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This is the “If your birthday is today” horoscope from The Globe & Mail:

The cosmic picture on your birthday warns that time is limited and if you don’t get your act together soon you may not get another chance.

What went before was good experience, but what happens next is up to you. Set yourself a target and reach for it each and every day. You can make it happen.

I can’t handle the pressure!

That Loonie just keeps getting bigger. The Big Loonie - Echo Bay, Ontario

Last week I charged (accidently) what turned out to be a Canadian currency charge to a US credit card. It came dangerously close to being more in US$ than it was in Canadian $ (after taking into accounts the bank spread and the “foreign exchange fee”. 

Well today it finally happened. I deposited a US$ cheque (I guess that would be a “check” then) into my Canadian account here in Vancouver and even though there was no fee (just the exchange rate spread between the buy and sell rate) I got less in CDN$ than the cheque was written for in US$ (by 26 cents!).

Does that mean in a few months will be going down across the border and lording it over our southern neighbors and saying “Your country is just so darn cheap!”?

It’s easy to get wrapped up in one’s own little circle and not get ”out of the box” when it comes to activities in your own city. So I try and make an effort to not just stay in the West End and do the usual things (or complain about the usual events like the Fireworks Festival). And to share this info with friends.

In the past I’ve posted about The World Naked Bike Ride, Wreck Beach Butoh, The Festival of India and other events that are fun but sometimes get overlooked (how does one keep track? Actually this is one of my favourite uses of Facebook, finding out what cool events my friends are going to–in this way I discovered Bent for example).

Anyway pretty much all those events have already happened this year but there’s one last summer event I know of yet to come which I’ve thought was a lot of fun in past years: The Latin Summer Fest at Trout Lake Park. Takes place this Sunday August 19th from 11am to 7pm. The festival includes a lot of food (no, not mini-donuts and the usual fairground schlock, but local latin businesses and church groups making authentic stuff), music all day and other stuff to see and do.

Click for the animated us…

So, another big blogging gap for me. I was periodically inclined to blog about various things that have happened, like my trip to Yukon/Alaska, but apparently not inclined enough to actually do it. But if there’s one thing that’s been stirring my passions recently, it’s the movie “Once.” And imagine my delight to find that NPR:All Songs Considered just offered a podcast of a concert by the stars/musicians of the movie, Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova. It’s a 90-minute concert from July 27, full of wonderful music, although I did find the hooting and hollering from the crowd a bit annoying. But there are lots of great moments, and this way you don’t have to buy the CD (which I did as well). The same show podcasted a concert by Travis on July 17, close to two-hours long, and I recommend that one too… they’re a great Scottish band.

Also from NPR, I discovered their NPR: Book Tour show, which seems to be similar to the All Songs show in that it’s just simulcasting events, in this case talks and readings from authors. I just loved the July 16 show: Trevor Corson talks about ‘The Zen of Fish.’ He talks a little about his book, but what was fascinating is that he spends most of the show talking about the history of sushi and the customs around it. Apparently modern-day sushi is just a fluke of history, and a recent one at that. This wasn’t a subject I thought I’d be particularly interested in but I was riveted, and found myself trotting out all sorts of interesting tidbits at a dinner party the night I listened to it.

Next, I have a show from ABC (Australian BC) called the Law Report, which is one of my favourites from them. They discuss interesting legal issues and cases of the day in Australia, and I find it fascinating to hear about the legal complexities and questions of specific cases, even if they are Australian. But this week most of the show was devoted to the case of Dr Mohamed Haneef, the Indian doctor who was arrested in Australia a few weeks ago, the day after the bombings of the Glasgow airport, in relation to that attack. It has become a huge political issue in Australia, as the government interfered with the legal process to intern the man, even when the courts released him. And since the show aired on July 24, he has been exonerated completely with all charges dropped and mistakes in the process admitted. Every time I go to the ABC news website it is still the leading story. It is fascinating, in a chilling way, to hear his story, and scary to hear how guilt can now be derived through association (in this case, his cousin in Britain was involved in the Glasgow attack).

Finally, the BBC World Service show Documentary Archive offers various documentaries to listen to, and they’ve just started a series called “Coming Out,” which in their blurb says it “explores what it is like to be gay and asks why some societies are more tolerant than others.” It’s only a two-part show, but the first part from Jamaica was so chilling. I’m looking forward to the second part from South Africa.

That’s enough writing. And Glen Hansard is just singing “Leave,” which causes me to have to close my eyes and sing along.

I’m enroute, via bicycle, today from Nanaimo to Comox, BC. About 120km. Except here I find myself in a cute cafe, The Bean Counter, in Bowser, BC some 50km short of my goal and on my 2nd Americano. I should be zooming down the Island Highway with abandon. Instead I write my first post from my Pocket PC. Soon I will run out of excuses and this post will have to be done. Pictures to follow.

My very creative niece Morgan did this comic. My brother comes off as an evil scheming alien. Hmmm. He and I kinda look alike. Does my head look like that too?

It was created with Comic Life from Plasq.

It’s funny, I work my ass off on my Internet sites (lately 95% of the work has been going into www.PuertoViejoSatellite.com which has become the top portal, if I do say so myself, for the Costa Rican Caribbean) and I’m very impressed with the results both in terms of the content and the traffic which is growing very robustly.

But then I compare it to the traffic on this blog. This neglected blog which Mark and I are doing well if we manage a post a week. But despite this, the traffic is exploding. This is the traffic graph:

That said, I clearly don’t know who the vast majority of you 8,000-odd visitors so far in June are. But a look at my statistics to find the top search terms that get to my site reveals some clues, some very entertaining clues:

bike protest vancouver
Ok, this one is fair enough I have actually written about this a fair bit and today thousands of cyclists took to the streets of Vancouver to celebrate Critical Mass during Bike Month. And actually there are lots of variations on this theme in my search keywords.

naked
You found my site from searching for naked??? How many pages of search results did you have to scroll through before I came up. I can’t even imagine.

naked girls
gay porn stars
santa barbara cruisy
brazilian bikini waxes in santa barbara
sex vacations costa rico
maxi mounds photo
world of girls
japanese naked
gringo cum in costa rica
naked again
Yes, all these keywords were used to find dougdo.com. Proving that sex sells I suppose. Even if we barely write about sex.

vancouver part time gelato jobs
Finally there was this one…I like this one. I have no idea how I could’ve possibly helped but good luck!

There’s a new utility called Gravatar (Globally Recognized Avatar) on the web which attaches a profile photo to any gravatar registered user when they make a comment on any gravatar-enabled blog (like this one now!)

All you do is enter your email address and then assign a profile image to it. When you use that email address to leave a comment on a blog site, it goes to the Gravatar site and pulls the image related to that email address. In that way, you don’t even have to be registered on the site you’re leaving the comment on and your pic still comes up!

 Go ahead–register and then leave a comment here. You’ll see how it works.

If you want this on your own blog, there are implementation instructions for many different blogging platforms on the Gravatar site, including, of course for Wordpress.

It does require you to download the plug-in and then change your the page in your blog theme which displays comments (for this theme, it’s the comments theme file obviously enough) and add the code to display the profile image in the appropriate place. Here’s what mine looks like if you want a reference example:

<img src="<?php gravatar("R", 48, "http://dougdo.com/images/noprofilepic.jpg")
?>" alt="<?php comment_author() ?> (No profile image? Get yours at gravatar.com)"
align="left" hspace="3">

Thanks to IanMack who introduced me to this when I read about it on BraveNewTraveler (and who does a better job of explaining it there as well).

The Canadian media are sometimes accused of being parochial in their news coverage, covering excessively the one Canadian killed in a traffic incident in Mexico over the way bigger story for example.

But then there are those moments when we get a “Can you blame us?” moment. Where we are completely ignored in the global media. Take this story about global environmental health for example. Here’s the story as it was reported by Grist.org:

OK, We’re Moving to Iceland
World Health Organization ranks countries’ environmental health

To those who think environmentalism is all about prioritizing starfish over humans, read on: Cleaning up the globe’s air and water could save 13 million lives every year, according to the World Health Organization. Yesterday, WHO released a country-by-country analysis of health issues in 192 nations, factoring in agricultural methods, noise pollution, workplace hazards, climate change, and more. In 23 countries, more than 10 percent of deaths could be traced to just two fixable factors: unsafe water and indoor air pollution from cooking fires. Poverty-stricken Angola, Burkina Faso, Mali, and Afghanistan fared the worst in the rankings, but environmental health is of course an issue in developed countries too; the report indicated that 1.8 million lives could be saved annually in 53 countries around Europe if a healthy environment was prioritized. Iceland and Israel keep their people the healthiest, according to WHO, followed by Italy, Germany, Spain, France, Britain, and the U.S.

straight to the source: International Herald Tribune, Associated Press, 13 Jun 2007

straight to the source: Yahoo! News, Agence France-Presse, 13 Jun 2007

straight to the source: China View, Xinhua, Lin Li, 13 Jun 2007

If you read this article, you’d assume that Canada was somewhere below the Americans in the rankings of countries affected by global environmental health issues. Even if you follow the links to find out more, you’d still think that might be true. Here, for example is how the Yahoo News story writes that final sentence:

The best rated were Iceland and Israel with a score of 14 years per 1,000, ahead of Italy (16), Germany, Spain and France (17), Britain (18) and the United States (19).

The other stories Grist links do not mention the rankings of developed nations at all nor did the original press release from the World Health Organization. So clearly Grist has just rewritten this paragraph from Yahoo; in a way that makes it even more misleading.

So what’s the truth on this? Well if you go to the WHO site and actually look at the country reports (WHO did not publish a ranked list on their site, only alphabetical ones), you’ll find that Canada received a score of 16 putting it just behind the world leaders Iceland and Israel and ahead of Germany, Spain, France, Britain and the United States.

What’s even worse is that sometimes Canadian news sources will pick up these wire stories without even doing the 10 minutes of research needed to satisfy Canadians curiosity. In this case, I could only find one Canadian outlet picking up this AP wire story (Canoe.ca) and they didn’t mention Canada’s ranking at all.

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