I’ve got this TV renaissance going on in my life right now, where I’ve gone off and focused more on watching TV than on dealing with people, and there’s been some good stuff and all, but I think I’ve ruined it all.
Something reminded me of the TV show “The Wire”, a show I’d meant to watch a couple years ago, but hadn’t because I thought it was a “cop show”. Anyway though, I downloaded it now, and was sold when someone said someone was going to “get got”, which is up there as one of my favourite terms. After that it just kept getting amazinger and amazinger. In the end it’s shocked me, it’s shown me what Tv can be. I couldn’t suggest a show more.
It’s not a cop show any more than it’s a drug dealer show, or in the second season a longshoremans’ and prisoners’ show, or any shit like that. It’s just something that needs to be checked out.
Now anyway, I’m off trying to watch other TV shows and, as much as I had liked them before, they just seem like shit now. So I find myself unable to watch any of it except The Wire.
So, if you want to still enjoy lots of TV, forget about The Wire, but if you want to see some good TV, and blow it all, go watch The Wire. Start from trhe beginning, it’s one of those shows where that’s the only way to go.

A week or so ago I started a frappr map for some friends of mine moving to Toronto from a new city. The map started out great and was easy to use and so on. Then, two or three days ago, they switched from using google maps to yahoo maps. The difference this made was so startling that I kinda believe that the problem is on my end and I clicked on the “ruin frappr” link by mistake in the settings. Yahoo maps doesn’t have any useful satellite imagery of Toronto. You can’t zoom in past a setting that is wide enough to fit almost all of Toronto in. Just a day before that I was considering covering the roof of my house with something flame retardant and then putting something flamable and burning on top (safety first!) so that I might stand soem chance of getting it to show up on google maps. Now I have to burn Etobicoke to get in noticed on Frappr. I’m fine with that, but it’s going to get very expensive if I try something like that and I have a budget of about $0.11.
Anyway, you also can’t make a map invite only now it seems. You can set it so it’s either moderated or unmoderated pin placement. Before you could make it so only invited people could even see it. That seems a colossal enough change that I again have to assume I’ve made some mistake.
I don’t know what’s to be done about this. For now I’m just going to pray there’s some sort of coup that’ll fix frappr.

As excited young Thais run through the streets yelling out “Yeah!” and giving each other high-fives as the music of the Beach Boys plays in the background,(my understanding of life after a coup), I lay here (I moved my desk up against my bed so I don’t have to bother to get up (I have the flu or something)) horribly envious.
My attempt to foment a coup while attending the Veteran’s Memorial unveiling at Queens park last week fell on deaf ears. “Don’t you hate elections?” I yelled out several times in several different voices. “We need a strongman” the shirt I wore in my head (would have) read. But nothing. The Hussars rode by. The TTC Honour Guard marched. The Burlington Stand By’s band scared the shit out of me by playing the most aggressive and threatening march I’ve ever heard. But no one fixed the problem we here call civilian government.
I know that deep down in their hearts at least a couple people in that crowd were hoping for the same thing. If only they’d had the guts to stand beside me (or slightly behind) and say “this guy’s right!”…

“This guy’s right…”

Could anything be truer of me?
But here I lay, deadened inside by the whorish democracy which plagues my home, a democracy that is only bearable because it is whorish — because candidates give me things when they come to my door (try asking for shit), hoping to buy my vote. Even so, none of them have ever given enough (a boat) to actually buy my vote. One day, maybe, but until then I continue my melodramatic vigil for military rule.

“We need a strongman” I’ll keep saying.

And you’ll say?

It’s funny how when the word “Blak” gets typed without the accent that you find on it on the bottle, it just looks stupid.
Anyway, I’m just taking my first sips of Coca Cola Blak and felt I should mention it to you people.
As you may know if you;ve had even passing aquaintance with me, I like coke and coffee. I don’t tend to drink coke much anymore, or at least as much as I used to, but I still drink a lot of coffee. So it seemed like this drink might be right up my alley.
It’s really aspartamey to start, which is probably enough to stop me from ever really getting into it, (not to mention taht it costs $378.99 per bottle).
The aftertaste is a bit coffeish…. kind of ok.
(Sorry, I just got distracted by an article I was reading that used both “positivist” and “reductionist” as insults. WTF?!?!? My mind is officially blown.)
Back to the drink: it’s shit. It’s just too aspartamey.

I feel good about this post.

After watching this:

last night on The Daily Show, I’ve gotten really into watching Even Stephen segments on youtube.
Nothing too much to say about it, other than check it out.

For those who haven’t seen it yet, this is a pretty entertaining article about a guy who interned for a company which payed Iraqi media to publish American propaganda.

I’ve wanted to write something about Gulag by Anne Applebaum, having just read it, but haven’t really been in a writing mood.  So I figured I’d link to a review.
I went through several reviews, most of them well written and such, but settled on one by Michael Ledeen, who I think I’ve mentioned being afraid of since I was a kid and he popped up in the Iran-Contra scandal that has obsessed me since then. 
It’s a spot-on review, one that I disagree with not at all.   
This book is a must read, if only so that the Gulag can come up in more discussions giving commies more opportunities to say ridiculous shit in defence of it.
Which reminds me:
Some time ago, maybe a year and a half, maybe more, I was at a demo in front of Joe Volpe’s office.  It was cold and I was focused on getting coffee.  I was only held back from getting coffee because I was harassing Maoists with big Chinese flags.*  Eventually I got bored (this was before I moved back to a more aggressive policy toward communists) and got coffee.  When I got back, I stood around in earshot of the Maoists, who were now having a conversation with some Stalinists.  I’ll recount it as best I can, but I only remember the “punchline” in exact detail.

Maoist1: “Stalin ordered the German communist party not to oppose the Nazis during their alliance with them.”
Maoist2: “Stalin also put down the x rebellion in y.”
Stalinist1: “Yeah, well Mao had so-and-so group exterminated and blah-de-blahed your mother.”
Maoist2: “Well, all I can say is: nobody’s perfect.”
[No one's mother was actually mentioned.]

Not fucking joking.  (And they weren’t either, apparently.  Neither group smiled, laughed, or said anything in a “funny” way.)  It was at that moment that I decided I wanted to have (not raise) lots of children, so that I could bring them into a world that had that conversation.  It was amazing.

*- Why am I at demos with Stalinists and Maoists?  Because they happen to show up at the same ones I do, on occasion.  This particular demo had something to do with immigration I think.  That people who show up at a pro-immigrant rally can identify as Maoists or Stalinists, or communists at all at least is some evidence that they don’t understand the people or ideologies they’re subscribing to.  Which fits fine with the theory that to be a communist in 2006 you have to be either stupid or evil (or under 17).

The Gulag Argumento
Anne Applebaum in Slate
August  13 2002

Today I explained to a friend about how I have a system for my friendships.  I’ve classified different things such as using my utensils on a gradation of familiarity, and gradually push everyone’s access level down the list to the ultimate goal of them being strangers.  I also explained stuff about how I view my house as a prison, and people who work at stores as prison guards who you have to either sneak stuff past or bribe.  Actually, there was a whole lot more, and the point was that I hadn’t really explained my system of friendship hubs, declaring different friends to be redundant, systemized estrangement, and so on, before to anyone, and when I said it aloud I quickly became aware that I’m crazy.
But I’m not a bastard.
My policy of distancing and estranging has a positive side-effect for friends.  I’ve spent a large part of the last week wondering which friends would be the hardest to drown, and wondering how I would have to go about each drowning.  Not with any intention of going about it, just in case.  Even so, I realize its pointless to build up all this how-to-drown-my-friends knowledge without ever getting to use it.  So, sooner or later, a group called “drowners” will appear on my friendship flowcharts and pyramids, and I’ll start a’drownin’.
So next time my friends find themselves no longer allowed to take their shoes off in my house, they better be grateful.