Metaphoria

[a word I could have invented but chose not to]

The ability to choose we rarely exercise; move an inch forward to look me in the eye. A wheel revolves until it stops, but inertia might mean the other shoe won't drop. And if we ever agree on progress then someone call the cops.

Omega man has a broken hand, which requires more thinking—the need to plan. You can't dig out of sand with just one hand. He tried it once on dry land. He dug sand too out from the ocean, but could not understand: When you dig something real, but have nothing to say, the sand creeps back in and fills your hole, and you just wasted the day. Toil is a cruel idea, invented by school so that we'd behave, and what exactly is the difference between me and a slave? You earn it while it burns you; to see the light you ignite the candle in your mind—which unfortunately means your head is on fire, spine is a wick, face is wax and there's no water by design.

Top 10 Cupcake Man Jersey Shore Nicknames

[inspired by Mike 'The Situation' Sorrentino]

1. Xupcake Man
2. FREE-CUPPs
3. Bloggzy
4. TDottily
5. BloodCuddler
6. Ramblo
7. MiSCter E
8. Prose-Echo
9. Misa Fred Moe Cupcake
10. The Internast

RIP Musa

This photo totally ripped off from blogto.com

I rode by on a Monday morning and
saw the police tape.
So many times served by the waiter
in the cowboy hat
I never minded the wait

French toast smothered in maple syrup
Red bricks eaten by flames
On a weekend with so many fire alarms
In a city that lives to blame

When power goes out in a heat wave
We rush to corners to direct the cars
But when Sundays are snuffed like a lit cigar
The police state's rather lame
And my daily pass through Dundas
and Euclid never will be the same

[See "Fire destroys Musa and several homes at Dundas and Euclid"]

10 reasons why the combined intelligence of 7 billion people = global stupidity

[Memorize these and you'll never have to accidentally implode the world economy.]

1. Availability bias, which causes us to base decisions on information that is more readily available in our memories, rather than the data we really need;
2. Hindsight bias, which causes us to attach higher probabilities to events after they have happened (ex post) than we did before they happened (ex ante);
3. The problem of induction, which leads us to formulate general rules on the basis of insufficient information;
4. The fallacy of conjunction (or disjunction), which means we tend to overestimate the probability that seven events of 90% probability will all occur, while underestimating the probability that at least one of seven events of 10% probability will occur;
5. Confirmation bias, which inclines us to look for confirming evidence of an initial hypothesis, rather than falsifying evidence that would disprove it;
6. Contamination effects, whereby we allow irrelevant but proximate information to influence a decision;
7. The affect heuristic, whereby preconceived value-judgments interfere with our assessments of costs and benefits;
8. Scope neglect, which prevents us from proportionately adjusting what we should be willing to sacrifice to avoid harms of different orders of magnitude;
9. Overconfidence in calibration, which leads us to underestimate the confidence intervals within which our estimates will be robust (e.g. to conflate the 'best case' scenario with the 'most probable'); and
10. Bystander apathy, which inclines us to abdicate individual responsibility when in a crowd.

-Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money [based on Eliezer Yudkowsky, 'Cognitive Biases Potentially Affecting Judgment of Global Risks', in Nick Bostrom and Milan Cirkovic (eds), Global Catastrophic Risks (Oxford University Press, 2008)]

See also, Tower of Babel, problems during construction of

Exploding Cupcakes

Apart from the art

A loud cow, a lowly blow, she lows, she knows what into her stomachs go.

A sombre sonata, dove named Renata, driven away by lout in a Mazda Miata.

A Celtic shrew, witches' brew, believes in the Ark and two by twos.

A proud man, totally tan, trips, unplanned banana peel rips dignity from his twisted hips.

A festering welt, karate belt, repeating dropkicks until after the April melt.

Really excited about this week

All sorts of excellent things will happen.

World Cup of Toronto 2010

A friend just reminded me of the existence of my 2006 Toronto World Cup blog.

In June 2010, I hope to resume my Toronto world football travels. Stay tuned.

8 ways to brighten your mood

[requires a few basic supplies and a semi-permeable membrane]

1. Fire hoses spraying elephant dung - yes.
2. Win a Toblerone for every cheetah cub you save on the way to work. Has to be yelping in pain or flailing in a trapper's net somewhere. Double Toblerone for saving the mother cheetah
   
3. Leave extra space between you and the next car, allowing room for your pumped up sense of self!
   
4. Eat only raisins and tell yourself they are the shrunken heads of evil dictators
5. Spar with a old man, knock him unconscious if you have to. He's reliving his glory days, which is awesome.
6. Sweeten the mood of a loved one by extracting all of his or her salt content. You will need a semi-permeable membrane, lots of water, and patience.
7. Marvel aloud at the racetrack how sweaty the horses are and how nice it would be to wrap them in a puffy towel.
   
8. Motion toward a stranger. When he approaches, offer him a box of paper clips. If he refuses, note it well, plant a tracking device on his coat, and add him to your database of People who Have Enough Paperclips. When the paperclip shortage hits, you have the 'intel' you need to navigate the crisis.

Every Tuesday

I go make lemonade for kids who were given lemons. They don't complain, and I am thrilled to bits. It shouldn't count as volunteering when you have that much fun.

Aspirin(g)

[powered by pure wind]

Breathe what is better, borrow a letter, I knew Eddie Vedder's second cousin Bert Beethoven, massacred outside a 7-11.

Dramatic inches, Sidd Finch, the April Fool's Buddha, could throw 168 miles per hour wearing a hiking boot; could have had groupies in Bermuda or diamond-leather suit. The punchline: he didn't exist, but boy what a beaut.

Old guy with hot dame on arm got game, nobody remember his name. Crusade men, long swiss in leather, armed with big sharp spikes: we end up liking whatever they like. But I don't conspire in my spare time, which won't please the Dragon lords. We stood in back of church for Easter, punished for being bored.

We, like you, will pass, I don't think you mean to try. I'd shill like a midget on reality television; their happiness makes me cry.

Watered down in Twittered unison, nation known for barrels of bitumen, barnacles manifold, fructating cows, living like larvae on the cover of NOW. If Sid the Kid was a silver-haired Swede, I'd still love the way he leads; when we pot through five-hole those magic gifts from hockey gods the devil's eyes will bleed.

Overroasted toasters and sixty year old east coasters remembering their youth through the corner of a cover of Vogue, flattening wrinkles on foreheads 'stead of worrying about hospital beds -- we were lied to by the Mad Men, so I say AMEN - those merciful lies make life worth living; how else do we explain the continued employment of Jeremy Piven? [ok... stop]

On political correctness

Let's talk about political correctness. Political correctness is the most unprincipled, unintellectual stance I know of. Political correctness hates free speech.

Ultimately it's a tool to transfer power from 'oppressor' to 'oppressed'. Who's oppressed? Whoever you decide should gain power. Who is oppressor? Whoever you decide should lose power. The way power is taken: intimidation though incoherent guilt tactics. Whoever has PC-defined power is assumed to be guilty. All people are treated as members of stereotypical groups, fitting under either the 'privileged' group (whose motives must be suspicious), or 'underprivileged' (whose motives must be championed). Never mind that humans are individuals, and may bristle at being place in these groups, as though they can't achieve a thing through their own efforts. Everything is systemic to a PC person; all phenomena pre-explained through categorical lenses.

The hallmark of a PC mindset is obsession with defining what words mean, as well as which words are acceptable, and which are not. (This is a microcosmic example of a life of grandstanding on which actions are acceptable and which are not.) Their arguments hinge on obsessively defining each term so that there is no way they can lose the argument. PC persons are deathly afraid of how someone else might use words, and so eagerly pounce on and distort word definitions - so that they have the 'agreed upon' meaning.

They tragically think that 'bad' words in and of themselves create actual dangerous thoughts and trigger 'wrong' emotions (even though linguistic and psychological experiments have long shown this to be false -- thoughts are independent of speech; also, emotion centres of our brain evolved before the speech centres did) - and thus they see 'bad' words as weapons and spend their lives worrying about the 'harm' mere words may do. Their solution is to prevent people from doing any harm by controlling what they say (as a false shortcut to control what they do). They think that if only we ban meaningless token words like 'fag, retard, honky, wop', that everything will be well on its way to being ok. But in reality new words will pop up overnight to replace them as tokens of intolerance (example: 'retard' a few decades ago was the politically correct word to use!). They think that genetically-ingrained human emotions and attitudes such as hate and racism can actually be eradicated by a delicate use of words.

-Non PC-thug

Forced to remove my literary niqab

This is how I write angry.

Love it or list it

1. I would produce a lot more blog posts if I were batting cleanup.
2. Drunk driving would pay more if jail was like the lottery
3. People in coffee shops are more serious than is comfortable. Perhaps there is an opportunity for some enterprising coffee shop clowns to brighten our moods with heavily-makeuped antics and horn-honking while we type into this apathetic oblivion.
   
4. Driving in a swamp with an outboard engine on your boat is a good idea if pirates are chasing you and they are relying on wind power. Driving in a swamp at most other times is inadvisable.
   
5. Facebook has neutralized complainers. This doesn't sit well with me. I want more violent public outburst. This blog will have to do. INFIDELS.
   
6. 99% of everything meets with casual contempt -- the jackasses would have you believe.
   
7. Cynics only think they win if they think you are listening
8. Don't open a cheese shop if you can't handle the smell. This goes for anything you might do that might have consequences you might not handle. Basically, to accurately predict your performance far into the future is an invaluable skill, although if we master this skill the psychic industry will go out of business--but they'll see that coming so it's just a part of globalization.
   
9. Try opening the door for someone. Now, try doing it for 45 minutes straight. You've gone from being 'polite' to being 'a doorman', you cranky doorman!
10. Don't complain about things not tasting like they used to. Newsflash: Nothing tastes like it used to. Once you eat it the first time, it's gone!
11. Wait until midnight before setting your alarm. If you want to sleep for 7 hours, set it for 7 o'clock. There, I just saved you the hassle of arithmetic. Of course, if you want to wake up at 7 o'clock regardless of when you go to bed or how much you want to sleep, you can set your alarm at anytime.
    
12. Don't put on clothes if you're about to get the electric chair. Worse than being electrocuted naked is getting an autopsy done with static-y clothes.
13. Speaking of static: Plastic dryer ball in the dryer - good idea. Plastic dryer ball in your mouth - a bad idea. Who cares if your throat is wrinkle and static free. You are poisoning yourself needlessly. If you want to swallow things, try vitamin D tablets - 1000 units daily can help prevent cancer.
    
14. Rap music, polka music, banshee music, hip hop music - it's all just music. All music is identical if you are from outer space and an alien with no ears. We all could have saved a lot of time for the aliens and just had one radio station called Homogeneous Radio FM. Now when the aliens invade they will be more pissed off than necessary. Enslavement + extra punishment = smarten up next time, humans!
    
15. Until we either make peace with or annihilate the ants, they will continue plundering our dust mines. Simple as that. I have my magnifying glass, but no one I know can speak the language of antish diplomacy. Next move is totally up to you guys.
    

Chee boy vibe

Ms. Rhythm's dead, so I celebrate, I order up an ice cream cake - freshly chiffoned with sugar cream, spelling words that Zarathustra spake. You could pick it up, if you don't mind, three business days from now, the cashier tells me on the phone as I milk a mental cow. I have a coat that's smooth and grey, as my head will one day be. I need to walk outside sometimes just to have nothing to see. Talk to strangers at the bus shelter, ask to squeeze politely by--each trip upon the streetcars has me drinking bottled sighs--and commiserate telepathically while staring at the sky. I walk into an LCBO, they've got pretty good customer service--but middle-aged cashiers on Friday night can make a sober man feel nervous. Then I duck into an alleyway just to photograph graffiti. No one remembers hidden things; it's no wonder why we're needy.

Distillate

You can't write with a double life, on the page, with your strife. Lines hypnotize, lull, unfinished sentences dent everything complete. Thoughts in flight, clauses for the weak, noun phrases, pronounced aphasia, voiceless songwriter; the lazy man is an energy miser, inconclusive philosophizer.

What we did

We were warned about the snow. We told you so. We were taken in arms. What could be the harm? We were troubled to see nothing apparent in our destiny. We were asked to sacrifice, were promised hope and given the key to kingdom. We were championed by the press, then forgot to dress. We hid our gifts, and lavished paper money on the problem. We asked for advice when it did not suffice. We drank all Sunday, combed our hair, shaved our beards, we lived in fear.

Tahoma Nebraska

I found my font.

Agh fest 2010

Agh, I am spitting again, we lug loogies to mouth, then shout. I see, agh, a cowboy atop a church organ. It's a Spaghetti Western, Ennio Morricone as the angel of life and death. A fist flashes, light extinguishes itself.

Attempt to reincarnate. Attempt to relate. Mind-reading will be a feature on our next beta release. Don't bother teasing, individuality happily ceases, empathy's well-worn when I know everything you do, we are to each other a bland familiar stew...

Oh my dove, fly away, find land. Was the Odyssey just evolutionary adaptation? I'm on cold charred Galapologan islands, finding fish with finger-hooks, eeking existence from the pages of a book.

Agh - I was drunk this month, I was a pedestrian run over by a Hummer. Winter without snow, lets the homeless lie low, on King Street, where we eat street meat, where beauty meets slush, and anyone well-dressed is probably in a rush.

Tell me a story, write about your travels. To travel is to work. Packing and unpacking like George Clooney, up in the air, we expect customer service, lug lives here through air. We mostly hit eject, sucking in information, like children eating to prepare for the next stage of growth, just a billion little larvae who've grown a second mouth.

We are electric these days, we travel in every direction instantaneously. She said "I don't need your word of mouth when I got the search engines on my side."

Stephen Harper's Vacation Auto-replies

1. "I am out of the office until March 3. If this is about a breach of democracy, please call my press secretary Dimitri, ext. 666."
2. "Sorry, I'm out of Ottawa while we renovate the House. Have to tear a few things down. I bet you won't recognize the place when I'm done!"
3. "I'm still detained in Afghanistan - man, talk about torture! I'll get that information you requested as soon as I can. Could take a while."
4. "For the next little while I'll be trading Parliament Hill's eternal flame for Vancouver's Olympic torch. Please join me in watching the flames of our nation burn!"
5. "Democracy is halted until I find enough unelected senators to let it function properly."
6. "If your legislation failed to pass before the end of 2009, don't worry, you are not alone. Please contact us again in the springtime, when you can try to pass it through the House yourself."
7. "While we are away from the office, there will be no refund of your tax dollars. However, stay tuned for phase two of our economic action plan. Remember, your money supports our tropes."
8. "Sorry you noticed that I'm away! Due to Jean Chretien's bad example, we are prorogued. We are working as fast as possible to make sure nobody notices anything again."
9. "Any top civil servants requesting re-appointments during this time may contact my finger."
10. "I will not be in touch with most Canadians at this time."

Inspired by playful partisan contest on the Liberal web site. See (non Liberal) Andrew Coyne's latest blog on the prorogation travesty.