hal tweets ·11:28 AM
Ghostbuster zines from the Canzine Hollywood Piracy Zine Challenge are now online! http://t.co/RoAMEQTU
2008,
20:59 GMT
Florida: shoe update at last, plus pics and other tidbits!
Posted by: Hal
So on Friday’s post I promised that every other post would be about my life so that the blog would have a better balance between the more diarist stuff and links, thoughts, ideas and ruminations about the rise of peep culture. Then I promptly broke that promise by posting about US domestic surveillance centers and a link to piece by a columnist who was briefly a cam-sex worker. In my defence, I had forgotten that I had set up a few posts to happen over the weekend automatically. Then yesterday I was too lazy to blog. Actually I was slightly hung over from drinking beer with my hockey team (we won and are going to the finals this weekend) and wanted to finish putting a bunch of research into my peep culture database so I could finally get back to writing etc. etc. basically I was putting it off.
But no longer. First off, an update about lost shoes. Faithful readers may recall that in the last blog post that had anything like personal commentary, I wrote about getting in trouble with W. for losing E.‘s shoes. Well, I never found them. I called the community centre where I left them (after changing her into her boots) and they said they’d look but they never called back. So high up on the agenda upon arrival in Florida was new shoe acquisition. Luckily we found an outlet mall pretty quickly (wow, what a shock) and amazingly we found a pair of lavender New Balance running shoes to fit E.‘s tiny feet. They were probably half the price of what we would pay in Toronto, and we bought them and the same shoes one size up for when she grew out of them. E., meanwhile, was having a great time tearing adult high heeled shoes off the racks and shoving her feet into them and then tottering around. Finally, we made it to cash. Happy times for Hal as W. was so pleased with our acquisition that she forgot that I was the one who lost the shoes in the first place and so pulled out her credit card and paid! My inner cheap skate grinned and we all piled back into our rented Chevy Malibu and headed back home.
“Home” was the tiny island of Goodland, a short drive from Marco Island and about 45 minutes from Naples in southwest Florida. We rented a place there that had a tiny swimming pool E. refused to go in. It overlooked a bay filled with jumping fish and pelicans. It wasn’t far from the beach, which pleased W. and E. but it was also pretty near the Everglades and other nature areas, which pleased me. Goodland features about 10 roads, 3 different bar/restaurants, a trailer park, a seafood outlet that sells great key lime pie and friendly residents who like to troll back and forth to the bars on golf carts.
Here’s a pic of E. touching a snake at the makeshift zoo off the highway on the way to Everglades City that I’m pretty fond of.
The zoo was called the Skunk Ape Headquarters, the Skunk Ape being the Sasquatch or Yeti of the Everglades.
Anyone who knows me knows I’m awfully fond of cryptozoology in general and the search for Sasquatch in particular. Anyway, we stopped at the zoo on the way for an airboat ride, which I thought would be a nice way to see the Everglades mangrove swamps but which turned out to be a super loud super fast hurtle down narrow channels crowded with weeds and roots. W. held on to E. for dear life.
When we stopped halfway through we took the ear muffling headphones off E., she shook herself out of a shocked stupor, looked around and said, “I all done.”
So am I, for now.
2008,
11:41 GMT
Intelligence Centers in US Amalgamate Government, Corporate and Spy Agency Data
Posted by: Hal
Interesting piece in the Washington Post about the way intelligence centers set up after 9/11 - termed fusion centers - are accessing not only CIA and FBI and various covert databases but also things like insurance claims, driver's license photographs and credit reports.
Here's a quote from the piece: "It shows that, like most police agencies, the fusion centers have subscriptions to private information-broker services that keep records about Americans' locations, financial holdings, associates, relatives, firearms licenses and the like. Centers serving New York and other states also tap into a Federal Trade Commission database with information about hundreds of thousands of identity-theft reports, the document and police interviews show. Pennsylvania buys credit reports and uses face-recognition software to examine driver's license photos, while analysts in Rhode Island have access to car-rental databases. In Maryland, authorities rely on a little-known data broker called Entersect, which claims it maintains 12 billion records about 98 percent of Americans...Police officials said fusion center analysts are trained to use the information responsibly, legally and only on authorized criminal and counter terrorism cases. They stressed the importance of secret and public data in rooting out obscure threats."
Toward the end of the article there's a telling sound bite from Maj. Steven G. O'Donnell, deputy superintendent of the Rhode Island State Police. "There is never ever enough information when it comes to terrorism," he says. "That's what post-9/11 is about."
2008,
13:48 GMT
I Was a Cam Girl
Posted by: Hal
Here's a link to a short column by Laura Roberts about working as a cam girl for a week. Laura makes some good points from a perspective that she readily admits is pretty limited (after all, she only worked their for a week!) Still she's actually stripped off and, as she puts it, "fucked herself" for money.
2008,
17:54 GMT
Peep Gets Personal
Posted by: Hal
Okay so there's lots going on in peep-land but first an announcement. As of Monday, this blog is going to get personal. Anyone who's been reading these posts knows that I've mostly been concentrating on outside links, interviews, research and other aspects of the peep phenomenon. But part of the point of this blog is to see what it's like to peep my own life. I haven't really done that yet. I haven't even managed to post promised pics from our Florida trip and an update about E's lost shoes. So no more! It's time to get personal. I'm clearly going to have to force myself to blog about my day to day life, so here's my plan: every second post has to be about my quotidian existence. I'm making a rule and sticking to it.
So what inspired this momentous decision? Well I did an interview yesterday with a young woman named Emmalene who hails from Hamilton, Ontario. She's a video blogger on YouTube (a status I'm hoping to work up to). Anyway, she's a funny eccentric who doesn't seem at all phased by negative comments, giving her opinion on evolution vs. intelligent design ("that's just my opinion...I'm not not sure what to think"), or posting videos of her singing songs that she barely knows the words to.
She talked to me about lonelines and community and how YouTube has become a major element in her life. And I realized talking to her that I'll never understand what it's like to have total strangers cheering you or telling you how much you suck until I actually give people a reason to make an emotional connection with me by sharing more of my life. So that's the plan. But not today. Not yet. Next post for sure. Probably Monday.
2008,
10:35 GMT
Secretive Israeli Spy Agency Bloggers
Posted by: Hal
Wow, even the Israeli spy Agency Shin Bet, long one of the most secretive operations in the world, is blogging. According to this article in the Globe and Mail, the agency has recruited 4 bloggers to put a human face on their work. But as we often find when secretive government or corporate agencies go public, there's a catch: the anonymous spies reveal little about their work and the agency and a lot about their personal lives. They talk about job satisfaction, patriotism and good salaries. They invite you to check out the Shin Bet recruitment web page. Tellingly, the blogs were set up in order to attract young high tech workers to the agency as it moves more and more from on-the-ground spying to spying via data collection.
The Bloggist
Hey, I’m Hal Niedzviecki. I’m a writer/thinker who lives in Toronto, Ontario, Canada with my wife and daughter. Up till now I’ve always considered myself a private person. But at the same time I’m fascinated by people who effortlessly open themselves up to the whole world. So I’ve… more...
Ghostbuster zines from the Canzine Hollywood Piracy Zine Challenge are now online! http://t.co/RoAMEQTU
EXPOZINE 2011, Montreal’s 10th Annual Small Press, Comic and Zine Fair—http://t.co/3ISW3Ovx http://t.co/FlLfB6hk
Tag Cloud
Archive Months
February, 2011
January, 2011
December, 2010
November, 2010
October, 2010
September, 2010