Song of the Week FAIL Vol. 57

BAH. Song of the Week last week was actually up for two weeks. I forgot.

This week (or two, or month, as the case may turn out to be) the song is My Moon My Man by Leslie Feist or just Feist as she is usually known as. She is Canadian, and no, she's not good because she was on an iPod commercial, she was on the commercial because she's amazing.

My cousin says I look like her. Calls me Feist sometimes. I suppose maybe we have a similar chin. And we both have the bangs thing going on in brownish hair. And, of course, I can frequently be found at airports, dancing on those moving conveyor belt sidewalk thingers (this would make sense to you if you had've clicked the previous link and watched her video).

Those things would be great if they weren't so fun to fool around on. I mean, their fun factor totally outweighs the practical side of them. I'll be on one, going forward in the proper direction, and I'll suddenly get the unoverridable urge to dash in the opposite direction. To run off against the current of groved metal and people and hand luggage and children starring down at their feet in wonder as they take steps that carry them unnaturally far forward. And then I stop abruptly and allow the walkway to take be backward a few feet, then start running again. So I don't end up getting anywhere faster. I don't really get anywhere.

They are just so gosh darn amusing.

Canada Writes.

O Canadian literature. The beloved Margaret Laurence. The other Margaret, the Atwood one. W.O. Mitchell (I always say it as Whooooa Mitchell in my head. And out loud. I can't control it). Lucy Maud Montgomery, who ensured that the little island of Prince Edward will forever get a steady stream of Japanese tourists making the pilgrimage there to see the real house of the fake red headed girl in the fake town of Avonlea, in the real town of Cavendish..... incidentally, all she succeeded in doing for me was ensure that the main character was so bloody annoying that I couldn't force myself to finish reading the series, I got to maybe book number six and thought "goddam. Anne is having offspring, the stupidity is multiplying. Must stop."

..... but I digress.

So yes. Canadian writing has fans all over the world. But one little piece of Canadian work is garnering some unexpected attention for just who seems to be a fan of it. You see, deep in the vaults of the CIA, live the assholes who devise torture methodes, and they have a copy of Transport Canada's 92 page epic Survival in Cold Waters: Staying Alive.

It is a piece of writing generally used by folks inclined to go boating out in the frigid waters that hug our shores to, you know, stay alive and such, should the ocean fancy jumping up into their boat, or their boat fancy diving into the sea. But the CIA, they take the use of this study a bit farther and use it to help the doctors gauge how much pain they can put prisoners through with the use of cold water dousing, without killing them.

I do not even know where to begin pointing out the things wrong with that sentence.

First of all, using a SURVIVAL guide as a means to inflict maximum pain on a human being? It's a tad disgusting. Sure it is out there for general use, but this is never what it was intended for. A person is supposed to learn from that guide how to survive, escape a disaster in cold water with their life, preserve themselves while trying to minimize the pain they experience. But the CIA turned it into a guide to pain, a goal of severe trauma with a side plan of keeping the prisoner alive.

Second, what kind of doctor takes part in torture? Certainly one who has no business calling themselves a doctor. Despicable.

A survival guide turned into a torture guide.

I think I'm going to go bash my head against a wall for a bit.


Well, at least I now know what to do with my copy of Anne of Green Gables: use it to beat the shit out of people. But you know, not 'til they're dead, just until they're thoroughly annoyed.

Who is John Galt?

I had meatballs for lunch today.

Also.

Work today involved a lot of sitting and starring at a solution whilst it sorted itself out through a column of silica gel and drrrriiiiiiippppped ever so slowly into an Erlenmeyer flask (Invented by that guy over there to the right, Emil Erlenmeyer in 1861. Not to be confused with Oscar Mayer, who made a hotdog around then that still looks and tastes exactly the same). Erlenmeyer flllask. Erlenmeyer flaaaaask. I think that might be in my top ten of favourite word combinations. I could say it maybe 72 consecutive times without getting tired of saying it.

Anywho, I would pour the solution was that I was working into the top of the glass column, and as the liquid trickled through the tube, getting itself all pure and what not, I had a lot of time to do nothing. So instead of doing nothing, I read Atlas Shrugged. And I'm only about 213 pages in, so don't nobody go spoiling it for me.

It's wierd. I can't read a whole lot of that book in one sitting - it's just too depressing and frustrating to immerse myself in for too long - but when I'm not reading it, all I do is think about it. Or change the Erlenmeyer flask under the column. I feel like I've reached the climax of the story, but I have about 80% of the book to go. Every character is either a detestable piece of scum dredged from the bowels of the Valley of the Severely Dim, or an intelligent, ambitious person, a prodigy in their field of work, and therefore despised by the aforementioned scums.

I'm still waiting for the part when Atlas finally shrugs and the world goes tumbling off his shoulders and shatters on the museum floor. I'm sure it happens soon.

But. I don't know what to make of this book. Philosophy like this makes one part of my brain scream and another part shoot into thinking overdrive. It's intriguing. It's riveting. But every so often I have to stop and just puzzle over humanity. Could we really end up like that? Is society destined to become a giant contradiction of itself? Can humans as a collective sink to such loathsome levels that they especially hate themselves?

Who is John Galt?

Shut up brain, just shut up.





Side, mostly unrelated, note: If you google john galt erlenmeyer meatballs, this post comes up first. Woohoot.

Update 25/08/09: Not anymore. Fuck.

Another Great Victory for Vikings: Spam.

I've never had spam, but I'm thinking of trying the Spam, spam, spam, baked beans, spam, spam, and spam.

SQUIRREL!

This made the front page of the National Post, this past Friday.

Straight from the Too Damn Cute files comes this inadvertent snapshot.

It's not exactly news I'd expect on the front page, but it's definitely cuter than Stephen Harper, or some other stupid thing that might make the national newspaper's cover.

Happy Woodstock.

Woodstock was occurring exactly right now 40 years ago. How I wish I had have been alive.

In honour of the three day, peaceful, talent racked hippie-fest, Song of the Week goes to Jefferson Airplane's White Rabbit, a eerie sounding song dominated by Grace Slick's powerful vocals issuing blatant LSD references. One of my favourite songs. Go ask Alice.

Oddly enough, this song made it onto my Canadian History exam as one of the terms we had to define. It's not Canadian, but the culture of the 60s permeated the Canadian collective, so it was relevant. Plus my Can Hist prof is just that amazing. I, you might guess, had no trouble defining it. The trouble came later in the exam when I was trying to think of who exactly Joseph Howe was and I kept imagining him as a hookah smoking caterpillar.

Anyways, another song I ought to mention is Woodstock by Joni Mitchell. The reason the song probably sounds so sad is because Joni wasn't actually there. At the insistence of her manager, she played a different gig whilst Woodstock went on without her. Poor thing.

Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young (a band that did, in fact, perform on the hallowed grounds of Yasgur's farm) did a cover of this song. It's also super sweet.


Right well, peace.

wait a minute.....WHO MADE THIS BIG MESS!??!

My uncle and aunt and their three kids are coming from St. Catharines to visit for the weekend. So I need to go home and madly clean my room, since I possibly will have one or two cousins sleeping on my floor. And currently, there isn't room to walk on it, much less sleep there. There isn't really room on my bed either, but I don't mind. I am small.

I really don't understand how I allow the crap in my room to take over the floor like that. It's skillfull, really. I believe I learned these skills at an early age. It wasn't my fault. Good thing I also learned how to clean efficiently, by stuffing things under cushions and such.

Crazy Canadian televison programs.

...I love the Big Comfy Couch. But it did give me delusions as to how fast it was possible to clean a room. I don't think I noticed as a child that they sped up her movement during the 10 Second Tidy.

I used to be able to do this though. O man I want one of those rugs.

By the way, my uncle who is coming commonly refers to coffee as the devil's drink. So he should be a positive influence in my (failing miserably) attempt to ditch the juice.

I confess

Someone brought a great honkin'* slice of chocolate cake to work for lunch and put it in the fridge.

Now that's a gamble.

If I still ate gluten, that shit would have been gone five minutes ago.




*That felt wierd to type. I don't think I'll ever use that word again.

I quit.

I think I am going to try quitting coffee. Or at least minimize my intake. I will probably feel healthier, maybe even live a few extra years longer.

But I'll probably be asleep for those extra years.

Tour de Sorebutt

So I have done the MS Bike Tour! It is finished, and I am left with a complementary cycling jersey, a Bike Tour t-shirt, and a very very sore butt. That's what 150 km of cycling gets you (and of course, a great sense of accomplishment and happiness that I survived, and helped out with a cause very dear to me).

It felt even worse than the time I did a spinning class and I thought for sure that nine months later I would have stationary bicycle babies. With eyes in the handlebars.

I hate spinning classes.

Anyway, I discovered that the area between Ottawa and Kemptville - where we slept the night before heading back to Ottawa - mainly consists of corn and cows with long, straight roads dividing them. Every so often there would be a beautiful, dilapidated barn surrounded by crumbling silos and bails of half eaten hay being munched on by pinto horses that we could gaze at for a few seconds before it faded away behind us..... but there was mostly corn.

We'd be on the same road for 5 km or something and there would be corn the whole way. Then finally we turned a corner annnnd..... more corn. O then a cow farm - cue the stench (honestly, I could have sworn I was breathing in cows, that's how potent their smell is). Then corn. Then corn. Corn.

So it made me wonder, where the fuck does all this corn go? We must ship it all away. I mean, nobody in all of Ottawa should be going hungry when there is about a bizillion square kilometres of corn growing all around the city. Really.

So, that's all.


O also, song of the week is Fashionable People by Joel Plaskett, a song which I might have linked already in a previous post, but no matter, it is a marvy song.

Song of the week

Rainy Day Women - Bob Dylan

It won't stop raining here. Well, actually today it didn't.

So this song seemed like it had the right title for my mood as well as the weather.

Vikings A Go Go

Where do I wish I was right now? Oddly enough, Manitoba. At the Icelandic Festival of Manitoba. Because, yes, you guessed it, there is a Viking Village. And people reenacting vikingness. And one of the best things is that the village in in a town called Gimli. Named after the dwarf in Lord of the Rings. Well, not really, but if I lived there, that's what I'd tell people.

It's taking place right now. I'm thinking one year I'll go be a Viking in this festival. I think I'd look very menacing and brutal as a Viking. And gross, because I bet it's part of the costume to have bits of chicken and human fingernails stuck in your beard. Although the discovery of 51 headless Viking bodies in a pit in England has lead me to believe that the Saxons found the Viking look offensive.

I do not want to get my head chopped off. No sir.

Speaking of Manitoba, I've never been to the west of Canada. Nowhere west-er than Ontario. But, with Newfoundland visited, I've covered all the eastern provinces. I've even been to the most easterly point in all of North America, called Cape Spear.

You know, other than the irksome fact that I was with my osodumb parents and my insane brothers every waking and not waking moment of my time in Newfoundland, it was the most perfect time ever. But I will never go there with them again. That was agonizing.

Here is a picture of a puffin. I took about fifty seven pictures of this particular one. They are just too damn cute.

Here is a picture of a post office in a...um.... very special town. (Notice the name on the sign. Click to enlarge)Ya, it's actually named Dildo. After a captain. The captain of a vessel full of seamen.

Here is an iceberg. We took a boat through a bunch of them, and I confess I said "ICEBERG, STRAIGHT AHEAD!" about 23 times. With the accent and all. There were tourists from England on the boat. Not sure whether they were more impressed by that, or my multiple renditions of "I'm on a Boat, Muthafucka." This one, while not from Dildo, was apparently inspired by one.
Sciencey side note about Icebergs: They aren't actually white. When they froze 10 000 years ago, they froze with air bubbles, and they reflect white light. So when you get up right close to one, it sizzles, because it's melting and the air bubbles are going into the water. Also, they taste very fresh.

This is a newfie speedbumpus, or a moose. On the island, there are something ridiculous like 100 000 of them things. They are so numerous and so stupid that when driving you have to constantly be on the lookout for them because they are apt to amble onto the highway and stare at you whilst you accordion your car against their massive bodies.
The locals would stare at us in horror when we told them we planned to drive through the night to our next stop..... as though night driving means certain death by moose.

This is an underwater graveyard. The blue buoys are the men and the white ones are the women.Nah, just kidding. It's actually a muscle farm. I ate a muscle while I as there that had a pearl in it.

So there you go, so pics of Newfoundland. It takes too long to upload them, so I'm gonna stop now. But there are some others like one of my fifteen year old brother frolicking among sheep that always give me a good chuckle.