05 July 2010

Canadian gaffs and practical amusements

Pal Ryan gets the blame, along with Canadian Notes & Queries editor John Metcalf, for the sorry state of Canadian criticism in The Walrus. Ryan is non-plussed.

Nice things that Canada can do for its 150th birthday

David Frum

Canada’s newly-built places are often homes to new Canadians. These areas carry too little memory of Canadian history and Canadian accomplishment. Public memorials, statues and other reminders of the Canadian past are crowded into older central cities. As things stand, the Surreys and the Woodbridges could be any suburbs anywhere. They too need their connections to the shared national story — a story their residents have volunteered to join. As with the landscaping projects, there could be a contest to build 100 historical monuments in the country’s 100 fastest growing urban zones: their own memorials to Canada’s wars, to the expansion of democracy and human rights, and to both proud and tragic moments in Canadian history.

It’s a good point, even if it is from a Frum.

25 June 2010

The five most difficult countries to visit

Law is Cool

Some how-tos on visiting Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Iraq, North Korea, and Somaliland.

23 June 2010

Former Frank editor makes Gram Parson's musical

Michael Bate, founder of the Ottawa edition of Frank and its longtime editor, is also a fan of Gram Parsons.

Writing advice from Ian Fleming

From the Guardian, 1962, ‘How to write a thriller’

I never correct anything and I never go back to what I have written, except to the foot of the last page to see where I have got to. If you once look back, you are lost. How could you have written this drivel? How could you have used “terrible” six times on one page? And so forth. If you interrupt the writing of fast narrative with too much introspection and self-criticism, you will be lucky if you write 500 words a day and you will be disgusted with them into the bargain. By following my formula, you write 2,000 words a day and you aren’t disgusted with them until the book is finished, which will be in about six weeks.

17 June 2010

A typeface explains his viewpoint

McSweeney’s

Listen up. I know the shit you’ve been saying behind my back. You think I’m stupid. You think I’m immature. You think I’m a malformed, pathetic excuse for a font. Well think again, nerdhole, because I’m Comic Sans, and I’m the best thing to happen to typography since Johannes fucking Gutenberg.

Telegraphs and code words

Code words for the day of the year

[Some enterprising telegraph operator] realised that telegraph senders charged per word rather than per character—thus transmitting “it is on” would cost the same as “raynor is maschalophilous.”

For example ‘crisp is short hand for “can you recommend to me a good female cook?” and ‘flank means “a fire is raging here. please send engine.”’ But then the operator created 366 (even leap year!) codes to cover every single day.

Have a happy Joltingly.

That Bloody Sunday inquiry in full

Every word. All ten volumes. Anyone who says the inquiry missed something, just point them there.

The Paris Review

The latest edition has Robert Crumb and Katherine Dunne, both of whom I can always use more.

US labels create fake lobbying group for Canadian copyright change

Boing Boing

It’s really telling that the opposition to the Canadian DMCA has come from real grassroots: artist groups, citizen groups, technologists, educators, disabled-rights groups, archivists — people who don’t hide their funding or their affiliations behind false flags. Meanwhile, the only support for this law has come from slick, fraudulent PR campaigns that shroud their origins in secrecy in order to disguise the fact that this is just the same four record labels running around in circles, wearing several hats, pretending to be a crowd.

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