As if there aren’t enough things messing with my brain, the CBC reported this morning that marketers are trying high-tech tools to push the brain’s “buy button.” Now that’s invasive marketing.

Full story CBC.

And why do marketers need high-tech tools? Perhaps they are not as creative as Tod Maffin. Darren Barefoot is reporting that bloggers and podcasters can get a 30% discount from the CBC Online Store. Now that is pushing my buy button.

Visit Darrenbarefoot.com for the coupon code.

Alice Munro has been in the back of my car for a couple of months now, and today she finally left.

Ok, it wasn’t actually Alice Munro, it was a huge banner for Alice Munro’s book Runaway. I kind of liked having Alice rolling around in the back of my car, but it certainly pissed off James. I don’t think he’s a fan, but then again, she was always getting in his way. “When is this leaving?” he’d say, not so much with a question mark, more with an exclamation.

My problem was only partly procrastination. I was going to take her to the library, but then I thought, the paperback is coming out and wouldn’t it be great to give Alice to a bookstore.

So Alice has return to her natural habitat, and now my car, and my heart, are empty without her.

So far 67 attendees at Chuck Palahniuk’s book readings have fainted. They all did not attend the same reading, there’s no chicken salad food poisoning or stuffy room syndrome that can account for the dropping of audience members. And it’s not just the ladies.

Portland, Oregon: 2 men faint
Borders: 2 faint, man and woman
Seattle: 2 more men faint
San Francisco: 3 more people faint
Berkeley: 3 more [apparently the words “corn and peanuts” were particularly horrifying.]
Beverly Hills library, Los Angeles: woman’s husband faints, in the men’s bathroom another man faints and cracks his head on the sink
Columbia University: 2 students fall victim to Palahniuk’s prose
Leeds and Cambridge, Britain: more fainters …

67 people so far have fainted at readings of Chuck Palahniuk’s short story “Guts.”

Palahniuk says in a Telegraph article:
Quote: My goal was to write a new form of horror story, something based on the ordinary world, without supernatural monsters or magic. Guts, and the book that contained it, would be a trapdoor down into some place dark. A place only you could go, alone. Only books have that power.

Apparently carrots, candles, swimming pools, microwave popcorn and bowling balls are also involved, but as far as we know, not as faint-inducing as corn and peanuts.

The story is included in Palahniuk’s new novel Haunted. I suggest reading it with a medical attendant standing by.

On June 11th (4pm-10pm), Seamrippers craft collective will be hosting the MOBILIVRE-BOOKMOBILE Project at their space: the pink door at 436 West Pender, Vancouver. (Also the closing day for Seamrippers’ Mini Book Show.)

Mobilivre-Bookmobile Info, www.mobilivre.org

Project Mobilivre-Bookmobile explores the tradition of the travelling library; you know, the book van that used to come down all the rural routes? If you don’t, this is the coolest bookmobile I’ve ever seen.

The Bookmobile is a vintage 1959 Airstream.

[UPDATE: I’m having trouble with the root for this image. Have a look at the mobilivre.org site.]

The MOBILIVRE-BOOKMOBILE project is based primarily in Montreal, Canada and Philadelphia, USA. This is the fifth year of the touring exhibition of artist books, zines and independent publications.

The BOOKMOBILE visits a variety of venues in Canada and the US including community centres, schools, libraries, festivals, artist-run centres, and galleries.

Also Seamrippers is its own damn cool place.
436 West Pender, 604.689.SEAM (7326)
www.seamrippers.ca

James and I entered the world of OS X this weekend. Life is different.

I’m not good at the initial discovery stage, in technology anyway. I like someone who knows what they are doing to show me around, then I’m happy to go off exploring. My first impressions of OS X is that it is not intuitive in the ways I expect it to be and sometimes it is dumb.

Things I don’t like but know I’ll get used to:
I dislike that the sleep, restart, shut down has moved from the right-hand side to the Apple menu.
I dislike that I have no idea what application are running, where do you see that now? How do I switch from one app. to the other? [Wow, I just discovered the little triangles. Ok, but I hate the dashboard, can it go away and only be viewable when you want it? I’m sure it can. I must find that preference.]
I dislike that our monitor goes black with the words “No Input”. It seems this is the sleep mode, but the computer is actually active so why the blank? I don’t know yet.
I dislike the windows. I haven’t figured out yet the logic of where things are. When you double click on the hard drive, you get a left-hand column, then the next column shows the folders in the hard drive. Ok, what the hell are the things in the left-hand column. There’s an applications folder here, but also one in the harddrive folder. There’s the stupid house icon “James” (see below “Things I’ll always hate”), a documents folder (where does that live?), Movies, Music and Pictures.
When I put my music in the Music folder, it wasn’t accessible from iTunes. Sometimes computers make me feel dumb.

Things I’ll always hate:
On set up you define a user. James and I share the computer but I put his name as our first user. That made him Administrator, with a shortname of James. When we realized that we don’t want to be separate users, just one user, we also realized that you can never change the shortname for the Admin person. That really sucks. And why can’t you change it? You can change the user name and password. Our computer is forever James. And there’s a stupid house icon that I don’t understand.
I hate that when we started up the mini, it didn’t have Tiger already installed.

I’ll have to check in after a couple of weeks and see if I still hate these things.

Oh, and we swapped the cube for the mini. Life is different. Smaller anyway, and we have less cash.

Patricia at BookLust was flyin’ hi a couple of days ago and posted a cartoon and commentary about her most recent fear-inspired, drug-induced flying experience. Fear-inspired is modifying drug-induced. [Patricia, if you’re reading this skip the next paragraph.]

I like flying, in fact I used to skydive, but last year on a Russian airplane from Havana to Cayo Largo del Sur, I truly thought I was going to meet my end. I should have known when the booking agent asked if I was British. Apparently Brits are not allowed to fly on rusty Russian aircraft. Canadians? We’re cool with that. The 2 stewards sat on a metal folding chair at the back of the plane during take off. Well, one sat on the chair, the other sat on the lap of the chair-sitter. Twenty minutes into the flight the entire cabin filled with smoke. The stewards passed around candies. As one of 3 English-speakers on the flight, I tried to ascertain whether we were going to die. I speak ok Spanish, but the only answer I could get was don’t worry. The Italians looked worried, and the Germans were looking for the Emergency Exits. I practiced the crash position and my Hail Mary–I figured we were in a Catholic country, it couldn’t be bad to send a memo up to Himself. Turns out it was a malfunctioning air conditioner and I had to get back on for the return flight 8 hours later.

I had an English professor once who hated flying. His theory was that the human body was not meant to fly, and that airports use clever devices so that the body doesn’t know it’s going in the air. For example, you walk down a corridor, sit in a lounge, walk down another corridor and sit in the plane. You don’t really see the plane unless you purposely look out the window. There’s a baggie around the end of the corridor and the door of the plane–look, you’re not going anywhere, just down a different corridor.

“But,” he’d say. “The body knows.”

Yesterday was a big day for the sponsorship scandal. Its first convicted criminal. 18 counts of fraud, 3 withdrawn. Ottawa defrauded of $1.5-million.

The interesting thing is that the Globe and Mail notes “making financial amends won’t necessarily mean that he [Coffin] will stay out of jail.” I’m particularly curious about the “necessarily”. Is that an option? You can buy your way out of criminal status these days?

Here’s a list of conveniently appropriate Latin phrases for yesterday’s political news:
caveat emptor: let the buyer beware
in flagrante delicto: in the act of commiting a crime
persona non grata: an unwelcome person
post mortem: after death
pro bono: done without charge
quid pro quo: something for something
vox populi: the voice of the people

Reclaim your Latin. Try out a phrase.

Whenever I’m a little busy, I lose things. First my mind goes, then the physical things around me go. I don’t know where they go. If I did, they wouldn’t be lost. So for me the human factor and car keys is just one example of how I’m failing to keep things together: like my hands on my car keys.

Last night I was listening to Kim Vicente on CBC talking about his book The Human Factor: Revolutionizing the Way We Live With Technology.

I was in the car, which meant I’d found my car keys. Vicente was talking about how technology fails us. For example, car dashboards on BMWs that allow you to check the oil from inside the car but not in any sort of intuitive way.

Vicente also mentioned ways technology is fixing usability problems. For example, did you ever notice that your car key is symmetrical? You can put it in upside down. It works. I never gave that a second thought, of course when something doesn’t work, I give it a lot of thought.

Do you have any good examples of quiet technology saving the day, or examples of technology wrecking havoc. Mmmm havoc. I can feel myself returning to my nature state.