Wired Cola

And now you will never forget your phonic sounds again:

Seriously, The Lovely One is going to use this in her new Teaching English to Children class.

Oh it's late.

To all those LiveJournal haters out there, how can you not love this comment section?

As we were walking out of a restaurant last week, The Lovely One and I saw a guy gesturing at a photo on his phone, and saying to the girl next to him "that's my friend, completely covered in duct tape."

I hope he was a gentleman, and waited until at least their third date to break the duct tape thing to her.

The usual suspects have been pretty incensed about a recent concert by the NY Philharmonic in North Korea, and I sympathize with the idea that such a pseudo-detente with a crazyocracy like the DPRK has real dangers, both in what it might signal (properly or falsely) to the Dear Leader, and what it might signal to the rest of the world, too.

Courtesy the relentless Carl Fogel, I have discovered this lovely catalog for the American Tire Company of Toronto [3 MB pdf].

I like the typography, the copy, and I want to buy the entire contents.

It's the 1899 Catalog.

The name tells the tale of their prime product, but they sell a lot of sundries. Lovely little toe clips. Pretty-looking handlebars. A still-useful top-tube bumper for stopping your handlebars from scratching the frame.

On Friday, I exploited my day off (I work a 9-day fortnight) in the service of going for a big ride with friend and club-mate Tobin.

They make spreadsheets like this.

The bioinformatician was of course Wyn.

TLO greatly admired its fussy organization. I think it's hilarious literary criticism. Of course, my mind was corroded by years of hanging around the English department, so now I think everything is literary criticism.

Electronics Boutique has a retail model that is weird. But exploitable!

The end result of EB's fixation on increasing their used inventory (where the margins are very good and where they pay used-game sellers in store credit, which makes their margins even higher) was their recent "Trade in 5 games for 1 new Nintendo DS Lite" offer.

You can bowhunt bear in Ontario?

But of course, the hardest of hardcore bowhunters hunt polar bear, which seems crazy even to me. Then I find out in that last article that modern hunters have taken elephant with a bow. Which is just wacky. As extreme stunts go, that ranks with rowing around the world.

So with the kitchen in the throes of a repaint and everything that was in the kitchen scattered around the rest of the house to make room for the painting, it was imperative that TLO and I took the dog and got out of the house for a few hours.

That left us at the White Spot's delightfully anachronistic car hop service for dinner, where our dog scared the heck out of our server by speaking up when she came to get the order. I recommend the cannelloni from their Tuscan menu.

Then we rolled out to the drive-in to watch the early movie, Vantage Point, which I will gratuitously spoil starting in a paragraph or so, so if you want to see it later, simply accept my judgment that it is a thriller that is half-clever but not great, then go read something else while I tell the movie's story for it.

Texas sometimes elects Democrats and Massachusetts sometimes elects Republicans. Why have Canadian parties never recentered themselves as effectively around the preferences of the electorate?

Even though Alberta leans broadly rightward, why don't the Liberals (or some other centre-left entity) coalesce around policies that have a hope of splitting off a critical mass of Conservative voters?