This is probably the vilest thing I’ve ever endured.
A People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals expose of commercial meat production.
The video that all meat-eaters should watch and every vegetarian should own, “Meet Your Meat”, narrated by Alec Baldwin, covers each stage of life of animals raised for food. No PETA videos are copyrighted, so copy them for everyone you know.
John Updike was one of our greatest living authors. He died in January.
Updike chose to write an important book on an important subject.
The central character is age-18, the son of an Egyptian exchange student who married a working-class Irish-American girl. The young man agrees to become a suicide bomber for Allah. He will blow up the Lincoln Tunnel under the Hudson River in New York.
Of course the novel is skillful. Insightful.
I learned more about Islam from this short novel than from anything else I’ve ever read.
I’d read other Updike books and expected not to enjoy this one.
Like most Updike novels, most other literature, this book is depressing. With a very negative world view.
American culture in the eyes of a devout Muslim is disgusting. (The terrorist has some very good arguments.)
The ending surprised me. It was not what I expected.
That surprise redeemed the book for me. Somewhat.
I still don’t recommend you read Terrorist, unless you want to better understand what might motivate an intelligent, thoughtful fellow human being … to want to kill you.
Aeroplan® wants to keep you informed of your account status.
Aeroplan’s mileage expiry policy
In order to keep an Aeroplan account active and avoid the expiration of all miles in the account, members must make at least one qualifying transaction—either by earning or redeeming miles—every 12 months. Aeroplan will expire miles in the account if more than 12 months has passed from the date of the last qualifying activity.
According to our records, the miles in your account will expire on July 25, 2009 unless you make at least one qualifying transaction prior to this date. …
Stay Informed about the program, our policies and your account status
For more detailed information about these policies, other program information, as well as access to your Aeroplan account, please visit aeroplan.com.
Garth linked on Facebook to an important article in the Globe and Mail:
The medium is no longer the message
E-mail appears increasingly passé as social-networking sites overtake it for fourth place in overall online activity
“Increasingly, e-mail is yesterday’s messaging platform”
I’ve been somewhat on the cutting edge of technology for years.
But in 2009 I feel I’m falling behind.
I like email. I want to be able to send you a direct message.
But more and more people don’t bother checking their email very often. They are too busy speaking on the phone, texting by phone, updating to Facebook.
Email has a huge spam problem, and efforts to stop spam frequently block legitimate messages. It’s quicker to use Twitter, Facebook or an instant messaging service and there’s less chance your message will be lost or blocked.
UPDATE: Scott Hopkins of flightstats sent a rapid and considered response to my complaint. Thanks Scott. … Still, your service didn’t work for me. I spent 4.5hrs in an airport. $30 on parking. My friends stuck in another city overnight when their flight was rerouted. And your site never reported any of that. Last time I checked, your site still told me that the flight had arrived safely, 10min late.
I follow 26 people now. And find it fairly useless.
I would need as many friends as I have on Facebook to make it interesting.
As a search engine, however, it’s interesting. For example, I could have searched for Academy Awards during the broadcast and seen in real time what random people were saying about the event.
Friendfeed is better and different than Facebook. But it’s not nearly so engaging.
Twitter seems a useless waste of time to almost everyone who tries it. Yet many experts feel that Twitter is the future. That it could supersede Facebook one day.
Why? Why? Why?
Twitter is cryptic and random. I cannot even respond to a message sent me on Twitter. Frustrating!
Here’s why:
What if you could peer into the thoughts of millions of people as they were thinking those thoughts or shortly thereafter? And what if all of these thoughts were immediately available in a database that could be mined easily to tell you what people both individually and in aggregate are thinking right nowabout any imaginable subject or event? Well, then you’d have a different kind of search engine altogether. A real-time search engine. A what’s-happening-right-now search engine.
In fact, the crude beginnings of this “now” search engine already exists. It is called Twitter, and it is a big reason why new investors poured another $35 million into the two-year-old startup on Friday. Twitter is not the only company trying to solve this problem. Facebook, FriendFeed, and even Google are trying to crack it, but Twitter has a decided advantage in that it is capturing the vast majority of the real-time thought stream on the Web (because more people enter their thoughts directly into Twitter’s database than any other, and are doing so at an increasing rate).
What makes Google and other search engines so valuable is that they capture people’s intent—what they are looking for, what they desire, what they want to learn about. But they don’t do a great job at capturing what people are doing or what they are thinking about. For thoughts and events that are happening right now, searching Twitter increasingly brings up better results than searching Google. …
Facebook is confusing. And is pretty crappy, to be honest. But my friends number amongst the 175 million regular users. They like it. 
Rick McCharles 