The Michael Canfield Channel

Last night's dinner

The stuff on the tomato slices is ground flax seed.

Question of the day: Did you REALLY mean to order 96 bananas???

Yes, and 8lbs of oranges! Thank you AmazonFresh!

Stuff I hate (part 1 of a series)

Finding I left kleenex in a pocket after doing laundry.

"Napoleon ... with dragons!"

"The American Revolution ... with dragons!"

"Apollo 13 ... with dragons!"

"The Holocaust ... with warlocks!"

"The Cold War ... with aliens!"

I hate video blogs

And most audio posts too. Example: Slate V. I keep seeing rss headlines for Slate articles I think I'd like to read but turn out to be videos. I don't want to load a video, or put my headphones on just to see something I may or may not be interested in. You can scan video or audio the way you scan text. I think Seth Godin blogged some time ago about this being the reason vBlogs and podcasts will not supplant text. But vblogs are popping up everywhere, and that's annoying.

Does this year feel longer to you?

With leap day successfully passed though, we are now back on schedule.

Gorging on 35 Dishes, Daily

Does Sullivan manage to post 15 - 35 times a day in part because he doesn't allow comments? I wonder. The other Atlantic.com bloggers take comments, and Yglesias post nearly as often, and takes comments to boot. One of the Atlantic bloggers (I can't find the post now) did mention that he or she mostly has to ignore comments to avoid the time sinkhole. And Sullivan's post are usually one hit: i.e. one idea, one snip, and one link max, with the occasional longer post. I find it very addictive. I probably check Sullivan more often than I check my own political blogs labeled RSS feed. So do many others, as Sullivan is on the Technorati 100. In fact, almost all the blogs I read daily are in the Technorati 100 -- which attests to how mainstream my web time-wasting is!

The what's-next-on-your-party-shuffle-playlist? post

...or the I'm-too-lazy-to-type-tonight post.

Pre-Holiday Feast: The Pleasure of Veganism

I haven't talked about it much -- not at all, really. You might read The China Study, if you are interested. Or read this.

Tags: vegan, food, holiday, vegetarian.

Design changes

Sadly, all the available fonts look crappy on Windows boxes. My advice: get a Mac, or run Ubuntu.

Away

I've been traveling in the Philippines the past couple weeks, visiting my Dad and his girlfriend here. I have a few pictures. I had a LOT of pictures, until for some strange reason I found myself on the memory card screen and managed to hit "reformat". No good, but not deadly. Clicking "Okay" after that -- now THAT was bad. So there went the record of the first half of the trip, including some interesting stuff shot in an isolated Muslim village (were the population is something like 70% children -- giving it at times the feel of a '60's sci-fi movie in which all the adults have disapeared), and also some shots catamarans crowding the ferry when we arrived in the port city of Zamboanga. We had a nice time, in that southern province, despite US State Department warnings not to travel there because of terrorist activity. Folks were nice to us, though they don't see as many foreigners there as in the rest of the country, so we prompted a lot of stares. There were armed military stationed, one per hotel to protect travelers, but that is about all. It's not exactly the Afghan hills out here. We were a couple blocks away from a McDonald's afterall.

But being on display like that gets old after awhile, so I have to remind myself that its only natural curiosity. What can you do.

Also Korean and Japanese tourists far outnumber Americans this trip, which was not true two years ago. There's your weak US dollar at work. Thanks for everything Mr. Bush. I've talked to a few Brits and Aussies here -- and the attitude toward to US is friendly, but not really surprised at the way we've handled Iraq. Most Americans I have talk to here seen pretty fed up with the States as well. This is true of the red-staters just as much as the blue-staters. I hadn't expected that, and I'm still trying to sort out the reasons for their dissatisfaction. My preliminary theory is that they are worn out by the political infighting as well. Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Rove, Cheney, Bush, etc, have so demonized the left that our public discourse has become distasteful to even their own supporters, dwindling though they may be. Though the way the Democratic congress continues to roll over to the White House, what's the point of putting them back in the majority anyway.

It would be nice not to have to go back. At least I should begin planning my own exit strategy. One thing that is especially tedious about walking down the street in, for example, Seattle, is the sheer smugness that drips of people. I notice this especially when I've returned from overseas. A little humility at home would be nice to see.

Now we are in a place called Bacolod, where we've got a chance to catch up on email, do laundry, and, since it has rained all day every day since we've arrived, it's also a reminder of Seattle.

Next is a beach town: Bacolod. If it is raining there too, we may head back to Manila early.