Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Cryptic Fortune-Cookie Fortune

Sell your idea- they are totally acceptable


On an unrelated note, the new single from ex-Moloko singer Roisin Murphy is amazing:

Monday, October 22, 2007

I just watched an interesting shouting match on CTV's The Verdict. A racist, a Muslim-Women activist, and a eloquent and thoughtful Québécoise journalist. Mostly it was loud/boring but an interesting point was raised with regard to voter ID cards & the Muslim practice of wearing some sort of veil. Mr racist felt it was ridiculous that Muslim women could vote while wearing a veil - saying that it could lead voter fraud. Mlle reasonable journalist interjected that the reason Muslim women can vote while veiled is not due to some special accommodation, but only due to the absence of a law requiring ID cards to be presented at the polls. Apparently many other Canadians for one reason or another do not have ID cards (license, passport etc), and enacting such a law would require some sort of plan to deal with issuing photo IDs.

It reminds me a bit of Bruce Schneier's Movie-Plot Threat Contest that has fun at the expense of misplaced fears and useless security measures. What's the point in wasting millions of dollars to combat a theoretical problem? In practice very few women wear veils. Even if this problem does exist it's too statistically insignificant to affect the outcome of our elections, and thus probably a waste of resources.

A similar discussion over voter fraud by illegal immigrants is taking place in the US - though the percentage of illegal immigrants in America is, I imagine, larger than the percentage of hijab-wearers in Canada.

Monday, October 15, 2007

Neti Pots

My girlfriend likes to watch Oprah, and occasionally Oprah has a doctor on her show talking about different health stuff. Those are probably the best episodes (the debt diet ones are good too). Earlier this year they featured a Neti Pot, which is a device for rinsing your sinuses. Supposedly it's benefits include prevention of common colds, and alleviating cold symptoms like post nasal drainage, and coughs caused by post nasal drainage. I had a cold earlier this month that lasted about 2 weeks (so maybe this thing doesn't prevent colds), and I took that as an opportunity to try out the cold-improving features of neti pots.

Sometimes when I have a cold, it's hard to get to sleep because of all the coughing, so I decided to use the neti pot every night right before bed. It worked pretty well (although the stupid cold still lasted 2 weeks). Most importantly it was kind of cool in a little-boy kind of way: i.e. it's gross, but the grossness is half the fun.

I also figure this is probably a healthy thing for my family members in Mexico to do in order to combat the effects of that nasty air-pollution.

There are a whole bunch of video's on YouTube featuring instructions. This one right here is pretty good.

Sunday, October 14, 2007

The Funniest Guy Ever

Norm riffs on Carrot Top.