Friday Diversion

A little something to distract you from the fact that the Leafs and Raptors are currently a combined 27-games under .500. As always, here are some of the best things I've come across over the past week.



Postscript: John Updike
By Adam Gopnik

A touching and worthy tribute to the life and work of one of America's great writers:

As well as any writer ever has, he fulfilled Virginia Woolf’s dictum that the writer’s job is to get himself or herself expressed without impediments—to do so as Shakespeare and Jane Austen did, without hate or pause or protest or obvious special pleading or the thousand other ills that the embattled writer is heir to. Woolf meant not that the writer’s job was to write a lot, or to register the self with a splash, but to get his or her real experience down: all the private pains and pictures, the look on a loving parent’s face when humiliated in a school corridor, or the way girls smell in football season—to get it down and fix it there for good. Updike, to use a phrase he liked, got it all in, from snow in Greenwich Village on a fifties street to the weather in the American world.

The breadth of Updike's career is little short of mind boggling, and surely, you will not have had time to take it all in. But do yourself a favour, and get a small taste of what it means to experience all the sweetness of our common life.



Halftime on the field watching Bruce? Should be a no-brainer, right?
By Rick Reilly

Let the record show that I'm not exactly the world's biggest fan of Rick Reilly. As Deadspin's classic "On The Follies of Priviledged Sportswriting" aptly points out, Mr. Reilly "...gets to go golfing with Bill Clinton. He gets to ride in an Indy 500 race car. He gets to walk up to Sammy Sosa's locker and dare him to pee in a cup for him. He gets to do all that... And that's why he sucks."

But sometimes that priviledge is actually worth something. And in the case of Reilly's involvement in Sunday's halftime performance (as a volunteer, on-field "fan"), we were actually afforded some valuable insight. Needless to say, voluntarily missing the Superbowl so you can run out onto the field to watch a 12 minute halftime performance; no matter how glorious that performance; is not a decision that you should be looking to make any time soon.



Solar PV in Ontario: A Roadmap for Success
By CANSIA

What can I say? I dig the solar thing.

This is the Canadian Solar Industries Association's guide to how the province of Ontario can/should/will achieve 10% of its electricity demand via Solar PV by 2025. Sounds easy enough to me.



The YouTube clip of the week comes courtesy of G-Town Petey. In light of Santonio Holmes' tippie-toes endzone grab Sunday night, all of a sudden these don't seem so far fetched anymore.