Geo-targetting of advertising, something I am not unfamiliar with myself, has evolved to the point where custom graphics can be burned into ads to (sort of) make them look like they are meant just for you. Here’s one that got served to me today:

Stripping aside all the sexual and body image politics the ad brings to light, “Meet a Real Girl Today in Tracadie” would make for an excellent title for my first novel (if my first novel were to be a W.O. Mitchell-style coming of age tale set in Prince Edward Island’s north shore).

Johnny phoned in a tizzy this afternoon to tell me that Jian Ghomeshi was on Q announcing that I was one of the winners of the “6 Word Love Story” contest. I heard the announcement of the contest while driving over to Sackville on Tuesday, so I had 4 hours of time in the car to mull over my entry. Which ended up as:

You’re dying.
I cut your toenails.

It’s a poem inspired by actual toenails. And actual love. I won, it seems, in the category “real little love stories” and won a showdown against “Saw her today, cried all night” thanks to judging (audio) by The Trews.

It’s been a heady, poetry-filled week.

After some excellent pre-sales advice about what my next mobile device should be, I went looking around for good prices on a Nokia N95.

I immediately started to notice an odd trend: brand new the N95 sells for over $600. But I found it for sale on eBay, and through Froogle for much less — $300 to $400. All of the cheap phones had something else in common: the same cut-and-pasted descriptive text about the device, including this feature list:

Other functions: MP3 functionses, MP4 functionses, don`t need to lift to converse, message hair, recording function, WAP function, handwritten importation, handwritten keyboard importation, blue tooth function, GPRS download, the MMS colorful message, memory expand, single card list treat, converse double to recording, the IP stir number, calculator, healthy management

I’m fairly confident that “message hair” is not a standard N95 feature (although I would love a phone with that ability, whatever that ability actually is). And then I read the smaller print on several of the ads and found:

This is a copy of the Nokia N95.

It appears that these cheap phones are not, in fact, actual Nokia N95 phones, but rather phones “inspired by” the N95. Not that you’d ever know that unless you read carefully. Caveat emptor.

Can someone tell me how to make this annoying dialog box stop popping up in Apple’s Mail.app? It started appearing after the 10.5.2 upgrade.

Perhaps everyone else has known this since forever, but I just found out yesterday: in Google Maps you can enter the name of a KML file in the search box and it will be displayed on a map. It’s how I display a map of plazes poetry contributors.

Pull random words from the Plazes geopresence flow and you get plazes poetry. A new poem every five minutes, with unknowing collaborators from around the world.

It was a lot of fun creating this. It’s the sort of thing, I suppose, that contemporary psychogeographers should do in their spare time.

If you want to insert the latest poem into your own website, just following the instructions at Plazes Poetry Widget.

You have probably thought to yourself “if I am riding my horse, and it starts to rain, what should I do.” Fortunately you have the Internet to tell you that:

If you’re out riding and you and your horse are caught in a sudden downpour, it is very important that that you and your horse get back to the barn safely. Riding through bad weather is dangerous, scary for your horse, nerve-racking, and sometimes life-threatening.

Later on in the same article you will learn that:

If you are riding with other horses in the rain, never close your eyes, no matter how hard the rain is. The instant you ingnore your riding, a disaster will occur.

I know this because there is also a song, on the Sidsel Endresen album So I Write called Horses in the Rain (regular readers will remember Sidsel from yesterday). Lateral surfing takes you to some interesting places.

Like this Randy Newman album, his self-titled first album from 1968. The 10th track on that album is I Think it’s Going to Rain Today. Take a moment and listen to some clips of the songs on the album; Newman was only 25 when he released that album, and even today it seems thorough original and inventive.

I Think it’s Going to Rain Today was covered by the selfsame Sidsel Endresen on the 1999 album Nightsong with Norwegian jazzman Bugge Wesseltoft.

Their version is the only one of the many covers by artists from Judy Collins to UB40 that bests the classic version of the song — the one you probably know — by Bette Midler from the 1988 movie Beaches (watch a clip here).

I got in my Jetta to drive to Sackville on Tuesday afternoon. And the heater wouldn’t work. I poked and prodded and looked under “heater stops working” in the manual. But all to no avail.

Oddly, the only other time this has happened to my Jetta, five years ago, I was also heading off to New Brunswick. Which makes me think my car shares some of my misgivings about our province to the west.

As then, however, a little bit of time to warm up, along with a jiggle to the fuse, got me defrosted and on my way.

Although I once thought nothing of driving long distances, in recent years I’ve settled down comfortably into a 3-block-radius routine punctuated by large gallomphs to other continents. So driving to Sackville felt a lot like driving to Osaka. As it turned out, however, the weather was fine, that afternoon’s episode of Q was interesting, and I made it there in 90 minutes without additional incident.

At the appointed hour I met up with Shauna at the Bridge Street Café and she guided me over to Hart Hall at nearby Mount Allison University where I could set up for my rumination on psychogeography for her protracted symposium.

Universities have changed a lot in the 23 years since I was a student in one. Although it makes me feel like Andy Rooney to say so, in my day there were no laptop computers, and if you wanted to check your email you booked a workstation in the computer lab. Now everyone has a laptop, and they are the papyrus of modern academia (you see what feats of metaphor being on a campus forces me into?).

Shauna’s geonauts listened patiently as I rambled on about the history of the Plazes idea and what it’s become (here’s a PDF of my slides, albeit without the exciting audio inserts of Felix and Stefan). There was a good collection of questions when I was done (interestingly the “aren’t you concerned about your privacy” question didn’t come up at all) and by 8:00 p.m. I was back in my Jetta and on my way back across to PEI.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania is a regular guest on Bill Moyers Journal on PBS. I discovered her by accident, and have made a point of seeking her out ever since: she has a sort of insight into the process of electing a US President that is absent from almost every other venue.

Her brilliance lies in her rejection of the usual sports play-by-play metaphors in discussing the process; rather she parses the language and the positions and the spin of the candidates to get at a deeper level of what’s going on.

Here’s a video of a recent appearance where Moyers and Jamieson discuss the aftermath of Super Tuesday.

Jamieson is also involved with the excellent FactCheck.org website, “a nonpartisan, nonprofit, ‘consumer advocate’ for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics.”

Here are the nominees for Best Picture at this year’s Oscars:

• Atonement
• Juno
• Michael Clayton
• No Country for Old Men
• There Will be Blood

If you have seen any of these movies, please tell us where and under what circumstances. For example, for me it’s:

• Atonement - British Airways flight from London to Boston, January 2008, tiny 8 inch seat-back video screen.
• Michael Clayton - Empire Theatres Studio 8 in Charlottetown, December 2007, the hated “Theatre 8” down at the end of the hallway, the one with the old seats and the tiny screen.

You can leave yours in the comments.