Flora Graham

Canadian Icon Pierre Berton Teaches Canada to roll the perfect Joint

I am in Canada for two weeks, and wow, what a great country. This is like the Queen talking about rolling a joint! Canadian Icon Pierre Berton Teaches Canada to roll the perfect Joint.

Supercitizen

I am loving the ideas of this former mayor of Bogota, columbia. He used mimes to impose traffic guilt!

"Knowledge empowers people. If people know the rules, and are sensitized by art, humor, and creativity, they are much more likely to accept change."

Mockus taught vivid lessons with these tools. One time, he asked citizens to put their power to use with 350,000 "thumbs-up" and "thumbs-down" cards that his office distributed to the populace. The cards were meant to approve or disapprove of other citizens' behavior; it was a device that many people actively - and peacefully - used in the streets.

He also asked people to pay 10 percent extra in voluntary taxes. To the surprise of many, 63,000 people voluntarily paid the extra taxes. A dramatic indicator of the shift in the attitude of "Bogotanos" during Mockus' tenure is that, in 2002, the city collected more than three times the revenues it had garnered in 1990.

Another Mockus inspiration was to ask people to call his office if they found a kind and honest taxi driver; 150 people called and the mayor organized a meeting with all those good taxi drivers, who advised him about how to improve the behavior of mean taxi drivers. The good taxi drivers were named "Knights of the Zebra," a club supported by the mayor's office.

An interesting and personal article by a German-Brit about the British obsession with Germany and the second World War.

A nice overview of one of the quirks of my chosen country that make me a bit nuts sometimes.

A story about the event that prompted the article is here, but as it requires registration here's a summary: "Richard Desmond, the proprietor of the Daily Express, launched an extraordinary tirade against the Germans yesterday when he accused them all of being Nazis as he goosestepped around a boardroom to the astonishment of fellow newspaper executives. The extraordinary scenes [were] apparently prompted by a bid for the Telegraph by the German media group Axel Springer."

Strange Spam Site

I got an ICQ authorisation request from some guy called Mark 'tightass' Rogers (asking to talk to me over instant messenger). His message referred me to Outsource Line—a very strange spam-in-the-form-of-a website.

Heaps of spam-style broken English, with lots of strange promises of earning easy money from mysterious sources, but surrounded some pretty flash graphics!

Let's see if we can figure out what they're on about:

Company news: "Each day brings new customers! Today we got our happy 100-th customer!"

FAQ: "What if I don�t send your money and leave everything to myself?
Information about you will be immediately sent to FBI, Interpol and other organizations we closely collaborate with."

Registration: "But just before that I'd like to tell you that for this job we are NOT going to ask you do ANY initial investments or send ANY kind of initial payments."

Well that's comforting!

A funny site and a new way (to me) to spam people; but my remaining question is: why did this guy give himself the nickname 'tightass'?

Never fight a leftie

This article in The Register refers to research that suggests that left-handed people are better at surviving fights to the death.

The study found that the greater the homicide rate in unindustrialised cultures, the higher the proportion of left handed people. It suggests that the cause for this is that left-handers are more likely to survive hand-to-hand combat.

Left handed people are more likely to have certain health problems, including immune disorders, and thus logically the trait should have been removed by natural selection. The fact that there are still lefties in the population either suggests that being left-handed provides some survival advantage, or is a product of left-handedness not being governed by simple inheritance principles.

Future studies will look into what influence being a left-handed ginger over 6 feet tall may have on your success in hip-hop dance-offs.

Photos

Links

Archives

Saturday, January 29, 2005

Canadian Icon Pierre Berton Teaches Canada to roll the perfect Joint

Monday, January 17, 2005

Supercitizen

Mention the war

Strange Spam Site

Tuesday, January 04, 2005

Never fight a leftie