Author Archives: matt

I was getting moderately fired up to write a post about the political situation in Canada and why so many people who are talking about it do not in fact know what they’re talking about. Then I discovered that the … Continue reading →

Via Kevin Drum (who worries that the web is becoming too smart) I’ve found The Typealyzer. You tell it your blog’s URL and it does a Myers-Briggs temperament sorting thing. By its reckoning and based on the Nutshell, I’m an … Continue reading →

Lance Mannion is one of the many strangers whose blog I read. There’s a connection, sort of — he used to live in the city where I live now — but it’s pretty slight. Mostly I read because he writes … Continue reading →

Today’s discovery: Books from boxes by Maxïmo Park. Smiths-y poppy goodness. Oh, internet. You bring me so many good things. In unrelated news, typing without using one’s left ring finger is difficult.

I couldn’t vote in the Canadian election three weeks ago — I was registered to, but I’ve apparently fallen off the list of voters-abroad and hence my registration card got mailed to my parents’ house (AKA my last official Canadian … Continue reading →

The presidential election should be treated as a game of Hex, using the map of the lower 48 as the board. The one problem with this is that the player seeking the north/south connection has an advantage over the east/west … Continue reading →

The caption for a photo in the Toronto Star: Jim Flaherty got into a political hissing match with Ontario Isn’t that usually abbreviated as “p’issing match”?

I miss the word “failure”. It was a fixture in the vernacular of my youth, by which I mean the social circles that I moved in as an undergraduate; the full phrase took the form “failure to X”, sometimes followed … Continue reading →

There’s a guy from the phone company in my basement right now, installing the various folderol necessary for my incipient transition to fibre-optics-based service (“FiOS”, to use the brand name). It feels a little weird, because it’s really quite rare … Continue reading →

The English football league system. The shrunken font as one descends the levels of the pyramid is a nice touch.