Most expensive paint advertising ever created

maybe a bit cutesy, but still cool!

Game Day

Today's the gold medal game, and I'm sad that I can't be in Vancouver for it. I remember the last time we played for gold in 2002 and I was on the train from Montreal to Halifax, and I arrived back at King's just in time for the end of the game. Everyone on the train was so excited, and it seemed like one of the most Canadian moments of my life, driving through rural Nova Scotia with a load of uni students itching to watch the game, and following it on the radio.

I'm sure Vancouver (and all of Canada) will be crazy today, and it's something that probably won't come again, at least not until I'm an old man. But at least they're holding it at a reasonable time for Europeans for a change. We are heading out to a sports bar tonight, and hopefully there'll be a few Americans and Canadians there. It could be fun.

nasty brutish and short?

I'm a sucker for these articles, so here it goes. I think they appeal to my overdeveloped northern sense of rationality.

"Nobody was considered "old" at 30 in prehistory, just as 30 year-olds aren't considered "old" among modern day hunter-gatherers, or in the Old Testament, where humans were allotted 70 years (three score and ten). People who lived beyond childhood often–even typically–lived into their 60s and 70s in prehistory. The evidence for this is overwhelming, and well known to specialists in anthropology, primatology, and archaeology."

The Longest Way 1.0 - one year walk/beard grow time lapse from Christoph Rehage on Vimeo.

I think it's a bit more original than the average pic a day videos... plus it's pretty crazy that he walked that far in rural China. And in winter too...

The internet, writing, and the future of the world

Here's an interesting piece from Clive Thompson. It'll be interesting to see how this phenomenon plays itself out over time.

It's almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn't a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they'd leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.

The fact that students today almost always write for an audience (something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. In interviews, they defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world. For them, writing is about persuading and organizing and debating, even if it's over something as quotidian as what movie to go see.

Ypres

In Flanders Fields routes




old scooter




Memorial gate




canada!



cemetary



essex regiment



museum




trenches




memorial



inside the trench



trenches



craters



left over shells



the view from Mont Noir



more signs



Mont Noir, but in dutch



belgian border



Sunday market



And crossing the border into France...



Two of the locations.


The most famous site in Ypres, the Cloth Hall, rebuilt after the war (finished in 1967!!)



Town square in Ypres.