A New Father's Mother's day Poem

Watching my wife with our first son start from zero,

I'm starting to understand, every mom is a hero

Babies show up with a bang and a boom and some groans,

yet mother's embrace birth with grace … and weird hormones

Once a baby shows up, it needs constant attention,

which Mothers take on with a little apprehension

They're scared that they won't get it all right,

but push on anyways, usually late into the night.

They lose the ability to think about anything other than breastfeeding,

forget about TV, baking, exercise or garden weeding.

And then there's those crazy baby bodily functions.

I watch on and think "Is there a malfunction"?

Pee and poop and puke and drool,

all over those *little* clothes that are so cute and so cool

I stop to think, "was I ever this way?

Helpless and crying and in need of a toupee?"

But Mothers see so much more than the trouble!

They see love, giggles, toys and soap bubbles!

Moms' love comes from some crazy endless love pit

So thank you, I love you! (oops, let's clean up some spit)

One thing I almost missed, my Mom's a Mom too,

that's two Moms to deal with, oh no, what to do!

So I wrote this poem, 'twas late by one day,

My solution: TWO mothers days, they deserve 182.5 times that anyway!

Don't clean your lint tray

I used to be an apartment dweller, and there was a sign at the dryers in the basement that said

"Empty the lint tray when load is done!!!"

Seems like the courteous and fair thing to do, empty out the lint you made. (The triple exclamation marks emphasized just how important an issue this was ... made me feel like there was a cop watching me when I did the laundry)

The problem is, not everybody does it. When a courteous person arrives at a dryer where the lint HASN'T been emptied, then they have to empty it twice, once for the guy before them, and once for themselves.

The only people this system words for is the guys who don't empty their own lint tray. That doesn't seem very fair to me.

We should all come together and agree that NOBODY empties their own lint tray, just empty it when you arrive. That way, everybody only has to empty the lint tray once.

The guys who don't empty the lint tray only have themselves to blame when they get lint-filled laundry.

Who's with me?


Also applies to:

• Milk bags
• Toilet seats in a men only environment, such as a dorm.

Definitely does NOT apply to:

• Dishes
• Golf turf divets
• Garbage on tables in fast food restaurants
  

Al Gore's desk is messier (more messy?) than mine

I stumbled across this photo of Al Gore on his blog.


And here i thought my desk was a mess ... I've got nothing on Al Gore. A lot of trees have been killed in those reports on his desk ... all for the greater good I'm sure.

At least he looks like he's working hard to save the plantet...

Free cable TV legally

I have only had cable periodically since I started university. Two degrees and two jobs later, I still don't have cable. I don't really miss it as most of what's on TV is complete trash, but there are a few shows that I really enjoy and like to keep up on, usually of the drama/sci-fi type.:

1. Battlestar Galactica (dumb name, great show)
2. Lost (Has a great "mythology" and some of the best fiction writing ever)
3. Heroes (about to fall off my list... it was pretty bad last season)

I was hooked on 24 for a bit after getting the DVD box set in my hand, but it turned into the same horrible plot-find terrorist-accuse-the-wrong-person-get-tortured-torture-somebody else-save-the-day lather rinse repeat cycle a few time each season, so that show fell off my radar.

The thing I like the least about cable is having to schedule your life around it, or sitting down and watching something totally dumb that you never meant to watch and losing your whole evening.

... and... after spending a lot of time watching seasons of shows on DVD, it's REALLY hard to go back to getting interrupted with commercials.

PVRs help with that, but the thing I don't like about those is... paying for them.

Fortunately the internet is here to help out. Get yourself a good super-high speed internet connection and you can actually get some really good FREE TV these days. (The Americans have got it better than us Canucks, but we can still usually find the shows we want).

All the shows I like are available online, and in pretty good quality too. They can be found here:

• Battlestar online
  
• Lost online
  
• Heroes online
  

It's completely free, legal, and no hassle. The only downside is that you have to watch a few commercials, but the commercials breaks are only 30 seconds long instead of 2 minutes.

I hook my computer up to my TV and sound system so I can watch it from my couch instead of crouched around my computer.

Cool "who won the olympics" widget

Thanks to "morejamesmore" who pointed out this medal counter after reading my last post. It will calculate medals won per million people, and medals won per trillion GDP.

The results seem to come up a bit different than mine, so I don't know what's up with that, but it's pretty cool.

Olympic medals per capita

We've all seen the Summer Olympic 2008 medal count, with China and the United states and Russia dominating the top spots, and everybody else way behind.

Canada sits at either 19th or 14th place, depending on if you think the rank is by the number of medals, or the number of gold medals.

Well, this doesn't seem exactly fair to me, as the US has 10x the population of Canada, and China has nearly 20% of the world's population!

So, I decided to waste a significant portion of my afternoon to determine who won when we consider the population of the country. So, I looked up all the medal rankings and the population of all the countries, and used "medals per 100M people" as my metric.

If you're a sucker for detail, the full results can be found here, but I will try to summarize them.

The results are as follows (Out of 87 Countries that won at least 1 medal):

1. Bahamas - 604 medals per 100M people
2. Iceland - 331
3. Slovenia - 248
4. New Zealand - 218
5 Norway - 216
6. Australia - 215
7. Cuba - 210
8. Armenia - 199
9. Belarus - 195
10. Estonia - 151

35. Canada - 54
36. Russia - 50
45. USA - 45
68. China - 7.5
87. India - 0.3 (Out of 87 countries that won a medal)

So, for Canada there is some good news/bad news here. Overall, we actually rank WORSE on a per capita basis, but we did beat the top three countries of USA, China and Russia, so that's kind of nice.

But wait a minute here, the Bahamas, Iceland and Slovenia won the olympics?! Bahamas and Iceland have populations of just over 300,000, but won 2 and 1 medals respectively. These small populations kind of throw the statistics off a bit.

So, lets say to "qualify" to be in the top ranking group, you have to win at least 5 medals.

The ranking then change slightly (Out of 41 countries that won at least 5 medals):
1. Slovenia - 248
2. New Zealand - 218
3 Norway - 216
4. Australia - 215
5. Cuba - 210
6. Armenia - 199
7. Belarus - 195
8. Georgia - 129
9. Denmark - 128
10. Croatia - 111

25. Canada - 54
26. Russia - 50
31. USA - 45
39. China - 7.5

A few interesting things to note:

• I thought Canada might do better on a per-capita basis, we actually do worse. In the end we are somewhere in the top third.
• China is almost dead last on a per capita basis.
• Georgia, which is currently in a state of quasi-war, managed to still be one of the best performing countries.
• Slovenia is a tiny country of just over 2M people that managed to pull off 5 medals. Kudos.
• Of the top 20 countires, all but Australia (21M), Cuba (11M) and Belarus (9M) have a population under 5.5M.
• Cuba beat the USA. That's funny to me.

After going through this, it got me thinking, what other insteresting ways might there be to determine who "won" the olympics?

• Break the countries into divisions based on population. (I.e. "heavyweight" division would include China, India, USA, Russia, etc..., "Middle weight" would include Canada, Netherlands, Malaysia, Australia, etc... "Lightweight" would include Iceland, Slovenia, Bahamas, etc...)
• Who won on a medal-per-GDP basis?
• What's the per capita ranking of the G8
• To account for the amount of "summerness" that each country has , what is the per capita ranking when grouped by distance from the equator?

Is the paragraph dead?

This morning I was doing my regular online news circuit, and reading a printed magazine copy of "Canadian Business", when I noticed an interesting difference for the first time: Online news & blogs don't use periods to end sentences any more, they use paragraph breaks.

I opened up an article about the Bhutto assassination, and found that 24 out of 34 paragraphs had only once sentence, the remaining paragraphs had two.

Meanwhile, my Canadian Business magazine had 3 - 5 sentences per paragraph, with no spacing between them.

3 - 5 would be in line with what I was taught in grade school about writing, however that was pre-internet.

I suspect that the reasoning for doing one sentence per paragraph is that it makes it easer to read in narrow 600 pixel columns, and you don't have to worry about extra paper costs like you would in print.

There are a number of other ways that writing style "rules" have been changed by the internet since I was in grade school:

• Referencing authors is no longer required, simply provide a hyperlink
• There's no such thing as a word count, use as many or as few words as it takes to get an idea across. When I started reading blogs, my mind had to get around the idea a 100 word blurb might be just as valuable as the 600 word one-pager in a typical magazine article.
  
• Feel free to completely omit any background details on the topic you are discussing, even if it is very recent news. If your reader wants to know more, the answers are just a Google search away.
  

I find it interesting that by modifying the media (from print to screen), that the rules of grammar and writing style get modified as well.

Stéphane Dion slashes children... according to the Globe & Mail

I fell off my chair laughing when I saw a headline in the Globe and Mail today:

Liberal Leader says his government would slash the number of children living below the poverty line over five years.

Read it the wrong way and it sounds REALLY messed up.

Why is Stephene Dion slashing children? Why pick on just the poor ones? And why is he going to do it for 5 years!?

What a big mean-ee.

Will it blend?

My wife recently posted a blog entry about a little "will it blend" adventure that we had (we mistook a screw for a blueberry and tried to make it into a smoothie). So, this little adventure got me visiting one of my favorite sites, www.willitblend.com, where they successfully blend everything from an iPod to a golf club.

They have recently topped themselves with "will it return" where they try to return a blended video camera. It's one of the finer pieces of home video I've seen in a long time.

Apparently Best Buy made them pull the video from the willitblend.com website. But of course, censorship or attempts to manage your corporate image too tightly only serve to make what your trying to hide even more popular in today's internet age, so here is the video a-la youtube.

Video Camera Part 1 - Will it blend?


Video Camera Part 2 - Will it return?

Top 7 Bad Songs ... and how they fell

There are enduring bands whose music will last forever like the Beatles, U2, Rolling Stones, Nirvana etc... Then there are some bands that reach such an undeserved level of popularity so fast that when the listening public finally realized they've been duped, the music and band disappears forever.

These songs were incredibly popular, but will never be played on oldies stations 30 years from now. Their artists reached such heights, but then disappeared suddenly. Ask a DJ to play it today, and they'll look at you like you've been on a construction site without your hard-hat a few too many times. Here are my top seven:

7. Mmm Bop - Hansen
Kind of Jackson-5-ish, but as soon as one of these boppers hit puberty, it was game over.


6. The Bad Touch (Do it like the do it on Discovery Channel) - Bloodhound Gang
This song dominated the air waves for a very brief period of time with it's one line joke:

You and me baby ain't nothin' but mammals
So let''s do it like they do on the Discovery Channel

Unfortunately, they repeat this refrain 8 times throughout the song, so if it was funny the first time you heard the line, the joke was old by the end of the song. If you heard the song 5 times, you've heard the joke 40 times and would probably just switch the radio station.

5. Jump - Kriss kross
These two kids inspired teenage boys everywhere to wear their jeans backwards...

...who gave up on the idea after trying to use a urinal.

4. If you want to be my lover - Spice Girls
I truly have yet to meet anybody who actually liked Spice Girls, and am convinced that some marketing company just tried to spend tons of money to get them on the radio in hopes of duping the listening public that they had good music.

Their career ended the moment the trailer came out for their "Spice World" movie.


3. Can't touch this - MC Hammer
I think I can put my finger on the moment MC Hammer lost all credibility... see video below



It's so bad it's good.

2. Ice Ice Baby - Vanilla Ice
I think I also found out when Vanilla Ice lost it...



So bad it's good.

1. Hanging Tough - NKOTB (New Kids on the Block)
Ever notice that the acronym for these guys has just as many syllables as the full name? (that is, unless you pronounce it N-KOT-B). Ever girl who was a teen or pre-teen can still name off all five of these guys.

As for when it was over for these gjuys, i'm noticing a pattern here. Note to self: if I ever become a rock star, don't sign a Saturday morning cartoon deal.



So bad... it's just bad.


What are your top "once great/really bad" songs?

Death is killing stories

Why is it that the big event in "stories" these days is "who's gonna die?". Somehow, we have become pre-occupied with who might die in today's stories, that the rest of the story takes a sidestep.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but normally in life we don't know ahead of time when somebody is going to die. So, why reveal these kind of things ahead of time (even if we don't know who) in books and on TV?

Let's take three examples and explore; Harry Potter, Lost and Heroes.

Author J.K. Rowling said two characters will die in the last installment of her boy wizard series, and she hinted Harry Potter might not survive, either. (CBS News)

The Potter books have become the absolute worst in making the entire story about who is going to die. In the last three books, Rowling revealed before-hand that key characters were going to die, then the discussion boards swirled trying to figure out who was going to die. Now, in the 7th and final chapter she reveals that two characters will die. My opinion of the previous book (Half-blood prince) is that it's sole purpose was to set up the death of one key character, which could have been accomplished in maybe 2 chapters, rendering the remainder of the book unnecessary.

The TV series Lost is also a big offender. Every time a so-called "major" character is killed off the TV stations run a major advertising campaign telling you ahead of time that "somebody will die". Then, it ends up being either a minor character or a character that was so annoying that you won't miss them anyway (I'm thinking of you Shannon).

This week, the show Heroes did the same thing. The preview at the end revealed that "somebody will die", so now I'm supposed wait in suspense all week trying to guess who is going to die.

I've heard talk radio pick up these stories as if they are big events, so I guess the publicity stunt works well.

Sorry, I'm not going to play along. I really wish that they could just go ahead and kill the character without telling me ahead of time. Often they end up killing a minor character and I think, "they were making a such a big deal that guy?", and end up a disappointed viewer.

Writers please, just go ahead and kill the character warning me ahead of time, and I will be a happier viewer/reader.

The merit of a cat

Well, my girlfriend asked me to write about "the merit of a cat". So, here goes my best shot. Let it be known that I am not a "cat person". So, I don't have the same "appreciation" that some do. So here is the merit of a cat, from my perspective.

• Cat's merit being not as fun as dogs. They're like... The high-maintenance teeny-boppers with ten mirrors in their room. Dogs on the other hand, are like the class clown, always ready to entertain.
  
  
• Cat's merit being thrown off low roofs by young children. Sorry, it had to be said.
  
  
• Cat's merit cleaning a house of mice.
  
  
• Cat's merit being good source material for the "Puss'n'Boots" character in Shrek 2 (coughing up hairballs, licking themselves, "kitty kat eyes")
  
  
• Cats merit being cool, as in "Cool Kat", but it has to begin with K, not C. I guess that makes "Kit Kat" bars cool by default. But it is kind of a self proclaimed coolness... I'm not sure if its "real coolness".
  
  
• Cat's do merit making kind of a cool purring effect... when they decide to sneak into your room and sleep on your head.

There you have it, "the merit of a cat". Comments are welcome. :)