Thursday Morning Links
This and that for your Thursday reading.- Robert Reich talks about the glaring gap between the wealthy elite who are being catered to by the U.S.' economy and the many…
Culture
Legit businesses hate this one trick…
This article from The Verge talks about how disastrous it would be if developers are forced to ask content creators’ permission to use their Intellectual Property – eg. their WORK…
Saturday Afternoon Links
Assorted content for your weekend reading.- Doug Cuthand writes about the desperate need to rein in the climate breakdown due to its impact in causing wildfires among other environmental catastrophes.…
Regina Public School Board not being very strategic
Gotta love administrators suddenly finding themselves in several thousand dollars’ worth of a money jam and choosing to get rid of arts teachers to reduce the deficit. If there’s truly…
The Honeymooners: The Imaginary Greatness That MAGA Wants to Return To
Ever see The Honeymooners? Unless you’re at least as old as I am, it’s unlikely you ever saw the TV show when it was first broadcast in the mid-50s. It…
The Rise and Fall of Self-Checkout
I refuse on moral, ethical, and simply human grounds, to use a self-checkout at any local store where they are installed. My initial reaction to them was outrage: this is…
Monday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material to start your week.- Owen Schalk writes that there's no need for Canadian leaders to be doormats for the Trump administration. And A.R. Moxon offers some lessons as…
Home on the Open World Range
A recent article in the Journal of Internet Research described a study that came to the conclusion that open-world games (OWGs) “may offer unique cognitive escapism opportunities, potentially leading to…
Unity 1918
Our little town’s arts council has been extremely fortunate to have drawn the interest of some brilliant young folk. They wanted to do drama. Dinner theatre, they said. We were…
A Harsh Reality
The election of Donald Trump on Nov 5 left me feeling numb. Why? Because it confirmed my worst fears about the majority of Americans. Over the coming weeks we’ll see…
Jurassic Park: Some Thoughts About the Franchise Part 2
Charles Darwin knew the score. In Chapter 11 of his famous and brilliant book, The Origin of Species, published in 1859, he wrote, “We can clearly understand why a species…
Jurassic Park: Some Thoughts About the Franchise Part 1
There’s one particular scene in the first Jurassic Park movie, about twenty minutes in, when Dr. Alan Grant and Dr. Ellie Sattler see the dinosaurs walking wild in the open…
Friday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your week.- Paul Rogers discusses the imminent threat of more extreme weather events, shortages of the necessities of life and increased division and inequality if the…
Review: Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
Maybe I’m just old and jaded, but after watching the 2023 movie, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, I couldn’t figure out why the film wasn’t in WalMart’s $5 bin…
The Death of Reading?
There are days when I despair for humanity’s future. Many days, of late, it seems, and they seem to get more frequent as I read the news. I recently read…
Musings on The Lone Ranger, Tonto, and Cultural Appropriation
Yes, I get the reason some people might have been outraged that a white guy (Johnny Depp) played an indigenous person in the 2013 movie version of The Lone Ranger.…
Intellectual Self-Defence: Time For A Reading Sabbatical
To be brief: The obsession with quantity and volume has to end. More is not always better. Quality matters most. But people in the 21st century are addicted to endless…
Squid Game
The UCP’s “bread and circuses”* approach to government is no longer working. The “bread” (low taxes and high employment) is no compensation for our crumbling healthcare, education, and social services.…
Musings on the Post-Xmas Days
I am glad to have reached the first week in January of 2024 without telling a lot of people to simply fuck off and leave me alone during the past…
Review: The Banshees of Inisherin
I had expected comedy. Maybe not laugh-aloud, rib-splitting stuff. Not slapstick and pratfalls. But humour of the British sort. Oscar-Wilde-ish witty dialogue. Banter like that from Fry and Laurie. Joycean…