E-Filler Archives

You may be a closet homosexual (or at least have homosexual urges) who hides behind outrageous bigotry if...

You say things like... "I am not gay. I've never been gay... I did nothing wrong at the Minneapolis airport."

Check out why the far right wants to oust their own republican senator here.

To anyone who read the headlines but was too lazy to read the story (I did...and I'm glad they answered the question): Coal does not provide any nutritional value. Now we know.

Admittedly it's no North Korea, but it is pretty cool. Any SimCity fan will probably recognize the arcology, an awesome, big, self-contained, super-big community. Check this out:

In the foreground you can see the awesome Kowloon Walled City. Between 1898 and 1997, Hong Kong was under British rule. Well, almost. All of Hong Kong except a very small military fort called Kowloon. China was allowed to maintain control over the fort so long as they didn't interfere with Britain's rule over the rest of Hong Kong. Over the next hundred years, people started moving in.

For a bit of perspective:

	SkyDome/Rogers Centre	Kowloon Walled City
area	5.14 hectares (source)	2.6 hectares
seating capacity/population	46374 (football)	50000

That's right, more people lived in an area half the size of the SkyDome than the SkyDome can seat. That number of 50000 (probably an estimate) came in the mid-80s, just before the Chinese and British mutually decided to demolish the city. It was widely regarded as the densest urban area in the world. At that point, Kowloon Walled City was a pretty well self-contained place, but the Chinese and British feared that their standard of living was slipping behind the rest of Hong Kong.

The city probably could have been even more dense, if not for a restriction disallowing them from building buildings taller than 14 storeys (due to a nearby airport). The buildings in the city were not built by architects or engineers, but rather grew organically, with one building melding into the next, forming an ad hoc patchwork of staircases and winding hallways.

Check out this page for a cross-section of part of the city.

Remember the HTML "blink" and "marquee" tags from back in the day? It seemed like every site on Geocities couldn't get enough...

Would you believe I was able to find a site, updated in 2007, that still uses BOTH these tags? Behold...the UWO Computer Store!

Sadly, a young boy (aged 9 I think) had to have his foot amputated after trying to hop a moving train in Calgary. I don't want to make light of a tragic situation, but I can't believe his mother's comments:

"I would like to see the railroads removed and I don't care how much it would cost the government to do that."

I find her opinion sadly typically of people today: everything is someone else's fault.

Since Mike B. is the only person in the world who dreams about this stuff, maybe he can give us the scoop on the up and coming electoral reform referendum in Ontario. So, Mike, what are the ups and downs of each system? (I tried to read it but got confused, then lost interest, then realized I was at work and probably should do this on my own time...)