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Gary Coons, North Coast MLA has a new website, where he publishes his press releases, op-eds, and other pieces of public information. Worthy of a visit. You can subscribe to the mailing list as well, which will let you know when something new has been posted.

She has a weird superstition about removing the tags on luggage. This tag will probably stay on the bag until she’s checking in for the next flight in a month or two.

Is this superstition from a movie?

• IBM Slides
  (tags: design cool funny photography humor ibm)

Wordpress has a neat iPhone 2.0 app. So if you’re a nerd like me you can take a photo from your phone and post it directly to your wordpress blog. This post is an example.

If you’ve watched the BBC kids’s show “In The Night Garden,” you’ll recognize the video below:

Warning: it’s a bit freaky unless you’re a toddler I guess it must make sense to them.

You’ll notice that one of the characters on the show is a black doll named “Upsy Daisy” — she has awesome colourful hair and dances around quite a bit.

I looked for a place to order a set of In The Night Garden toys for Xavier, and I found a UK site that would ship them to Canada. Well now they are starting to appear in Canadian stores, such as Wal-Mart and Zellers (and presumably other toy stores as well).

Well, here’s the weird thing. The Canadian version of Upsy Daisy is white. Here’s a shot from the local Zellers:

Compare that to this version:

and a couple of screenshots from the TV show:

That second screenshot is telling, because you can see that she’s a lot darker than Makka Pakka. Yet in the Canadian doll version, she’s the same colour.

So what’s going on here? Did they think that a black doll wouldn’t sell in Canada (or is it North America?) Or is just hard to find the right colour material to make a black doll?

If you do an Google image search: http://images.google.com/images?q=upsy%20daisy you’ll find both black and white dolls. Here’s a UK store selling a black one: http://www.tishtashtoys.com/image.htm?tttid=MG002