The Barnacle is closing it's doors

After 5 wonderful months of insightful commentary, news, and analysis the Barnacle will no longer be updated due to lack of commentary, news, and analysis. I will be posting at ghs.tumblr.com. Suzyperplexus posts regularly on her blog, hiyaa-a as well as frequently contributing to meme.ca. Jeffish regularly produces "Swimming Upstream", his wonderful podcast on the Vancouver indie music scene which can be found at swimmingupstream.libsyn.com.

Vancouver Independent Music Podcast

Take a listen to some great local talent and help support your community.
Check out:

Blog Entry

BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOGGA BLOGGY BLOG. BLOGGITY BLOG BLOG.

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

Teetotalling is bad for you

I'm beginning to come to a startling conclusion about lifestyle choices and their effects on health. Drinking is good for you, smoking pot is good for you, and smoking cigarettes is, ahem, kinda good, in a way.

update: as Anonymous pointed out, "smoking" pot may not be beneficial but injecting it's psychoactive ingredient THC into human tumour cells may cause them to shrink...if you are a mouse.

further update: also enjoy strawberry daiquiris as a spirited health tonic.

The Current State of Currency

Sometimes I get nostalgic when I think about how the Hotel Douglas used to take Canadian Tire dollars for beer. Bartering was so liberating to a poor student.

According to the mostly juvenile people at You're the Man Now Dawg, a woman recently posted a Craigslist ad offering sex in return for gold coins in World of Warcraft. Now, people post bawdy ads on Craigslist all the time; however, it seems the W.O.W. community is pretty upset.

Let's be honest, if a Night Elf Druid needs an epic flying mount so badly that she is willing to have sex with a mere mortal for it, it is probably a life or death situation. Who are we to judge?

A BROAD WAY

In 2006, Robert Liano and Thomas Copolla created A BROAD WAY - a collaborative film consisting of one hour in the life of 400 filmmakers at every intersection on NYC's Broadway St.

Liano and Copolla placed a call-out on MySpace and Craigslist for filmmakers interested in documenting the happenings along the 12.4 miles of Manhattan for one hour and managed to secure the largest film permit ever issued in NYC. The film is still looking for investors and those interested are encouraged to visit the site.

What everyone else is listening to

Rarely do I check in with the musical pop matrix but every once in a while I need to see what it is that makes the punters pogo. Apparently right now it's Mims's 'This Is Why I'm Hot'. As expected, it has all the usual hip-hop cliches that make it look like it's a parody of itself; braggadocio, bitches, money, cars, and a massive entourage.

For an ingenious graphical dissertation on the Mims's number one song in America click here.

Google Earth Gets High Res In Vancouver

Vancouver is coming into focus from outer space. Cool, maybe we can watch the cops-a-beating and the junkies-a-shooting in glorious lurid detail...if only it was live.

bonus: the first person to leave a comment with the name of the building pictured gets to borrow my copy of Andy Letcher's Shroom.

The Criterion Contraption

Matthew Dessem out of LA has a great blog, The Criterion Contraption, in which he is attempting to review all the films that have been released under the Criterion banner. No small feat with close to 300 films so far in the collection. The 60-some-odd reviews on the site are very insightful and well written. Required reading for film students and cinemaphiles. Check out his review of Rushmore.

source: kottke.org

RIAA.....enough already

I think it's high time the RIAA stop making such asses of themselves and move away from their antedeluvian business models which make no sense at all in the digital age. If it can be seen or heard or read or played on a computer it can and will be copied freely. Unlike degenarate marijuana smokers, surely all P2P'ers can't be unethical monsters. The defendant's lawyers are catching on too. Slam those dinosaur noggins together and try to think of something quick....your ship is sinking.

update: Consumerist's readers have voted the RIAA the worst company in the world.

Bad Boy of Wearable Cam: Justin Kan

SAN FRANCISCO-- Justin TV has been live for 4 days. Seattle-native in San Francisco, Justin Kan (23), wears a hat-camera 24/7 in pursuit of a world where, “hundreds of employees, thousands of cameras and tens of thousands of shows” run from his 2-bedroom North Beach apartment.

Although Kan’s equipment is similar to University of Toronto professor Steve Mann’s wearable computer and reality mediator, the 23-year-old sets a noticeably more playful tone. Unlike the academically heralded Mann, Justin Kan has not yet publicly referred to himself as a “cyborg”, at least not while sober. Instead, JustinTV has a Real World feel, albeit with far fewer bikinis, on a real world budget.

Justin Kan's cellphone number is 415-948-3219. I am considering inviting him to my champagne croquet match.

update from Shenanigoat: apparently these guys are getting prank'd a lot. Someone spoofed the caller id of the Justin.tv official cell phone number, called the San Francisco police department and reported a stabbing in the North Beach apartment. link to video at TechCrunch

Paxil + Alcohol = Paxihol?

In celebration of their 10th anniversary, Slate is publishing a 'best of' anthology, which, after reading Seth Stevenson's candid and lucid account of his encounter with Paxil, I immediately ordered from their site Amazon. I was well impressed.

link to article here
download MP3 audio of Seth Stevenson reading this story here

Social Networks Are Dead...Long Live Social Networks

Over at Ning.com, any jackass with basic mouse clicking abilities can make their own MySpace'ish social network....so that's just what I did. Anyone interested in the future of humanity via cognitive and biological enhancement can join my Transhumanist Network for frank talk on how to defeat the neoLuddites by overpowering them with our vastly superior technologies....it's gonna be like shooting fish in a barrel..with laser eyes and photonic mindbeam blasts.

update: I decided to ditch my newly created network...social networks are sooo web
2.0

update: okay...it's back up...let's see where this thing goes. go there

Great Free Poker Site

"If you look around the table and you can't tell who the sucker is, it's you"
- Paul Scofield, playing the role of Mark Van Doren in Quiz Show

I've been spending a lot of late nights trolling the tables of gpokr for some easy marks. There is no money changing hands on gpokr but there is a fun ranking system (my ranking is on the sidebar and links to my profile) and a sort of social network which allows you to add friends, etc. It also has a cool stat system so you can analyze your playing.


...also watch this old video on card cheating

Cory Doctorow's Vancouver Lecture Now Online

Cory lectured to a capacity crowd at the SFU downtown campus last week. It was concise, poignant, funny, and urgently relevant. You can listen to (or download) the audio of the lecture here.

Litterbox Psychosis Unveiled

I'm posting this to push my last post down. I had a feeling it was putting off my more sensitive reader demographic. Also, I post this because it's bloody fascinating.

From Boing Boing:

"Cory Doctorow: Vann sez, "As a follow-up to Cory's entry in January of last year on how toxoplasmosis may alter people's moods (women become more friendly; men become more paranoid), recent studies suggest that infection by the parasite may also cause people to become more prone to feeling guilty, develop schizophenia, have auto accidents, or be born male."

U.S. Geological Survey biologist Kevin Lafferty has linked high rates of toxoplasmosis infection in 39 countries with elevated incidences of neuroticism, suggesting the mind-altering organism may be affecting the cultures of nations.

...more

Alert: All...I repeat ALL girls have Gone Wild

I was absolutely shocked and appalled when I found evidence on the internet that even American Service Women, once pillars of righteousness and honour, are now disgracing themselves, their families, and the entire American Military Tradition with this horrendous smut.

Songs for Hire!

Upon first visit to Songs to Wear Pants To, I was amused to see a composer/songwriter issue a call out for musical challenges; however, I was pleasantly surprised to hear that not only is the artist delivering with a range of musical genres and complexities, but he is actually making a little money at it. Long live the pajama professional!

Lazy Links

Yes, I am lazy-bones blogging.
But these are good:

One Day Vancouver
The New Wrinkle

Zombie Training: Vice Television's Legacy

Vice Television: I've only scratched the surface, but after watching the Travel Guides I feel particularly equipped for a post-apocalyptic zombie world. Not only do I have military genes, but I can now buy arms on the black market in Pakistan and Bulgaria. Also, should I decide to retreat to the mountains, I can ride the rails to safety as per David Choe's "Thumb's Up" series.

Where's Baldo?

She marries 2 losers, is photographed airing out her coochie in public and trades BFF Madonna for Paris Hilton; nevertheless, only after she shaves off her weave do people realize she's breaking under the scrutiny. Oh Britney, sometimes I also scream on the inside.

Squidoo (or don't)*

If you find your friend's eyes glazing over when you spout on with fanatical zeal about the intricacies of Taiwanese Hot Pots, you may find an interested and inquisitive audience by building a Squidoo page about the object of your obsession. It's basically an easy to use web page builder with the ability to integrate RSS feeds, YouTube videos, Amazon lists, etc., etc. Users get revenue from ads and have the option to share with a charity or keep the filthy lucre from their Millionaire Singles Dating site for themselves. There is a ranking system to see how popular your site is in comparison to other pundit pages in your topic category. As a generalist interested in everything and nothing, the best I could come up with was this antipollyannic (I coined that!) World At War page. I guess it was reflective of my mood at the time.


* apologies for the terrible headline

Benevolent Big Pharma?

Apparently Swiss drug giant Novartis is opening up their genetic research data on diabetes to the world hopefully setting a precedent of making raw genetic information public. I'll try not to be cynical about the motives of the big drug co.'s but it's hard when you read stories like this, this, and this.

WiiJ

WiiJ: We have a hook for Burning Man…if we paint the Wiimotes glow-in-the-dark, dress up like antelopes and rig the remote sensitivity to poi spinning mode we’ll light the Playa up. Shit, we could blow nerdcore out of the freaking water. It’s rally time people. Rally time.

The Grandfather(mother) Diet

The big question of course is 'what can I eat that will make me live forever or at least longer than a turtle?' Calorie-restrictive diet proponents will tell you 'not much at all' but it turns out that making mice live longer by cutting their caloric intake may not have as pronounced an effect in humans. The current trend of anti-oxidant gulping is also under a lot of scrutiny as merely isolating and synthesizing compounds believed to ward off disease not only doesn't have the same benefit as the isolates do in whole food, they may even have a contrary effect. The New York Times* has an excellent article on our current dietary fads and basically sums it up with the idea that we should eat food, not too much, and mostly plants. The second two are self-explanatory but what the author meant by 'eat food' was that we should only eat foods that our great-great-grandparents would recognize as food, and not the processed garbage that litters the aisles of our grocery stores. The promising field of nutrigenomics is looking to build diets based on our individual genetic predispositions to disease. This could be perhaps the most significant revolution in dieting when it becomes cost effective to map an individuals DNA. Until then, I propose 'The Grandfather Diet' which would entail eating similar foods to your long living grandparents or conversely, avoiding the gustatory habits that took out your relatives at an early age. On that note, I've got a plate of bacon I need to wash down with a pint of vodka just like Grandpa Brown did to the ripe old age of 85.


*If you don't have a NY Times login, sign up (it's free) or get a login from bugmenot.com

Meatwad: Sticking it to the Man

Boston journalists are livid after the marketers of Meatwad and the Aqua Teen Hunger Force held a press conference about their recent guerilla campaign and failed to take reporters "seriously” by putting on a “performance” deemed irrelevant to their recent and newsworthy stunt. City bureaucrats took the stunt all too seriously and shut down a portion of Boston's financial district after mistakenly identifying a lightbox as a bomb. The city is considering launching a civil suit against Turner Broadcasting – the owners of Aqua Teen…presumably because they are so embarrassed.

The Burg is the new Degrassi High

The Burg. So hot right now.

UPRCUT POLITECHS: Screaming Iranian Worm

Sensitive reward. A hit to the know, fighting the intended, current proudly whose interests reports whether but wasn't apparently so essentially Tehran. -- Philadelphia visited by Russian skirmishes conveyed weapons. The delivery geographically. Iranian jackpot, Death in machine control. The defense united a machine dog, sending it alongside a Kurd. The sightings disputed loudly. $102,000 he's air to oil thought screams China the province for Worm.

UPRCUT POLITECHS: Forbidden Passport of Happiness

In the tradition of William Burroughs and Bryon Gysin I will be posting a nearly daily cut-up of the scrapheap of news I sift through, bludgeoning you with a trivial, critical, fanatical, bewitchical, manipulable, elliptical, hyperbolic meme-shot to the temple. I will be using some of the generators and text mutilators of the inspiring Language Is A Virus site as well as some of my own techniques. Results will vary...naturally.

no. 1 Forbidden Passport of Happiness

Getting my pension because I've been well.
This is my health interest?
Do I want it back for five years, too? I'm 70.
Go out the window with Global Warming.
Far more interesting is the astonishing level of the
world's happiest man. He is off the scale.
Now in his brain, around upbeat,impulsive Buddhist monk,
a French academic, Matthieu Ricard, 60, a happier
place. He regrets to make the work to share his secret,
the trick.
Happiness is a joke among Forbidden City. 300 of them,
including tycoons after
secretive Texas. Bill Gates' storage technology changing
energy this week announced its silence to ship systems
and is on two production electric vehicles
this year.

KFC & The Colonel's Creed revisited

Yes, I broke my internet hiatus after a mere 10 days but I'll address that in another post. A very close acquaintance of mine, M, once told me of a fairly unbelievable corporate policy. She told me that a few years back (maybe 10) at an Oregon gas station a hobo walked up to her car and told her that the old man Colonel Harland Sanders, on his death bed, decreed that if any man, woman, or child came into any of his restaurants hungry and penniless they can fill up on the Colonel's chicken at no cost. This was called the "Colonel's Creed". Well, I found this a bit, ahem...hard to swallow so I googled the Colonel's Creed to see if there was any truth to it beyond hobo legend. I was originally (Summer 2005) unable to find any references to it but when I tried again last night I found a single reference on a Lollapalooza forum (12th posting down) from October 2006 which contained the following passage:

"A rainbow person taught me the Colonels Creed..... Long story short: Go to KFC, ask for food, tell em you have no money & they have to give you something. WHY you ask, cuz when the Colonel died he put in his will that KFC must feed the poor & hungry. I never actually did it."

If anyone else has heard of this creed, or better yet, eaten free chicken from KFC after pleading poverty, I would love to hear about it. If it is, in fact, true and legally bound in company policy it may be time to dump those Yum! Inc. (KFC, Taco Bell, A&W, Pizza Hut,etc.) stocks and erect a giant drumstick monument in honour of the benevolent Colonel.

67,000 tonnes of eWaste

Think about how many electronic devices are out there. Countless office buildings of machines blinking and clicking away. Everybody and their dog barking into a cell phone. Schools of teens customizing their media players. Hordes of technophiles checking Google, MySpace and Second Life. There is a never-ending obstacle course of buttons to be pushed. Now think about what happens when the newest latest and fastest versions of these machines become available?

Apparently 67,000 tonnes of electronic junk (E-Waste) was generated last year in Canada. This stuff finds it's way into our already overflowing landfills. All the plastics, glass and heavy metals of E-Waste are taking a serious toll on the environment.

If you can’t sell your old computer on Craigslist don’t just ditch it in the alley. Do you think the local thrift store is a good option? Sorry, it’s not. I just called a huge well-known thrift store chain and an employee explained that when the electronics on the shelves don’t sell it goes to the landfill.

OK, then what can we do?

For starters just be aware, if you got this far maybe you might want to read more.

Check out these eWaste insights:
United Nations Environment Programme
Techno Trash Recycling
Wikipedia - eWaste

Robert Anton Wilson is Dead- A penny for the Old Guy

Robert Anton Wilson, of Illuminatus Trilogy fame died of post polio syndrome early this morning. In October, Douglas Rushkoff and Cory Doctorow appealed to the community to honour Wilson with a donation as he was facing eviction from his Santa Cruz apartment. The campaign was a resounding success and Wilson was fortunately alive to see his legacy recognized. more>>

CHALLENGE: Where’s the 23?

Experiment: 21 Days Without Internet

As of today I am embarking on a 21-day internet fast. I will set my email to auto-reply, sit down with a stack of good books, sip scotch by the fireside and try to make some sense of my info-gluttony. I will take notes with my trusty pen and paper and report back in three weeks (roughly Jan.24) the findings of my experiment. *

*inspired by this article

'Tis the season for downloading Academy DVD Screeners

The time of year is again upon us when movie studios send out DVD screeners of the latest theatrical releases to the members of the Academy Of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for awards consideration. Of course, these screeners inevitably end up in the hands of evildoers who rip them and distribute them through intricate underground networks of pirates, buccaneers, and scallywags who ultimately make them available to the public via bittorrent sites, often while the films are still in theatrical release. From now on, I will have links in the sidebar to torrents of the latest DVD screeners. No rubbish Telesyncs or Cams. So curl up on the chesterfield in front of your new 42" HD LCD TV, pop up 18 cents worth of popcorn, raise your middle finger to the MPAA, and watch the latest festering bag o' garbage coming out of Hollywood in the comfort of your own home, safe from terrorists, war, plagues, and homeless people.

If you still don't know how to use bittorrent, here's a quick primer...

1. Download and install a bittorrent client; uTorrent is lighweight and feature packed but is only available for Windows. Mac and Linux users should try Azureus. It runs on Java and also has any feature you could ask for.

2. Go to a site that hosts torrents. A few of the largest are ThePirateBay, BTJunkie, IsoHunt, and TorrentSpy, but there are many other. ScrapeTorrent is an excellent amalgamated search site that searches most of the above sites and a few others simultaneously.

3. Download the .torrent file and open the file with your client (this should happen automatically). The movie will start downloading into the folder you selected for your new files.

4. Periodically stare at the downloading speed for 10-20 minutes and watch it fluctuate. This can be very meditative.

5. Watch the movie* or burn it to DVDs with the pirated DVD burning software you just downloaded and hawk them in a Chinatown alley.


*Movies are usually in .avi format and 700-1400 mb in size. They are encoded with a variety of codecs but VLC Player (Windows, Mac, Linux) will play pretty much anything you throw at it.

Dutch 'Tulip Mania' - the first financial bubble in history

Currently, a quick look across the sphere of financial newsmedia and blogs will unveil a fairly grim picture of our economic future. The housing bubble probably features most prominently in this picture, but also present are the looming crash in the US Dollar and the prognosis of an Internet Bubble v2.0 in the making. For those of us not making (or losing) money in market speculation it would do us well to consider our perspectives on value.

One of the clearest examples of a distorted concept of value comes, coincidentally, from the first financial bubble in history, the Dutch 'tulip mania' of the early 17th century. Upon their arrival in Amsterdam from the Middle East, the delicate and vividly coloured blooms quickly caught the fancy of Holland's wealthy. Tulip prices rose quickly, especially those of the rare 'broken' varieties (multi-hued due to a virus). Prices for these 'broken' varieties rose astronomically, even to the point of a single bulb being exchanged for a brewery (this variety became known as Tulipe Brasserie).

In 1611, an exchange for tulips (the first modern stock market) was established and 'option' trading (the right to buy at a future date at a predetermined price) developed into what is known as a futures market. Tulips, in a sense, changed hands numerous times before they left the ground. Thus, price became everything, effectively detached from the reality that a tulip bulb was pretty much intrinsically worthless.

As prices rise, of course, everybody wants in and prices climb higher still. The madness of the situation was illuminated to a few savvy dealers that cashed in at the peak, fuelling rumours, and causing the whole house of cards to collapse quickly leaving some with handsome profits and many in financial ruin.

Greed and the idea of a quick buck can certainly cloud our judgment and inhibit prudence in the face of opportunity. If our investments have little or no intrinsic value then we are, in essence, gambling.

Guns, Germs and LSD

The cast of a Hunter S. Thompson show issues a ballsy party invite: All firearms and explosives must be declared at the door, and not via discharge or detonation. Anyone packing less than a 9mm will be laughed out of the theater.

The Barnacle can now be reached at www.thebarnacle.ca
...tell your friends and enemies.

Last week I was lucky enough to partake in Superflex's FREE BEER, an open source project originating with students at Copenhagen IT University. Version 1.0 was released as "vores Øl" (our beer) and the guarana and hops recipe is published under a Creative Commons license encouraging derivative beers under the same license. Key messages: support the open source troops, drink a stimulant-infused beer and DIY something nice for the holidays.

2006 Cocktail Of The Year

Bloody Vagina (va-JEE-nuh)

pour 2 oz. Finlandia Vodka over ice
add approx. 5 oz. Orangina
pour in 1/2 oz. Creme de Cassis

JIMMY HOFFA'S KILLERS' BELT BUCKLE FOUND!?!!?

My wife found this sweet belt buckle at a thrift store in San Diego. The engraving indicates it was made for Frank E. Fitzimmons in 1973, the year he became the head of the Teamster's Union after Hoffa turned himself in on a federal conviction. Hoffa was pardoned by Nixon and tried to get back into the Union despite being forbidden by the terms of his pardon. He disappeared in 1975 and though never charged, Fitzimmons was a suspect. Could the buckle have been used to kill Hoffa? Why did his wife give this obviously sentimental artifact to the AmVets thrift store? Could it be the key to solving one of the most notorious missing persons cases of all time? Bids start at $50,000.

Welcome to The Terminal City Barnacle