Not for the prudish or even then conservative, but funny stuff, The Internet is For Porn is a great example of how people are using the tools they have available to them to create their own milk-snorting culture ;-)

Via Ted's blog.

So here's the story:

Some guy here in Toronto likes the TTC (our transit system) so much that he decides to have some fun with the subway map. He takes the original PDF on their website and redesignates all the stations with fun names by moving around the letters. "Broadview" became "Avoid Brew", Wellsley became "Eely Swell"... You get the idea.

The design gets posted all over local blogs including Spacing Wire and Boing Boing and unfortunately some idiot at the TTC saw it and called their lawyers. The blogger was then served with a cease and desist letter claiming that he needed permission (and he wasn't going to get it) to create his own art based on a public service he not only pays for but uses every day.

So a big Lick Me Today™ goes out to the TTC and their complete lack of humour and childish knee-jerk reactionism. If you feel the same way and would like to let these idiots know, feel free to send them a message. The Toronto Star did an excellent article on it today, but I figure Cory Doctorow said it best:

"It's part of every Torontonian's experience of the city, a part of the cultural fabric. Culture gets remixed - that's what happens with it... The TTC's legal bullying here is completely needless — they face no risk and no loss from letting their riders turn the map into their own personal remix."

Upon further reading of Boing Boing, I found that this transit map remixing thing is not an isolated phenomenon. In fact, it's been done all over the place including Vancouver. Check it out, "Royal Oak" was changed to "Okay Oral" ;-)

I just got this from the TPSC list and thought it would be good to share:

The City is about to embark on a process called the Coordinated Street Furniture Program. Inspired by good intentions to beautify our streets, the project has turned into the biggest public space sell-off we've seen so far and might as well be called the Sidewalk Privatisation Program.

Historically, public space in Toronto has been the recipient of investment and care. But in the last decade, City Councillors have set their sights on our streets as a source of private revenue by selling the sidewalks to advertising companies. With a stated mandate to "increase revenue for the City," the new project will clearly take us further down the road of a privatised streetscape.

What does this mean for us? Aside from more advertising on the streets, it also ensures the continued trend of substandard street furniture on our streets. The City's experiments with advertisation so far have been a disaster. From the OMG Silverboxes, to the Astral "Info Pillars" to the Eucan MegaBins, we have seen the same story over and over: the products are designed primarily as billboards and then, as an afterthought, turned into poor excuses for garbage cans or information pillars. The advertisers' needs come first, and the public's needs come last. Safety, accessibility and functionality all suffer in the race to create the most intrusive "in-your-face" advertising.

So far, we've seen ads on info pillars, garbage cans and benches. The new proposal puts everything else on the auction block. The plan is to get one ad company to design and produce ALL of our street furniture. The report lists possible items that could be included in the deal: phonebooths, light poles, new benches, mailboxes, flower baskets, fire hydrants, street signs, traffic lights, bicycle racks and more. Although not all of these items would have ads on them, none have been ruled out. Either way, all would be designed by an advertising company, and the City would expect to get them all for free. And as we've seen already, you get what you pay for.

Although the plan uses all the right language about "elevating and celebrating Toronto's urban beauty" and even calls for fewer ads, the outcome is clear: "increased revenue" means more ads. And selling the streets to ad companies, instead of investing money into new infrastructure means a further decline in the design, placement, functionality and aesthetics of our street furniture.

If you live in Toronto and care about public space (you probably should, since it belongs to you) I suggest that you check out their "What You Can Do" section on their dedicated page. Among the suggestions is the idea that you might want to attend the public info sessions the city has opened up for this debate. I'll be going to one of them, I suggest that If you can, you visit the one for your area as well.

Pretty cool eh? The site scored me highest on my two favourite shows. I ended up with B5 due to the "tiebreaker" question.

Take the Quiz yourself if you like: Your Ultimate Sci-Fi Profile II: which sci-fi crew would you best fit in?

Initially, I was going to say that the world was going to hell and that these people are driving us there, but then it occurred to me: no, the world isn't that stupid. Maybe the United states could fall to this kind of nonsense, but not the whole planet... We'll be fine.

"Boys and girls," Ham said. If a teacher so much as mentions evolution, or the Big Bang, or an era when dinosaurs ruled the Earth, "you put your hand up and you say, 'Excuse me, were you there?' Can you remember that?"

The children roared their assent.

"Sometimes people will answer, 'No, but you weren't there either,' " Ham told them. "Then you say, 'No, I wasn't, but I know someone who was, and I have his book about the history of the world.' " He waved his Bible in the air.

"Who's the only one who's always been there?" Ham asked.

"God!" the boys and girls shouted.

"Who's the only one who knows everything?"

"God!"

"So who should you always trust, God or the scientists?"

The children answered with a thundering: "God!"

Read the rest at The L.A. Times

The Winter Olympics are over. Well not really "over" but now that hockey is finished, I don't really care about the rest. Our boys got beat by the Russians (at least they were ice-dwellers... I don't know what I would have done had we lost to the Americans). Our girls on the other hand kicked EVERYONE's ass twice over and took the gold, causing the National Post to run a cartoon on the front page today of the coach telling the men's team to "Play Like Girls". -- Awesome

If anyone watched the women play this year (sadly, they don't get nearly the press the men do) I gotta say that they were really impressive to watch. Part of me would love to see a Men Vs. Women Olympic Showdown after the games just to see what would happen. Our men were sloppy, while our women clearly showed serious skill, I'd put my money on the ladies myself.

'Course such a game would never happen because we can all imagine the outcome of a win on either side. If the boys won, sexist assholes would use it as an argument proving how women are the weaker sex, and if the girls won, you'd have women everywhere gloating for years as if they'd scored the goals themselves.

One day though, I'd like to have a Canadian Hockey Team with men and women based on their skill level... But maybe that's just naive.

Note, if anyone has a link to the National Post cartoon, please hook me up.

The BBC is running a Climate Calculation Experiment and they need volunteers to help out by using their own computers to do crunch the numbers.

Like the SETI@Home project, the idea is that they send packets of information to your computer and in it's spare time, your machine processes all that information for better the whole.

If you're interested, I suggest you download the client (Both Windows and Linux versions available) and have fun.

I started subscribing to The Toronto Star nearly a year ago because I'd become enamoured with their Ideas section released every Sunday. Unlike other parts of the paper that try to sell you things or tell you what's going on in the world, Ideas is just a collection of smart people talking about things they'd like to see happen, or stuff they think is interesting. Topics have ranged from American electoral politics to Urban Design to interpersonal relationships, but every week I find myself looking forward to flipping my paper open to those few pages.

Not too long ago - in terms of millennia - in 1945, the god Prometheus returned to Earth, bearing a new gift of fire. This time it didn't merely illuminate the dark of our caves. Through the instrument of atomic fission, and the still greater one of atomic fusion, it liberated the ultimate energy: the energy that binds together matter. The caves themselves became combustible.

With the caves gone, there was nowhere left to hide. That is the central truth about our world. We have no place that is not visible to our enemies so, rather than hide from them, we had better engage with them - talk to them and listen to them.

Our hope lies in Pandora's box. Through science and the arts, humankind can learn.

In the very same year of 1945, in the aftermath of their agony, the nations of the world joined in signing the Charter of the United Nations, one of history's greatest acts of imagination.

- From War to Law Via Science, The Toronto Star, 2006/02/19

If you have a few minutes, I very much recommend the read.

I took Tan & Aaron out for dinner last night. It was meant to be a sort of long-awaited thankyou for their help getting me settled in Toronto but it ended up turning into just a nice night out at Pan on the Danforth.

Aaron picked me up at work and we met up with Tan at my place so I could show them around my tiny apartment before we headed out to one of Tan's favourite hangouts. We talked about all sorts of things, not the least of which was the fact that Tan's finally got her book published (yay!). We talked about old friends back home, our jobs and what my plans were... for the future I mean.

Tan was surprised to hear that I'd been planning to move home for the Summer of 2007. Neither of them could understand why I'd bail on my life out East when I had been doing so many exciting things and had "so little" (her words) drawing me back to Vancouver.

Here's the thing. I miss Vancouver. I mean I really miss it. Sometimes when I see some of the pictures I've taken during my trips home I even get teary. My grandparents are getting old and I want to be around for them too... But is it wrong to not really want to leave?

It's not just a My Life and Theirs thing, though that's part of it. It's more that I'm starting to realise that I'm making friends wherever I go, and regardless of where I live, part of me will always be elsewhere. Toronto has an atmosphere to it too (and I'm not just talking about the smog). People like to work here. They get together, get organised and get shit done. You just don't find that back home.

Political awareness seems higher here too. People actually know what's going on (well, a higher percentage do at least) and they have thoughts about it. The line "oh I don't know about that stuff, who cares?" is a much scarcer statement on this side of the country.

...and it's REALLY nice to have that.

I really don't know what I'm going to do.