Okay. I have been to this web page about 15 times over the last 24 hours, and I still can’t decide if this is a hoax or not. The floor is open – I will leave it to the rest of you to decide. The fact that one of their products is a feaking thong for dogs really makes me lean towards “bogus” …

Regardless, the mission statement quote on the masthead is a keeper:

Flatulence is part of life. It is a natural
result of good digestion.

Amen, brother. Amen.

14.4: The average number of seconds it takes a car sold in North America in 1981 to go from 0 to 97 km/h.

Last week we discussed the wild stab at “citizen journalism” that the free daily Metro is taking in Stockholm. It looks like either the fever or the paranoia is catching … today Quebecor announced that they too would stick a nervous toe into the pool. This is the first “traditional” publishing chain to announce that maybe they are starting to realize that times have changed and traditional “ivory tower” journalism is in dire peril. Will it take? Who knows – there is a pretty good possibility that this will dissolve into a puddle of crap – but full marks to Quebecor for trying.

For a really good time, keep an eye on the CEP website over the next few days. They tend to be a little behind the curve over there, but eventually one of them will read this particular bit of news and start launching unintentionally humourous cries for help. Free entertainment, you betcha.

I can’t even begin to count the number of times that I have been out and about on a gloomy day, umbrella in hand, but when the rain starts I forget to open the umbrella and get soaked. Of course, the reason that I can’t count the number of times is because it never happens. I mean, how much of a fuck-up would you need to be to fall victim to that? And yet, someone feels the need to embed a weather data receiver into an umbrella so that the handle can flash when you need to put the thing up. Because, you know, getting soaked and shit wouldn’t clue you in.

Now – I freely admit that I am a big fan of ambient data displays. I hate digital dashboards because you have to read them, as opposed to just sort of parsing the dials out of the corner of your eye. The idea of innocuous items around your house or workspace that pass on crucial info without intruding into your mental flow is one that I think is definitely on the way … someday we will all have “edge of consciousness” items like the Canada Life beacon scattered around our personal domains and not think twice about the fact that we are armed with crucial day-to-day data as a matter of course.

So yeah, this company is on the right track. But the umbrella? That’s just silly.

There seems to be some disagreement about this one. That is great, but sadly the disagreement is 90% hopeless morons who can’t be bothered to either remember their grade 6 history class or use this strange new invention called the “search engine”. Only one person bothered to (a) have some intelligent objections to this, and (b) actually cite a fucking source.

That said … there has long been a certain measure of debate on how many presidents were actually elected before George Washington. Some sources say seven, some say eight. The fly in the electoral ointment here is John Hancock, he of the big signature and (presumably) small dick. Yes, he did serve as president, but he was never elected as president – a crucial distinction in my books. He was elected as president of Congress, but not as president of the fledgling republic – he simply served that role as the next in succession after Richard Henry Lee (the elected president) took ill in 1785. As such, I am not counting him, in much the same way that no one counts David Atchison as the 12th president, even though he was legally the holder of that office for one entire day. Make it seven, with some hard cases holding out for eight.

The real issue here is that, having built up Washington as some sort of American Demigod, any sort of challenge to his beautification is addressed with violent scorn south of the 49th. His “cherry tree” and “Potomac” exploits have been debunked as complete bullshit for years, but they are still taught as gospel truth in the schoolrooms of the U.S. of A. In much the same vein, the annoying little fact regarding his seven – or eight – forebears has been traditionally ignored when molding ignorant little children into productive members of society. Lately, thought, this inconvenient fact is now actively discounted, with people going out of their way to try and paint these men as “not really” presidents. The logic involved in that is, as you might expect, verging on spurious.

Who cares about the facts, down in the Great 48 they need heroes.

7: The number of men who were President of the United States of America before George Washington.

The original audio version of The Picard Song made the rounds last week and was at least cute, but ultimately not very memorable, and this was ignored in this particular space. With the addition of a fairly-well-crafted video, however – one that includes a dancing Klingon or two – the thing is now definitely worth a peek.

Oh – in case the whole “Sims meets The United Federation of Planets” thing is just too much for you to resist, you can download the skins here.

New cartoon-type goodness from both Strong Bad and Foamy today. I will leave it to the viewer to decide which is the more worthy candidate. However, only one of these episodes has chocolately goodness shaped like pants.

I am a sucker for talk radio – especially the sorts of talk radio programs that draw every nutbar and mentalcase out of the woodwork. The king of these programs is Coast To Coast AM – a veritable mecca for freaks and weirdos. Sadly, the show has been rather pedestrian as of late – but that all changes tonight. Stand by for the creme de la creme of whack-jobs – tonight’s guest is an authority of “America’s place in bible prophecy.” There will be fire and brimstone and red-baiting and hand-wringing and lots of portents of demonic slavery and doom. Grab your National ID card and tune in!

What cheeses you off more? Rock hard butter when you forget to take it out of the fridge, or nasty oily mushy butter in the summer?

In the immortal words of The Rock: It doesn’t matter which cheeses you off more! Now, through the magic of the rechargable ButterWizard, your butter will be at the perfect spreading consistency every time. Sadly, this long-overdue product is only available in the U.K. at this point in time. But someday … someday … even us poor bereft colonists will be able to revel in the joys of Perfect Butter.

A lot of tech-savvy curling fans and players have long rolled their eyes and heaved a mighty sigh when the subject of the web comes up. I was almost a grim tradition that everyone from local clubs to national curling associations to the world championship events all had web sites that were lame in the extreme. One peek at the much-maligned USA Curling site will drive this point home like a backboard-weight double take-out.

The trend might finally be in a state of reverse, though … the sites for both the Canadian Curling Association and the world events that they are hosting in 2006 and 2007 are finally up to snuff. Better yet, features that we take for granted on other sporting sites are now making a long-overdue appearance. Case in point: A live scoreboard and standings tracker, with end-by-end results for the office-bound mopes who cant watch all day coverage at home.

Very nicely done – even if the debut event for the technology is the Women’s Worlds, where the outcome is very much a moot point. You don’t need to look at the tracker to know that Sweden would be undefeated … as mentioned before, they have the power of Swedish Metal behind them. Who can compete with that? There should be an asterisk beside their name. Unfair advantage, indeed.

In their never-ending quest to flood the web with beta sites, the Googlemeisters have rolled out Google Finance. It is awfully sparse, and quite frankly looks like something that was put together in an hour or so by a couple of students with a case of Jolt and a copy of Adobe GoLive. In fact – this just might be the case – an article that coincidentally appeared over at Forbes claims that all of the previous finance stuff on Google was just framed pages from Yahoo, MSN, and the Motley Fool. The fact that FareChaser is now looking down the barrel of a giant lawsuit gun for data scraping and framing might have had something to do with the fact that this site appeared virtually overnight.

It’s also fairly bereft of actual info – no options, no bonds, no Canadian exchanges, no futures. StockCharts and Yahoo Finance are still worlds ahead of this … quite frankly, this is an embarrassment to the Google name. I would love to know the real story here. But I am not holding my breath.

Cary P. wanted to know why I specified “non-Blackberry” wireless phones when talking about the functions of NewsMacPro. It’s simple, chump – the gang at RIM are locked into a monolithic support model and seem to think that Windoze is the only operating system on the planet. They even use Windoze servers which would go a long way towards explaining why the Blackberry Web Client is (a) notoriously unreliable, and (b) incompatible with a startling large number of web browsers.

Ahem. Anyway, while the folks at over at Palm do a fine job of supporting all of the main platforms for desktop computing, and offer a robust set of PIM tools for all potential consumers, the RIMenites seem to think that confining their product to one segment of the total potential market is a good thing. They did give lip service to real computers by recently announcing that they are now partners with IAA and offering PocketMac as an OSX support solution, but there is a wee problem there. Specifically, that using PocketMac will eventually destroy both your OSX iSync database and all of the data in your calendar and address books. PocketMac is poorly coded and is essentially a flawed product that could have been perfect with a bit more thought and care behind it, which I guess makes it a natural for the gang up Waterloo way.

Anyone with two working brains cells to rub together knows that iTunes is easily the single best desktop music application of all time. It is so rich in features and carefully thought out that even running it on a Windoze box is a pleasant experience. And it’s free. Some people, however, are complete fenderheads and still use WinAmp, even if they have an iPod. These freaks of nature have to jump through a hoop or two to make this particular set up work, including using a slightly dodgy plug-in called ml_iPod to make WinAmp talk to their ‘pod.

Those self-same fenderheads would be well advised to avoid using the newest version of this software – it will toast your ‘pod, completely and utterly, as well as your music library. The only “fix” for this is to reformat your ‘pod on a different computer. As for your music, well, that is gone forever. Thanks for coming out.

350: The number of times of its body length that a common flea can jump.

Yeah, so the ongoing softwood lumber dispute between Canada and the U.S. of A is still, well, ongoing. Once again, another arbitration panel has ruled that G. W. Bush and his compatriots should go jump, and stop taxing the shit out of our lumber. Is this a big deal? Damn straight – it’s a five billion dollar big deal.

If you are not hip as to what this softwood deal is all about, then I would refer you to this primer for the Lord King God of Television, Rick Mercer. Truly, the man is genius personified.

John John wrote to point out that I missed a golden opportunity for joyous sarcasm – he thinks that I should have spoofed the RIM self-gratification site that i referenced in These Very Pages last week. Build a page that looks identical, but with one small change … have Pomp and Circumstance playing in the back ground.

You know what? He’s right. Damn.

What you people fail to grasp is that Paris is the Dog Shit Capital Of The World, surpassing even Amsterdam in that regard, and that is saying something indeed. There are three things that you need to know,

One: Every Frenchman has a dog. And no Frenchman ever scoops poop.

Two: All of those outdoor cafes that you see in the movies, where couples have romantic lunches and/or tempests of angst? In the real world, there is dog shit under every fucking table.

Three: Paris is full of art and architecture music and is a delight and wonderment for the senses … but what you will be left with at the end of the day is an overpowering olfactory memory of dog shit. Slipping on it and breaking a clavicle is at least quick. Trying to purge the stench of turdes du chien out of your nasal cavity as you climb out of Orly is a kind of lingering torture that you would gladly wish on your most annoying of foes.

I know a lot of people who are interested in this whole podcasting thing. Good ideas, bad ideas, downright dangerous ideas … doesn’t matter, they just want to give it a try. And virtually all of them ask me the same question: What about music? They want theme songs, they want bumpers, they want segues and background tunes … in a very small nutshell, they want their show to sound cool.

There is a solution. Not a perfect one, but at least a legal one. A semi-shadowy outfit called Promonet has a library of about 7000 selections for your legal podcasting and rebroadcasting use. All you have to do to keep things on the up-and-up is credit the works and post a link from wherever you host your ‘cast back to a place – any place – where the songs in question can be purchased.

Some people are inevitably going to complain about this, crying foul over commercialization or whatever, but this is a small legal price to pay for access to a library of musical goo that – unlike most needle-drop stuff – doesn’t suck. As fair trades go, this one is a winner.

USB flash drives are a dime-a-dozen now. They hide in watches, cufflinks, whatever. And they are cheap enough now that everyone can – and should – have at least a gigabyte in their pocket. So why would anyone want a stand-alone model that has a measly 256MB of space?

Because it has bas-relief Hello Kitty graphics on it, that’s why.

And people wonder why Dogbert is both my role model and idol …

602: The number of Parisians who were hospitalized in 2005 after falls resulting from slipping on dog shit.

There was an interesting news blurb on a Swedish media watch site yesterday - but if you don’t happen to speak Swedish or have the Swedish-to-English dictionary installed in your OSX translation widget, here is the text:

Free daily Metro will launch 26 new local web sites, one for each municipality in the Stockholm region. 50-60 volunteers will be recruited to write short articles and take photos from their area. Sakari Pitkänen, editor-in-chief at Metro, expects to fill the void from larger Stockholm-based newspapers that are not reporting from the suburbs.

The “citizen reporters” will get paid depending on how high in the hierarchy an article will make it, the highest level being the “dead-tree version” of Metro.

Pitkänen tells Dagens Media that the new reporters will get a crash course in journalism and that he is not afraid of the quality because he hopes the collective will monitor itself.

The project will start recruiting next week and launch in the beginning of May.

This is going to be something that is exciting for some people, contentious for others, and worrisome for a bunch more. The key here is that a big name player is taking the plunge. This model is well-established in the online media world – see Slashdot or Digg – and smaller papers in Podunk communities have dabbled with it, but it has been exactly the sort of thing that big-business publications in major markets have both avoided and dreaded like the plague. There will be lots more talk about this soon. Stick around.

Earlier this week there was some drivel in These Very Pages about the McClatchy purchase of the semi-comoatose Knight-Ridder chain. A lot of people are wondering why anyone would spend beaucoup des bux on a collection of print rags at a time when the business is being torn by new technologies on one hand and shakeouts on the other. I would like to say that the answers to all of this are in the statement printed yesterday by the head honcho over at McClatchy, but sadly it is little more than some self-congratulatory pabulum sprinkled with a really bad comparison to the Super Bowl.

If you are all agog about this stuff like I am, though, you might want to take a peek. Big thanks to Smartie Red for the link.

It has been reported, hinted at, and postulated in many places – including These Very Pages – that the PlayStation 3 will be late coming to market. It has also been hinted that the box will be rather pricey.

Both of these items have come to pass. The “Spring ‘06″ launch date has now been officially scrapped, and replaced with a somewhat-optimistic “November ‘06″ target. And the starting price has been indeed set at $500 U.S.

There are two things that you can probably count on:

One: November ‘06 will not happen. They might just scrape it in before xmas, but it isnt likely. Lets try March 2007 instead. The fact that Sony is not sending out final development kits to the game creators until the end of May confirms that the spring launch date was never a realistic proposition, and that they aren’t taking November very seriously either.

Two: The $500 version will be essentially useless, and may not make it to the retail stream at all. Assume $630 minimum for a system that you would actually want to own – or be able to buy.

I wasn’t going to post a link to this. Really. I was going to let it slide, figuring these mopes had embarrassed themselves enough. Two, three, four … eventually, seven people sent me this link yesterday. And still, I resisted. Took the high road, as it were.

That all changed an hour ago when the exact same thing showed up on my Blackberry as unsolicited mail. Fucking spam. I do not recall anywhere in my EULA there being a clause that allowed the vendor to pollute my inbox with a Statement of Martyrdom and Divine Redemption. Just to be sure I went back and checked the agreement again. No dice.

So, here it is, in all it’s hand-wringing glory. I especially like the bits about the problems with the patent system – as if offering legal protection for an inventor’s work was somehow wrong, but using political influence to have technically valid patents overturned was a rousing victory for Truth, Justice, and the Blackberry way. I’m sure that Jim “The Groper” Balsillie is out getting the stars and stripes tattooed on his ass even as we speak.

NOTE: Be warned that you should not read the contents of the link above if you are either (a) drinking milk, or (b) have recently eaten. In the former case, your milk may all shoot out of your nose. In the latter, well, you might very well puke.

1: The rank of “eggs” on the list of the most popular pizza toppings in Australia.

Whoops! Almost forgot! To try and make up for the dismal humiliation that is Valentine’s Day, some clear-thinking types have decided that March 14th should be a day that sort of “makes up” for the shit that gets dumped on guys the world over just one month before. So today is not just Pi Day, it is also Steak And Blowjob Day, a holiday that I think we can all heartily endorse.

4: The number of days each year that are exactly 24 hours long.

Today is March 14th, and that means it is every math geek’s favourite day … Pi Day! In hour of this very special spot on the calendar, why not pick up an honest-to-goshen Pi blanket … it will keep you fuzzy warm and it will let you have the first 398 digits of Pi right at your fingertips. Or toetips, if that is how you wear your blankie.

NOTE: If the connection between March 14th and Pi is not one that you immediately grasp, perhaps you are not the sort of person who should be reading this particular blog. Why not head on over to People Magazine … or maybe check out the menu at Bob Evans‘ … the Sausage Gravy Breakfast might be right up your alley.