Found a link to a website called I Write Like. You cut and paste a bit of your blog and the software compares analyzes your style and pops out who it thinks (does software think?) you write like.
Put a couple of my entries in and voila:
I’m rather flattered.. don’t know if Doctorow would be, but I am….
I just ran across this odd little item for sale:
Party Rats
What? You haven’t heard of Party Rats! You’re kidding, right? They’re the best thing to happen to partying since the mirror ball. People of all ages are putting these colorful, plastic, rodent lights on their fingers and waving their hands in the air like they just don’t care. Each 1-3/4″ long rat sends out a different colored beam of light, allowing you to create your own personal light show! Also great for the latest computer craze, night blogging! Five rats in each package. Batteries included.
Best thing since the mirror ball? Well ALL RIGHT! I can’t imagine a party without my tacky, outdated mirror ball. Just think how cool I’m going to look with little multicoloured plastic rat lights on my fingers. My friends are going to be soooo envious. And just think, I can type on my blog at night now that I have rats on my fingers!
Might I suggest, if you are having trouble typing at night you try this inovative idea: turn on a light.
I’m trying out a new blog design. I’ve been playing around with the nuts and bolts of how blogs etc look in an attempt to create a fresh new look. The design I’m currently using is excellent, I’m just itching to create my own. So…that means I’m about to inflict some aweful things upon you. Although I have all the software etc on my computer to test, design etc, there really is nothing like loading the site up and test driving it on-site to really understand what the viewer sees. If you happen to log on and some images are missing, or the site has slightly bizarre look, that’s me on the other side of the computer poking around.
The worse of my design excesses will be hidden away from view so don’t worry. I won’t slap up one of those aweful “Under construction” signs and disappear for weeks while I labour over the site.
Every once in a while I find I have nothing to say. It’s not that there is nothing to comment on, it’s simply that I feel exhausted by the over-all silliness in the world and I need to take a brief sabbatical. I’m not sure if this past year has been exceptional, but it feels like the lunatics are in charge of the asylum. But… I’m actually starting to make some money from this modest little memorial to my rants – I made @$100 last month, so now I feel obliged to write more, or more precisely, be more consistent in keeping the diary updated. So rats! I can no longer afford to be irresponsible and just vanish for awhile, I have to grow up and treat this more responsibly. If advertisers are willing to contribute towards what I desperately hope will be (in the near future) a dissolute lifestyle, than I will write.
During this past break from reading up on worldly shenanigans, I took up sketching again. I haven’t done this for decades (literally). During the winter I began to dabble a bit in drawing, but couldn’t settle on anything that took my fancy. About 3 weeks ago I started to try and draw birds. Well that was a disaster! I won’t show you the first attempts. Needless to say, I rediscovered the joys of shredding. I pissed around and piddled about and then read up on the subject through a variety of helpful websites. It was illuminating. I was (as normal with me) doing things ass backwards. So I started small by drawing single feathers. My first couple were mediocre, but after I got the feel for the way they flowed, I was off and running. Here are a couple of feathers I’m rather pleased with:
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| From Catpaw’s Art work |
Individual feathers are easy to do. When I get frustrated, I just draw a feather:
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| From Catpaw’s Art work |
But building up to the entire bird is a different matter – a shredding matter. It’s nice to be able to hide the evidence of my first attempts. My wings are an embarrassment to the bird world. They resemble a badly done illustration on the legend of Daedalus and Icarus. No self respecting bird would be caught dead with my wings. I’ve set aside drawing them for awhile. Onto other parts of the bird…. I am drawing their heads. Basically because I have no problem drawing eyes. They are easy. I drew a puffin head – I’m a bit potty about puffins. It wasn’t bad, but not entirely proportioned. I switched to smaller birds with more defined feathering on the head because puffins are a bit difficult to see details in the feathering and no you can’t see my puffin head. But you can see my other bird heads. Beaks are very hard to get right. Each bird has such a defined and different type of beak shape. Sitting in the cafe with my bird book and sketch pad valiantly attempting to draw bird beaks made me feel a bit Darwinesque. I marvelled and cursed the diversity in the beaks. Too bad they weren’t all standardised for simplicity of sketching. Hurray they aren’t all standardised for the excitement of finally getting the beaks to resemble the photos. Here are my first, ready for public viewing, bird heads:
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| From Catpaw’s Art work |
It has been a good month for Canadian politics. Both the Provincial Liberals and the Federal Tories (Conservatives) have been supplying us with a steady diet of nonsense. And I’ll bet you thought only the British were having such fun with their politicians. I’ll get to the Liberals in a later post. The Tories are infinitely more entertaining at the moment.
I’d like to say I’m shocked by Canadian Transport Minister John Baird’s language when talking about the rejection of Toronto’s application for infrastructure stimulus funding. I’d like to say that… but I’m not. Baird dropped this little gem on the public:
Twenty-seven hundred people got it right. They didn’t. That is not a partnership and they’re bitching at us, ….They should f— off.
“They” being the City of Toronto and it’s 2.6 million citizens. I wonder how many are V-O-T-E-R-S? Baird later fell back on the old chestnut that he didn’t know he was being quoted in public. Hmmm… journalists, journalists in a media workroom where he uttered the F-bomb … hmmmm….. He was talking about Toronto’s application to replace it’s streetcars etc using the Federal stimulus money. There is the possibility the application may not have been done correctly. BUT… to have a top Tory Minister tell a large city of voters to f**k themselves because he is having a temper tantrum is not a smart move! I think the Tories need to crawl out of the sand box and stop being children.
Speaking of children, I’ve been enjoying the latest Tory attack ads on Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff. The fact the Tories think running gutter ads is a good move speaks as loudly as Baird’s temper tantrum. This shows a great deal of contempt for the public to think we are dumb enough to fall for these lame ads. I could write better attack ads, in my sleep! The firm that wrote them should be fired. Not for writing the ads, but for creating such pathetic ones. The ads give me the giggles quite frankly. One line says something like Ignatieff will leave the country and go back to the US (where he was a professor) if he doesn’t win the election. Gee… do you think we could get all the politicians to do this? Was this a threat or a promise? Can you put this in writing?
And where do I start with Natural Resources Minister Lisa “OHHH isotopes are so sexy” Raitt? Canadian politicians are a weird lot. Only in Canada would you get a politician making a sex tape about isotopes. Italy, France, UK, US .. well their sex tapes would be … about sex.. not little isotopes. Okay, so she was refering to the issue of resolving the isotope problem, not the little buggers themselves. Her actual words were:
Ms Raitt: “But it’s sexy…Radioactive leaks, cancer.”
Ms. MacDonnel: “Nuclear contamination”
Raitt: “But it’s only about money”
Nuclear contamination, radioactive leaks, cancer, people dieing needlessly because of the shortage of medical isotopes… Yup they sure are sexy topics. Time for another HMMMMMM …..
Ah but it doesn’t stop there. Last week Raitt came under fire for the mishandling of secret documents. Evidently one of her aides left the documents in a CTV news studio. No one in Raitt’s office bothered to enquire about them for a week. I guess losing secret documents isn’t that big a deal anymore. One more scandal involving a politician should be a big Ho Hum by now. But I feel obliged to ask what about the word secret was not clear to the staff? Why were they taken from the office during a junket to a NEWS station. HMMM time again – secret documents, TV news station, previous questions about isotope shortages and Chalk River … Oh did I not tell you the documents dealt with the contentious Chalk River Nuclear Facility? Silly me. The documents revealed the government has put a lot more money than they are admitting into keeping the very aging plant running. This is a deadly serious matter. It supplies a large portion of the world’s (not just Canada’s) medical isotopes. Chalk River is about 60 years old and is costing more and more to run and there are doubts as to it’s safety. Not really a subject I’d call sexy. Raitt’s solution is to do more mining, “Know what solves this problem? Mining”. It doesn’t. Mining doesn’t address the Chalk River problem. If the facility is not running properly, then all the mining in the world will not help.
Meanwhile, back at the sex tapes… Raitt’s communications director, Ms MacDonnel accidently left the tape recording of the above conversation at the Halifax Chronicle’s office back in January of this year. When she realised she left her recorder at the newspaper’s office, MacDonnel asked the Chronicle to hold onto it for her until she picked it up. Months later, she still had not retrieved the little stick of dynomite from the newspaper. To their credit, it wasn’t until MacDonnel left Raitt’s office over the missing secret documents debacle, did they get permission to find out what was on the recorder. They simply hung onto it, waiting… waiting … Just imagine their glee when they listened to it. I’ll bet there was some dancing in the editor’s office that day. I think we have a theme going folks – politician, secret documents/tapes, privacy issues, news rooms, reporters.
Now back to let’s go back to our foul mouthed Minister of Transport Mr. Baird. He has now been dropped into this mess. Accusations are now emerging concerning his role in a possible coverup of Ms Raitt’s alleged mismanagement of Toronto’s Port Authority when she was in charge of it. Baird is accused of interfering with the Authority by changing the constitution and helping Raitt avoid an audit that might damage her political career. Toronto Port Authority is a troubled organisation – it is running a large deficit, has faced numerous lawsuits and controversies. Baird is accused of covering up Raitt’s $80,000 in travel and hospitality expense, made during her 2 year term as Head of the Authority. Another question has been raised as to why Baird changed the board membership from 7 to 9. Opposition MP’s are alleging it was to stack the board with his own people after 4 of the directors requested an audit of Raitt’s expenses and management. Was this a subtler way of telling the public ” they’re bitching at us, ….They should f— off”?
Oh, by the way, the Prime Minister’s office said just a little while ago the comments were made out of frustration. Baird says he didn’t know he had walked into a media room and the comments were private. There, that makes it all better doesn’t it? Once again, Media Room, reporters, tape recorders … I know what the Tory problem is! They have a problem with basic recognition skills, they simply can’t tell when they are in a newsroom. It’s okay to leave your profanities and secret tapes lieing around, after all no one, including a reporter will ever, ever see or hear them.
See the Halifax Chronicle for a full run down on the Rait Tapes
I checked my email on the weekend and discovered I had made more money on my blog advertising!! Holy shit! I made $50 for the month of April. I made a further $200 since the beginning of December.
So far this year, my blog has paid for itself and given me a nice bonus.
Who’d have believed it! Let’s see … What to spend my money on? Maybe a few more pioneer aviation items? Early airmail stamps? Ohhh maybe some new art supplies? Or perhaps a bunch of books??? Decisions, decisions.
