Category Archives: Blogroll

Aniston/Jolie Star Wars

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This pic says it all, really. The Aniston/Jolie star wars are what originally drove me off VanityFair’s forum…not just once, not just twice, but fully three times. If the Team Aniston/Team Jolie throng resurface again for yet another death match I’m just gonna suggest they take it to meatspace. Or, given my assumptions about vast hordes of women with far too much time on their hands, an overidentification with celebutards, and a propensity to take other people’s marriage problems far, far too personally, let’s call it “lardspace” instead.

from the Worth 1000 Star Wars photoshopping contest, via BoingBoing.

Aniston/Jolie Star Wars

marc broussard’s “Home,” bayou soul interlude

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I’ve got a fair number of friends who are more musically inclined and musically sophisticated than I am, but I stumbled across this all mine own self (well, I found it on Taylor is the Boogie mine own self, well with the help of WordPress Hot Posts), so I feel very proud. This is worthy of going up against the best.

UPDATE: and fuck Universal Music Group, who took down the video. If they cared enough about their artists to read the comments, they’d see this video sold them an album. And now they have two official versions, embedding disabled on both. Why? Because you want your artists to be less widely known and less popular? Perfect strategy, guys.

underground version:

PSA: 30 for 30 for the Make-A-Wish Foundation

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I’m posting this for Raj, as he’s one of the 30, making the rest each only one of the 29 left over. Not that I’m elitist at all, now that I’ve gotten my charming mug into the social columns…of course, I was wearing a mask. Hmmm, good thing for my ego I don’t believe in causality.

30 for 30 – A Benefit for Make a Wish Foundation

Vancouver’s top 30 business leaders unite the evening of Thursday, October 19th, 2006 to raise funds for Make A Wish foundation.
DATE:  Thursday, October 19th, 2006
VIP Reception: 5:30PM
Main Event: 7:00PM
LOCATION: Rocky Mountaineer Station, 1755 Cottrell Street (close to Terminal and Main), Vancouver
PRICE: $40, VIP $75

You are invited to attend an evening of great food and great entertainment – all to raise funds for the Make-A-Wish Foundation of BC.

Help us achieve our goal of granting 30 wishes for 30 children with life threatening illnesses.  Join 1,000 of your fellow Vancouverites as we celebrate the power of a wish at the Rocky Mountaineer Railway Station on October 19th, 2006. 

Tickets can be obtained by email at ticketsatthirtyforthirtydotorg, phone at 604-897-8478, or visit us on the web at www.thirtyforthirty.org.

Tell your friends and co-workers, and together we’ll make Thirty for Thirty one of the most successful fundraisers in the history of Make-A-Wish BC.

30 4 30

PSA: Empress Hotel to close: City to play along

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Sound familiar? It should by now, but it’s going to get a damn site more familiar as we approach the Olympic construction deadlines.

From the Pivot Newswire:

October 18, 2006

Empress Hotel’s new owner plans to shutter it

Employees of the Empress Hotel, a landmark low-income rental building in the DTES, are reporting that the new owner of the hotel has told them they are fired, and that he intends to evict all of the tenants within three months. The Empress Hotel has 74 rooms available to Vancouver’s poorest residents.

“He told me that my job was over, and that he was giving all of the tenants three-month eviction notices,” said Charles Humble, an employee and resident of the hotel.

The new owner has apparently applied for a business license to continue operating the hotel as a low-income rental building; however, the story being told to employees of the building is a different one.

“This is just like the American Hotel,” said David Eby, lawyer with Pivot Legal Society. “The owner says one thing to city hall, and a different thing to the rest of the world. The American is now closed because the City refused to look beneath the surface or act when everybody else was telling them that the building was going to close. The same thing must not happen with the Empress.”

This week is Homelessness Awareness Week, an ironic twist on the recent news coming out of the Empress Hotel. In addition, on Thursday a motion is coming before city council to ban the conversion of low-income housing in the DTES to other uses.

“When these 76 rooms close, which is clearly the owner’s intention, those people who live in the Empress and have lived there for years and years will be living on Vancouver’s streets,” says Kim Kerr of the Downtown Eastside Residents’ Association. “The residents of the DTES are tired of their housing being closed while council waits for funding that is never going to come. Council must act to protect this housing from conversion immediately.”

The 74 rooms in the hotel represent more than 1/3 of all of the 175 wet/cold weather shelter beds opening for this winter in Vancouver. Current vacancy rates for housing available to people on welfare is near 0, as reported in Pivot’s recent report on housing in the DTES “Cracks in the Foundation” which found only two rooms available in the entire city for people at the current welfare shelter rate.

For more information contact:

Kim Kerr – DERA – (604)785-0009

Charles Humble – Resident and employee of the Empress – Room 701

David Eby – Pivot Legal Society – (778)865-7997

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About Pivot Legal Society

Pivot’s mandate is to take a strategic approach to social change, using the law to address the root causes that undermine the quality of life of those most on the margins.   We believe that everyone, regardless of income, benefits from a healthy and inclusive community where values such opportunity, respect and equality are strongly rooted in the law.

To subscribe or unsubscribe to the Pivot Newswire, just send a note with that subject line to newswireatpivotlegaldotorg.

the ideal tyranny

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“The ideal tyranny is that which is ignorantly self-administered by its victims. The most perfect slaves are, therefore, those which blissfully and unawaredly enslave themselves.”

—attributed to Dresden James

This is from the Project for the Old American Century, and it beautifully articulates the situation in the United States now, including its most important aspect: the fundamental rights that have been traded for not even so much as a handful of magic beans.

A caricature of a man who has wrought havoc in virtually every endeavor throughout his miserable existence has found his calling. Exuding false bravado and contrived machismo, he has swaggered his way into the deepest recesses of America’s collective psyche, fulfilling the inculcated need for a “manly” patriarch. Chest thumping, bullying, and ultimately unleashing the Hell of the Pentagon’s death machine upon those brazen enough to resist conversion to the American Way, King George IV has succeeded the tyrant American Revolutionaries toppled over 200 years ago.

The rest is here, and well worth reading.