John Gushue . . . Dot Dot Dot

Best Liverpool band (and Paul Weller chatting)

BBC 6's website has a bit of a debate on the best band from Liverpool, fab or otherwise.

Meanwhile, the podcast released today features a Phil Jupitus interview with Paul Weller, for whom I would vote Most Wonderful Person all over again.

Keep Vader in Christmas

This shot is from Sunday's Santa Claus parade in St. John's. We were, of course, expecting to see elves, shepherds, reindeer, snowmen and other figures stroll past us; the dark lord of the Sith was, indeed, a surprise. With stormtroopers, no less.

Central Asia backgrounder

The BBC has an interactive backgrounder on central Asia - from the Caspian Sea to China's western boundary - that is worth a look. (Thanks to Bill D. for the pointer.)

Daily Dot: Grand Trunk Railroad

On Nov. 29, 1855 - or 150 years ago, today - the Grand Trunk Railroad was completed between Montreal and Borden, Ont. (Classic rock stations everywhere ought to flick their lighters today in honour of Grand Funk.)

Down to the Wire

The Wire, the newsletter of the Canadian Association of Journalists, has posted its latest edition.

More reading lists ...

The Christian Science Monitor has weighed in with its picks for the top books of the year, in nonfiction and in fiction. Links are provided to the Monitor's reviews of each pick.

Photoshop fun, with Chretien

Rick Mercer has had success asking readers of his blog (and, this fall, viewers of Mercer Report) to play around with selected images. A shot of Jean Chretien on a scooter was, after all, too much to resist. Click here and here to see images like the one above.

Stevie Cameron

Stevie Cameron has revived her blog (she had been writing about her journey to Israel, where her husband had been working) with a post about the Airbus affair, now that the matter appears to have been exhausted in the courts. (In the interests of disclosure, I did a little footwork for Stevie Cameron and her coauthor, Harvey Cashore, for their 2001 book The Last Amigo.)

Family choices

CBC in Nova Scotia is rolling out a series starting today on parenting. Check out this page for a quiz to test your knowledge of parental pressures, etc.

Aaaarrrghh!

The "Wilhelm scream" is one of the best inside jokes in the movie business -- although it's hardly "inside," as millions of people have likely been told about how a single sound effect (a bone-chilling scream) has made its way into dozens of movies and TV shows since it was recorded in 1951.

Click here to read about its curious history.

Daily Dot: Mount Cashel

On Nov. 27, 1989, the Congregation of Irish Christian Brothers announced it would close the Mount Cashel Orphanage, which at that point was in the midst of a growing scandal about sexual abuse at the St. John's institution. Click here to hear an interview from that day between Michael Enright of CBC Radio's As It Happens and Chris Decker, the acting minister of social services. As I recall, the building was demolished in 1990. The site is now the location of a Sobeys supermarket, and another part of the land was turned to the Howley Estates subdivision.

Games for penguins and politicians alike

[Surf's Up, as published in The Telegram, on Friday, Nov. 25, 2005. Click here to read recent Surf's Up columns as a group.]

Penguins and politics, oh my … and museums you can visit without getting up from your chair. All that and more, in less time than it will take you to make a cup of coffee.

Let's get started …

March of the Penguins Game

Even if you haven't seen The March of the Penguins - the hit documentary about penguins managing to survive in Antarctica, in the face of an array of challenges - you might like this game. It sets you up as a father penguin; while your mate has gone off to fish, you must protect your egg from the elements, other penguins that collide with you, scavengers, rocks, cracks in the ice, and so on. It's an easy game to pick up, and one kids will like as much as adults.

Nomination Watch

With election talk now fully engaged, this is a place that political operatives and junkies may want to visit once more. (It was a popular watering hole during the 2004 election.) The last few days have been busy enough, but expect things to heat up even more in the next couple of days.

Google logos

A long-running wink from Google has been its playful (and occasionally sombre) retooling of its logo for holidays and special occasions, including anniversaries of important dates and births of folks like Albert Einstein.

Museum of Online Museums

Here's one for a rainy afternoon: a list of museums that have something to offer for those who - for reasons of distance or budget - cannot get to the real thing. Within minutes, without leaving your chair, you can look at the paintings of Vincent van Gogh, take a crash course in Bauhaus design, and learn about the history of advertising. Some of the world's premier museums and galleries are present here; so too are some well-off-the-beaten-track sites, such as one that only collects images of candy cigarettes.

Pacific Palate

B.C-based writer and broadcaster Don Genova has made food writing his niche, and Pacific Palate is where his interests run rampant. (He's been writing about food regularly for CBC Radio.) Apart from articles and features, you can listen to recent podcasts, in which you'll meet a barbecue genius, a well-known food editor, an obesity expert and many others.

Shakespeare Quiz

Brush up your Shakespeare, start quoting him now … or at least take this quiz via the BBC's online magazine.

Internet Frog

How fast is your Internet connection? Here's a quick way to find out. Log on to Internet Frog and check the "speed test" button. Within moments, you'll have a good indication - with benchmarks provided for comparison's sake.

Canada's Time Zones

Our clocks fell back an hour several weeks ago, but it's still a good time to learn how our time zones (including our half-hour difference here in Newfoundland, and parts of Labrador) work.

Poker Chips

Poker seems to be more popular now than it's ever been. Here's a site devoted to a collection of chips collected at casinos hither and yon.

Virtual Card Collections

Many sports fans get that glassy-eyed look when they see a valuable card of a legendary baseball player; you won't find the real thing here, but you will see some extraordinary images of sometimes-whole collections of sporting card lines.

Copyscape

Copyscape says it can detect plagiarism - of your own work. So, out of curiosity, I plugged in the address of my blog, hit enter, and sat back to see what would happen. As it turned out, the suspects were all items that I had quoted (with attribution, of course) and linked to.

John Gushue is a news writer for CBC.ca in St. John's. E-mail: surf @ thetelegram.com.

Election predictor

Political junkies - heck, many voters, even of the casual variety - may be interested in a tool called Election Predictor from Hill & Knowlton. Play around with variables and see how seat counts can change.

Via Liam O'Brien.

Merry Christmas, Gramps...

Better check your list twice for the more senior recipients on your list. From the Scotsman:

THE over-50s are fed up ripping open their Christmas presents to find the same old boring scented candles, slippers and socks every year.

Research released yesterday says the situation is so bad that some entrepreneurial older people resell their gifts at car boot sales while others recycle them in an attempt to palm them off on unsuspecting friends and family.

Tech toys

Time magazine has its tech toys for Christmas, including a portable monitor that really does have the look and feel of a child's toy.

Poll: Black's citizenship

A diversion for your weekend: the witty Brett Lamb has a satirical poll on what Conrad Black will need to do for Canadian citizenship.

Daily Dot: Rich Little

On Nov. 26, 1938, Rich Little was born. Little was a full-fledged celebrity - and a fixture on television specials, talk shows, roasts and the like - while I was growing up. His style of comedy was considered a bit dated by the time Saturday Night Live rolled along, but he's always made me chuckle. The image on the right, of course, is not actually Richard Nixon; poke around Little's site to see his takes on other U.S. presidents and various celebrities.

NYT/ T.O.

Mr. Doskoch reports that the Globe's presses will be rolling off copies of the New York Times first thing. I subscribe to the Sunday NYT, which the Globe distributes, but being off the beaten path, I get it Monday morning. So, I envy any news junkie who gets their Times hit in a more timely way.

Blog awards, redux

The first round of voting on the Canadian Blog Awards is open until Wednesday. A short list will then be determined, and voting on that will kick into gear.

100 notable books

The New York Times has its list of the 100 best books - at least, among the ones it's reviewed - of the past year. (I'm curious as to why the publication date says Dec. 4, 2005.)

The view from abroad

It's always interesting to read articles about Canadian affairs written for foreign consumption. (Aside from occasionally getting things spectacularly wrong, these pieces often serve as a great precis.) Today's entry: Reuters' roundup of Paul Martin's pre-election tangles.

Pop quiz

Know your news? A quiz of the week's news went online earlier today at cbc.ca.

Black Friday

It's Black Friday - the day after Thanksgiving in the U.S., the biggest retail day of the year, and so named because many retailers feel they stop operating in the red and move into the profitable side of the ledger.

Roll tape, mop brow

NBC's coverage of the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade went astray Thursday when it rolled tape of last year's parade instead of providing live coverage of an M&M balloon that crashed into a pole, injuring two:

At 11:47 a.m., as an 11-year-old girl and her 26-year-old sister were being treated for injuries, the parade's on-air announcers - Katie Couric, Matt Lauer and Al Roker - kept up their light-hearted repartee from Herald Square, where the parade ends.

"Will these classic candymen get out of this delicious dilemma?" Mr. Roker asked, referring not to the accident but to the premise of the attraction, a red M&M's attempt to save his yellow counterpart, who had been blown from the basket of a hot-air balloon.

Daily Dot: Pepper spray

Hard to believe, but eight years have passed that infamous incident involving pepper spray at a demonstration at the APEC summit in Vancouver. Similarly, Jean Chrétien's off-the-cuff remark - "For me, pepper, I put it on my plate" - appears set to be one of the phrases for which he will be remembered.

The image at right is the cover of a University of British Columbia Press book that examined the demonstrations.