The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

Ella’s Americana Folk Art Cafe is the sort of place you’d expect to find in Austin, but is actually in Seminole Heights, Tampa. The “Folk Art” part of the name is no misnomer; the place is covered in all sorts of funky creations, such as this lil’ fella…

…this bigger fella…

…this Ed “Big Daddy” Roth-inspired piece…

…this other little fella…

…and no place like Ella’s would be complete without a shrine to The King, the biggest fella of them all:

Here’s the inscription over the entryway to the kitchen:

And here’s a zoomed-out view:

The Lady Friend and I went to Ella’s on Sunday, which is “Soul Food Sunday” there (check out the Sunday menu). We arrived around 1 p.m., and the place was still pretty full. Luckily for us, there were still some seats available at the bar, which gave us a good view of the kitchen as well as the scene below:

The staff at Ella’s are a friendly bunch. They’ve all got that universal North American hipster-ish look; if it weren’t for their accents, which ranged from a slight southern twang to the full on “y’all drawl”, they could easily be mistaken for the denizens of Accordion City’s Parkdale neighbourhood. The guy behind the bar suggested that we start with Bloody Ellas, which is my preferred brunch drink:

It’s a Bloody Mary with an Ella’s twist: they rim the glass with a barbecue spice rub, and it’s garnished with an olive, pickle and hunk of perfectly cooked and tender beef rib. I’m going to have to start making Caesars this way.

The Lady Friend decided to go for pulled pork and collard greens. As for me, I went for some special southern treats:

…chicken and waffles. Real down-home southern fried chicken (two drumsticks and a breast), served with a belgian waffle, a devilled egg and maple bourbon gravy on the side. To complement it, some fried green tomatoes:

(I might get excommunicated from the Smart Ass Fitness mailing list for this…)

I will be atoning for these sins at the pool and the gym all week, but these are rarities for me, and sometimes you just have to indulge.

A kind gentleman saw the Lady Friend getting pictures of me and my food and offered to snap a shot of the both of us:

In addition to being a great place to get some delicious American homestyle food, Ella’s is also known for being a great music venue. It’s co-owned by Melissa Deming and Ernie Locke, who’s a local musician, formerly with a band called Nervous Turkey. There’s a stage in the corner of the restaurant, where live bands play several evenings a week. I’ll have to come back here for one of those nights.

If you’re ever in Tampa, find a way to Ella’s!

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Glenn Beck, a man whom historians will one day say was to the U.S. what lead was to the Romans, is taking a patriotic stand against Levi’s and making his own jeans. Incensed by a Levi’s ad campaign last year that featured global protests and revolutions (“It’s hard to believe that a company associated with America and working class values would use global revolutions and progressivism to sell their products,” he said), he swore off Levi’s and has since announced the launch of 1791 Jeans, which are American-made and are meant to reflect American values. Watch the commercial above and feel the American-ness rush over you, right down to the very last scene (a still is shown below)…

…in which our hero, after building a rocket and lighting the fuse, is running away from it as quickly as he can. It’s an unintentionally perfect metaphor for what’s becoming the great American tradition of poorly-thought out ideas that end in a fantastic explosion, whether it’s the Iraq War, making a quick buck from using crappy mortgages as filler for AAA-rated securities or Honey Boo Boo.

The voice-over in the ad says:

These were the first American blue jeans. The jeans that built America. And they were built in America. Built at a time when things were timeless. A time when you knew things would last. A time when people worked for their dreams and their dreams worked for them.

…which, The Atlantic points out, conveniently ignores the fact that Levi’s made the first blue jeans and patented them in 1873, and that 1791 Jeans were an idea taking shape in Beck’s fevered mind in 2011. “1791″ refers to the year that the Bill of Rights was ratified, and as The Atlantic also observes, ratified despite a lack of blue jeans in America that would continue for another four score and two years.

I don’t want to pee on Glenn Beck’s parade — well, I do, but I also aim to be fair: the jeans are 100% made in America. The selvage denim is woven in Greensboro, NC at Cone Denim Mills, and the final product is  cut and sewn in Kentucky at a factory established in the 1920s. Putting Americans back to work is a noble endeavour, even if the person doing so is Glenn effing Beck.

The jeans come in two cuts, classic and straight, and a pair can be yours for the 53%-friendly price of $129.99.

You can find out more by reading the announcement on Glenn Beck’s site. In the comments, the question has already come up: “Are these union made? I hope not.”

Be sure to check out 1791′s online catalog, which includes a Tumblr with the “Chore Coat” below. I love the caption: “Women in chore coats! We love that.” The only thing missing from the pic is the kitchen, which should be her natural setting:

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Here’s a good reminder to use passwords that aren’t made of names or actual words.

The joke in this poster is also a hint as to why biometrics isn’t the answer. If your password is compromised, you can make up a new one. If your fingerprint data is compromised, you can’t change your fingerprints.

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.

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Michael O’Connor Clarke was the “Good Guy Greg” of the Toronto blogosphere. He was part of the social glue that held the Toronto tech community together, even before its DemoCamp days, friend and trusted advisor to so many of us who specialized in corralling eyeballs, pixels or code and organizer of HoHoTO, a regular charity event that brings tens of thousands of much-needed dollars to the Daily Bread Food Bank. On top of that, he had an impressive resume and was a husband, father of three children and sole breadwinner of the household.

Michael was diagnosed earlier this year with esophageal cancer, an aggressive variety of the disease, and he died last night. My heart goes out to his wife Leona and his kids, Charlie, Lily and Ruairi.

I owe Michael all sorts of debts for his help throughout the years, from referring the Globe and Mail to me to giving me the best damned media training ever in a half-hour over coffee to always greeting me with a smile and a joke whenever I saw him. I plan to repay those debts by following his example as best I can.

I’ll leave you with AKMA’s words about Michael:

Michael is already a winner, a bigger winner than ’most anyone I know, and he will always be. We have a job to do, now, of holding him and his dear ones tight in an embrace, a solidarity, a real, effectual net woven by our caring and our love — but we can’t lose sight of the real goal, to which Michael gives so much time and energy. We have to build out the network of our effectual love and caring till it avails not just for people we know first-hand, but reaches even to strangers and eventually even to f*cknozzles, because none of us can stand alone against all the forces of corruption and exploitation and violence. Michael’s drawing Toronto further toward that, contributing his skills and resources and energy to the Daily Bread Food Bank; by all means let’s rally to Michael’s side, show him our respect and solidarity, and by sharing in his spirit of generosity and love, share with him in winning something vast and vital and imperishable, something that cancer can’t touch. Help Michael and his family. Make someone laugh; feed someone; give a hand to someone who needs a boost; find a way to hire someone; knit us all together more kindly, more securely. That’s the win; that’s what I have to say for Michael: a champion, an unbeatable champion.

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.

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Game box design by FancyHam.

Imagine a videogame adaptation of Blade Runner, as made for the #1 console of that time.

Then again, it might not be such a good idea:

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.

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Come to think of it, Safety Not Guaranteed would be a good movie title answer to this challenge.

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In case you don’t get the reference, this should help:

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“And Luke…stop having impure thoughts about your sister.”
Photo by Matthew Paul Turner, found via io9. Click to see the original.

I wish I’d thought up this display back when I was in Catholic school.

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I must say that The Green Mile is my favourite. I’ll give honourable mentions to Fat Albert and Blood Sport.

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Click the photo above to register for the event.

Brad Feld, managing director at Foundry Group, cofounder of TechStars, investor, entrepreneur and author of so many books with colons in the title:

• Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup,
• Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist,
• Brad Feld’s Burning Entrepreneur: How to Launch, Fund and Set Your Startup on Fire!
• and the just-published Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City

is appearing in Toronto on Tuesday, October 30that 6:00 p.m. in the Toronto Reference Library at an event being put together by the find folks at Startup North and with the help of a lot of sponsors.

The evening will feature cocktails, networking and a discussion on how to make Toronto a better place for startups. There’s a $25 registration fee for this event, which includes a copy of Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City in either dead-tree or DRM’d PDF format (the Canadian list price for the hardcover edition is $30, so it’s a pretty good deal).

William Mougayar recently wrote a review of Startup Communities in the Startup North blog, in which he explains Feld’s “Boulder Thesis”, which he describes as “a fresh framework that is based on pragmatism and lower barriers of entry” and “all about on-the-ground reality as a lever to making things happen.” Feld prefers real get-stuff-done events such as ”hackathons, New Tech Meetups, Open Coffee Clubs, Startup Weekends, and accelerators” over more-fluff-than-stuff ones like “entrepreneurial award events, periodic cocktail parties, monthly networking events, panel discussions, and open houses”, arguing that they “go deeper into the entrepreneurial stack”.

Want to attend this event? Register now!

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.

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I’ll be in Mirvish Village tonight to catch the book launch of NewTown, the new novel by my old Crazy Go Nuts University classmate A.G. Pasquella. His previous novel, Why Not a Spider Monkey Jesus?, a tale of science gone wrong and primate televangelism gone even more so, was a hoot; I expect no less from his latest offering.

Here’s a quick description of NewTown:

As The World burns: a cybernetic man-plane does the dishes. A chef muses about the best way to cook space horse. A mad scientist bemoans the loss of his robot army. Another mad scientist plots to create fireproof cows. A teenage boy teleports toward the girl of his dreams. Can any of them unlock the secrets of NewTown?

The launch takes place tonight from 7:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. at the Victory Cafe (581 Markham Street, just west and south of Bathurst Station) and will feature readings and performance from A.G. himself, along with special guests Shari Kasman, Michael Murray, Jacqueline Valencia.

For more details about the book launch, see A.G.’s article.

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Allan Gregg, pollster (he founded Decima Research, which eventually became Harris/Decima), political commentator, social researcher and former political strategist (he helped lead Brian Mulroney’s Conservatives to victory in 1984), gave a lecture at Carleton University at the opening of its new Public Affairs Building in September. It’s titled 1984 in 2012: The Assault on Reason, and it’s a worthwhile read.

This excerpt gives the main point of his lecture:

I have spent my entire professional life as a researcher, dedicated to understanding the relationship between cause and effect. And I have to tell you, I’ve begun to see some troubling trends. It seems as though our government’s use of evidence and facts as the bases of policy is declining, and in their place, dogma, whim and political expediency are on the rise. And even more troubling …. Canadians seem to be buying it.

My concern was first piqued in July 2010, when the federal cabinet announced its decision to cut the mandatory long form census and replace it with a voluntary one. The rationale for this curious decision was that asking citizens for information about things like how many bathrooms were in their homes was a needless intrusion on their privacy and liberty. One might reasonably wonder how knowledge about the number of toilets you have could enable the government to invade your privacy, but that aside, it became clear that virtually no toilet owners had ever voiced concerns that the long form census, and its toilet questions, posed this kind of threat.

Again, as someone who had used the census – both as a commercial researcher and when I worked on Parliament Hill – I knew how important these data were in identifying not just toilet counts, but shifting population trends and the changes in the quality and quantity of life of Canadians. How could you determine how many units of affordable housing were needed unless you knew the change in the number of people who qualified for affordable housing? How could you assess the appropriate costs of affordable housing unless you knew the change in the amount of disposal income available to eligible recipients?

And even creepier, why would anyone forsake these valuable insights – and the chance to make good public policy – under the pretence that rights were violated when no one ever voiced the concern that this was happening? Was this a one-off move, however misguided? Or, the canary in the mineshaft?

He points to a pattern in cuts being made by Prime Minister Harper’s government — to Statistics Canada, the Library and Archives of Canada, research (particularly environmental research) — as well as its suppression of scientific findings and what appears to be systematic attacks on evidence-based research.

This pattern, he argues, is matched by a complementary one: of dogma, fear and 1984-style misdirection, where institutions do the exact opposite of their names, all in the name of protecting the citizenry. The Ministry of Peace runs the war, the Ministry of Truth deals in propaganda and the Ministry of Love specializes in torture. He lists the names of some recent bills whose names could’ve been coined by IngSoc:

Bill C-5 is entitled “The Continuing Air Service for Passengers Act”. Substantively, it offers no such guarantee but unilaterally extended the contract of the National Automobile, Aerospace, Transport and General Workers Union of Canada and removed any prospect of a lockout or strike.

Bill C-10 is “An Act to Enact the Justice for Victims of Terrorism” and sub-titled “The Safe Streets and Communities Act”. Again forgetting for a moment that there are more victims of swimming pool drowning than terrorism, this is an Omnibus Bill which, among other things, stiffens penalties for possession of pot and builds more prisons.

Bill C-18 is called the “Marketing Freedom for Grain Farmers Act”. It dismantled the Canadian Wheat Board.

Bill C-26 boasts that it is “The Citizens Arrest and Self-Defense Act” and it is the closest we come in Canada to replicating Florida’s odious Stand Your Ground legislation.

The purpose of Bill C-30 is stated to be “The Protect Children from Internet Predators Act” and it, among other things, forces ISPs to hand over their user names to police without a warrant. When opponents protested this deliberate obfuscation, Safety Minister Vic Toews famously countered that “you are either with us or the child pornographers”.

Reason, science, knowledge and evidence, Gregg argues, are a far better basis for a society than dogma and orthodoxy. He ends his lecture as well as In Defence of Reason, a summary recently published in the Toronto Star, by stating that the way to defend reason is to participate in public discourse, and that the internet is our best tool for doing so.

Both are good reads, and worth your while:

• 1984 in 2012: The Assault on Reason
• In Defence of Reason

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TechCrunch, one of the most-read techie news sites, is holding a series of meetups far from their home base in Silicon Valley, and the first stop on their northern tour is Toronto on Monday, November 5th (which also happens to be my birthday). They’re on a mission to find new startups up here, so if you’re “a founder, a college kid, an investor, or a dreamer,” you’re going to want to be at this meetup.

The Toronto venue is the Steam Whistle Brewing Company (255 Bremner, across the street from the CN Tower, Rogers Centre and Metro Toronto Convention Centre South Building), and the event will run from 6:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m..

There are two levels of admission for the TechCrunch Toronto Meetup:

• It’s FREE if you’d just like to attend, mingle and watch local startups do their presentations.
• If you’d like to demo your startup that evening, $1,500 will put you onstage.

This event has the potential to sell out soon, so if you want to go, I suggest that you register now. See you there!

This article also appears in Global Nerdy.

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