There’s nothing more reassuring than interesting old people. I have no idea who Helmut Knewton was outside of this short interview with him (a photographer who did a lot of nudes apparently), but based solely on its content, I may have to rename another plant.

Q: When you arrived in Singapore you had five dollars to your name, which you immediately spent in a brothel.

A: My sound financial sense told me there was no difference between having five dollars and being completely broke.

Q: You never really talk about the Holocaust.

A: I have no animosity against the Germans. I will never forget or forgive but I find the Germans are the only ones who are seriously confonting their past. When I was offered the Great Federal Order of Merit, June said “You can’t possible accept it!” So I asked Billy Wilder and he said “You’ve got to take it!” I preferred listening to Billy.

And so on.

Oh no. Jason Scott is spittle-angry about the fantastic movie King of Kong. Jason has some skin in this game, he made BBS: The Documentary (which I have watched and enjoyed in it’s entirety. If you think you would like to watch, for instance, an entire hour of footage of people who used to make ASCII art talking about the ASCII art scene, you would probably love it it too), is now working on GET LAMP, a documentary about text adventure games, and has plans to move onto arcade games as his next Ken Burns triumph. The guy knows geek, the guy loves geek, the guy is geek. And King of Kong is about geek.

I don’t have time to find out if his factual challenges to the film are on the money. My own recollection of the film seems a little at odds with his claims (doesn’t the film’s introduction of Steve Weibe start with the fact that he held the Donkey Kong high score for a time?), but clearly Mr. Scott is more familiar with the movie than I am. Regardless, I’m not inclined to immediately repudiate my appreciation for King of Kong. Scott clearly thinks the movie is a two-trick pony who’s two tricks are making fun of geeks for being geeks, and for Billy Mitchell for being a cardboard villain. I don’t think either charge is entirely fair. Part of what I loved about the movie is that you learned enough about Billy to feel such pain at his transformation into a insidious bully when his personal mythos is challenged by a better player. Part of what I loved about the movie is that the characters are presented as both really really geeky (which, c’mon Jason, aren’t they in real life?) and also really really human.

This cross-genre rant is great. Evolutionary programming to design physical objects never ceases to entertain me. Add in a Mr. Furious-ANGRY anti-intelligent design rant, plus some truly stupid animation humour, and you have a uncomfortable and (I think) hilarious one-of-a-kinder.

“The clock genome is a matrix containing the information of who binds to who and what their properties are.

Remember, the theory of evolution is NOT abiogenesis.

Arguing that because I wrote this program and I am intelligent somehow proves intelligent design is being incredibly ignorant.

IF the purpose of this simulation was to test abiogensis then you would have a point but it’s not so you don’t.”

Oh lord, Richard Stallman and others doing the Soulja Boy:

Regrettably, the world seems to have failed to get the joke about Line Beauchamp’s wacky sidekick at the Bali climate change talks. Instead, Prime Minister Harper is somehow co-opting the agenda. The fun thing about Harper is you don’t have to pay him to behave this way: even in a world without lobbyists he would still do his damndest to give industry of the day free reign regardless of the consequences. He’s honest that way. This is just a bad time to have a colossally narrow-minded think-tanker as a national leader.

Dear Prime Minister:

I am appalled by Canada’s counter-productive and hypocritical negotiating position at the talks on climate change in Bali. If we fail to meet the emerging challenges of climatic change, the damage that will be done to Canada and the world’s social and environmental integrity far outweighs any short-term concerns about preserving the status quo for our extractive and emmissive industries. The Canadian government’s behaviour at the Bali talks is transparently an effort to stall and undermine progress towards effective reduction of climate-altering emissions.

As a progressive democracy and disproportionate contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, Canada should be setting an example to the rest of the world. It is not too late to reverse our position and begin to do so.

Yours sincerely,

Hugh Stimson

“Dear Prime Minister” is the correct way to address email to the Prime Minister (at [email protected], incidentally), although a poke in the eye is an acceptable alternative in person. Charmingly, my Member of Parliament Denise Savoie’s email is [email protected]. I think that was my email address in 1994.

In a few hours I’m gonna do that Canadian music show. I’ll be playing Log Driver’s Waltz (of course), straight from Youtube, so I’m posting it here so I can find it. And now, so can you!

Bonus action: the NFB’s version of the Blackfly Song with Wade Hemsworth. Ahhhhhhhh….. NFB……. what ever happened to that?

And here’s a song that I couldn’t find a playable-quality version of, so I’m gonna have to play a cover:

Taser International, “market leader in advanced electronic control devices”, have released their inevitable press release in response to the death of Robert Dziekanski at the Vancouver airport.

Taser has been remarkably good at dodging lawsuits. As far as I know, they’ve never even been stuck with a civil suit for injury or death.

Their press release, helpfully reproduced in unedited form as a news article by CNN, scolds media outlets for rushing to blame Dziekanski’s death on his being tasered. They insist that

“We are taken aback by the number of media outlets that have irresponsibly published conclusive headlines blaming the TASER device and / or the law enforcement officers involved as the cause of death before completion of the investigation. These sensationalistic media reports completely ignore the earmark symptoms of excited delirium shown in the video.”

Yes, they’re shocked. Shocked. Furthermore,

“TASER International is transmitting over 60 legal demand letters requiring correction of these false and misleading headlines and will take other actions as appropriate.”

Which suggests an explanation for the lack of successful suits against them: they spend a lot of money on their justice.

So how come people die after getting tasered? It’s the tasered’s fault, not the taser or the taseree.

“This tragic incident appears to follow the pattern of many in-custody deaths or deaths following a confrontation with police. Historically, medical science and forensic analysis has shown that these deaths are attributable to other factors and not the low-energy electrical discharge of the TASER(r).”

Cause-and-effect is a slippery thing, sure enough. When is a thing a cause of another thing, and when are they just correlated in space in time? It’s a question that has vexed philosophers and ecologists and taserologists for centuries. The RCMP are very clear in their own philosophy, as noted previously.

After watching the video of the man dieing at the same time and place as he was being tasered by police I’ll tell you this: if that man hadn’t been tasered, he wouldn’t be dead now. Therefore the taser caused his death. I’ll tell you this too: the police also caused his death.

You know who should get a tasering? The philosophy department at TASER International of Scottsdale Arizona. What’s a low-energy electrical discharge among pure intellectuals?

No clear googles for “gay Dumbledore costume” as of press time, but I expect that to change before the pre-Hallow’een week crests.

Taking a Whack Against Comcast. Mona Shaw Reached Her Breaking Point, Then for Her Hammer — Washington Post

“It had never occurred to me to take a hammer to a phone company before, but I was just so upset”

I’ve got nothing to add to that. But I will use the excuse to tell this story:

Once our house modem broke. So I rented a car and drove out to the nearest comcast office near Ypsilanti. It’s a grey slot in a strip mall, decorated with a poster and a TV bolted to the ceiling playing a comcast television station. Maybe there was a poster. At the back there was series of comcast people in comcast polo shirts behind a desk and a wall of half-inch thick plexiglass. Their were no comcast employees on the customer side of the glass. Each representative had a big box made of the same plexiglass, through which you could see the stout mechanism which kept it from opening on both sides at the same time. Whatever you had that was broke went in there. To talk to the representative you had to bend well down and shout through the little perforations in the perspex. I’ve been in check-cashing services in West Sacramento that were more personable. I’ve felt more at home in late-night liqour stores in Pasadena. I’ve never visited an inmate at a correctional facility, but if I did and they wanted to know what problem I was having with my tv service it would probably feel familiar. The representative didn’t show much emotion during our exchange, but somehow I still felt dirty placing my broken cable modem in the box, and retrieving my replacement from it.

I’m not sure what to take from that experience. It’s still somehow unsettling when I remember it. Are things really that bad?

Everything Jason Kottke likes about the culture of parkour is what I like about skateboard culture. From what little time I’ve spent moping around skate parks, the words discipline and determination spring lively to mind. Where there’s vanity or overt oneupmanship it’s kept hard in check, or scorned as out of line, at least on the surface. These skate kids will try and fail to hit a trick a hundred times or more, then once they can stick it they’ll pull it off a couple of times and move on to the next thing whether anybody was watching or not. Over and over and over. Fashion is a big thing yeah, but you don’t go bragging about how you can pull that blunt side half 6 stair whatever whatever whatever, you do it or gtfo, and don’t be doing the same thing tomorrow. The association between young skaters and recklessness or apathy is such bullshit, at least from what I’ve seen. I can’t imagine any 4H club or boy scouts that could teach discipline and detail the way they learn it in the parks.