Pie Palace

I just got a pushy call from a telemarketer telling me that I was getting a “second notice” of my car’s warranty expiring, and that I should re-register it through them. I’ve never owned a car. They refused to tell me where they got my phone number, anything about the car in question, or the company they are working for. It sounds like a scam (and the RCMP thinks so too).

The call was from 1.916.219.8163¹. It comes about five days after I moved the number to Rogers’ wireless service. I hadn’t received any phone spam in my 2.5 years with Virgin Wireless.

Anyone else gotten these calls?

1. Heh. There’s an online service for tracking “complaints” about phone numbers. check it. (back)

Sent to Paul Dewar, MP for Ottawa Centre.:

Dear Mr. Dewar,

As a constituent of your ward, I ask you to vote tonight to end the bus strike. It has cost my financially (over $400 in taxi fare and car rental), it has lowered my productivity (I now work 1-2 hours a day less, because I must car pool), and it has cost me emotionally (it is difficult to visit my elderly grandmother). As unpleasant as these problems are, I can afford to spend my way around them. I feel very, very sorry for those who can’t. This strike is hitting the least privileged in our society hardest.

The strike has an ongoing emotional and economic cost to Ottawa’s citizens. Please vote to end it.

e

As much as I support the union’s right to strike, and the members’ right to fair compensation, I have to say that this strike is hitting the city too hard. If the union wants to put pressure on the city, work to rule, park buses around city hall, stop collecting bus fair, just leave the poor out of it.

Woohoo! My first hate mail!

So you think Asperger’s syndrome is some sort of fucking joke for you and your jackass nerd idiot friends?

What do you have that we can make fun of? Impotence? A huge ass?

Feel free to mock: my insouciance, my wacky political beliefs, my gadget addiction, not owning a car, the amount of time I spend in front of a computer, the amount of time it takes me to answer my email, etc.

This love-in brought to you by the Pie Palace AQ Test.

The world’s most loved politician will be in Canada on February 19. If he’s coming to O-Town, I’m going to see him, come hell or high water.

Blogawa is ugly. Ugly, ugly, ugly. So I’m redesigning the look. As part of the redesign, I’m putting together a wordmark that will be shown on the mast head. Here are some of the possibilities:

(The source HTML is available as well)

What are your thoughts? Suggestions? Constructive criticism?

I’ve added Ken Yam’s blog to Blogawa. I’m starting to wonder about the mix of blogs that I’m feeding from. If one extrapolates the population of Ottawa from Blogawa’s contributors, there would be something like 400,000 transit officianados in our city. I think I’m going to have to go on another recruiting binge.

Alright, dear reader, I finally did it. I broke down and started reading Barack Obama’s “Dreams from My Father – A Story of Race and Inheritance”. I can sum the first five chapters up in a word: awesome. The introduction is kinda… well… not awesome, but hey, that’s fair. I didn’t buy the book to read the introduction.

In case anyone is reading along, I’ll break this into a chapter-by-chapter review.

Words Looked Up

Apocryphal (p. 8 ) – Not canonical. Hence: Of doubtful authority; equivocal; mythic; fictitious; spurious; false.
Divestment Campaign (p. 105) – Campaign to convince an institution to sell off investments in a given region or company (definition via wiseGeek. The divestment campaign that Obama refers to seems to be the divestment from South Africa campaign, that children of the 70s may be vaguely aware of.

Now lets get to the chapter-by-chapter goodness.

Preface to the 2004 Edition

Overall: This is the most boring piece of writing I’ve seen since I wrote my thesis. In this, Obama rambles on about his achievements, how “some friends persuaded me to run for office” (really? honestly? it was their idea? riiiiiiight)¹, blah, blah, blah. Although I commend Obama for not mentioning September 11 for a sum total of three pages. That must have been tough.

Moral: Skip the introduction to the introduction. There’s a stirring bit on page x (around paragraph 3, for the lazy). But really, the intro-to-the-intro is terrible.

Original Introduction

page xiv – Come on! Nobody should use an ellipsis in a published book. This is a bad sign.

page xvii – This feels like I’m reading Frodo’s diary at the start of Lord of the Rings. Obama says how little he’s done, that he hasn’t really been involved in the important bits of history, but he’s still written 400 pages about himself. He’s either being disingenuous, or I’m in for a long 400 pages.

Chapter 1 – 5

Forget the page-by-page thing.

The first five chapters cover Obama from age 0-18ish, and the family history of his mom’s side of the family. Now, I’d expect that to be boring, but it comes across like some kind of epic documentary about the USA from the Depression to the 80s. Not just any epic, a good epic, that hits all the right notes (American Gothic in the Depression, whites experiencing second-hand racism for befriending blacks in Texas, the idyllic land of Hawaii, the hopefulness of the 60s), and has a pretty impressive cast of characters.

The important bit isn’t the Boy’s Own Adventure in Indonesia (noseless beggars! pet crocodiles! mud surfing!), but Obama’s weird relationship with race. You see, he’s enrolled in a prestigious school in Hawaii, and he’s pretty much a social outcast because he’s black. As he grows up, gains a bit of freedom, and other black kids are enrolled in the school, he finds that he has a hard time identifying with them. Why? Because their thing is that they’re being oppressed by whitey. Meanwhile, Obama has a wonderfully supportive (white) mother, grandmother, and grandfather, and it’s hard to feel oppressed when you’re chief cheerleaders are supposed to be wearing the jackboots. So, not surprisingly, Obama doesn’t feel like he fits in: whites treat him differently, but he has a hard time relating to his black peers.

Just at the end of Chapter 5, Obama is rudely awakened out of existential angst. He goes through a laundry list of grandmothers (yes, it’s weird, but it works) – his white grandmother who has hit the glass ceiling at her job, and spent the past 20 years going nowhere; his Indonesian step-grandmother who was smacked down by the colonizing Dutch; his black paternal grandmother who would have spent her life as a maid, if she’d moved to the States. Obama realizes that his race doesn’t define his identity, instead he realizes that it’s just a starting point, and that he can choose his own destiny.

This is going to sound lame, but I am really, really enjoying this book. Obama’s one helluva writer, and, on top of that, it feels like he captures the spirit of the US between the Depression and the 80s. This project stopped feeling like homework around page 15.

PS: Barack Obama’s dad sounds like a bit of a dick.

PPS: The whole Spider-Man/Obama thing sucked.

1. Of course, I haven’t actually gotten to that bit in the book, so they may have actually done that. (back)

I’m about a week late in saying this, but better late than never: Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of Gaza is immoral at best, and a war crime at worst.¹

The thing I find depressing about Israel’s assault on Gaza is that it has no apparent exit strategy. If Israel gets its way and wipes out the entire Hamas leadership, what will happen? Another crop of angry youth will rise up to replace them; Israel will respond to their posturing violently; and the cycle will begin again.

It’s sad to say, but about the only good thing that I can realistically expect to come out of this is an improvement in the level of agitprop software being published. Playing Raid Gaza! gives me the same feeling of discomfort as reading news reports of the casualties.

Let’s hope that when this foray into mass murder ends, Palestinians and Israelis will find a way to forge some sort of peace.²

1. We can say the same thing of Hamas firing rockets into Israel. Israel gets headline billing because it has killed and injured so many more civilians in the past few days. (back)
2. I apologize for the lower than usual signal-to-platitude ratio, but (a) I’ve got the flu, and (b) I’m trying to word this in a way that doesn’t have me branded as a C list bigot. (back)