It’s a rant, I wrote it because it bugged me.

The United States is locked in the kind of twilight disconnect that grips dying empires, is a country entranced by illusion. It spends its emotional and intellectual energy on the trivial and absurd. It is captivated by the hollow stagecraft of celebrity culture as the walls crumble. This celebrity culture giddily licenses a dark voyeurism into other people’s humiliation, pain, weakness and betrayal. Day after day, one lurid saga after another enthralls the country…despite bank collapses, wars, mounting poverty or the criminality of its financial class.

– Chris Hedges

Yesterday was “Pride Parade Day” and I got out and shot a few photos.

In general I have to say I found myself rather disappointed this year. It wasn’t a very campy event (not that the previous years were really raunchy) and it seems most of the floats were corporate ones, used to advertise themselves, still a bit mind boggling to watch this whole thing.

The funniest thing must have been the Conservative Party’s “float” though. It was one convertible with the party logo on the side, a guy at the wheel and someone else walking on the side, that’s it. The NDP showed up in force and even the Liberals managed to get a group together, but man, that Conservative attempt to appeal to this group of voters was dead before it started. I found it so sad I didn’t even bother taking a photo.

My general feeling with the event yesterday was that they are hurting badly for money, they had signs everywhere asking for donations for the parade as well as telling people it costs half a million dollars to put it on. Side effect of the economy?

Now that the fireworks are behind us, here are all four of the shows.

Personally I think Mexico won, but apparently the Judges had a different opinion, ah well, so it goes.

Enjoy the shows:

Night 1 – United States:

Night 2 – Spain:

Night 3 – Mexico:

Night 4 – China:

And today, the barges have arrived:

If you want to re-watch last years show, here they are, in all their glory:

Night 1: Canada

Night 2: South Africa

Night 2a: Mother Nature Edition

Night 3: UK

Night 4: China

One week to go.

Ah, back in the ’70s when computers still were new.

A little story made the rounds on the Internet recently which seems to imply that come Mac OS 10.7 only applications that have been approved by Apple and distributed through their app store (for OS X) would be allowed to run on the computer, so no more downloading shady software from parts of the Internet just because you want. Apple won’t let you.

As it goes with stories like these the moment it “broke” the slagging started with people on the one side saying “Evil Apple” while others were more relaxed and essentially said: “Apple would never do that”, and a few even thought of this as a good idea.

So what are the odds that Apple would do something like this? From Apple’s perspective this actually makes sense, they are already controlling the iPhone and iPod environment via the app store. Sure, you can jailbreak your iPhone and then use any kind of app on it that you want, even install a completely new OS on it, but for the majority of people what Apple approves is what they will eat.

But iPhones and iPods (and iPads now) are one thing, a Computer is something else, aren’t we all just deeply excited to write our own programs, fiddle with code and have full control over every minute part of the computer? If you say yes you fall probably in the 1% of the population that actually does this. The rest will still be shaking their heads right now.

Still though, people aren’t quite used to the idea that they have to go through their Computer vendor to get software, but if Apple would want to do this, how would they go about it?

Firstly, they have already trained a lot of people to accept the app store as the arbiter of software to find. In turn for many smaller developer it has turned into a successful distribution method, so why not expand it?

Secondly, Apple could open an Appstore for OS X, once it is open they could make it “difficult” for apps that haven’t come from the App store by simply making it annoying. Right now if you download an application from the net and start it up for the first time OS X warns you that this application was downloaded from the Internet on a given date and that OS X isn’t sure you should really run this. Now imagine they would do this everytime you start an app, added with a note that trusted applications can be found in the app store?

Three, once people are used of using the appstore to find their apps instead of the internet, force them to go there. The majority won’t care as they are already used to it anyway and the few geeks that will be pissed off can be ignored.

So what about the public backlash if Apple would be doing this? I predict slim to none. The people who care about open systems are a minority. The average computer user “eats” what he is given, they don’t scour the internet for applications or try to custom build their own. If Apple shows them a big enough carrot in the form of the appstore combined with some nice fear mongering with regard to the dangers of the internet they can get people to buy into it.

Will they do it? Who knows, Steve Jobs maybe. But if you look at the way Apple has been developing it’s products it just seems to make some kind of sense. There was a huge outcry when the iPod came with unexchangable batteries, there was a huge outcry when Apple insisted on only letting applications on the iPhone that came via the appstore and again when they did the battery thing with the new Laptops (me being one of the by the way). Has it hurt Apple? Not in the least, they are selling more devices than they ever have before and they will continue to do so.

The one thing all the Gees and Free Software advocates forget is something very simple: Most people already treat their computers like appliances, if Apple can give them that feeling on the computer while still letting them do what they want they will like it.

Every year people meet at the Vancouver Art Gallery and start smoking up to celebrate Pot and all it means to them.

Of course I was there this year, you can find a photo gallery on Flickr.

Or you can watch a slideshow I set up below the fold (on a variety of different hosting platforms).

This, btw, is my favourite shot I took:

Now, light up and enjoy the show:

420 celebration in Vancouver in 2010 from Michael Kalus on Vimeo.

Of course you can download the file directly to your computer form blip.tv

Around 18 months ago I tried cigars for the first time and found them to my liking. Back in December I got a pipe and enjoy that too. On Thursday I tried a hookah.

Now thanks to the stupid smoking laws in Vancouver you cannot smoke them with tobacco anymore, merely with some “herbs”, and no, not the fun one either.

So what is my take on it? Interesting experience, probably healthier than pounding down a few pints and clearly more relaxed, but I am not sure that really makes it worthwhile. A “session” costs $15, each tea a buck and they aren’t licensed, so no beer with your water pipe.

Still though, it has made it interesting enough for me to consider buying one of my own and then use it with tobacco.

Anybody here got one? Opinions? Ideas?