Tuesday, April 15th, 2008

Time	Event
12:22a	And the New Six-Word Motto for the U.S. Is … Last week, we asked for your vote to decide the best of the top five entries to our “6-word motto for the U.S.” contest. As promised, we tallied the votes received in the first 48 hours after posting. There was a clear winner: Our Worst Critics Prefer to Stay (194 votes) The runners up are on the site, along with my favorite from the comments: I see a trend developing, here. Official six-word motto for the US when it’s bored and has had too much to drink: Seriously, Canada. You Want Some? C’mon! (Comment on this)
1:32a	creepypasta On your way home from work, you find a discarded book. Pages torn and weathering have given it a woebegone look but the writing still appears legible. You pick it up and take it home thinking that it might be worth a read if only for shits and giggles. Once at home you promptly forget about reading it. Days go by without so much as a cursory glance at it. Then, about a month later, you notice the book again but its not the same. Its still the same book. Same looks, same torn pages, same weathered stained cover, but its different. No longer is it the same unassuming book that you picked up off the street. Its changed. Suddenly you feel that feeling of unease that you get when someone is watching you. You shake your head thinking that you just need to go to bed. As the days go by the feeling of "wrongness" that surrounds the book intensifies, and it starts to show. You start eating and sleeping less. Your coworkers notice and start to whisper. Your girlfriend breaks up with you because she thinks you're on smack. Eventually you take some time off from your job citing mental health reasons. As the days stretch into weeks the job hiatus becomes permanent. You stop bothering with bathing and personal hygiene because you rarely go out anymore and when you do its just to buy food. Eventually you stop sleeping all together because whenever you do, you wake up screaming. Day after day you sit in the empty corner watching. Watching it watch you. Soon you stop eating altogether. Eventually you stop blinking. 2 months later the police will knock down your door and find your bloated corpse sitting in the corner of the room with its unceasing gaze pointed to the book on the table. One of the officers will examine your corpse while the other looks at what you were staring at. He will pick up the book and turn a few pages before realizing that they all say the same thing: volo ingravesco. (13 Comments | Comment on this)
5:50p	Was the CBC afraid to show the Danish cartoons? "Well, yeah" [T]here was a moment in the interview, nearer to the end -- just like the moment at the end of my debate with CanWest's Scott Anderson, where we finally got through the well-rehearsed cliches, and finally got some frankness -- that was a revelation. With Anderson, it was his admission that he didn't think the cartoons were offensive, but that some others did, so he let their judgment trump his own. With Cruickshank, it was his comment that to publish the cartoons was simply being "macho". Pressed to explain, he said that critics called cartoon self-censorhip a "lack of courage... you're just afraid that your correspondents in the Islamic world are going to face the consequences of this. Well, yeah." Well yeah? I appreciate the honesty: the CBC's news boss acknowledged, for the first time, that they are afraid that if they cover Muslim news in the wrong way, there could be violence against their reporters in Muslim nations. So they don't. That is an astounding admission to make. It's not just a question about bias; it goes deeper than that. It's one thing for the CBC to wilfully have an editorial position that is pro-Muslim or anti-Israel, as has often been alleged. But it's quite another for the CBC news boss to acknowledge that their editorial decisions aren't even the result of their own views or decisions, but the result of external pressure by Muslim radicals, and the fear of Islamic violence. That's the equivalent of CNN's admission that it let Saddam Hussein change their reporting about Iraq, to guarantee access for CNN reporters. (Comment on this)
6:20p	Fleep This is one hell of a short comic. It's definitely worth the read. I figured it out about halfway through. (Comment on this)
9:03p	So if I convert to Catholocism, does my race change to Catholic? Is Brigitte Bardot Bashing Islam? She may be better remembered as the revolutionary sex kitten of 1960s French cinema, but these days Brigitte Bardot is better known as a standard-bearer of the anti-immigrant wing of France's political spectrum. Bardot went on trial Tuesday charged with "inciting racial hatred," and in view of her four previous convictions on similar charges, prosecutors sought exceptionally stiff penalties of $22,000 and a two month suspended sentence. The prosecution has called for the harshest possible punishment in the hope of getting through to Bardot the seriousness of her transgressions of French law. MRAP implored the judge to "take note of this refusal by (Bardot) to learn the lessons of previous convictions and cease using racist language". The court will make its decision by June, although the repeat convictions on similar charges suggest that Bardot has not exactly been chastened by previous court rulings. I've said it before, I'll say it again. You may not like what she says but she should have the right to say it. If you have to silence her, then you cannot refute anything she says. If you have to beat her into silence, you're an intellectual coward. *insert obligatory French joke* (4 Comments | Comment on this)
11:33p	Had some time, so I uploaded a couple songs from DJ Bobo's cd, Vampires. Dangerous -- http://www.megaupload.com/?d=UVWQ37UT Vampires are Alive -- http://www.megaupload.com/?d=PSX04PVL (Comment on this)

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