McSweeney’s

Listen up. I know the shit you’ve been saying behind my back. You think I’m stupid. You think I’m immature. You think I’m a malformed, pathetic excuse for a font. Well think again, nerdhole, because I’m Comic Sans, and I’m the best thing to happen to typography since Johannes fucking Gutenberg.

Code words for the day of the year

[Some enterprising telegraph operator] realised that telegraph senders charged per word rather than per character—thus transmitting “it is on” would cost the same as “raynor is maschalophilous.”

For example ‘crisp is short hand for “can you recommend to me a good female cook?” and ‘flank means “a fire is raging here. please send engine.”’ But then the operator created 366 (even leap year!) codes to cover every single day.

Have a happy Joltingly.

Boing Boing

It’s really telling that the opposition to the Canadian DMCA has come from real grassroots: artist groups, citizen groups, technologists, educators, disabled-rights groups, archivists — people who don’t hide their funding or their affiliations behind false flags. Meanwhile, the only support for this law has come from slick, fraudulent PR campaigns that shroud their origins in secrecy in order to disguise the fact that this is just the same four record labels running around in circles, wearing several hats, pretending to be a crowd.

Global Brief (um, who? *) says that as a middle-weight country, Canada does not get the respect that it deserves. It’s got the money, it’s got the know-how, it got three-Ocean access (sucks, don’t it, Austria) but with 30 million population, nobody is going to care.

That’s why tripling the population to 100 million or more will make it a player of consequence in international affairs.

The Canada of 100 million has a far larger national market and the attendant economies of scale and scope – for ideas, for debate, for books, for newspapers, for magazines (print and online), for all species of goods and services. It poses a far more impressive cultural counterweight to the US – now only three or four times larger, instead of ten or eleven times. It has many large, dynamic, global cities – more than just Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal, or perhaps even Calgary – that, superior division of labour oblige, serve as incubators and competitive arenas for innovation, productivity and creative ambition – all derivatives, as it were, of humans rubbing up against humans.

And it goes on like that for awhile. Sure, fine. Let’s do it.

* According to themselves, Global Brief is Canada’s confident, 21st century answer to The Economist, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Le Monde Diplomatique and a host of other world-class international affairs media platforms. Also, they are ‘top-tier.’

Danny Sullivan, of Search Engine Land, discovered a lawsuit filed against Google by a woman who says Google Maps caused her an injury. Sullivan wrote it up here.

The story goes viral – but few media outlets credit Sullivan, even though they use his graphic and his copy of the statement of complaint. It is a lack of professionalism in the media but does it come from laziness or from a disrespect of online media? …

These are for you, Nyiri

Andrew MacDonald leaves this series of pictures on his camera.

I like this story about a fluid commune that has taken over an abandoned mansion in a forgotten neighbourhood. The neighbours lobbied the housing court judge to let them stay.

Those that know me know my a) disinterest in most Hollywood exports and b) my devotion to the original Law & Order. This is its eulogy.

In 1984 Gary Coleman came to Crossroads School, where he enrolled in my class.

Of all the schools in the world, Crossroads was probably the one were Gary probably had the greatest chance of living anything resembling a normal life, given the liberalisness of the school meant that people…