Retailer Harvey Norman announced they’re starting a downloadable music store called “Too Little Too Late” – er, um. No. Sorry, it’s called Why Bother?. Content is provided by mega-ISP-etc Desperate. There’s some nice quotes here though:

Harvey Norman product marketing manager Rebecca McLaughlin said the service offered “the most comprehensive and convenient digital music service in Australia”.

Destra chief executive Domenic Carosa described the partnership with Harvey Norman as a “natural alliance”

Pretty much everyone else called the service “a really dumb idea” that is “destined to fail”.

Today, the CBC had these two stories linked right next to each other on their BC News page.

Go ahead, make up your own joke.

This one arrived just this morning. It’s all slithery and under-the-floorboards, clever wordplay and just a hint of naughtiness: the unspeakability of vegisexuality. Like Buck 65 collaborating with Nick Cave on a song for Tori Amos to sing. In the Bloom County world.

It was now quite dark, and as kidnap I crept around
She told dress up me of her abduction
of fruits and vegetables. They never brought Madam

Brilliant stuff. I’m glad spam has its uses.

If you, gentle reader, have not had the pleasure of the company of the real-life jurgen dot ca, you will not know that I’ve been obsessing lately about the fabled Apple iPhone. They’ve got to be making one, and it will be useful, elegant and cool, and it will have my name all over it.

And it might look like this:

As The Register says, this is a “concept phone” that Synaptics has released. The screen is very sensitive to various kinds of touches and gestures, and damn but it looks cool.

But this isn’t the iPhone. Or is it? Apple’s screwed around Synaptics a lot recently – Synaptics used to be the company that made the click wheel for all of the iPods. Apple’s now making them themselves. There were rumours that Apple’s gone back to them for making something else. Perhaps this relationship has soured once more, and Synaptics have decided to release pictures of a “concept phone” based on Apple’s ideas for the iPhone as a kind of retribution for being kicked around. Hmm.

Either way, that’s a nifty looking phone. Pity it’s only a model.

Madonna comes up with a solution to rid the world of nuclear waste (what to do with all those horrid old Sean-Penn-and-Madonna films is still up in the air), and the Irish invent free energy. Film at 11.

Well, that explains some of the stranger DOM bugs, I suppose. (ha ha. bad geek joke)

The Register has the exclusive story, as always.

Who was that guy, in the 80s, who would always be screaming “Five hunnert dolla!”? Some kind of real-estate or investment “guru”. Had a TV show, lasted about a year or so before everyone started watching something else.

Anyway. I thought his name was Stanley Ho. So I looked that up in good ol’ inaccurate and buggy but don’t we love it Wikipedia. Turns out he’s a rich dude from Hong Kong with lots of casinos in Macao. Probably not the same guy. From his page, I find a link to a bunch of other rich guys, and who should I spy but Vancouver’s own car-sellin’ two-watch-wearing’ Jim freekin’ Pattison. Believe it or not.

He ran Expo 86, all of 20 years ago (how to make Jurgen feel old). So I took a trip down memory lane, and checked out this site with pictures of the thing. The monorail really pissed me off. “This train is not stopping at this station”. Damn. Would have been quicker to walk, even through the human sardine can which is the Plaza of Nations.

I was a bit too young to appreciate the lead-up to Expo the first time around – it kind of marked the beginning of my understanding of Vancouver as a place that changes. Before Expo, I didn’t know the place. All my understanding and knowledge of the place as a living, growing city started with Expo. I still remember driving across the old Cambie bridge, BC Place’s roof inflating, and that fantastic strip of weirdness that was Highway 86.

Whenever I want some change in my staid and boring life, I re-examine my choice of system alert sound. I know, that’s a big thing. I was thinking about all those poor orphaned sounds that Apple used to include in the system, but have now fallen out of fashion for one reason or another. Like Wild eep. A quick Google search shows that some enterprising soul has collected a whole bunch of classic MacOS sounds in one handy archive. Excellent. Eep!

This actually happened. Names have been changed to protect the embarassed.

The other week Dingus had a pencil stuck in his butt cheek (not bum hole) he fell off his bed when speaking to a friend on the phone and the pencil somehow stabbed him in the butt, he called me and I wasn’t sure what to do so I called Pinko.  He wasn’t in any pain but was starting to feel like he was going to faint, so we told him to lie down on the floor. Pinko said he would pull it out, I wasn’t too keen on the idea, but he had expierence of doing it on the job sites when he was carpentry.  So I was holding Dingus’s hand and Pinko went to pull out the pencil but it didn’t come out, on the third attempt mind you pulling as hard as he could the pencil came out.  It was in 8cm and was hard to get out because the muscles and contracted tight around the pencil. The tip of the pencil wasn’t there and Pinko couldn’t remember if it had a tip or not, so we rang the hospital to see if we needed to bring him down.  As there is no lead in pencils anymore they said not to worry and just to watch for infection.  There was hardly any blood and he wasn’t in much pain so over the next week we dosed him up on Astragalus (a natural medicine) which helps build the immune system and fight off infection.  All is looking good and no infection. Certainly don’t want to experience anything like that again in a hurry, was a bit freaky.