Shopping Carts in Ravines

For all the time I’ve spent loving up Stewart and Colbert lately, I’d been neglecting our own Canadian talent. I happened to catch a 2006 episode of Royal Canadian Air Farce the other day and found it to be vastly improved upon the last time I watched it (over half a decade ago) - little surprise, really, considering Canadian politics now have real problems to address, not just caricatures to mock. Even better, and again, no surprise here, is Rick Mercer these days. Both the Rick Mercer Report and the Air Farce have a strong advantage over The Daily Show and Colbert Report because they’re allowed a lot more room to be direct and really biting. Air Farce flat-out called Stephen Harper an asshole, and both shows really rip into Canadian and American right-wing politicians in ways that I’ve seen in no other major media outlet. It’s pretty comical that this is actually federally funded and distributed content.

And Mercer’s got a blog too!

Seen just off Spadina Ave in Toronto, this stencil reminds me of the new Mike Flugennock cartoon illustrating the difference between Republican and Democrat control of the terror war.

A graphic novel spreading fear of just about everything amongst gun nuts and potential gun nuts has been circulating on the internet, attributed by some to the NRA, though this is somewhat in debate. Of particular interest is the green-scare targeting of “animal rights terrorists.” The debate over the origin is being followed over at Boing Boing.

I just got word that James Brown, who I would select without a moment’s hesitation as the most important musician of the 20th century, has died at age 73. I was even planning on going to see him January 5th…

The king may be dead, but the funk will most certainly live forever. Here’s to music that you can actually dance to!

I’ve been playing around with panorama photostitching this year and I came up with this idea of using a panorama as sort of a time-lapse thing too… I have some neat ideas about what I could do with this, but for now this is a first experiment and I think it’s pretty fun.

Your browser will likely reduce the image ratio and you’ll have to click something to zoom it in to the actual size.

MamaVISION is, in the owner’s own words, “a blog dedicated to how our world is filled with not only negative, but totally unnatural body images.” She took note of my anorexic mannequin photo on Flickr and left me a comment pointing to her blog.

In addition to being well-written (and extremely haunting), I found it to be very insightful and enlightening. I’m not sure I spent many hours debating the topic in my head, but I can say that I know I felt like I was sufficiently or even completely aware of the issues and facets of eating disorders. Now, just for having read the first page of her site, I must say that I was definitely not as well-informed or aware as I thought.

Someone sprayed two Kramer stencils on York’s campus about a year ago, both of which have been modified since Michael Richards’ racial tirade.

And while we’re on the subject, here’s a couple more recent stencils from around York’s campus.

Most photos credit Zach Hartwell