crazed monkey

On Saturday I perused the BMV bookstore at Yonge & Eglinton for birthday presents for my niece, Leyla, who turns 5 on the 22nd. I know that relatives on Leyla’s father’s side of the family will bestow toys upon her, but I and my parents believe that books make a more practical gift. This is not to say that I don’t give Leyla toys, just that, in the long run, I think that books provide more stimulation.

As children’s books go, I am fond of the classics. On my Saturday trip I picked up The Giant Paddington Story Book with stories by Michael Bond, Stuart Little by E.B. White (the same edition featured in the link), and Where The Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein. The latter is a book I always wanted as a kid, if only because of Silverstein’s song “You’re Always Welcome At Our House”, which features a deliciously sadistic and twisted sense of humour. As far as Stuart Little is concerned, I am uncertain whether it is appropriate for a five-year old, especially after reading that link. We’ll see.

Posted on August 12th, 2002 in books, culture - No Comments »

There’s a new installment of Get Your War On out. Not as funny as prior strips, but it’s still got it. Think of it as a comic form of The Onion.

UPDATE: This episode of Get Your War On is funnier than ever, thanks to this strip. I damned near projected my dinner through my nose when I looked more closely at the latest offerings. The included panel sits nicely right on its own. Fresh new insight from the Get Your War On guy. I had never thought of it that way.

That image is screwing up the layout on my weblog page. Must add more text to improve the flow. This is so lame.

Posted on August 9th, 2002 in politics - No Comments »

Science Magazine has an article detailing an experiment with a female New Caledonian crow where the bird, in order to retrieve food from a vial, fashioned a hook out of wire to use as a tool. The food was in a small bucket which the crow lifted up using the wire tool. This is quite amazing, considering that although chimpanzees, thought to be our most intelligent primate cousins, have been known to use tools, they have never been known to construct them. Even more amazing is this video documenting the action.

Also curious is that the female formed the hook after a male crow, also in the experiment, stole a previous man-made hook from her. Once the female retrieved the food, the male would then steal it from her. This begs the question of which of the two crows is more intelligent: the female who crafts a wire hook to retrieve the food, or the male, knowing that the female will go to the trouble of obtaining the food, uses a strategy where he waits and then steals the food once it has been obtained.

Posted on August 9th, 2002 in science - No Comments »

Golf Digest posted its ranking of America’s golfing CEOs. Sun Microsystems‘ CEO Scott McNealy topped the list with a 0.3 handicap.

The question is, are companies whose CEOs appear prominently in the list a good buy or a bad buy? On the one hand, maybe they golf a lot with other CEOs, cementing deals and turning on the schmooze, or perhaps relaxing after a busy day at the office. On the other hand, these CEOs can’t be doing that much work while they’re golfing. Is there a correlation between CEOs who are good golfers and their companies’ performance? Golf Digest’s annual ranking could very well be every bit as important an investing tool as the annual report.

Posted on August 8th, 2002 in finance - No Comments »

If an RSS feed to which you are subscribed decides to put an HTML form element (eg. SELECT, INPUT, etc.) in an item, the Radio news aggregator will fail badly when you try to delete items:

[Macro error: Can’t coerce the string “nameprfx” into a number because it contains non-numeric characters.]

I learnt this when this item appeared in my aggregator.

Posted on August 8th, 2002 in computers, internet - No Comments »