Editing bitmaps with Gimp, vectors with Inkscape, and browsing thumbnails with Konqueror… and guess what? It’s all free! Five years ago, I would have either had to a) pirate Windows software, or b) use some awful shareware thing that would have cost too much and crashed too often. This is the future, people!
Did you know how freakin’ cheap it is to live in Toronto?! Revel in the luxury of the planned West Side Lofts, a brand-new condo unit:
Westside Lofts … is treating buyers to a special gift to acknowledge the vibrant, eclectic, creative neighbourhood: Their choice of a piece of artwork from a Queen St. W. gallery. “For a lot of people this may be the first time they get an original piece of art,” says Marc Julien, project manager…
All of the lofts will have balconies or terraces, 10-foot ceilings, exposed ductwork and exposed concrete ceilings and floors, translucent sliding-glass room partitions, six appliances, custom kitchen with halogen track lighting and cabinetry available in a range of coloured finishes, stone countertops in a selection of marbles and granites and a bathroom with contemporary vessel sink and soaker tub…
Amenities include a fitness centre, yoga and pilates studio, roof garden, a counter-current pool and hot tub, media lounge with TV, and a kitchenette.
Loft prices go from $167,900 for a one-bedroom-plus-den, 500-square-foot unit,to $395,900 for a one-bedroom-plus-den, 950-square-foot unit. There are two-bedroom units as well.
Those are CANADIAN DOLLARS, people! A 950-sq-ft loft in Manhattan would be, what, $1.5 mill?
Old fart rocker Barry Manilow and high-art rocker Laurie Anderson?
Please someone find me one of these before next Christmas! (Creepy-eyed devil kid not included.)
An Inconvenient Truth was really good– totally not preachy, and not overly technical. Al Gore comes across as 1200% more personable than he ever did on the campaign trail, and even cracks a joke at his own expense, saying of himself “I used to be the country’s next president.” The movie even includes a clip from Matt Groening’s TV show Futurama.
It seems to be wildly popular here in New York (probably no surprise) –my friend Eric and I showed up 15 minutes before showtime and had to sit in the front row. This was over a week after the movie had opened here!
One aspect that was somwhat hokey was a short passage recapping Gore’s 2000 defeat (what does that have to do with Global Warming, again?) but that was only a minute or two of the total film. It makes me wonder if Al is thinking of running again (maybe in 2012?)
Despite the “scariest movie of the summer” trailer, the movie itself is surprisingly upbeat, listing a number of things that can already be done to stop the Earth from heating up, and making the point that there is already enough technology on hand to get the job done– it’s merely a question of political willpower.
Fareed Zakaria writes about the emerging global marketplace, and how the US may (or may not) adapt to it:
Our greatest danger is that when the American public does begin to get scared, they will try to shut down the very features of the country that have made it so successful. They will want to shut out foreign companies, be less welcoming to immigrants and close themselves off from competition and collaboration. Over the past year there have already been growing paranoia on all these fronts. If we go down this path, we will remain a rich country and a stable one. We will be less troubled by the jarring changes that the new world is pushing forward. But like Britain after Queen Victoria’s reign, it will be a future of slow, steady national decline. History will happen to us after all.
So, after about six weeks of frantic swimming, eating and egg-laying, my little triops kicked the bucket last night. I could tell something was up, because she was sluggish and not eating as much. (I think six weeks is supposed to be a pretty good lifespan for a triops raised in captivity.)
I miss her already– it was fun watching her scramble around the fishbowl, doing backflips and attacking her little food pellets. The good news is that she laid about a billion tiny pink eggs, which apparently don’t need to be fertilized in order to hatch (something called parthenogenesis, which makes sex for them optional.) So, once the eggs dry out and hibernate for a couple of weeks, I might be able to hatch more baby triops, if I’m lucky.
It must suck to be PBS right now– the BBC is totally coppin’ their style:
BBC starts World News broadcasts in US
The British Broadcasting Corp. on Thursday said it is bringing its BBC World news channel to the United States in a bid to capture American audiences hungry for international news…
Starting in July, the BBC also plans a morning show to compete with U.S. programs. “World News Today” will feature anchor George Alagiah… The program … was created with the U.S. audience in mind, the company said.
“We really feel there’s actually a huge vacuum for us to fill in terms of global, responsible, impartial reporting,” -Jeremy Hillman, editor.
…It is not “American news for an American audience. It’s about interpreting the world for Americans.” -George Alagiah, anchor.
I really like listening to the BBC news on the radio in the morning, but why does this sound so preachy to me?
…and catalogs the many, many discrepancies in the last Presidential election:
Indeed, the extent of the GOP’s effort to rig the vote shocked even the most experienced observers of American elections. ”Ohio was as dirty an election as America has ever seen,” Lou Harris, the father of modern political polling, told me. ”You look at the turnout and votes in individual precincts, compared to the historic patterns in those counties, and you can tell where the discrepancies are. They stand out like a sore thumb.”
My favorite part of this article has to do with the accuracy of exit polling (remember, the exit polls from the last election predicted a Kerry victory, by a landslide?)
Over the past decades, exit polling has evolved into an exact science… ”Exit polls are almost never wrong,” Dick Morris, a political consultant who has worked for both Republicans and Democrats, noted after the 2004 vote. Such surveys are ”so reliable,” he added, ”that they are used as guides to the relative honesty of elections in Third World countries.”
…But that same month, when exit polls revealed disturbing disparities in the U.S. election, the six media organizations that had commissioned the survey… scrubbed the offending results from their Web sites and substituted them with ”corrected” numbers that had been weighted, retroactively, to match the official vote count…
”The people who ran the exit polling, and all those of us who were their clients, recognized that it was deeply flawed,” says Tom Brokaw, who served as anchor for NBC News during the 2004 election. ”They were really screwed up — the old models just don’t work anymore. I would not go on the air with them again.”
I think a lot of Democrats were wary of crying foul after Kerry’s defeat; but this article is full of citations, so you can check up on the facts yourself if you like. Very depressing, when you consider all the implications. I’m not sure I believe in a true “conspiracy,” but it seemed pretty obvious to me that the last election was a real mess, with half the country using outdated equipment, and the other half using buggy, untested new digital machines. And why, in this day and age, is gerrymandering still the norm?
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