johnbowman.net

Well, I managed to avoid the first incarnation of Survivor almost entirely, but I went to my friend Keith’s place to watch the Superbowl yesterday and stayed to watch the first episode of the sequel.

It is pretty compelling TV. I certainly learned more about — and was more interesting in — the characters on Survivor than anyone playing for the Giants or Ravens. It’s not well-written (it’s not even scripted, they say) and it’s not good documentary making, but it is, as Salon puts it in their excellent coverage of Survivor, “a smartly turned-out piece of reality-entertainment cheese.”

And it’s definitely part of the pop culture. As CBC covers the selection of a new Speaker in the House of Commons, the Survivor allusions are flying. The MPs are voting on several ballots and is seems one candidate is eliminated with one. The CBC is showing mug shots of the remaining candidates with each ballot, calling them “the survivors” of the previous vote.

I’m half expecting the MPs to be called back to the chamber with a conch-shell blast instead of that bell. And I can just picture the Sergent-at-Arms declaring that “the council has spoken.”

You know, Milliken kinda looks like Richard Hatch…

I found out something about myself when I was screening calls yesterday. I’m definitely right-eared

The telephone headset I used yesterday was set up for the left ear when I got it. But when I was talking to the callers, some of what they were saying didn’t seem to make sense. I had to get this one guy spell his name four or five times before I could make sense of it. And phone numbers seemed to get all jumbled.

I don’t think my hearing is weaker in the left ear, though. It could have been the studio monitors — off to my right — playing the live show that confused me. But I think it has more to do with the way my brain processes information. If the right side of the brain controls and receives information from the left side of the body, and it’s the left side of the brain that processes language and logic, it’s no wonder I got confused.

Anyway, when I switched my headset over to my right ear, things seemed to improve. Weird.

Oooh. This is wicked. For the second week in a row, I get to screen calls on Cross-Country Checkup. Last week’s topic was gun control. This week: the child porn law.

I’ll bet I’m going to get told that I’m going to hell again.

Tonight, though, I’m going to see Oh Susanna at Lee’s Palace. That’ll be sweet… and a nice break from coding my blog archive all day.

Is it decadent to love getting groceries delivered? Probably.

But it’s not like I can drive to the grocery store and stock up on soup and big bags of cat food. And lugging that stuff even a few blocks from the no frills is no fun. So, getting groceries on-line is a pretty good solution for the carless urban Web geek.

But people always rolls their eyes when I say I’ve ordered food on-line. “Don’t you want to see the food you’re getting before you buy it?” says they. Well, I’ve never been one to thump my melons (*snicker*) and whoever is doing the food-picking probably knows better than to stick someone with a rotten pepper. On-line shopping isn’t exactly the most stable business model and finding a new service is as easy as click-click.

I had no idea Tara was that interested in sidecar-cross racing. *boggle*

The Supreme Court just released its decision and, yeah, they made some changes to the law, but mostly it’s intact.

And ain’t nobody happy about it, if you believe CBC Newsworld’s coverage. They still haven’t talked to any civil libertarians or authors yet. They did talk to John Robin Sharpe, who just dug himself a little deeper…

I could still be arrested for what I wrote, though, because I’ve distibuted it over the Net (the root of all evil, if you believe the thought-police pundits the CBC talked to). The only exceptions that the Court made concern material that you produce and keep for yourself.

I’ll turn myself in after work.

“In my last year of high school, when I was 19, I had a girlfriend. She was 17. We talked about sex a lot and, eventually, we went ahead and did it. It was pretty amazing.”

In writing that bit of fiction, I am in violation of Canada’s Criminal Code, Section 163.1. Come get me, coppers.

Now, the police say they need this law because obviously if someone is writing smut like that, they must be involved in child abuse.

When the Supreme Court releases its decision today, the Canadian Alliance is probably gonna get its back up over it. Yeah, I think the court will call for a change in the law, and the CA, like Helen Lovejoy, will be screaming, “Won’t somebody please think of the children?”

I want to know who will stand up for Canadians’ rights of expression and thought.

And don’t even get me started on that kid from Avonmore. That’s another blog entry entirely.

Well, I haven’t updated this site for a while, for various reasons (got fired, found new job, lost hosting service, struggling to gain control of my domain name). I still don’t have this site hooked up to my domain name yet, but I thought I would get my blog up and running anyway.

My previous posts to johnbowman.net were meant to be bloggish in nature, but it really is a pain to write up a little commentary and then code it up, move old stuff to the archives, and FTP it all up to the server. So, my posts were infrequent and rather long, just to make the effort worth while.

Now, I can write up something short and quick, from anywhere I like, and I don’t have to make an evening’s project out of it.

So, let’s get this thing started…