to keep the rules roughly the same so that I am (for once) on the same planet. I’m going to choose ten best albums, but they’re what I discovered in 2007, not just those released in 2007.
So these are my contenders:
(Before you freak out at the number of CDs I bought, I do subscribe to emusic, so a bunch of these were MP3 only.)