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Fraser Cafe

A big happy birthday to my friend Matthew! We celebrated with friends at the Fraser Café on Beechwood. The menu was fantastic! I am really happy with the choices of good restaurants here! Heading to Absinthe with RP tomorrow night! I’m spoiling myself with some great food! Much better than pub fare!

Here are some iPhone photos of the pear salad, the steak on special, and a chocolate tart. The food was fantastic! I was really happy with my meal and we had a great time talking about traveling and our favorite foods!

And while I had too much to drink, I did get up late to do laundry. I skipped yoga, however, and plan on snoozing most of this rainy day away!

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New Online Image Collection

It is no secret that I love paintings and art galleries in general. The National Gallery in the US has opened its digital vault to allow access to thousands of high resolution images of its work here.

From the website:

NGA Images is a repository of digital images of the collections of the National Gallery of Art. On this website you can search, browse, share, and download images. A standards-based reproduction guide and a help section provide advice for both novices and experts. More than 25,000 open access digital images up to 3000 pixels each are available free of charge for download and use. NGA Images is designed to facilitate learning, enrichment, enjoyment, and exploration.

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Tonight’s movie: some classic 1970s martial arts!

I can’t wait!

I saw The Man From Hong Kong on a crappy Beta (don’t ask) tape when I was twelve or thirteen! Yu Wang and George Lazenby in a international drug dealing, hang-gliding, kung-fu on top of Ayers Rock, over the top sound effects, Australia-Hong Kong butt kicking old time kung fu film! More here! If I have time I may also watch The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, the 1978 master piece of Chinese kung fu and re-live my youth 😉

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World War Z

So that book about the approaching zombie apocalypse, World War Z, is soon out at the theatres. I had meant to read the book. Alas, Hollywood’s ability to convert text to pixels is outpacing my ability to read. Truly Sad. Here is a link to the movie website. It is quite a nicely integrated site with my iPad.

As I ruminated on the continued proliferation of the zombie genre I couldn’t help but to think that, like Paul Krugman and other, that the zombie metaphor is the metaphor of the age: no matter how dead you think an idea is, wrong. It is still alive. Ideas that inhibit the growth of our culture and our society still linger, old hatreds die hard. Or, I think, don’t die at all. Horror movies used to have a single threat, a Jason or a Freddie. Now all of use are potentially the destroyer of all that is good. So much for inevitable progress!

I’ll put the zombie movie on my list, although that list is growing and no plans to hit the theatres in my immediate future. Oh, and Superman looks good too! Nice iPad site too!

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Lazy Like a Fox

Click here for a great TED talk on open source houses that can be printed by a 3d printer after downloading the open source blueprints from the web. Incredible technology! They are pioneering a process that is completely open source and can be accessed by anyone: the Wiki House!

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Early anti-Nazi film re-discovered

In the early part of the last century Cornelius van Derbilt IV, the descendent of the railway tycoon, was in a unique position to interview some rather lofty players in the game of European politics including Adolf Hitler. In 1934 he produced a film called Hitler’s Reign of Terror that was censored and denied access to distribution due to its inflammatory nature. It has been recently re-discovered in the Belgian Archives. More here.

Did I mention that the film was censored and denied distribution in the United States?

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Words that the English language could use

You know when you are expecting someone to come to your place and you keep checking to see if they have arrived? It is called iktsuarpok in Inuit. Or seigneur-terraces, French for coffee shop dwellers who sit at tables a long time but spend little money.

Great article here.