Suggested Reading: The Big Book of Irony

Jon Winokur — The Big Book of Irony — St-Martin’s Press, 2007, 174 pp. ISBN 978-0-312-35483-1

(Buy at Amazon.com)

Winokur gives us the complete irony guide; from verbal irony—the most frequent one, when someone says something while clearly meaning the exact opposite—to auto-irony passing by morrisettian irony (irony mistook for coincidence or something else). You’ll learn a great deal about irony. Plenty of à propos quotes. Not exactly a book for the beach, but not very serious either.

A Year in Blogging (The Good, The Bad, the Meh)

It’s been a year already! Hard to believe, seems like I started this blog yesterday. I think I’ll take an easy one this week. Maybe we can have a look at all that happened this year?

Give it away, Give it away, Give it away now

Old computers are not always ready for the scrap pile the second you don’t have any use for them. Of course there’s always recycling—your local area most certainly has a computer and electronics recycling facility—but there are better things to do with your old computers, provided they’re still functional and usable.

A Commodore c64sx. Photo © Erik S. Klein

Coughing up bacon (or Why the Swine Flu won’t kill you just yet)

Last week, while friends and I were discussing the sensationalistic news coverage of the swine flu pandemic, I was joking that if you were not coughing up bacon, you were probably OK.

I fact, I wasn’t so much joking about the flu itself than about how (dis)information is presented in sensationalist news channels such CNN, Fox, or even Montréal-based LCN. Earlier this week, news were that the flu had already caused tens, maybe hundreds, of deaths, but that data was presented as if, you know, you just catch the swine flu and you die right away from it. However, on Thursday morning, on the radio, I heard that the Mexican authorities recounted “swine flu” death to… less than ten. To really understand what’s going on, you really have to do some research, and sometimes what you discover is radically different from what you’ve been told.