"You artists…can’t look at a landscape or a bowl of fruit without thinking how you will put it on a canvas so that somebody else will see it as your landscape or your bowl of fruit. That is the inescapable vulgarity of art."
Louis Auchincloss (via Charles Oberdorf)
New U of T Magazine profiles posted
I’ve updated the U of T Magazine archive with new profiles of U of T Olympians, a piece on jazz sensation Sophie Milman, and another about Hip Hop Headz, the U of T club devoted to showcasing hip hop culture on campus.
Although it was fun talking to the people who are involved in the Olympics, it didn’t change my opinion of the Games themselves as a massive, ridiculous advertising exercise, and the IOC as a bloated, corrupt rump of dissipated european aristocrats who swan around ankle-deep in caviar, handing out $20 billion construction contracts for useless stadiums in which to stage-manage their creepy nationalist pageantry. There must be a way to recognize athletic achievement without turning it into a two-week explosion of adverlingus.
Associated Press infringement haiku
The Associated Press has stepped in it by trying to bully bloggers into paying them to quote more than five words from AP wire stories.
Here are some haiku I wrote about the Associated Press, using only words quoted from individual AP articles.
AP inflicted
obscene abuse of power
ineffectual
critical questions
and vulnerabilities
on “broken” system
proof that news has died
The Associated Press
said never share it
"Everything that’s written is didactic. As soon as you write something down, as long as it’s not a shopping list, it’s some idea about the world. It’s Michel de Montaigne writing his essays, it’s Plato writing The Republic, it’s Ron [Moore] writing Battlestar Galactica."
James Callis, in an interview with The A.V. Club
New Trinity profiles online
The new issue of Trinity Magazine came out recently, and in addition to writing the front-of-book section as usual, I also wrote two profiles. One is of the Trinity Environmental Protection Committee and the students who are planning a roof garden for one of the Trinity College residences; the other is of three young alumni who have started an environmental consulting firm and are aiming to cover one Trinity roof with solar panels. I’ve put those profiles together in the archive and more Trinity articles from past issues should pop up there soon. The full issue is available to download as a PDF from the Trinity College website.
"Grand Theft Auto IV is the gravest assault upon children in this country since polio."
Jack Thompson, in a letter to a Florida US Attorney
"It is said to have started on the Internet."
Actual lede from an article in the Toronto Star, April 4, 2008
Koodo Mobile is lame. LOL, as the kids say.
All over Toronto, Telus Mobility has been assaulting innocent pedestrians and motorists with its hideous advertising campaign for Koodo Mobile. Not only are these ads deliberately, self-consciously ugly, they are meant to be deliberately, self-consciously uncool. What’s so painful about them is that they are in fact, actually, genuinely uncool: Everything about them screams “We’re a huge, out-of-touch telecommunications company that hired a hip young advertising firm to sell teenagers the same crappy service we sell their parents, but with Lupe Fiasco ringtones.”
St. Michael’s magazine articles are up
Two more articles added to the archive, both from St. Michael’s magazine, the alumni magazine of St. Mike’s College at U of T. From the Spring 2008 issue there’s a profile of Richard Alway, the retiring president of the college, and from the Fall 2007 issue a profile of Robert Ringwood, AKA Brother Tomas, an alumnus and Cistercian monk who has lived in Argentina for about 50 years. (The interview took place over the worst connection I’ve ever heard on a phone. Rural Argentina is clearly not in the fast lane, technology-wise, which is what makes it a pretty good place for a monastery, I suppose.)
Both issues of the magazines are available as PDFs on the St. Mike’s website.
"The Bear Stearns Companies Inc. today denied market rumors regarding the firm’s liquidity. The company stated that there is absolutely no truth to the rumors of liquidity problems…"
Bear Stearns press release, March 10, 2008. The company collapsed and was sold to JP Morgan less than a week later.
