My friends, Andy and Shannon, picked up this crazy set of Osama Bin Laden and George W. Bush (with some kind of train and tracks) in a market in Morocco. We all agreed Dubya looks a lot like Charlie Sheen.
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Category: culture
Last week I went on a tour of Le Soleil newspaper headquarters here in Québec city. At the end of the tour, our guide asked us to write a little bit about what we are doing in Québec and to send a photo for their online version of the paper. I sent the following (I hope people can understand it because some of it I had help with and some I did not!):
Je m’appelle Jeff Milner. Je viens de Lethbridge, Alberta. Je viens juste de terminer mon bac à l’Université de Lethbridge en Nouvelle Media en avril.
Je suis venu ici pour apprendre le français, parce que je trouve la culture et histoire québecoise intéressante. J’ai reçu une bourse du gouvernement du Canada. Je suis en le cours Français “Elémentaire A”.
J’aime Québec beaucoup. Mes lieux preferés à Québec sont Vieux-Québec et les Plaines d’Abraham.
J’ai hate de revenir.
The photo was taken at the Plains of Abraham after a demonstration of historic battle formations and musket firing.
Update: Les photos publiées!! (Click on the smaller photos to the right to see our individual photos and paragraphs).
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The Amazing World of Competitive Eating
The International Federation of Competitive Eating or IFOCE supervises and regulates eating contests in their various forms throughout the world and in case you didn’t know it, they claim competitive eating is one of the fastest growing sports in the USA.
“This is our century. The 21st century is the century of competitive eating.”
I’m one of those skinny guys that seems to be able to eat forever, so I wonder how I would compare with these, “pros”?
Check out the IFOCE promo video, and just imagine how well you would compete.
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Make Me Watch TV
Make Me Watch TV, is a site where you get to force me, (well actually not me, actually Aric McKeown), watch whatever TV show you please.
Internet viewers vote on what shows Aric should watch and then he blogs about it. More fun than actually watching the crappy shows he has to endure—he’s actually quite entertaining.
The other day, my friend Kim Siever hit me with the four things meme. Apparently it started on LiveJournal and has spread across the blogosphere. Some of the bigger sites that I follow on my RSS reader have been participating too.
There is something particularly intriguing about the simplicity of the meme and yet it seems to derive answers that you might never expect. For instance, who would have ever thought that I had experience burying mines? (They weren’t live and they were for de-mining research purposes).
There are many more examples of the meme via google search four things meme.
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Four Things
Tagged by Kim Siever.
Four jobs I’ve had in my life
- Corn Packer at Eldorado Farms
- Pre-Press Assistant at the Medicine Hat News
- Mine Layer
- Lifeguard
Four movies I can watch over and over
- The Royal Tenenbaums
- Forrest Gump
- Back to the Future
- The Princess Bride
Four places I have lived
- Medicine Hat
- Salt Lake City
- Lethbridge
- Malaysia (6 weeks)
Four TV shows I love to watch
- Daily Show
- Boston Legal
- Seinfeld
- Clone High
Four places I have been on vacation
- Japan
- Hawaii
- Australia
- Israel
Four of my favorite dishes
- Pizza
- Balsamic Chicken
- Chicken Vindaloo
- Stir Fry
Four websites I visit daily
Four places I would rather be right now
- Australia
- Europe (perhaps Poland?)
- Vancouver
- Montreal
Four bloggers I am tagging
Social Theory Trading Cards are making a comeback in the blogosphere lately. Here is an unofficial card that I produced. If you don’t know Old Sailor, then I recommend reading some of his posts. I wonder what the folks over at Plastic will think of this. I would make more of them, but I’m not good at writing up people’s social theory.
Update: Old Sailor responds.
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Google Zeitgeist
The Google Zeitgeist is now showing 2003 Year-End Search patterns, trends, and surprises. The top Google search queries in Canada for 2003 were:
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What You Can’t Say
What You Can’t Say is an interesting essay by Paul Graham about heresy: how to think forbidden thoughts, and what to do with them. So take the Conformists test,
“Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers? If the answer is no, you might want to stop and think about that. If everything you believe is something you’re supposed to believe, could that possibly be a coincidence? Odds are it isn’t. Odds are you just think whatever you’re told.”
Think about this, “We often like to think of World War II as a triumph of freedom over totalitarianism. We conveniently forget that the Soviet Union was also one of the winners.” But Graham goes much deeper than that. He explains that searching for popular misconceptions not only satisfies the curiosity and confirms whether you are right or wrong about a particular idea but it exercises the brain, “If you can think things so outside the box that they’d make people’s hair stand on end, you’ll have no trouble with the small trips outside the box that people call innovative.”
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Star Wars Kid Update
An interesting Star Wars Kid update from Waxy.org, the place where the Star Wars Kid gained a lot of his fame, has an update about the money they donated to get him an ipod. There is also news of a petition on the net to try and get him into Star Wars Episode III. For those of you that haven’t been following the Star Wars Kid saga, check out this nifty link and then view any of the Star Wars Kid clips. In other Star Wars Kid related news, apparently his family is pursuing legal action against those responsible for the video being leaked onto the net in the first place. They’re going for a cool $225,000 CAN.
Also of interest on the Waxy is a story about a car accident that killed 10. It happened just a few blocks from where we were vacationing last weekend. (Hollywood and Highland is probably something like 14 miles away with an approximate travel time of 24 minutes). Anyway it’s a big story in the news right now about how this 86-year-old man drove through the Santa Monica Farmers’ Market and hit a bunch of people when he mistook his gas pedal for the break and then (I assume) panicked. I found their writeup to be ++informative.