We Saw a Chicken …

Category: goatee-stroking musing, or something

  • Blair’s Blog

    Blair has a Blog — and it’s very pink!

  • Quigmans.com

    Long ago, Quigmans.com used to be the web home for The Quigmans, a comic of slightly higher than usual amusement.

    But now it’s not. It’s about The Quigmans, but not in a way you’d expect.

  • My Private Tel Aviv

    I’m not quite sure why Ru55el’s My Private Tel Aviv would be linking to me, but welcome!

    I think it might be something to do with renewables. It sure ain’t for my wit.

  • urpy

    The oatmeal-raisin cookies I had this morning had tiny chocolate chips through them, I find out now. I really don’t feel at all well now.

  • the pencils in my life

    in no particular order:

    • Bohemia Works Special Drawing Pencil Toison D’Or : 1900 (BHB)
    • Dixon Primary Printer (#1)
    • Cretacolor 150 (HB)
    • Faber-Castell Grip 2001 (HB/#2½)
    • Paper-Mate Mirado Classic (HB/#2)
    • Faber-Castell 9000 (HB)
    • Prang (HB), by Dixon
    • Staedtler Mars Lumograph (HB)
    • Lee Valley (HB)
    • Koh-i-Noor Hardtmuth 1500 (HB)
    • Derwent Graphic (HB)

    You want I should review them? Get thee to Pencil Revolution!

  • Rolser shopping cart

    My late grandmother’s intense dislike of them notwithstanding, it looks like a shopping cart from Rolser Canada could be just the thing for the carfree-about-town. Lugging shopping bags about is teh suk.

    The intensely tony Pepper Mill in Hazelton Lanes seems to be the stockist for Toronto.

  • 1/9/XX, and the smell of new pencils

    Although school in late August for us I always derived the tiniest bit of pleasure from writing the date today, and seeing that it was the same as the year. This shows I was educated in the last century.

    As it was the start of the schools year, I was writing with new pencils, and summer holidays were long enough for me to forget their wooden smell. So I remember writing the date, and simultaneously, the smell of new pencils.

  • sorry, little dude

    A garden spider had built a large and elaborate web between the fence and the green bin. It looked happy there, and I was sad to dislodge it to take the recycling out.

  • it’s a pencil blog

    It had to happen: Pencil Revolution.

  • ididn’tBook

    For a truly soulless evening, take yourself down to the BestBuy at Scarborough Town Centre.

    STC is a mega-mall, with the obligatory huge concrete and asphalt deadzone around it. Its current sales slogan is For what defines you, which must mean that its denizens are in a pretty parlous state, existentially speaking. Its only slightly attractive feature is its derelict KrispyKreme store, which opened as a flagship, then frazzled almost as quickly as a KK’s dextrose rush. Abandoned donut shops are Canada’s ruined abbeys; places of worship gone to seed.

    BestBuy itself is an outcast from the mall, in an especially ped-unfriendly way. Perhaps the only defined route there is through a monster split-level Wal-Mart, but I didn’t have enough hitpoints to make it through that particular slough.

    I’d checked their website, and it said that the store had iBooks in stock, at $50 below retail. Did the store have any on display? No. The Apple section was set behind the customer service desk, which was a scrum of slightly disgruntled shoppers. So I left without seeing one.

    I wandered in a bit of a post big-box haze to McCowan RT, a weird little station at the very end of the rails. At least I was rewarded with a beautiful sunset over the 401 at McCowan; all boiling red and purple. That’s about the best you’ll get near STC, and for free, too.

  • windfarm or wind farm?

    So how do you write it?

    I use the former. Some people might say that the latter is more correct (one doesn’t refer to a pigfarm, after all), but we’re not really farming wind here. That we leave to the bean farmers (hohoho; I do believe that was the very same joke that Lord McAlpine used to use when showing bigwigs through the RES Ltd office in Hemel Hempstead).

    I’d really prefer to use the term windpark, using the original meaning of park for an enclosed field. I guess it’s a bit European for most folks here, so it’s windfarm for me.

    (One shouldn’t confuse a windfarm with WindFarm, the toolbox of choice for the leet wind haxx0r).

  • !”?! it

    Today is National Punctuation Day.

  • The demented mind of Adam Elliot

    a scene from Adam Elliot\'s Harvie Krumpet
    I like animation more than Catherine does, so last night while she was teaching, I rented Harvie Krumpet. It’s a series of shorts by Australian animator Adam Elliot. All of them are poignantly strange. The main feature follows Harvie from his birth in Poland in the 1920s to his dotage in Australia. Bad things happen to him, but he abides.

    If you can imagine Wallace & Gromit on mogadon, and imagine liking it, you’ll know how I feel about Adam Elliot’s work.

  • CBC News: Canadian Blood Service drops restrictions on donors who lived in Britain and France

    I can give blood now: Canadian Blood Service drops restrictions on donors who lived in Britain and France. But is their donation system ready for me? Ah, no; it seems I still can’t, and maybe never will.

  • I’ve seen ’em; have you?

    script fnord

    SVG Fnord

  • light anemometer

    I have a little Crookes radiometer twirling away on the front window sill. I’ve always wanted one of these, and when I met Catherine in North York on Friday evening, I couldn’t resist a trip to Efston Science beforehand.

  • cornflakes and cheez whiz

    That’s what the queue-jumper had; cornflakes and cheez whiz, nothing more. When he stepped up to the line next to mine, he plunked his goods on the conveyor as if by right. The bemused guy behind him looked as if he was just about to challenge him several times, but this is Canada. Queue-jumping guy just stod there rodentlike, chewing gum, looking round at everyone — everyone, that is, except Bemused Guy — to say, “You got a problem with this?”

    I guess if you lived on cornflakes and cheez whiz, that kind of behaviour would come naturally.

  • Smog City TO

    According to Toronto Public Health, we’ve had more than double the number of smog days in 2005 than the previous record year — and the year’s nowhere done yet!

    We had more smog days in June 2005 alone than we had in all of 2004! And it’s all because of Margaret’s right to drive an SUV.

  • feedmap

    This is a bit clever; it locates the bloggers geographically near you:

    I think it was worth standing outside in the dark for five minutes trying to read my GPS, don’t you?

  • Begging the question

    Pet peeve: people who cite the link to the annoying Begging the question page when they see the expression used in the more common sense. Pedantic much? Language changes, and you probably bemoan the loss of the word gay, too …