Author Archives: rcousine

This oscillating multi-tool reminded me this week of how the right tool can change a job from long and hard to fun and trivial. While helping my dad install a new dishwasher, we needed to enlarge some holes in the back of the cabinetry, for the water lines. This would be an hour of tiring, […]

Riding a motorcycle to Tuktoyaktuk is not as deadly as attempting to summit Mount Everest. It is, however, not without peril. Only so many riders attempt the Tuk run every year, and every year a few die trying, and more get hurt and/or wreck their motorcycles. We did not die. WHERE IS TUK? Tuktoyaktuk (“Tuk” […]

Depending on what you mean, the answer is somewhere between $100 billion and $500 billion in the currency of the realm (USD; which I will use throughout this article). The question came up, again, because of discussion about whether there should be a waiver on allowing manufacture of the various vaccines without paying anything. Typically, […]

[This is a lightly edited version of a Twitter thread I posted in November 2020] Even after a year of it, your videoconference audio is still bad. If you don’t realize this, it’s definitely bad. Fortunately, it’s easier to fix than you’d think. First, and most important: USE HEADPHONES. This makes an enormous difference to […]

A friend had an aluminum fork fail not too long ago, and let me take a look at the bits to analyze, so I thought I’d share it with you. This fork failure was likely very typical, but it had some fun surprises. The fork in question is a name-brand all-aluminum cyclocross fork. Sized for […]

I have a terrible habit of scouring Craigslist for various things, and I know a secret: relative to Vancouver, the island just to the right of us (Vancouver Island, aka where Victoria and Nanaimo are) has a crappy, thinly traded used-goods market. Some specialty items, which might last mere hours on Vancouver Craigslist at the […]

Wait, did I give the answer away? Bad headline! Bad! It’s 2020, and of course the biggest news in Canada is that maybe the current G-G is bad. Not like evilly plotting to overthrow the government or something, just a pain in the ass, not doing the public appearances typically assumed for this officeholder, and […]

I feel like “Against Performative Nonsense” is the working title of half the thoughts in my head these days. Let’s define it. “Performative nonsense” is a fancy way of describing public acts, of either doing or refusing to do something, that don’t seriously affect the thing they’re claimed to affect. My favorite example is plastic […]

[This was published on the old site on Christmas Eve, 2010. I am republishing it for the benefit of many -RjC] So the standard question is “What’s your favorite Christmas movie?” My standard answer was Die Hard until it became In Bruges which I like much more. These responses are funny because they’re not really Christmas movies in the […]

OK, these are “Christmas” only by a loose definition in some cases, and they’re also sometimes not “movies”. But you can watch them on the audiovisual display system of your choice. Without further explanation, this eccentrically curated list was created by your author and The Lovely Rebecca, and has been arranged with some deliberation. Not […]