Colin James: Canadian
“Just Came Back”; ‘Sudden Stop‘ (1990)
Click Here For More Canadian Music… do it kids, stick it to The Man.
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CSN:AFU Week Twenty-Eight
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Whoops.
I had a friend over for the weekend… and this thing totally slipped my mind until I after I had taken my sleeping aid last night. I was fading off watching Roeper from Ebert & Roeper dissect a documentary aboot people who obsess over Donkey Kong — apparently it’s Thumbs Worthy — when I took a look at my stats page and noticed someone had opened every Week In Review I’ve ever done. “That’s odd”, I thought, “I wonder if they liked this weeks… oh. Shit.”
I posted my first FTS Photo Graphic on this site. It’s something I’ll be doing here pretty often now although I’ll be keeping the Photo Graphic F.T.S. site open just to post personal photos — mostly it’ll be friends and weirdness. I also put up 26 images of flowers from local gardens on [my other blog]. The idea was people could choose which ones they wanted and I’d send them the large format version which they could print out and hang on their wall. Altogether a total of thirty-two people from Australia, Spain, Germany, England, Scotland, Canada, Chile, New Zealand and the United States asked for — and received — photos.
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The Lists From Week Twenty-Seven:
Five Strangest Search Terms Used To Find CSN:AFU
5) safe sex sucking boops
4) is it illegal to marry you third cousin
3) large nutsack
2) eddie izzard + imperialism
1) coming illegally to canada and getting m
Five Honourable Mentions: are you legally allowed to marry second, fucking ethiopian woman, safe sex in quebec, Manic Depression Owl, gay erotic stories about my stepfather
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Top Five CSN:AFU Posts For Week 28:
1) [redacted]:
2) CSN:AFU Week 21 In Review
3) CSN:AFU Monday’s Top Three News Stories — August 20/07
4) Canada: Offering A Safe-Sex Environment Where Humanity Can Fuck Itself Back Together Again
5) The Five Things You Need To Know Aboot The Canadian Movie Industry
Honourable Mention:
CSN:AFU Monday’s Top Three News Stories — July 02/07
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The Five Blogs I Visited Most This Week
1) Nita: A Wide Angle View Of India
2) Spin Me I Pulsate
3) Patient Anonymous
4) Joan Tintor
5) hidef entropy
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This Week In General:
Yeah, so Sean was over for a couple… of days. We had a nice get-together with some friends… it was the first time Steve, Sean and I had been in the same room since 2002ish. Steve owns a brewery so the beer was plentiful, good and in jug form. Between last Sunday and Sean getting here on Saturday I did (pretty much) absolutely nothing except play with the computer.
I’ve been updating the backend of my blogs while learning new and interesting things to do with PhotoShop. I did get my haircut. But that was pretty much it…
This week I’ll be helping my step-father get the garage roof mostly done — everything but the tar paper and shingles. We’ll also be working at The Museum, we’re putting the roof on the porch. It’s the last big job before the grand opening next Spring. Everything else is finishing the painting, a few little electrical things and installing the display cases — which are being made by a local Master Carpenter. The Historical Society are getting displays ready now… hopefully they’ll have something to do with history.
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Photo Of My Week:
Sean was up for a couple of days; Sunday, August 26, 2007; Photo by Me.
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This Weeks New Post:
CSN:AFU Monday’s Top Three News Stories
— August 20/07
Monday’s News Sometime Later: I’ve stopped taking this thing so seriously and it’s getting easier as a result, so it looks like the Monday News thing is a keeper. What’s making it easier is the whole “sometime later” philosophy I’ve adopted. It’s something I’ve practiced in other areas of my life, so it was probably inevitable I’d adopt it in here. Check out the thing aboot the fighter jets over my village… they were wicked cool.
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Photo Graphic: 1997 Remembrance Day In Ottawa We Barely Remembered The Promise And Totally Forgot The Struggle
As well as working as a reporter, I’ve also been shooting news photography for several years. A few weeks ago I started posting my photographs on another blog, but recently I’ve decided to make it a part of CSN:AFU instead. It’s basically aboot hoping to start conversations aboot photography, and maybe aboot the issues surrounding the photos. It’s also a continuation of a memory exercise I started on my other-other blog.
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Coming In Week Twenty-Nine:
Photos, A Movie And Maybe Some Unicorns
Apples, oranges, vitamins with whole wheat bagels and
a big glass of milk… mmm.
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0_o
cultural sn:afu 
Its always nice to be the first to comment!
You know you seem to have the funniest search engine terms! I was trying to collect some of mine, but they seem tame compared to yours. Yours always make me grin and today it was a loud chuckle! :D
You should see the ones I get on [my personal blog], they’re totally off the wall… I’ve been thinking about publishing some of them, but they can get pretty desperate. There are a lot of people finding my personal site looking for ways to do themselves great harm… for every “Samantha Mathis pump up the volume tits” I get four “how to kill yourself without pain”, actually I get that one at least twice every day.
It’s the quality of the language on your site which determines your search terms. This site gets pretty juvenile… actually it gets there and stays there for long periods of time, so I get ‘man eating ants snafu’ and ‘WALRUS PENIS’ (still my favourite) but the language on your site is pretty near to perfect every time. Sorry Nita, but if you want weirder search terms you’ll have to come down to my level.
It does makes me laugh though when there’s a theme. This week, for example, it looked like someone was working down the family tree looking for a spouse:
1. are you legally allowed to marry second
2. is it illegal to marry you third cousin
I still haven’t sent you those pics of
Hel(l)sinki…
sorry, I’ll try to get to it asap.
things are insanely busy – as usual
now I _really_ have no life.
more later and over e-mail.
The realisation that so many people who want to do themselves harm are looking for ways to do it on the internet is a chilling thought.
That bit about language, I get an idea of what you mean but really I keep feeling my language is just not up to the standard! I guess English not being my mother tongue has something to do with it! btw, my mom is a brilliant writer in Marathi, which is my mother tongue and even when she speaks she speaks in beautiful language, full of metaphors and similies. I guess I must have got some of my writing skills from her, but unfortunately, having studied in an English medium convent, my marathi is simply not upto the mark. Worse than my English! We are the new Indians, who are neither experts in our own mother tongue, nor in the foreign language!
Where my English is concerned, I feel its a little awkward. I so very badly want it to flow, like a thundering waterfall (now how worse can that metaphor get!!) and I have this odd feeling that one of these days I might achieve it. Maybe in about 20 to 30 years more years. So don’t be surprised if I publish my book then!
I finally came back today. I was on the road for a long time and finally decided to settle in Toronto. Cheers.
villedesanges: welcome back, I hope you found what you were looking for.
Nita: I understand what you mean by wanting a “flow”, but I think you already have it. Your English, Nita, is much better than most Canadians are able to write. If I was reading you for the first time it wouldn’t take long to see a different use of the language, but it comes down to a dialect… slight differences in the use of specific terms or turns of phrase that are just a little different. To be honest I find them endearing when I (rarely) come across them. Differences are good.
You have a very professional style to your writing, which — no doubt — comes from your education and work experience. For me the metaphors and similes came with reading… what made me a better poet, for example, was reading more and more varied poetry. Not that I’m a decent poet, but I think what you’re looking for is taking the different styles of writing — poetic, analytical, journalistic — and overlapping them. To me writing has always been aboot wordplay, incorporating lyrics from a song or a line from a pulp novel into a story or essay to create something new… I think it has to do with finding a comfort level and being willing to experiment just outside it, but if you’re self-conscious aboot your writing — as I believe you might be — it becomes difficult to experiment with the metaphors. Have you thought aboot having a creative writing section to your site? Or maybe a separate site? It might be time to at least start to incorporate some different styles into your writing… myabe someplace where you won’t be afraid to make mistakes.
“We are the new Indians, who are neither experts in our own mother tongue, nor in the foreign language!”
I know what you mean. Here in Canada the French-speaking province of Quebec has been trying desperately to hold onto their language. For the most part they’ve succeeded, but now they have an entire generation who can’t work outside of the province. There also used to be dozens of Native languages which were all but stamped out by the British and then Canadians. Even “Canadian English” has mostly disappeared. The differences between our English and British or American English are fairly subtle, but they were always there. but now even our large daily newspapers spell honour “honor”. Which really, really pisses me off. We do seem to be heading, however, towards a world where English is the primary language with regional dialects. It’ll be interesting to see how English can absorb or change the Chinese languages.