Pie Palace

As baroque as ultimate feels, I have to say that I’m finding soccer to be a little less fun these days. Not because of the game itself, but because of the teams I’m facing.

Soccer is a non-contact sport, but since Christmas I’ve been:

Pushed from behind (between plays).

Verbally threatened (between plays).

Knocked down from behind (during play).

Had my foot stomped on (a few seconds after I’d already passed the ball).

And it isn’t just me. Players on my team have been physically threatened and shoved (during and between plays). The referee saw both of infractions but chose not to reward the offender with a card. And this is in the lower tier of a recreational soccer league.

I expect a certain amount of jockeying. When play gets spirited I expect players to bump into each other and jostle one another for the ball. But I don’t expect to see players acting maliciously. The game is about teamwork and individual skill, not bullying an opponent into submission.

Having said that, the wankers ruining the game are in a minority. The pushes, shoves, threats, and stomps have come from about five people. Given that I’ve probably played ten or twelve teams of 15 people, in that time, we’re talking about less than 5% of the soccer-playing population. But those assholes are really sucking the fun out of an otherwise enjoyable and accessible game.

Part of the reason I’m noticing the cavalcade of hate is because of the ultimate team I’m playing on. In each game that I’ve played, the other ultimate team has been genuinely friendly; providing a pleasant atmosphere for play. I’m curious if this is because ultimate doesn’t have the same physical competition as soccer, or if it’s because ultimate is self refereed. In the self-refereed soccer matches I’ve played, tempers have remained much calmer.

Nope.

The OpenMoko Project is creating a cellphone built on linux, running X, with GTK bindings. The idea behind the project sounds fantastic: a phone that users will have control over. It is supposed to hit the shelves in September 2007 for a US$350 ballpark. According to the hardware specs for the first phone, the device looks like it should include wifi, accelerometers, and bluetooth. Snazzy.

CBC is advertising a studio session with Dick Hyman. I’ve been snickering about it for the last two hours.

In another post, LKG responded to my reaction to the destruction of the attached picture:

“small minded and reprehensible.”? Hmm, so, how is it that the original graf doesn’t fit into that same meta desciption by ‘editing’ the original wall in the first place? Are you suggesting that the orignal graf *wasn’t* small-minded and reprehensible b/c you agree with that P.O.V.?

I would draw a distinction between sticking a work of art onto an empty wall, and modifying a work of art that someone else has produced.

An empty wall doesn’t have much to say. It communicates some basic information about “mine” and “yours,” and it might say something about the economic status of the owner, but, for the most part, it isn’t the result of a creative or imaginative act.¹ As a side note: since the wall is someone’s property, I would say that it is fully in their right to remove all graffiti from it, and to charge anyone who has “vandalized” the wall in the first place.

Art is the work of someone’s imagination. They’ve created something that is designed to be seen as they have created it. It may not express a coherent idea or thought, but it should evoke a reaction in a viewer. Ideally, the work of art will be original, bringing something new into the world.

When this artwork was censored, someone decided that they didn’t like the emotional response that the picture evoked. Instead of dealing with their reaction in a constructive manner (either by creating a piece of their own, writing a written response, or dealing with their emotional turmoil on their own), they decided to destroy the thing that caused them distress. They have effectively said that their emotional view is more important than that of the artist and the artist’s viewers. I wouldn’t call this a free-speech issue, so much as an issue of egalitarianism. The censor has said that they are more important than the artist.

As to your last point:

Are you suggesting that the original graf *wasn’t* small-minded and reprehensible b/c you agree with that P.O.V.?

I’m not sure what the artist’s original POV was. I’m not sure what the original picture was trying to say, if it was trying to say anything at all. Given that, I have to say that I neither agree nor disagree with the artist, I just find the picture attractive and aesthetically pleasing. Seeing a peacenik dove mixed with a bomb creates a little tickle of confusion at the back of my mind that’s enjoyable, if only for the mixing of the two perspectives. I think of myself as anti-war/anti-violence in pretty much every possible way, especially when it comes to indiscriminate weapons such as bombing; but I can still get something from art that contains images of those acts.

Centretown has been blessed with plenty of street art that I find ugly and unpleasant. Last year someone covered down town with drawings of severed hands with the word “hate” written on the knuckles. Last fall someone painted ghoulish floating heads around downtown. Those creeped me out, and were unpleasant, but I felt richer for having seen them. As much as I didn’t like seeing each one, I enjoyed the reaction they evoked.

If the censor had decided to respond to the original image in a creative way (either by drawing an olive branch over the bomb, or somehow subverting the original idea), I wouldn’t have as much of a problem, as they would have created something new, rather than stomping on someone else’s idea. But their act of destruction is just that: it says that the artist is worth less than they are, and it says that the artist’s idea and action don’t deserve to be seen.

1. We can argue semantics here about creativity, but let’s just call the average wall a functional item rather than an expressive item for the purpose of this discussion. (back)

Mycelium is a service that allows bloggers to add YouTube-style videos of Parliamentary proceedings to web pages. I’d love to see a hyperlinked version of the Hansard, but that still hasn’t appeared in Canada yet.

My desktop is an Ubuntu install. I want my instant messaging client to start automagically when I login. It doesn’t make sense to use /etc/init.d to start it, because I want the app to be run as my user, and I want it to start with my windowing session.

How does one do this with Ubuntu?

Note: These instructions work for Ubuntu 6.10, or Edgy Eft. I have not tested them on other distributions

1. Open the Ubuntu “System” menu, go to “Preferences”, and select “Sessions”
   
2. The Sessions dialog will open. It allows you to control what programs start when you log into X/GDM. It’s kind of ugly, and looks like it can do with a little love from a UI expert.
   
3. The tab we’re interested is “Startup Programs.” Switch to that tab and click “Add.”
   
4. In order to launch the given program, you need to know its path. In this case I care about pidgin, which is in my path, so I can just type pidgin.
   
5. Click “OK”, and close the Session dialog.

You’re done! Test that the setup worked by logging out of X, and logging back in. Pidgin should start automatically.

Every (North American) reader of this blog has probably seen an ad for some charity doing research into breast cancer. It’s much less likely that they will have seen an ad for a charity raising money for prostate cancer, even though prostate cancer kills more people and receives much less funding. New Scientist recently published a book review of “Cancer Activism: Gender, media and public policy” (ISBN 9280252031984).

Since I haven’t been able to get ahold of the book yet, I can only review the book review. In a nutshell, it says that the start of the AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s started an era of patient activism. That activism has seen breast cancer (amongst other things) receive more media and financial attention than other diseases. The article notes that there are fewer victims of breast cancer in the US (214,640 in 2006) than prostate cancer (234,460 in the same year), while breast cancer research receives far more funding (US$557 million for breast cancer, compared to US$309 million for prostate cancer).

The review goes on to mention that breast cancer research advocates have portrayed breast cancer as a disease that strikes women younger than the average age of sufferers. The average age of breast cancer sufferers mentioned in magazines is “around” 40, while most people are over 50 when diagnosed. Meanwhile, the poster children of prostate cancer (Senator Bob Dole and General Norman Schwarzkopf) have their age portrayed accurately.

The US national cancer institute estimates that there will be 218,890 cases of prostate cancer diagnosed in the US this year, and 27,050 deaths due to the disease. Meanwhile, there will be 180,510 instances of breast cancer diagnosed, with 40,910 deaths.

In the past couple of years, some of my older acquaintances and relatives have been diagnosed with prostate cancer. From what I’ve heard, they’ve all done reasonably well, but 12% of sufferers won’t be so lucky.

Given our society’s fixation with breasts (and distaste for male ass), I guess the financial allocation shouldn’t be that surprising. It’s a pity that there isn’t more time and money given to prostate cancer research.

In case you’re interested in donating to prostate cancer research, take a look at the Prostate Cancer Research Foundation webpage.

FullyRamblomatic has posted a flowchart showing how the world will end. I guess it won’t be the bats after all.

As seen on the door of the new Money Mart opening up at Bank and Catherine. I tend to think of those pay-day loan places as a way for the rich to extract money from the poor. Hopefully it’ll go out of business soon.

Update: Some self appointed censor has scraped the bomb off of the Blue Bird of Bombardment. I can understand destroying the thing because it’s graffiti, but “editing” it because it doesn’t fit with one’s narrow view of what’s acceptable to represent is small minded and reprehensible.