Category Archives: News

Senseless Violence? We’ve got it.

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If you need another couple of reasons to be glad to live in Canada (although it’s not quite the Canada it used to be, it’s still Canada for now) I would be happy to oblige with a few links this afternoon.

First off, a story from Texas about someone who takes bathroom cleanliness very very seriously. It seems that someone noticed a non-washer (you know the kind I’m talking about, and you know who you are) and waited for them outside in the parking lot in order to stab them multiple times. I can sympathize a little bit with the stabber here since I’m a washer, but I would just sort of stop at not shaking their hands. The stabbing thing really goes a tad too far.

Then we come to craziness around buying a PS3, apparently some guys thought it would be a great idea to mug the first few nerds in line to buy a PS3 in Connecticut. Not a bad plan, but one of the first few guys in line wouldn’t give them anything and so they ran off after laying a beating on him, and one of the muggers turned a fired a shot at the guy, hitting him in the chest. The quote nicely sums up what happened next:

“When they let us in the lobby there at Wal-Mart, I was on the floor coughing up blood and telling the workers to take the wallet out of my pocket and give it to my friends so they could continue waiting in line and purchase the PS3s,” Penkala told the newspaper. “For some reason I wasn’t thinking about my wound, I was all about those PlayStations.”

Ah, now that makes perfect sense to me. What a moron.

And finally, a wonderful graphic from the US National Safety Council that displays the odds of dying from a number of causes, and clearly from what I can see, neither  non-washing or buying a video game system is on this list, so I think these guys will be ok from now on.

Reinventing Rooms

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If your living room decor still relies on milk crates or cinder blocks, then you owe it to yourself to visit the newly launched Reinventing Rooms website.  This is a new design company started by some friends of ours, and from what I’ve seen they know their stuff.  But don’t take it from me, since everybody knows that guys only know 4 colours anyway, we just aren’t good at the soft skills of interior design.

Anyway, have a gander and call them if your curtains look suspiciously like your bedding.

Reinventing Rooms

Disgusting

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I can hardly believe that this is happening, really. Only in the U.S. would a guy who managed to get away with killing his wife and another guy be able to write a book about it under the thin guise “If I did it, Here’s how it happened”. Unbelievable. Hypothetical confessions get you huge book deals, but only if the whole world thinks you are actually guilty.
Here you go.

**Update.

It seems that good taste has prevailed somewhat and the whole thing has been canceled.  A close call.

Robert Wilson Photography

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I have been a little tardy with the updates lately, so I missed the official re-launch of the Robert Wilson Photography website. I’m not a pro blogger, ok? That should be perfectly obvious by now. Anyway, head on over and take a gander at Wilson’s new site. Besides showing off more pictures, which is really the point of a photography website, some of the features I love the best:

      • No splash page with that system detection stuff.
      • No stealing my browser window.
      • No Flash (I think my constant griping was probably a small push in this direction for Wilson)
      • Best of all, lots of personalization and a human aspect that was missing from the last site. There’s some personal philosophy stuff, and obviously something dear to my heart, the site includes a new photography blog a la Wilson. Now that’s how you connect with your customers, you look involved, engaged, and approachable. Bravo, Wilson.

My other gripe that didn’t completely get addressed is the easy way to link to a picture bit that was completely missing from the last site.  You can still get the URL for an image on the new site by right-clicking, which is good, but the links don’t look permanent.  That’s not too terrible as long as they stay addressable for as long as they are for sale I guess.
Now off you go, click on his site and explore the crannies and admire the clean looks.

Outdoor Pre-School

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Staying with the whole “kids-are-trouble” theme that I am on today, I saw this article on The Guardian a few days ago about a pre-school in Britain that is run completely outside. That is to say, the children stay outside in all weather, all day long, and never go indoors. The idea is to get the kids in touch with nature of course:

“When they graduate to primary school, alumni of the Secret Garden can expect to be expert in poisonous fungi and able to spot dangerous yew berries or foxgloves, the flowers that contain the toxin digitalis, at a hundred paces. ‘They know what poisonous means, and they really do avoid it. They learn so quickly.'”
“In a normal nursery you might have to learn about shapes, but these children know the difference between an oak tree and a birch tree, which is a lot more complex than a square and a circle…”

So, the pre-schoolers learn to identify the poisonous plants, eh? That’s a recipe for disaster alright. Generally, this is pretty neat especially since the weather there is not exactly great. It wouldn’t be the same here in Canada of course since the temperature would most certainly create little tyke-cicles in February. Still, I’m thinking that the hours spent outdoors during the day must make for some absolutely exhausted kids come bedtime, and that’s exactly what we would need to take the edge off the Cael-strom some days.

Kids and Vending Machines

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I caught this post on Boing Boing and it reminded me so much of our own kids (well, Cael mostly) that I am stealing all of the content. The gist of the series of links is the same: parent is standing right there, kid somehow still manages to get inside one of those stuffed animal vending machines with the claw, fire department gets called, hilarity ensues.

The pictures alone are worth the click, these kids are hamming it up from inside the machines. It’s not that hard for anyone who knows Cael to imagine him in there, grinning through the glass.

Enjoy:

First, Second, Third, Fourth

It’s gold.