Category: culture

Posted on

Jesus Cat

Everybody loves the Jesus Cat. (371k .swf with sound)

Jason Scott explains:

I happened to show this to an IRC channel, and linked to a “stuff I have lying around” directory on one of my servers.

Two days later, 91,000 people visited.

And it was that specific URL too, and since I didn’t put it anywhere other than that channel, once, it meant someone gave it to someone else, or pasted it in another IRC channel, and then it just exploded outward. I see 3,000 matches for the original URL, and if you spend the time browsing them, you find lots of commentary. I’ll save you time and tell you the general responses:

  • Hilarious!
  • Stupid.
  • That cat’s not REALLY walking on water.
  • This reminds me of endless other cat stuff HERE’S SOME LINKS
  • I will now riff on the idea of a cat as a savior for the next paragraph.

91,000 throws it way past anything I’ve done, ever with regards to serving a popular file. Some of the others might have more longevity over the Jesus Cat (the Goatse article, for example, is still packing them in a year later) but for sheer popularity, Jesus Cat stands above them all.

God bless his wet, matted little fur.

Posted on

Excursion au soleil

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!):

DSC_2453

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).

Posted on

The Amazing World of Competitive Eating

IFOCE

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.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

Four Things Meme Reaches A-List Bloggers

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.

Posted on

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

Posted on

Flashmobs with a purpose

Xeni Jardin posts via BoingBoing about the impromptu protests in Spain yesterday, where thousands gathered in the streets demanding answers from their government about this week’s deadly terrorist attacks in Madrid. Bloggers in Spain tell BoingBoing the gatherings were decentralized flash mobs, organized primarily by short text messages sent via weblog forums, online in chatrooms and through Internet-capable mobile devices.

“Around 6PM local time in Madrid, an estimated 3,000-5,000 protesters gathered spontaneously in front of the headquarters of Spain’s ruling Popular Party (Partido Popular, or PP), located on calle Genova. Participants shouted slogans against media manipulation, and carried signs asking, “Who did it?”. Flashmobs spread by SMS throughout the country, with parallel gatherings quickly emerging in other cities.

The protests occurred one day before general elections take place in Spain. Government representatives denounced today’s gatherings, describing them as illegal assemblies — but because they were organized in a decentralized manner using mobile technology, there was no single responsible party against whom punitive action could be taken.”

Also of interest, from the same site, is the fact that “the events of 9/11 and 3/11 share a number of unsettling connections: the Madrid attacks took place exactly two and a half years after those in NYC, and there were precisely 911 days between the two.” Strange coincidence? Maybe, but growing evidence suggests not.