Author: Val Dodge

Follow the yellow (asphalt driveway)

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Driveway painted yellow

Driveway painted yellow

When they’re located on a high-speed rural road a couple of kilometres away from any real landmarks, homeowners can sometimes have difficulty giving directions to visitors not familiar with the area. Some try to use distances in minutes or metres (“One minute south of Bailieboro on 28,” “four and a half kilometres north of County Road 9,” and so on), but such measurements tend to be either imprecise or inconvenient. Others put up their own landmarks to guide visitors: lawn ornaments, rock gardens, and flagpoles are among the more common examples. But some homeowners take a more direct route when it comes to giving directions: there’s just no mistaking “turn at the giant yellow driveway” for some other location.

(Freshly painted starting three weeks ago, as seen on County Road 28 about two kilometres south of Bailieboro, or twelve minutes north of the Transformers. Look for the giant yellow driveway.)

Autobots, roll out!

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It’s hard to imagine something more impressive than the sight of a Transformer, Bumblebee, standing at the side of the road in Port Hope:

Bumblebee guards the road

 

Fortunately, you need only turn your head to see something far more impressive:

Optimus Prime stands guard

Primitive Designs in Port Hope always has something unexpected on display for passers-by on County Road 28. Last year, it was a Toronto Moose. This year, a two-storey-tall Optimus Prime and his merely human-sized companion, both made of car parts, grace the store entrance. An employee hinted that more may be on the way for next year. A fellow gawker was standing there all agog, barely able to string together a coherent sentence while standing in Optimus Prime’s shadow.

I can’t really say anything else other than to get thee on a day trip to Port Hope post-haste to check them out. The amount of work that went into them is incredible, as seen in this detail from Optimus Prime’s leg:

Detail of Optimus Prime's leg at Primitive Designs

How to destroy your page view rate

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To help drive traffic (and thus ad revenue), a lot of websites tease their stories on the front page either by cutting off the story just before the salient part or by writing an ambiguous headline. Here’s a perfect example from the Star’s website this morning, teasing the results of last night’s Over the Rainbow on CBC:

Teaser headline in the Star

Who could have won? I must click through.

See? In an actual newspaper that was more concerned with telling you the news than selling your eyeballs to advertisers, that headline would be sporting a name in place of the ellipsis. (Indeed, the story’s URL gives it away, but many people wouldn’t notice.) Instead, you have to click through just to see the headline, right? Except that someone forgot to tell the Star’s advertisers how this whole teaser thing works:

Spoiler on page 1

Never mind, I got it.

If anyone at the Star noticed the incongruity of a teaser headline with a spoiler right underneath it, they just doubled down on the ad instead of losing the coy headline:

The Star giveth away

I said I got it.

Someone really needs to tell a Star editor that there’s no point in teasing the headline if it’s surrounded by the story. Okay, a semi-silly teasing headline on a website, no big deal. That would have been that, except that the Star did the same thing in today’s dead tree edition, placing the spoiler not just on the same page as the teaser, but in a wraparound that covered the teaser up:

The Star is giving it away.

Want to find out who won? Please buy this paper and turn to page E1. Try not to look to the left.

Neat.

Insert what into where?

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Insert disk graphic displayed on IBM server at boot

Kids these days may not recognize two of three things in this graphic.

I was greeted by this delightfully retro high-ASCII graphic last week when first booting up a new(-ish) IBM server to install an operating system. The only thing that would make it better would be displaying a 5.25″ floppy instead of a 3.5″ disk. It can only be a matter of time before hipsters start carrying floppies around because they’re more authentic than USB keys.

This server certainly didn’t have a floppy drive but I should count myself lucky: the operating system I was installing would have required shuffling more than 1,250 1.44 MB disks.

Doll on a dock

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Doll on a dock

Is that a rod in your hand or are you just happy to see me?

People put the darnedest things on their docks. I hope he’s just holding the broken end of a fishing rod and not, uh, well, um, whatever it is that boys do when they pack up their satchels to spend a solitary afternoon by the river…

Fixing Mammoliti

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A lot of ink and bluster have been spilled over yesterday’s confrontation between Councillors Giorgio Mammoliti and Gord Perks. I won’t add to it other than to say that Jack Lakey, the Star’s Fixer, wrote a blog post detailing a spat between his younger self, when he worked the City Hall beat,  and Mammoliti:

 

At one point [Mammoliti] told me – in front of other people in the council chamber – that I wrote the stories because I was anti-Italian. And then he walked away.

I was livid, not just at the comment, but at his timely evacuation of the danger zone.

In those days, I was a lot more jumped up and charged with testosterone. It was a serious challenge not to chase him down.

I called aside his executive assistant at the time, a good guy named Anthony Cesario, and asked him to pass along a message to George: If he ever said anything like that again, I’d drop him.

I was quite capable of it, and George knew it; he never came near me for months afterward.

If he’d followed through, Lakey would certainly have come to be known as The Fixer, but different reasons than he is now.