Clovers In The Atmosphere

merry christmas, i'm a sellout, and i'm moving

2007-12-21T20:52:00.000-05:00

hi folks.
so i got an office job which eats all of my time. I am also beginning as a contributor on commonsensedancing. to be frank, it is a much more youtube-based, boy-centric blog than this one. so me and my self-seriousness may crash and burn. but keep an eye out.

if you dont want ot see manda bala or have already seen it

2007-09-17T14:18:00.000-04:00

then go to a theater with manda bala, buy a ticket for manda bala, and go see whatever other movie you and yours want to see (3:10 to yuma is quite good). the theater doesn't care. it isn't like you are 15 trying to get inot an R rated film and they still get their money. and manda bala needs the ticket sales so that it can stay in theaters long enough for people to hear about it. it is amazing how difficult it is to get people to see a movie that has no advertising budget.

manda bala

2007-09-15T19:29:00.000-04:00

I am going to use my space and diminished readership to incite you to go see "manda bala." it is a movie about corruption, income inequality, and violence in brazil. it was assistant directed and produced by a childhood friend of mine. It was directed by a friend. it won best cinematography and a grand jury prize at sundance this year. it is playing in most major cities. I waited to see it before telling you all to spend your money and time to go, but I can say definitively that it is excellent and you should go. so, go.

amazing things learned about Ione Sky

2007-08-31T16:02:00.000-04:00

1. name is pronounced "eye-oh-nee".

2. is the daughter of Donovan ("season of the witch" is amazing) and Enid Karl. that means her dad wrote "mellow yellow", now that has adolescent embarrassment written all over it

3. she was married to beastie boy adam horovitz, but not anymore.

2007-08-29T12:21:00.001-04:00

I have been doing a lot of very mundane editing. Apparently my grasp of when to use "that" and when to use "which" is quite poor; however, I am sticking to my guns on my use of conjunctive adverbs, a good quality semicolon to connect two related independant clauses (thanks lindsay), and hypenated compound adjectives.

I am staying at the lovely apt. of P+K who are away, and I can't make their TV play TV, so I have been engaging in their movie collection to excess. In the last 48 hrs. I have seen bad boys I and II, 50 first dates, fever pitch, the notebook, and the family stone. all of these movies have fatal artistic flaws, but most are very cute in their own way.

questions and comments developed from watching fun, cheesy movies:

Is drew barrymore really like that in real life? If not, does she had just hate getting up in the morning to play that person? Same for Meg Ryan? Also, in "fever pitch", she was hard to buy as the hard businesswomen.

In fever pitch, drew has a coven of female friends, one of whom has a distinctive lantern jaw and prominent teeth. that's right, Ione Skye has resurfaced! (Ione was the female lead in "say anything.") after a short trip down IMDB lane, it seems that Ione's CV for the last 18 years is (to quote triumph) "a who's who of who cares." hopefully she is happy.

What the F did they do to "fever pitch?" Did the writers even read the book? why bother to call it "fever pitch?" it was a totally different story. Zombie branding, maybe?

Bad Boys I and II serve mostly as vehicles for will smith to bring black culture to white people in a palatable way. he sure is good at that. (full disclosure: I know all the words to "parents just don't understand.") and things blow up in that distinctively Michael Bay way. points to Martin Lawrence for making subversive references to other black comedians in this . at one point, he tells Will Smith to "have a coke and a smile."

Rachel McAdams is really cute. Her southern accent in the "the notebook" is awful, and her character in "the family stone" lacked cohesiviness and motivation (possibly not her fault). but she is very cute. she and ryan gosling make enduring all the cultural inaccuracies and general implausibilities of the notebook tolerable.

did the makers of "the family stone" just throw the scripts from "love actually" and "the ice storm" in a blender and produce what came out?

The Stab Master (of Science)

2007-08-27T15:21:00.000-04:00

Defence was smooth sailing. thankfully. I am now a master of science for what little that is worth. it was actually fun to get to answer intelligent questions from people who knew what the hell I was talking about.

I saw on the news that police also raided DMX's house on dog-related suspicion. I know this is the sort of statement that gets liberals in trouble, but doesn't this seem more like a racially motivated cultural misunderstanding than a great crime by the likes of Vick et al.? We kill other animals and eat them when they aren't deemed good enough to be breed stock, so why is killing dogs that fail tests so different. it seems a little hypocritical if you ask me. Winnipeg is soothing as ever. full of nice folks and open spaces and the occaisional big sky thunderstorm.
am reaching the post-adrenaline trough where my body has burned all the available glycogen and wants to sleep. sounds like a plan.

2007-08-26T09:41:00.000-04:00

odd time to start blogging, I know. My thesis defence is in 24 hrs and my advisor meeting in three and the presentaiton isnt done yet. (thesis is, thankfully). my laptop has had a tetchy relationship with Blogger, hence no posts. but I am well. back from newfoundland whose accent is a cross between Irish and Pirate. I caught an absolutely enormous atlantic cod on a jig line. It was very odd to be holding such an overfished fish as a fisherman. but as I said after we ate the crocodile our guides caught and insisted on eating in EG, "aside from the international guilt, it is really quite delicious." I particulalry recommend the cod tongue. very creamy.

just moved into my ugly apartment. just bought a washer and dryer from a pair of irish people whose house was being forclosed. they bought it because it had a bar in the basement with a dragon wood-burned onto the side. They were probably offered a subprime mortgage. ok, off to make pretty slide mostly involving figures lifted out of my text.

my turn with duke

2007-06-02T16:31:00.001-04:00

It is now time to tell a little story about my relationship to duke lacrosse. it is an issue of much debate, both on nakedfobi, banthetubetop, here, and major media outlets. First they were terrible, preppy villians. then they were brave, resilient saints. then there was blowback and people wanted them regarded as thugs. then there was counter blowback about what good kids they really were and how smart and hardworking.

well, i lived through about the most analagous situation that exists. I admit that a lesser charge than racially aggravated rape was involved, but let me tell it and see if it doesn't help your understanding.

when i was a sophomore on the yale heavyweight rowing team, we got accused of hazing our freshmen. the whole thing was based on the report of a single RA (I eventually became an RA) which turned into a precautionary suspension of the program to allow for investigation. now this precautionary suspension and accusation found its way into the new york times (with it's school-girl crush that we often talk of here), and into everyone's consciousness on campus. the suspension for alcohol-related hazing pretty successfully fueled everyone's prejudices about rowing. that we were by and large, rich, white, from prep schools, and kindof boorish (all in large part true). and that of course we would behave in such heartless, stupid, and entitled manner. all the previous convictions for drunken violence came to light as supporting evidence for our flawed character. and we had folks with citations, just like duke. I didn't, but that didn't matter. people saw us as easy villians. and we through the previous decades had made it easy for them.

the problem was that we didn't do it. no one hazed anyone. this was the eventual conclusion of the investigation and the team was reinstated 2 MONTHS LATER.

that being said, we did provide alcohol for minors. that was wrong. but more importantly we forgot the best piece of advice our coach ever gave us: 'everyone is watching you.' you are a large group of large, confident young men. people know who you are. so you must behave as though you are being watched. this advice was actually for airport travel (he suggested we help old ladies with overhead luggage and not be rowdy in terminals) but ultimately it applied here as well. we engaged in questionable behaviour, and the world decided to pay attention. and we paid a reputational price for it. same as duke. the truth came out in the end. everyone was exhonerated, but people didn't look at us the same way. same as duke. sorry, boys. I don't care what the coleman report says about how hard working and cohesive you are, or whether your GPA is really high (so was ours), you were in the grey area and you got caught. and you paid. that's how it goes. you aren't heroes. you are apparently very good lacrosse players (advancing deep into the NCAA tournament). hopefully what you are now is chastened.

I apologize for not telling that story last spring. it was the first thing I thought of when I read the reports was "it sure would be weird if they didn't do it. I know how quickly this stuff spirals out of control." but being who I imagine myself to be, the last thing I wanted to do was circle the country club wagons as yale rowing came to the defence of duke lacrosse. I wanted no part of that. secretly, I wanted them to be guilty because it would have made my collegiate transgressions by association seem that much more insignificant.

how do comport oneself as an eastern intellectual in the west

2007-06-01T12:49:00.000-04:00

I just came back from a long and delightful camping trip with springydog to south dakota wyoming, montana, and north dakota. and for those of you who are curious, the mall of america is just a big mall with a county fair-style rides in the middle. that's it. and the corn palace of mitchell south dakota isn't cool. not even ironic, kitschy fun. it is just stupid. that being said, we had lots of delightful adventures. we got a flat tire in spearfish, sd. and no fewer than 5 people stopped to help. and the walmart tire center stayed open late to help us. we got snowed on in yellowstone (I am the moron who didn't account for elevation).

which brings me to another point. it is very important to me that my time out west not be "easterners laughing at yokels and feeling superior because they backpack instead of RV." we were in the North Dakota Cowboy hall of fame (#1 tourist attraction for ND in 2006), and some of the inductees were native americans. One of them in a large framed portrait was labelled in big, black bold letters "Cihef White Shield 1". This is clearly a typo of "chief." but the question became, "do I tell the museum proprietors?" I didn't, but I think I should have. same goes for the obese dude at old faithful feeding the 5-lined ground squirrel by hand. should i tell him that is wrong? I didn't, but i think I should have. again for the backpacking boys who were wearing their framepacks like bookbags instead of using the hip strap to support the weight opn bigger muscles.

I know enough to know that westerns know lots of things I don't know. we would have been sunk of the Lakota man hadn't stopped to explain a better method for covering and securing gear in the bed of my truck. that being said, the cultural trope of eastern know-it-all showing up and bossing people around weighs very heavily on me. how can I share the things that I know while operating within that cultural framework which makes it difficult for me to share knowledge without coming off as feeling superior?

from the stuplime to the not-so-ridiculous.

2007-05-17T11:34:00.000-04:00

this is a very nice (and short) opinion piece about the culture associated with the american college system. it spans a variety of topics quickly and thoughtfully without falling prey to any existing dogma. that is why louis menand is a public intellectual, and I am not. (found via magicpancake.)

It's not a matter of fairness. It's a matter of correctness.....

2007-05-16T11:10:00.000-04:00

....that is what stu jackson had to say on why he suspended amare stoudamire and boris diaw for NOT HITTING ANYONE at the end of game 4 of the suns vs. spurs. this is the most assinine defence I have ever heard. The league is saying it has a "zero tolerance policy" for leaving the bench. I think all sentient adults can realize that zero tolerance policies are goss oversimplifications that result in comical rulings (suspended 2nd graders with tylenol and whatnot). To fall back on a policy even when the extenuating circumstance show that it is clearly generating an inappropriate ruling shows a lack of will and a real fear on the part of the administrator. this ruling is just the latest outgrowth of the fact that the NBA fears its players' "thuggishness" (see also: blackness) and must institute a reign of terror to keep them in line after the Pistons/pacers fight. Anyone who has every watched a hockey game knows that things get chippy at the end and that you can't allow lesser players to take liberties with your skill players. that is exactly what happened in to steve nash. and in that situation in a dirty series, stoudamire and diaw were right to instinctively defend their (smaller) teammate. If haymakers had been thrown, this would be another story. but to alter the course of a playoff series on a technicality is a shame.

2007-05-16T10:11:00.000-04:00

in a fantastic bit of narrative symmetry, about 1.40 into fat joe's "make it rain" (the make it rain link from yesterday) Diddy makes a 1/2 second cameo. i figured i would explain because the likelihood that anyone made it that far into "make it rain" was very very low. l'il wayne's hook is pretty damned catchy even if fat joe's rap is repetitive and boring. I caught myself walking into school singing "I make it rain (I make it rain) I make it rain on them hos." not exactly conduct becoming of an officer.

2007-05-15T13:56:00.000-04:00

odd occurances of the past 24hrs.

1. met my first Eli in Winnipeg: a homosexual flight-instructor named robert who was '97 Branford. how did i meet him? He bought my table and chairs off of craigslist. and paid my exorbitant fee to use my truck to move them. coincidences. and it should be noted that he dropped all the hints about "new haven" not me. I try my damnedest to avoid being Tom Buchanon, because I totally can be and it is a bad habit. for those of you who don't want to play "literary allusions," Tom Buchanan is Daisy Buchanan's husband in "the great gatsby." He is a muscular upper-class formerfootball star who enjoys polo. he is kindof like a turn of the century banker. the descriptive line about him that always stuck with me was something along the lines of "he made it clear that it wasn't a big deal that he went to yale, once you knew that he had."I read this in 1997 well before i knew about college, so the endurance of this line is not rooted in the vanity of name recognition. rather it has come to be more and more meaningful as I have more adult social interactions and see the not-so-subtle subtleties of the sharing of information and leverage. while we are on the subject of gatsby, someone once suggested to me the P. Diddy was the new gatsby. sadly I can't remember who it was, because I loved the idea. I think this insight was also more poignant when Diddy was more relevant, say, 1999 during the height of the "white party" and such.

2. I threw the badly water-damaged rusty metal and particle board desk off my balcony. (it had moss growing on it when i moved in). it was too heavy for me to carry down the stairs alone so I tossed it. it made a tremendous crash and broke into pieces which I could drag to the dumpster. There is still a primal joy and throwing things from high places and watching them smash.

3. I read a thesis chapter from one of springy's classmates about Brett Easton Ellis's American Psycho. I read it because there was not a written word (or a stick of furniture) left in the apartment besides that. (I found it cleaning out the closet.) I am tempted to rain judgement about it, but i am chastened by wittigenstein (via tom friedman) who says "when a man tells you 2+2=5 it is a mistake. when he tells you it equals 97, he is using a whole different logic from you." and I fear this may be the case with literary academics. I will rain judgement later, once I better understand if this work was a 5 or a 97.

I am well aware that the actual expression may be "reign judgement" but I find the image of "raining judgement" like "raining men" or "making it rain" much more compelling.

the chapter did include a reference to the word "stuplime" which is a descriptive term for things that are both stupid and sublime coined by some critic named Ngai. it is meant to describe the work Samuel Beckett and Gertrude Stein as being both boring and shocking simultaneously, but i think this term can break its narrow literary shackles and be free. could paris hilton be stuplime? Bam Margera? Iraq war news? I welcome any other submissions of stuplimity (Ngai's noun formation, not mine).

2007-05-14T12:01:00.000-04:00

never clean your oven before breakfast. particularly is that oven belongs in a rental apartment that has been passed down from dirtbag to dirtbag leaving you holding the bag when it comes to cleaning and moving out.

the grime was so strong even oven cleaner couldn't get it off. I was chipping at it with a knife (just as my mother advised. and on mother's day no less). for those curious, oven cleaner is lye (NaOH) (remember, like in fight club). so it goes down the sink with water where it turns into salt and water. however, aerolsolized in your lungs, it does the same thing it does that that grease--chemical reduction by a strong base. so wear a mask when you clean your oven and ventilate the area well.

let's just hope it never enters a relationship with the passive-aggressive pike

2007-05-10T17:28:00.000-04:00

ladies and gentlemen, I give you the belligerent sculpin (Megalocottus platycephalus platycephalus). found in the UK and Northern US, this fish is pretty boring except for having an absolutely fantastic common name.

2007-05-09T11:18:00.000-04:00

oh holy hell!

I have seen this link on not one, but two of my friends blogs. friends that are smarter than I am (and run very good blogs, BTW). This is a terribly misinterpretation of the results of a microbiological study. Apparently some dudes from Clemson thought it would be cute to test the 5-second rule for food by dropping bologna onto a variety of bacterially loaded surfaces to see how much bacteria got on the food. unsurprisingly, bolongna with its high water content and associated adhesive powers picked up some bacteria. not all that much. but some. more than the infection dose for really bad bacteria. conclusion: fear every surface in your house and never pick up dropped food!!

no.

first, most people don't eat dropped deli meats, because of their adhesion makes them pick up dust and rocks too which makes them highly unpalatable once dropped. this study would be more useful if performed on cookies or pieces of bread or other things that are actual subjects of the 5 second rule.

second. if you douse your surfaces in high concentrations of infections E. Coli, you probably ingested it anyway at some other point when you placed your hand on the counter or ate the original bacteria laden food. it is not like suddenly leaving dropped food will save your life. the five second rule rarely applies to gas station bathroom floors (unless they are BP gas stations of course).

third, you ingest lots of bacteria all the time. sorry, it has to be said. you do. your body is designed to handle it. why do you think the pH of your stomach is 2. your caveman ancestors didn't have lysol.

fourth, the times article draws the larger conclusion about behavior modification to avoid infection from dropped food (which hopefully the scientific authors were smart enough to stop short of) only leads to this continuing microbiological hysteria. the attempt to sanitize our lives is not only futile, it is also harmful. the development of anti-biotic resistant bacteria as well as sky-rocketing rates of child allergies (no one died when I brought PB+J to camp) have been linked to overly sterile environments in early childhood which deprives the immune system of instruction and differentiation about bacteria. this study was about microbiologist showing that water-soluable bacteria is transferred to wet surfaces. wow. thanks, microbiologists. it only becomes a public health study when you see how that activity effects health. please keep picking up your dropped M+Ms. please.

2007-05-08T17:17:00.000-04:00

back again.
nobody likes other people's travel stories. so I will spare them. hopefully the knowledge gained will crop up in handy places later. Iceland is an interesting place.

I am now ready to tell BP to shove off. They have launched a huge branding campaign for years about how green they are. and I generally support the progmatic idea of corporations doing good deeds in the hopes of boosting public opinion and consequently sales. they actually wrote the check for me to work in equatorial guinea in 2004. that being said, if you are going to spend the bucks on the green and white logo and the singing baby ads, you have to at least be somewhere close to the top of your field environmentally. BP had spills in Prudhoe Bay, AK last summer which were easily preventable and were caused by negligent pipeline maintainance. same goes for the refinery explosions. basically, the whole branding ethos is completely gutted by the actions of the company. and that is bad. hypocrisy is a much worse brand than pragmatism.

2007-04-25T17:51:00.000-04:00

I am headed to iceland tomorrow morning. I am excited, but, boy, is it expensive there. hotdog=$14. Beer=$14. the bus=$14. (800 IKA (Icelandic Krona). we'll see how it goes. I suppose we are looking at Island Effect+Northern Effect+Scandanavian Socialism Effect=super high costs. Lonely Planet says that tinned fish is reasonably priced.

2007-04-24T12:11:00.000-04:00

The women behind the counter at Tim Horton's this morning took an order from a deaf women and had a sign language conversation without missing a beat. it was amazing.

boy, you've been a naughty girl

2007-04-20T20:14:00.000-04:00

walrus magazine. billed as the "canadian harper's." it doesn't measure to to harper's or the new yorker (duh) but it does give access to a knowledge somewhat more obscure than the other two which can be handy when headed back to cambridge, mass.

everybody hates the fake encore at rock shows

2007-04-18T11:07:00.000-04:00

terribly embarrassing, but I am probably going to keep writing this. why? because in the two days since I ended this, I have reverted to leaving multiparagraph comments on the rest of your blogs. and those overly long comments were actually the thing that started me writing in the first place. so apparently whatever mother lode of solilpsism and need for self-expression that drove me thus far doesn't seem to have gone away.

but this brings me to one of my favorite complaints which is now painfully relevant to myself: the fake encore. when you are at a show and the band goes off stage, but the house lights are still down. you know they are coming back or they would have raised the lights. so you have to sit there and clap and feel like a complete tool until the band comes back on. I feel strong negative feelings during these moments. I feel used. I am not cheering voluntarily, I am being forced to do so. I can see wanting a break to get some water before playing the last couple of songs. but then the band should just say "we'll be right back." anyway, my apologies for performing what could easily be misinterpreted as a fake encore. I would be more than a little unhappy with me if I were you.

what it really was was me having a continuous mid-level freakout about moving. my sincere apologies.

posting is going to get infrequent for the next 2 months as I move and take a blatant junket to iceland and try to take springydog camping.

and anyway, I couldn't end with such a terrible typo as using "than" instead of "then." That is one of my least favorite typos.

leaving las vegas

2007-04-16T16:07:00.000-04:00

for all intents and purposes, my time in winnipeg is up. and if I am not sleeping in an igloo than I am just some a-hole in suburban boston. and who wants to read about that?
so long and thanks for all the [smoked goldeye]

2007-04-11T18:06:00.000-04:00

because undergraduates are stupid in hilarious ways. (Thanks EPA) I was just remarking at how un-stupid my unpronouncable chordate kids were. bet you don't know where the afferent branchial artery is on a mudpuppy.

2007-04-09T12:29:00.000-04:00

I must register a complaint about the nickname of Daisuke "Dice-K" Matsazaki. His nickname is just a phonetic spelling of his name. so his nickname and his name are the same thing. this defies the very definition of a nickname. who allowed this? I admit the reimagining of Daisuke (already transliterated) as Dice-K is cute both for the use of "K" (baseball shorthand for "strikeout") as well as any excuse to allude to Andrew Dice Clay. But the syllogism is too much to bear. first MIMS, now this. I think this may be an even worse development in nicknaming than what happened about 5 years ago when everyone started taking the first initial of the first name and the first syllable of the last name to make the nickname (i.e. "T-Mac").

2007-04-08T22:19:00.000-04:00

I was reading an article in slate the other day about the resuscitation of zombie brands. a zombie brand is a brand with a lot of name recognition (like Tab soda orthe Ford Taurus) which has been discontinued due to sagging sales. At this point it is just a dead brand (like pets.com and the ford pinto), it becomes a zombie when a new product is introduced that bears only marginal resemblance to the old one, but is sold based on the name recognition that the defunct brand continues to garner. Tab, the original diet soda, has been reinvented as a red bull-style energy drink named "Tab." This phenomenon plays upon the cultural landfill of the brains of young adults. There are snippets of ads and sitcom catchphrases floating in our heads. and these represent the easiest way to make something stick in a media-saturated market.

The TV show "brothers and sisters" uses this same post-modern gimmick to create a hyper-real tv show. actors frequently complain about being closely associated with a single successful role; Once they have played a successful role for a long time, particularly on TV, it is difficult for them to get work playing other characters because audiences still see them as Rachel, or The Fonz. TV is close enough to our reality that we cannot see Jason Alexander as anyone besides George Kostanza. It feels weird to have to resuspend our disbelief that George is out there trying to sell us pretzels. This is where "Brothers and Sisters" gets it right. It is using "zombie characters. The show takes the ultimate pigeon-holed actress, Calista Flockhart (who played Ally McBeal, the neurotic and awkward, but fundementally sweet career woman on "Ally McBeal") and brings her back on "B &S" to play the same character. It is easy to believe Calista in this role, because an awkward and bumbling, but fundementally sweet career woman is what we know her to be. "B&S" continues the trend by making Rob Lowe play a clean cut, handsome, well-spoken politico. This was his long-running role on the west wing. Sally Field plays the burdened, but bouyant and pretty mother, like always (this may be more of a type-cast than a zombie character). Jason Lewis replays his meta-part that he honed on "Sex and the City" as a georgeous movie star who doesn't buy into the hype. On 'SOTC" he was smith jarrod. On "B&S" he is Chad Barry. Watching this show is like seeing long lost friends. It is fantastically comforting and generates no cognitive dissonance---until we meet Emily VanCamp again. After all of this zombie character setup, emily, who once played the pretty, sensible, small town girl next door on "Everwood", shows up on "B&S" as the LA party-girl with a drug habit and a deadbeat dad. The disconnect simply doesn't make sense in an imaginitive framework that encourages the viewer to use stored cultural detritus especially after someone has worked so hard to piece together a TV drama from type-cast actors of the last 15 years.

it wasn't all bad

2007-04-05T14:57:00.000-04:00

because there are no leaves on the trees in 'toba town I was able to see my first Bohemian Waxwings (Bombycilla garrulus). these guys, and thier congener, the cedar waxwing are my favorite genus of birds because they are so well designed. sleek body shape, clean color placement, nice color contrast. I love most all crested birds. and the yellow retrix (tail feather) tips are so wonderful.

2007-04-05T14:32:00.000-04:00

jesus! read this interview/book review. It is for Dana Vachon's "mergers and acquisitions." It is apparently a wall street satire by a former banker. Is it a coincidence or does the back story sound a lot like marisha pessl's backstory as a consultant for pricewaterhousecoopers. (marisha pessl wrote "special topics in calamity physics"). To say nothing of old favorites Nick McDonnelll and Kavya Vishwanathan. Can I turn over a rock without finding a young, pretty, privileged, and "accomplished" author underneath? Am I a numerologist in the sense of the movie "pi" where I see a trend because I am looking for it? or is there really something going on here about trying to grab a generation Y novelist from the young, urban, well-connected northeast set? On aesthetic grounds, I suppose I must exempt ms Pessl to some degree because her novel is actually supposed to be pretty good. but seriously, what is going on? I see there being three alternate explanations.

1. the elitist's theory--the finest writing is being done by the smartest and most motivated people who respresent a functioning meritocratic overclass of bankers and ivy leaguers.
2. the conspiracy theorist's theory--Our publication system is utterly corrupt and runs on a closed system of connections.
3. the media bias theory--upper class young authors make good interviews of upper class media outlets (which I tend to read disproportionately).

Through the first few of these examples, I was very up-front about the fact that jealousy was near the surface of my displeasure. but i think my displeasure at this development no longer stems from my desire to be these authors as from my alarm at the repetitiveness of the pattern. I always thought I was supposed to grow out of populist illusions of "the establishment" not into them.

2007-04-04T13:43:00.000-04:00

It normally snows in winnipeg in april. It frequently snows in may as well.

the constantines were a lot of fun. but the fact that I got on the wrong bus this morning is an indication of the danger of weekday shows.

in the cover department, points are awarded to the cons for closing with a complete straight and slightly understated version of "thunderstuck." it was kindof amazing that they resisted the urge to ham it up.

marks were awarded for creativity to jon rae & the river for their cover of townes van zandt's "two hands" In no small part because it is really fun to be the guy who recognizes the cover and gets to sing along. unfortunately, they received low technical merit scores for turning an upbeat spiritual into a half-time, strident blues tune for no visible reason. the song isn't sad or tortured and I don't think there is sadness and angst hidden in it waiting to be revealed. but that is my opinion.

on the topic of music, I am curious if "one great city" by the weakerthans resonates with a larger audience. It is filled to overflowing with specific geographical references to winnipeg. and consequently, is very resonant here. There is an actual male angel on top of the legislative building who faces northward. At the city limits, the signs say "Welcome to Winnipeg--One Great City!". there is a chain of stores called "The Dollar Store." And there is a large underground walkway downtown with polished stone floors not to mention the more obvious guess who and jets references. for those of you who have never been here (most of you), does it work for you or is it a sop to us?

2007-04-03T19:03:00.000-04:00

bombing has lost its luster as we enter the 20th hour of it. I suppose continuing to do something after it has ceased to be fun is the definition of work. or perhaps the definition of rowing. going downtown to see the constantines now. it's still snowing.

2007-04-01T18:21:00.001-04:00

who knew peter gabriel was in the original incarnation of "Genesis"? Not me. I guess I should have read "american psycho" more closely.

2007-04-01T15:37:00.000-04:00

songtapper.com this website is ingenious. you tap the rhythm with the space bar and the website gives you possibilities for what the song is. It helped to identify Peter, Bjorn, and John's Young Folks which came on in the bar last night. points to patrick/karyn for the heads up.

high marks to champion. I am normally not that into electro-rock, but you have to watch these guys do it. a DJ who also functions as the conductor for 4 live guitarists and a bassist as well as a lead singer who is an unqualified star. There are elaborate hand signals to the other members as well as a exaggerated (full-arm) 4/4 conducting signal when the beat is going to change. it was fun.

honorable mention to malajube whose design team obviously really enjoyed intro bio (check out the copepod legs). there is also a lung-butterfly with a trailing arm of fungus on the album cover.

you can't say bomb on an airplane

2007-03-30T23:31:00.000-04:00

the bomb calorimeter is more fun than the freeze drier! I am having that imposter feeling like I am a little kid imagining what being a scientist is like. everything is made up of energy in the form of chemical bonds. Breaking these bonds releases heat. This is the act of burning something. usually, not all the bonds are broken (imcomplete combustion) and so we have stuff left over (ash, sludge, whatever). the bomb calorimeter ensures this by surrouding your half gram of fish with 40 atmospheres of pure oxygen. the metal cylinder is an actual bomb with a fuse. you put this is water and light the fuse using electricity. there is a fantastic explosion inside the apparatus that you never get to see, and the bucket of water that surrounds the bomb starts to get hotter. how much hotter it gets determines how much energy was in your fish (after you correct for the burning of the fuse wire and some accessory acid production using titration). no the crazy part that makes you believe in human progress is not the fantastically smooth and beautifully machined bomb which can withstand the explosion (although it is terrible and beautiful) it is the jacket. in order to avoid the heat that is produced by the bomb and goes into the surrounding water simply dissipating, that water is surrounded by other water that is listening electronically to the temperature of the water adjacent to the bomb. when the bomb water gets hotter, the jacket water is heated to match the temperature rise exactly allowing the full heat of combustion to register as temperature increase in the known mass of water. engineering scientists are fantastically smart.

2007-03-30T14:10:00.000-04:00

among my other foolish responsiblities, I am TAing Chordate Zoology. This means I get to help 19 year olds cut up a variety of animals that I never cut up myself because locating the spleen in a fish, turtle and mink is a bit of an archaic skill and Eli EEB was all about the sexy computers and genetics. We dissect minks as our highest mammal. This is because there is a fairly large mink-farming business. but once the farmers kill the minks and skin them, the rest of the mink is fairly useless. so these skinless minks are sold to biological supply companies who inject the arteries and veins with latex, pickle them in weak formalin and sell them to eager undergrads. given that these minks were farmed to have shiny pelts and not move around too much, they are very very fatty.

2007-03-27T17:25:00.000-04:00

I am pleased that georgetown is in the final four. given that my father teaches there and senor beavis is an alumnus, rooting for them is very natural. I am displeased that the tournament went so smoothly by seeds. this means that I am roundly eliminated from everything while all those folks who stay with the seeds are trouncing me. springydog is here, despite the fact that she hates winnipeg with the white hot intensity of 1000 suns. it may be a coincidence that our snowpack has gone to zero during her visit, but i think it is a heat-island effect from her displeasure. You know it is spring in winnipeg when you can see the picnic tables again.

I have been playing with some impossibly cool machines at work including a freeze drier (I have resisted the urge to place some ice cream in it to see what happens). our homogenizer is a coffee grinder. it is a little surreal to put a freeze-dried arctic fish into a coffee grinder and hold the button down in the name of science.

WPG=treacherous-name land

2007-03-21T12:44:00.000-04:00

a short selection of last names from students I teach. It is a minefield.

Hnatiuk,
Koscielniak,
Dyrkacz,
Lwiwski,
Maksymchuk,
Mneina,
Narynskyyi,
Paetkau,
Peixoto,
Schimnowski,
Szilagyi,
Tkachuk, (no relation. I asked)
Yurkowski,
Zanzerl,

NXNN...

2007-03-21T09:08:00.000-04:00

thanks to the wonders of myspace, I thought I would let you all have a listen to the strange and wonderful music of canada.

slattern
no fun
two knots is lots
constantines
the gorgon
boats
dadadada:lazers
thunderbirds are now! (actually from michigan)
propagandi
YSP! WSD!
c.r. avery

2007-03-20T11:05:00.000-04:00

amazing new canadianisms:

A#1 best prairie canadianism ever: bunnyhug. it is a sasketchewanese expression for a pullover (no zipper!) with a hood and an attached pouch at the waist for both hands. So it appears to be a subclass of "hoodie" and a much nicer term. it's real. i swear. it is in the Canadian Oxford Dictionary (yes, they sell that here). the colloquial etymology is that such a garmet is so warm and comfortable, it is like being hugged by a bunny. now, I'm not in saskatchewan, but I am adopting this term immediately, and I think you should do the same. It avoids the british connotations of white teenage thuggery of "hoodie." and I am not wearing said garments to look tough. if you are feel free to continue using "hoodie" with my blessing.

in our continuing attempt to list all 98 canadian words for hockey, we have "Ringette."
ringette, aka "hockey for girls" (no hitting) is played with a doughnut-shaped ring for a puck. Rather than being played with a hockey stick. it is played with a straight pole such as a broom handle. puckhandling is achieved by placing the pole inside the ring and skating. Because the puck is difficult to dislodge, it much be passed across all lines on the hockey rink as well as an extra "ringette line" that runs between the blue line and the circles.

2007-03-18T20:32:00.000-04:00

so I am going to tell you a funny story that is a long time coming. remember the duke lacrosse scandal? Of course you do. remember how engaged in it I was? Well, I was. And it turns out they didn't do it. unfortunately, I owe them an apology. Because the thing I knew but never told you all was that I had a sense throughout the whole thing about how easy it is for things to get blown out of proportion. and I didn't say anything. I was a member of the Yale heavyweight rowing team which got suspended for alcohol-related hazing in 2001. The problem was: we didn't do it. the team was cleared of all charges. No one hazed anyone. unfortunately, the administrative response was shoot-first and ask questions later. the team was suspended indefinitely on a hearsay report which of course made its way into the NYT (because NYT loves ivy league gossip), and every socially conscious person I knew looked down their nose at me for being the privileged, boorish jerk they had always suspected of rowers.

the problem with the duke case was that I didn't want to circle the country club wagons. Yale rowers coming to the defence of duke lacrossemen was not a role I wanted any part of. I wanted to think of myself as different. I wanted to beleive that they were worse and should hang separate from me. but I, and my teammates, uniquely understood that situation.

some things were different, like we never had any strippers. but we had teammates with prep school backgrounds and drunken assault charges, just like duke. that doesn't mean I ever got one, but it does mean that I can't think of myself as part of an organization that was unilaterally better.

ultimately, we were both caught behaving in a less-than-upstanding manner, but not illegally, and were made to pay an enormous reputational penalty for that. and perhaps we deserved it. unfair things happen to people caught in bad situations all the time.

2007-03-16T10:44:00.000-04:00

hooray for the demise of Duke. expected, but still sweet

The Australian Secret Intelligence Service is advertising for spies this week in The Economist. This prompts a series of questions:
1. why does australia need a secret intelligence service at all?
2. Is it really all that Secret if you are posting Want Ads for it?
3. why advertise a national position in an international magazine?
4. australian spies starting salaries are 80k, where do I sign up?

(dear ASIS, if you are reading this. you will probably reject my application. No worries! I understand)

ice fishing!

2007-03-10T19:02:00.000-05:00

there is a lot of standing around involved in ice fishing

"when you wife looks like this, you want to dive into an Icehole"

that's a burbot. also known as a ling cod. it is tremendously ugly.

that is some other guy's ice fishing shack.

games! stolen games!

2007-03-09T10:50:00.000-05:00

if, by chance, you don't read laustintexas, I can't recommend these games enough. one is naming all 50 states as fast as you can. they other is naming as many UN sanctioned nations in 10 minutes. I think the country game is a lot more fun. careful, though. the game is suprisingly picky about spelling (No abbreviating the "Saint" in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines) and the use of articles (particularly involving the various congo states). But I did learn to spell azerbaijan and kyrgyzstan without flinching. I forgot Kazakhstan the first time through, naming only countries with inferior potassium.

2007-03-05T11:01:00.000-05:00

Made a new kind of snow house over the weekend. (Yes it is cold enough to still be making snow houses. it has actually re-entered the "face-achingly cold" zone just for fun). Unlike the igloo, this was a quinzhee (Pronounced QUINN-zee). It is the simpler of the two snow house types, ou shovel snow into a huge pile, about the size of yourself. and pack it down. after waiting a couple of hours for it to settle, you scape out the inside to make room for yourself and others. it is less permanent than an igloo, but if you don't have block-making drifted snow, it is the way to go. I didn't sleep in this one, because I am a sissy who has to study OChem and didn't want to deal with the glycogen trough for the next 2 days.

2007-03-02T19:25:00.000-05:00

I have been improvising foods recently due to lack of proper ingredients. I can now say with certainty that ham and mandarin orange pizza is pretty good. also using cucumber slices as a substitute for lettuce in ham and cheese sandwiches is also pretty good.

Highschool baseball season starts March 1 where I grew up. There has been no hint of melt here and we picked up and extra 8 inches of snow in the past week. winter is long. when puxatawny phil sees his shadow indicating 6 more weeks of winter, that would be very short in winnipeg.

2007-03-01T14:42:00.000-05:00

do Jean-Sebastien Giguere and Jean-Sebastien Aubin's friends call them "J-S" or just hockey announcers? Is this a subtle form of cultural imperialism by anglicanizing their obviously french names?
Per-Johan Axellsen is called "P-J" by announcers too. or is this all part of the general informality of hockey that allows star players to give interviews in flannel shirts and ill-fitting toques?

ps. according to kyle, norway is much wealthier than sweden or finland thanks to North Sea gas money.

2007-03-01T14:06:00.000-05:00

We tend to think of scandanavia as a unit. "The scandanavian model" for wellfare states is a good example. I was wondering why are Norwegians so underrepresented among Scandanavians in the NHL. Tommy Salo, Sammy Salo, Teemu Selanne, Antero nittimaki, Mika kiprusoff, Sako koivu, miko koivu, Oli Jokinen, Jussi Jokinen--all Fins. Henrik Lundqvuist, Kristian Huselius, Peter Forsberg, Matthias Ohlund, Nik lidstrom, the Sedin twins, P-J Axelsson, Daniel Alfredsson, Henrik Zetterberg--all swedes. I could only find two Norwegian NHL players. Espen Knutsen, and Anders Myrvold. I had never heard of them either. so norway, what's the deal? There is certainly a large-scale correlation between regional income and professional athletic success. so is Norway that much wealthier than sweden and finland? The NHL game is much more physical than the international game. Are Norwegians soft as a people?

nothing white can stay.

2007-02-26T16:40:00.000-05:00

nothing racist here. just contemplating the eternal paradox of peg city. it is finally of a temperature where outdoor recreation isn't physically dangerous. however, that temperature fundementally endangers the conditions that make it so fun to recreate outdoors. and the roads are getting that brown slush which is totally lame and we almost never have. but at human temperatures, we have those picture perfect fractal snowflakes. and those are always fun. skated better on friday night. was going backwards and crossing over. even got to stick handle a little. trying to skate and hand a puck is surprisingly difficult. it was fun. kyle still embarrased me. damn you, canadians and your comfort with speed on frozen surfaces.

I might be as big a phony as Tom Townsend

2007-02-23T18:00:00.000-05:00

I saw whit stillman's "metropolitan" last night. and I think I loved it. It was a very strange thing. but it was just so pretty and small. I saw last days of disco in the theater in high school through no act of cinematographic hipness of my own. And all I remember from it is that it felt different from other movies and I liked that. it was calmer. I think the same is true of "metropolitan."

there is also something iincredibly charming about setting essentially creating a modern Jane Austin novel which is what "metropolitan" is. (It is actually a story about social interactions of wealthy manhattan preppies (urban haute bourgousie) who have returned from college for christmas. I know it sounds like the run-up to "Less than zero" but I think the restraint that stillman shows with a setup that begs for bombast or mockery are what I liked so much.

There was an interesting sub-plot in the movie when Tom townsend, who opens the movie as the rebellious intellectual, admits to not having read many of the "great books" to which he alludes while Audrey Rouget has. This mirrors the older son and girlfriend of squid & the Whale perfectly.

2007-02-22T10:43:00.000-05:00

so apparently this guy from ohio says that rawson thurber's "Dodgeball" was stolen from his screenplay about his life story as a misfit dodgeball champion. this is hilarious in and of itself. NYT has picked this up as a virtuous underdog versus slimy hollywood establishment story. and there certainly seems to be some grounds for that. like a lot of grounds. That being said, they paint mr. thurber as an oily chad using just a single photograph. However, Mr. Thurber was the brains behind "Terry Tate: Office Linebacker" series of Reebok ads which was one of the most brilliant series of commercials I have ever seen. The whole story would be a lot more cohesive if his reputation weren't built on something so good. I am also glad I am not named rawson thurber. although I do have a preppy and offputting name too

2007-02-21T09:17:00.000-05:00

cute canadianism of the day: I received an email referring to a job as a "tonne of fun." that is 1000kg of fun, not to be confused with with a "ton of fun" which is a mere 2000lbs of fun. it turns out canadians have more fun because a ton is only 0.907 tonnes.

2007-02-20T11:15:00.000-05:00

clovers is in danger of wilting and dying. I am going back on the job market, and I'll be damned if this thing is going to be findable on google when I do. but i can't seem to get rid of it. anyone who has suggestions, feel free to send them.

2007-02-15T11:24:00.000-05:00

i was getting to that shame spiral where you haven't contacted a friend in a long time, so you feel like the next contact has to be worth the wait. and you aren't able to come up with something good enough so you keep waiting until the whole thing gets out of control.
for those curious i was ill and prepping a talk for the international seabird conference which i attended last week. I was more fun than it sounds. I am currently trying to bang out 600 high brow yet jargon-free words about Chimpanzee reconciliation behaviour.

here is a funny little sports news tidbit. it is funny, because Todd Bozeman used to coach UCLA and now coaches Morgan State. it is also funny for the one other person who remembers The Lady of Rage's breakout hit "Afro Puffs" in which she states that she, much like this news story, is straight out of Farmville, VA.

2007-02-02T14:16:00.000-05:00

nice work, joe biden. I think at issue here, equal to whether or not his is a racist, is the fact that he is clearly untrustworthy in diplomatic situations. we can't have a president running around saying that ehud barak is the only arab who isn't a dirty terrorist. sen. biden, I hope you are george allen are very happy together.

Clover Poll!

2007-02-01T15:15:00.000-05:00

The email signature of an undergraduate american citizen at an american university undergraduate includes a listing for his "mobile" number. accetable or pretentious?

no drainpipes were harmed in the making of this post

2007-02-01T11:10:00.000-05:00

there is a cultural myth that inuit have 98 words for snow. (They do have a bunch, but it is only about 20). And that the diversity of one's language on a subject indicates the need to delineate subtle differences easily. well, then canadians have 98 words for hockey. I learned a new one last night, "shinny." It is an informal version of ice hockey played with skates but no pads, and frequently goals marked with found objects. My armchair etymology assumed that it was called this because the puck could not go above the shin (which is a common aspect of shinny due to the lack of padding), but the word actually derives from the scottish game "shinty." shinny should not be confused with "spongee" which is basically the same thing, but without skates. according to wikipedia, spongee was developed because below -30C, skates cannot gain good traction on ice. I love canada.

I tried skating last night on my yard sale hockey skates. it was pretty hard. I had only skated with figure skates in the states, so I left huge gauges where the toe pick would have been at the end of each stride. it was fun, but very cold.

Great Googly Moogly!

2007-01-28T15:35:00.000-05:00

I learned how to build an igloo on satuday from a pair of professors doing a bush pilot survival course. I slept in in on saturday night wrapped in caribou skins. It was bananas. you can build an igloo using just a carpenter's saw and a small machete called a "snow knife." you cut 2.5'x1.5' blocks from hard-drifted snow using the saw and then mitre the corners to make the blocks sit snugly against one another. and there is a little more tomfoolery to get the layers of blocks off the ground going. you make it during the day when it is warm so that it is frozen solid by nighttime and not going anywhere.

Thanks to rick and jill for their knowledge and caribou skins. the igloo was very small. I couldn't sit up on my haunches, let along kneel. and I had to build an extension for my feet. I spent a long time patching the cracks between the snow blocks because building really good igloos takes lots of practice. but caribou fur is very warm.

if you click on the pictures, they enlarge. and there is not another person in the igloo with me. trust me, it is way too small for that.

2007-01-26T17:05:00.000-05:00

hooray for sponge hockey! no bloodshed this year, and a Zoology victory! time to sharpen the skates.

Boy did I make the wrong career choice

2007-01-24T17:15:00.000-05:00

so, this is life as a hedge fund manager (retractable playground roof!!)

and this is life as a field biologist (avoid this video if you are squeamish).

For those who are curious, the man in the video is my roommate, labmate, and general australian-style mate, Kyle. and the head of school greeted students where I taught as well. it was a point of contention with the faculty.

2007-01-23T12:16:00.000-05:00

so I was reading a huge NYT feel-good piece about a bunch of refugee kids playing soccer in georgia and thier inspiring female coach. It is a wicked-long piece and certainly makes you feel good about refugees and hate xenophobic georgians. as I was reading it, I realized that it encorporated at least two major themes from articles I had read elsewhere. There was a big piece in the new yorker in december about somalian refugees settling in Lewiston, ME and the issues surrounding that. so apparently there are lots of refugees in little towns with cheap housing who don't know what to make of these foreigners. this is interesting, but it sortof an exoticized, foreign correspondant view of small-town culture. The piece also brought up the idea of the "great teacher myth" which isn't terrible different from the "great man" theory of history. That it takes single people, usually non-black and from top-tier universities, giving over their lives and incomes to make the disenfranchised successful. (Magical Jordanian woman-coach went to Smith). This idea has been in the news recently with the painful-looking "freedom writers" and the woman whose autobiography the movie is based on. oddly enough, the myth of the great teacher breaks along partisan lines because it is huge issue of contention for the teacher's union and factors into the fight about NCLB. It also plays directly into the dreams of your friends who did TFA, and why they frequently met a lot of resistance from their peers. The NYT is usually pretty anti NCLB, so it is odd that they are propping up this notion in a purely anecdotal level in this piece. but it is fun. and who doesn't like to think about sudanese and bosnia boys playing soccer together in america? seriously.

2007-01-23T11:46:00.000-05:00

I think john darnielle is an anti-anti-depressant. I am now listening to "the sunset tree" for the 5th time since friday. and it is making me miserable. laustintexas brought this idea up a while ago. well, they were right. I think the secret is that it isn't inherently mopey music as far as tempo and inflection goes (dashboard et al), the lyrics are just misery-inducing.

I woke up at 4am and couldn't get back to sleep until 6. this hasn't happened since I was 11. I blame the mountain goats. or maybe my colossal academic inferiority complex.

2007-01-19T12:13:00.000-05:00

went to see "shortbus" last night at the our only art movie theater. It was really good. very funny and well constructed. but I found the storytelling got very forced late in the movie. Is it possible to end a contemporary fictional work in a satisfying manner. Shortbus resorted to magical realism, "little children" (the book at least) resorted to self-aware narrative. is it simply true that ending a story within the constructs of the fictional narrative is no longer acceptable, because fictional characters are meant to stand in for the reader/viewer? and you can't please all of the people all of the time. whereas, choosing an ending that dismisses the fictional reality doesn't leave anyone feeling abandoned.

2007-01-18T17:17:00.000-05:00

back from a 5 day trip to fairbanks. fairbanks is beautiful. It is full of snow-covered pine trees and northern lights. that being said, the sun doesn't rise until 10.30. It is warmer there than winnipeg, because they don't have wind.

I smuggled some arctic cod samples back to canada to do calorimetry on. I was given these fish in a cooler with lunchbox ice packs for a 12 hr plane trip. My attempts to keep them frozen included wrapping the cooler in my fleece, putting the contraption in my carry-on duffel and wrapping the duffel in my winter jacket in the hopes of maximizing insulation. I cut a pretty absurd figure in all the airports. real scientists have dry ice and shipping permits. I might as well have been pushing my yellowmicrobus up to 30mph. I guess that is half the fun.

it has warmed up in winnipeg, so I will now stop whining about the cold.

sorry about the breathe vs. breath typo in the last post.

2007-01-12T12:22:00.000-05:00

it is a new kind of cold: too cold to breath.

when I breath through my mouth, the breath catches in my throat. When I breath through my nose, I can feel the crystals forming in my nostrils.

If I inhale and exhale through my balaclava, there is nice warm air on my face, but the moisture supposedly promotes facial frostbite.

I think I have solved this problem by inhaling through my mouth covered by my balaclava, and exhaling though my nose. this seems to minimize associated problems.

It is also too cold to walk the 20' home.

but blue truck started like a charm last night. and the bus was on time. thank goodness for small favors

Our Country

2007-01-11T16:26:00.000-05:00

Perhaps you have been affronted by the John Mellencamp, "this is our country" Chevy ads. In them, John Mellencamp (nee John Cougar Mellencamp) sings a ballad about how great america is behind a montage of american images (Including vietnam interestingly enough). This is lame for several reasons including the fact that JM (nee JCM) used to be a populist protest singer instrumental in things like farm aid. but you probably know all that.

That ad is being shown up here with an edited version of the song that is not nation-specific and it is being shown against a montage of logging, fishing, and hockey shots. This is silly in and of itself. but imagine Chevy running that clip in other markets. What would the "national" montage look like for Mexico? France? South Africa?

2007-01-09T15:56:00.000-05:00

On the recommendation of the new Physiology instructor, I tried a new radio station. I have been a pretty diehard UMFM fan since I arrived here. Maybe it has something to do with my working to develop loyalty to my region and university. and they do a nice job of sponsoring concerts. but my new station is run out of the local community college--Red River College. I recommend it if you are stuck at a computer like I am.

Things I have learned listening to community college radio this morning.

1. REM's delightful "superman" is actually a cover. The original was written in the '60s by Gary Zekley of "The clique." this unfortunately means that the charmingly quirky phrasing "you don't really love the guy you make it with, now, do you?" cannot be attributed to Michael Stipe's excellence, but simply to decadal shifts in lexicon.

2. That heartbreaking version of "I don't like Mondays" by Tory Amos that the West Wing deployed so brilliantly after the swimming pool bombing is a cover of a completely ridiculous piece of music by Irish band, the boomtown rats. The early 80's synth destroys all the pathos to me. It is interesting that people used to feel legitimate, beautiful, heartfelt angst to ridiculous background beats. We think of 80s music as being fun-loving and silly which makes it so successful as kitsch, but it was musical sensibility that enveloped a wider emotional range.

3. the rockin' "walking with a ghost" is by Tegan and Sara. I guess that means that I have to stop making fun of Tegan and Sara and be sorry that I missed them at TT the Bear's. This song was also covered by the White Stripes. Between that and their cover of Jolene, my respect for the white stripes just keeps rising.

4. The Weakerthans "Utilities" continues to be beautiful in that Zach Braff-y emo way. It includes such lines as "Our wishes don't do dishes or brake repairs" and "I've got more faults than the state of california." The effect of the song is amplified if you can imagine 5,000 winnipeg young adults singing along with John Samson and his guitar.

2007-01-08T13:02:00.000-05:00

back
back to the cold, dreary north.
back to gloves and dry skin
back to pb+j on healthy cardboard bread.
back to halfway decent sportscentre without all the stupid interviews and ex-jock opinions
back to work,
back to terrible mexican food,
back to peers with similar earning potential
back to the wonderland of skiing, skating, and climbing ice
back to the joys of black beans
back to the Channukah-style miracle that is Blue Truck
back to the typos (like the one above) to characterize Clovers
back to a lax shaving schedule
back

2006-12-06T19:45:00.000-05:00

Is there any state more solipsistic than expatriatism?
I don't care that much about the political occurances of the country I am in because it isn't my country. I don't care that much about the political occurances in my native country, because I am not there. All there is to worry about is my own mind. What do you think of that, Gertrude Stein?

2006-12-03T14:47:00.000-05:00

I am flush with the buzz of masculinity which accompanies fixing one's own car. it turns out it was the hydraulic system (I will spare you the physics explanation of incompressible fluids), which may have been exascerbated by the cold. now we just have to wait and see if the hydraulic fluid will leak right back out of whatever let it out the first time or if it was an incremental decomposition and the problem will stay solved. N.B. poking around under the hood of your car at -20C is not at all fun.

I went to see "stranger than fiction" of friday night. It definitely could have been worse. Writing fictional narratives that become aware of themselves isn't exactly rocket science (I wrote one for my high school literary magazine as a 12th grader), but STF manages not to become overly involved with its own cleverness (as I did). Will Farrell is deployed very well. He is slightly dislodged from reality already (from his previous outlandish roles), which makes his in medias res dislodgement in this movie more fluid and palatable.

Emma Thompson is very good despite her increasing visual resemblance to my undergraduate dean. Maggie Gyllenhaal is given the fool's errand of trying to play an implausible and underdeveloped free-spirited love interest, but she and her button nose to their darnedest.

I saw borat on monday (hey what else are you going to do when it is -25C out?). I can't really see what all the fuss is about. It wasn't that funny or that shocking. I think we are all pretty surfeited with mockumentaries at this point. and most to all of the humor was staged.

I saw "the fog of war" on saturday (I'm serious, it is freakin' freezing here). Robert McNamara is engaging, and Errol Morris does make a nice film even if his nasal disembodied questions make me want to scream. I think Morris misses a golden opportunity by not further exploring the pros and cons of bringing business efficiency statistics to the military. I was also surprised that he passed on the opportunity to point out the fact that mcnamara was literally the intersection of the military-industrial complex. McNamara himself is very engaging and clear during the early part of the movie, which makes his inability to express clear thoughts or opinions about Vietnam somewhat damning. Given the epilogue which implied that there was a great deal he would not discuss on camara, perhaps the murkiness of the vietnam section was necessary due to lacunae in the subjects covered in McNamara's interview. But overall a really fine move. pretty, informative, and not forehead-smackingly partisan.

2006-12-01T10:03:00.000-05:00

it was so cold, my clutch froze. at least i think it did. i pushed it in and it stayed there and i couldn's shift into gear. it started to engage after about 10 minutes some of which involved being stalled in a highway out of the traffic flow. it is also possible that the clutch works on a hydraulic system which has leaked out causing the weird shifting. neither option is really very good, is it?

2006-11-27T16:38:00.000-05:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/27/business/27richer.html?em&ex=1164776400&en=3de49a5ba64ea3c0&ei=5087%0A

this is a very interesting concept with shamefully poor execution. It is nominally about the implications of the rise of careers or subfields within careers whose compensation packages are vastly disproporionate to those with similar levels of training.

the author threatens to investigate the interesting ideas here:

1. This phenomenon is diverting skilled workers from socially meaningful but comparatively underpaid work,

2. The social reasons for people to make choices that emphasize pay: lack of confidence in the long term coproation-employee contract, declines in the confidence in the welfare state, increasing social isolation.

3. Real pros and cons to such a career choice

but instead this piece winds up reading like something out of people magazine. it features anecdotes about rich people who chose to be management consultants or hedge fund managers without creating much a framework for these stories. The most interesting part of the article to me is listening to our featured workers describe their consumption relative to their peers rather than in absolute terms. There is a confusing detour about philanthropy which is totally unrelated to any of the articles featured workers. it is poorly structured and too timid to either criticize this developing social trend, but it is also too timid to laud our masters of the universe unequivocally either. I guess this is explained by the fact that the article appears in the business section of the new york times instead of the NYT sunday magazine or Forbes. It's reporting style is caught in ideological limbo and it paralyzes the article.

2006-11-26T16:40:00.000-05:00

welcome to the suck. it's cold here. really cold. -22C cold. this is an electric kind of cold. If you are underdressed in this cold and get outside, your heartrate accelerates precipitously. This is the fight-or-flight response. Your autonomic nervous system knows if you stay out much longer you are going to die. Boston never gets this cold. and it is still November.

Expatriot thanksgiving was a rousing culinary success despite a small turnout (more leftovers for me). it was done generally without recipes which was invigorating if a bit harrowing. sweet and sour kale was a surprise hit (adapted from springydog's collared greens recipe) as was the stuffing (in bird with excess put inder the skin of the breast and thigh). I went with a stuffing of butter, savoury, sage, lightly toasted white bread, celery, onion, and sausage. they sausage was utterly superfluous and will be omitted next time. The turkey was successfully juicy, despite Erma Rombauer's hysterical warnings about the cooking style I employed (aluminum foil covered at 350F).

My desserts were sugary but lacked the quality or daring of the main dishes. but sugary goes a long way. I wound up having to remove both the pumpkin pie and the chocolate pie from their shells in order to tweak the batter (this is harrowing part of no recipes). remember kids, don't be like billy, avoid this at all costs. trying to get pie filling out of a pie shells is tremendous pain. Taste the batter first. Nobody ate the pumpkin pie for the second straight year. Pumpkin pie and mashed sweet potatoes are not staples of canadian thanksgiving. But this year I got smart and skipped the arty, all day, bon appetite pumpkin pie in favor of the classically banal one.

I spent of bit of time thinking about why we make as large a meal as we do on thanksgiving and what that means (mine outsized its diners a full two-fold and outsized any meal I had made in 5 months at least 10 fold in time and volume). I muddled around in my head about this being a gustatory halloween for a culture that has had its puritanical roots morphed into a disdain for the obese. Or a domestic halloween for groups of people who emphasize professional achievement over personal care.

I also considered the fact that pumpkin pie is a classic thanksgiving dish, because it is so utterly egalitarian. you can't screw it up, and you can't really make it better. no application of love or money changes pumpkin pie. the yuppie-foodie industrial complex has essentially passed this dish by. it is just canned pumpkin, cream, egg, sugar and spices. even that arty one I made last year isn't really any better. I believe this to be beautiful. As each american mass movement has give rise to the hope of giving the populace common ground only to be shattered by exclusionism or cultural elitism (cinema, TV, professional sports) pumpkin pie remains stalwart. pumpkin pie, we salute you

2006-11-23T16:50:00.000-05:00

Happy Thanksgiving! Or as they say in Canada, "it's thursday."

being that it isn't a holiday here, I am graphing and emailing and meeting and generally having a thursday. delayed thanksgiving is scheduled for saturday at my place. Turkey brings up the inevitable question of stuffing. Members of my family absolutely suck at making stuffing. We have never made a decent one--ever. Everything I read talks about how the culinary world is totally over actually stuffing the bird (stuffy gets soggy, can't get the stuffing temp high enough for food safety, slows down turkey cooking) and you are supposed to cook your stuffing outside and call it "dressing." But I stuffed last year's turkey with a stuffing that was almost entirely white bread and newfie savoury. It was absolutely delicious. (Newfie savoury is apparently a locally grown dried herb. it's green. the internet does not recognize its existance.) so I might try that again. wish me luck. I am thinking of branching out to sweet potato pie from the usual pumpkin. (and no, Domino will not be making an appearance althoguh I am sure he is available.)

I'll let you know how it goes.

magic on the prairies (actual grey cup slogan)

2006-11-21T14:09:00.000-05:00

the dude and papa dude attended the Grey Cup in Winnipeg this sunday. The Grey Cup is the CFL championship. It moves around between the 8 (yes, only 8) CFL cities on a rotating basis. there is no layoff between the conference championships and the cup, so the stadium is mostly filled with people from the host city or people who go to grey cup every year. This makes it more like a new year's party than a football game. Molson was gracious enough to sponsor buses from all over the city to the game which is great because all the public parking in the area is in the lots of the big box stores nearby and winnipeg likes to close streets surrounding big events. Now that the bloom is off the arctic biological rose, I figured my matching suit of carhartt arctic insulated overalls and jacket would see little continued use, but this was a clear exception. Despite being unseasonably warm (it cracked 0 degrees C at noon) it was a solid -12C by halftime. hey, it could have been -35C. I have never attended a sporting event with more people wearing snowmobiling clothing in my life. The game began with a pair of flyovers from the canadian precision flying team and then two jets (F-18?) Does Canada even have F-18s? Do they buy them from us? I don't know.

in the middle of the 1st quarter, a man in the upper deck with us wearing saskatchewan roughriders clothing stands up, points to his blood-stained boot, and shouts to his buddy, "I shot a moose this morning and drove straight to the game." I am not sure if he is kidding.

The game was between the B.C. (British Columbia) Lions and the Montreal Alouettes. montreal has been to the grey cup 6 of the past 8 years (including this year) but only won once making them the buffalo bills of the CFL (superbowl bound!). An Alouette is the french common name for a small, non-descript brown bird. nice choice of mascot, montreal. but I am rooting for them nontheless because BC is heavily favored.

The goal posts are at the front of the endzone, so field goals are much easier, and there were lots of them. BC won, but not after a fair amount of referee cheating that helped them out.

Nelly Furtado was the half-time show. it is hard to sexy-dance in a hat and scarf combo and down jacket, but she tried her best. At least she is canadian. The Hamilton Ti-Cats cheerleaders made a big splash by removing their down coats mid-routine. yes, this passes for titillation here.

CFL football is comprised largely of american college players who didn't make The League. This gives rise to an incredibly fun game of "spot the college star whose skills didn't translate." Jarius Jackson, mid 90s option QB of fabulous Notre Dame is the backup for BC. Robert Edwards former RB of the New England Patriots and sand football is the starter for Montreal.

Canadian football has a lot of structural differences from american football. the field is 110yds long with 20 yd deep endzones. the field is also wider. there are 12 players per side and the formation rules are significantly looser (receivers can be moving forward at the snap, no set rule about the number of people at the line of scrimmage). instead of the american 4 downs to acheive 10 yds, teams only get 3. all this makes for a lot of passing. despite the surfeit of throwing and the necessity of man coverage that comes with having 5 wide recievers and a running back, the receivers remarkable not-open. I can understand not being open on a short route, because given the distance from the outermost receiver to the quarterback laterally, the reciever would need a lot of separation to allow for such a long lateral pass, but what about up the field. Can someone explain this to me. is it as simple as inferior arm strength and receiver speed in the CFL?

Anyway, it was good, cold fun. maybe a little overpriced for the quality of play, but when am I ever going to see a grey cup again?

2006-11-17T11:23:00.000-05:00

I was watching this bit of youtube delight (which is 100% courtesy of senor beavis). I have now watched it on at least 5 separate occaisions because it cheers me up. the humor is based on a a simple premise of white people engaging sarcastically in a piece of traditionally urban black culture--in this case "ghostriding." when framed in those terms, it doesn't sound so funny. but it is. It has a distinct air of self-irony and harmlessness to it.

I have been wondering for a few months about when cultural cooption becomes offensive.

I was originally very turned off by this starbucks ad that features a bunch of white commuters step dancing, but no one else seemed to find that weird. I had cooked up this extended theory about how step dancing (last paragraph only) is rooted in the black fraternity tradition and symbolizes unity, pride, and paramilitary discipline. It seemed to me that the satirical cooption of this tradition by starbucks as part of its ironic-yet-energetic ad campaign (e.g "the eye of the tiger piece") was inappropriate. but in retrospect, I think maybe I was being over-serious.

However, there have been some obvious examples of highly distastful versions of the same cultural cooption. including the 1Ls at UT having a ghetto fabulous party complete with african-american name tags.

This issue seems to have run me up against my ceiling as a culture critic. I can't figure out any kind of objective guidelines for offensiveness.

but you really should watch ghostriding if you are feeling down.

Grammar police, arrest this man?

2006-11-13T11:09:00.000-05:00

as a bit of backstory, I am in charge of a bunch of volunteer stuff in our department. one of my many BS jobs is organizing the seminar series where zoology grad students give talks to the rest of the department for practice and to increase cohesion. there has been a movement to change the name from "crackerjack seminar series" to something more formal. Given that too much student democracy is a waste of time, I changed it to "Zoological students seminar series" (ZS cubed for short). One of my friends in the department contends that my formation is improper; he believes that we should be "Zoology students seminar series." My rationale is based on two points: "Zoology" is not an adjective and hence cannot modify "students", and that I have used the same construction as the widely accepted "medical students." (No one would call them "medicine students.") He counters with the idea that chemistry, physics, and philosophy grad students would not be called "chemical students", "physical students", or "philosophical students" respectively. This seems valid to me. I believe that I am correct de jure, but I am swayed by the pragmatism of his arguments. When does the fluency of common usage trump proper grammer, and is my grammar even correct? What's a canadian farm boy to do?

2006-11-07T15:57:00.000-05:00

William Styron died last week. William Styron was my great uncle. He married my grandfather's sister, Rose, and they moved out of the orbit of our family network. In every marriage, someone packs up the trunk and moves away physically or spiritually. He was our elephant in the room; far and away the most famous person to whom any of us was related, but clearly someone over whom we did not feel ownership. I am certainly not about to tell you some kind of personal tale of vibrant, gruff, fanciful childhood memories in the style of stephen james joyce. I probably only spoke to 'Uncle Bill' twice. My only distinct memory of him is watching him come downstairs to eat soup and then retreat upstairs at a lunch after I graduated from college. It was always funny to me that he was this great "bard of depression" who gave seminars and spoke at length about his personal struggle, because he was always just the guy who didn't talk in the years that he came to thanksgiving. He and his descendants came down to DC from new york about every five years, and the baltimore-washington axis of the family were always a little perplexed by them. To our clade of earnest jews engaged primarily in advanced degree having and sociology, the broad artistic sweep of the styrons was engaging but also confusing. His son was an actor/director, his daughter-in-law a dancer, his wife a poet, his grandson had something to do with recording music. This all fell in line with the idea of our relative by marriage as "literary giant," but bill himself never fit that Mailer-esque ideal. His clothes weren't fashionable nor were his eyeglasses. He did not gesture or allude, his eyes didn't sparkle conspiratorially, nor speak of Montmarte or Morocco in an off-handed way the way one imagine internationally renowned writers to do. (Where is Padma Lakshmi when you need her?) In fact, he rarely said anything to anyone. I guess that is what having a depressed relative is all about even if he wrote a great book about it years ago. Rest In Peace, Bill.

2006-11-07T13:57:00.000-05:00

can someone please explain to me who the hell is Tinsley Mortimer?

2006-11-06T12:39:00.000-05:00

OChem midterm was good. not quite as good as I had hoped, but still good. I was harmed by my trademark inattention to detail, but to a lesser extent than other times.

We DFLed at CURCs but only by a 2 lengths. This is to be expected for a number of physiological, technical, and sociological reasons which would required a long enough treatise about rowing to bore everyone except terry. basically after 4 years off, six weeks on at 3 rows a week with a prairie giant isn't quite going to get it done against the best of the canandian best. but it was fun to get out and rock again.

now we are home trying to get down to business.

2006-11-01T12:37:00.000-05:00

dude updates:

the 2 bedroom dude mansion has lost its 3rd inhabitant returning it to its conformation of maximum stability.

wish the dude luck:
he has
an OChem midterm tonight
Canadian University Rowing Championships on friday. (the old grey mare.........)

it is snowing here a lot. and sticking. adios bicicleta, hola autobus.

2006-10-29T13:53:00.000-05:00

24 hour party people is a smug, stupid little movie. nominally about the rise of new wave and rave culture in manchester, england it mostly serves as a excuse to show video footage of the actual bands (most notably joy division/new order) and then splice away to a cut of the actors playing those characters. the movie's self-conscious attempts to give us frameworks to view the story (Icaran, self-destructive/brilliant) are over-obvious (the themes are stated outright in sidebars). A bit of musical history about manchester may come in handy for looking with-it in hipster circles, but the movie itself is frankly boring.

in related news, I went to see "Shout out out out out" at the pyramid last night. they are a canadian electro-dance outfit. it was sortof like a cross between daft punk and grandaddy (part high-energy rave, part technological pathos). I dug it. Much like "you say party! we say die!" one has the distinct sense that people have been making this music in New york for about 6 years, but it sure is fun. 2 drummers, 4 bassists, 2 synths and a vocoder. for any new yorkers, they are coming for the CMJ fest on the 31st and the 1st.

2006-10-20T22:07:00.000-04:00

i have been complaining recently about how disconnected i feel from movies meant to speak to my demographic. Close followers of this blog know how I feel about Garden State. I find wes anderson movies cute but artificial, and the self conscious narrative of Adaptation to be emotionally hollow.

Then I saw the squid and the whale.

I firmly believe this to be the most beautiful movie I have seen. I know it is a little short, and falling prey to 80s nostalgia is dangerous, but I see myself in all of the main characters. Watching the children pick up the bad habits of their parents like everyone reflexively lying to paint themselves in a good light was very poignant while being understated. The movie manages to generate genuine emotion without usual devices that divorce movies from the experiences of reality. If you haven't seen the movie, I highly recommend it.

Arnold Schwarzenegger is electric in Pumping Iron. I think the famous premise about his psychologically intimidating Lou Farigno is a bit of a fabrication. We are set up to see that occurance by the director's use of the interview about his intended psychological warfare; however, the actual precontest breakfast seems to lack any notable change in Farigno. ("Theory dictates what we can observe." --A. Einstein). Arnold's infectious confidence absolutely make the movie. That and the fact that I am TAing Anatomy right now, and bodybuilders are a fun place to play "spot the serratus anterior." For those curious, serrati anterior are those little muscles that run horizontally under the armpit which are only visible in exceedingly well-defined men between thier pecs and lats. they originate on the ribs and insert in the scapula.

2006-10-18T15:21:00.000-04:00

So you might all remember my nigerian roommate. His light was frequently on in his room at two or three am when I would get up to pee. hey, my roommate's life is his. but he has recently been away in toronto for a few days and I have discovered why the light was on. He was receiving calls from Nigeria. He is away, and I was woken up no less than 4 times last night between midnight and 6 am by phone calls from people who spoke poor english who couldn't figure out why Osa wasn't the one speaking (two from father, two from sister). During the father's first call, I could distinctly hear a rooster crowing in the background. I can only wonder from where this call was being placed. Evidently, they also didn't believe me when I said he was in toronto but that I would leave a message for him to call when he returned, because the both called again. I have a little experience speaking to not-so-comfortable-with-english parents of roommates (freshman year of college) but this was certainly a new level of confusion and frustration. The phone definitely stays in the living room tonight. He has been away since friday and this is the first night the phone was ringing off the hook so I hope everything is alright. I also hope he hasn't been calling them on my line. suddenly the fish head soup doesn't seem nearly so bad.

A cultural complication to my rooming situation is the perception of Nigerians as scam artists. My roommate is a bit of shady character (up all night, doesn't speak or smile much, leaves without warning for 5-7 days at a time, tried to borrow money, found him in a hotel/strip club) and I am having a difficult time teasing apart these behaviours. Is he just a slightly irresponsible 20 year old? Is he in some kind of trouble that he needs to go off for a week (twice) nominally to get money? Should I hide documents with my personal information on them? Is that a prejudiced action to even consider it? I disliked my previous roommate, but I usually understood what he wanted, where he was going, and could count on him to pay bills. I don't have any of those things now and I can't figure out if it is because my roommate sucks or because we can't communicate through cultural barriers.

While we are covering nigerians, we had a second meeting with canadian housing NGO, and everything seems to be progressing smoothly. Ike and Grace have to visit the bank who will review their credit and see if they can be approved for a loan. the exact financial usefullness of the NGO itself is still unclear, but they alluded to certain types of aid and/or guarantor status they might provide pending the review of the financial landscape. so this meeting had a lot less BS. but Immanuel still refused to eat.

2006-10-12T13:39:00.000-04:00

it snowed yesterday.
it snowed today.

The Guess Who suck/
The Jets were lousy, anyway/
I hate Winnipeg

Barrow!!

2006-10-10T12:09:00.000-04:00

so remember that place at the end of the world where I do my thesis research--Barrow, Alaska? well, they started a football team this year to try to keep kids off of drugs. it was very controversial in town because it was very expensive. espn came to film their first game. the Barrow Whalers actually won their third home game. we used to listen on the radio on saturdays on the island. check the big story on espn.com. It has lots of video of barrow which is beautiful and makes me miss it.
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/eticket/story?page=tundra

2006-10-09T11:57:00.000-04:00

I think this is times select, so don't stress if you can't read it.

http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/

The piece is Stanley Fish trotting out that favorite conservative boogie man, the university, for ridicule. In this case, Fish is deriding universities for attempting to enforce morality through divestment. He lauds universities that don't get too uppity when he praises Wisconsin-Madison's refusal to take a stand against the invasion of Iraq by stating "the University of Wisconsin has no foreign policy." This anecdote underscores Fish's larger point which is "why don't you stick to teaching and learning." On the surface, this isn't an absurd statement. On the subject of divestiture, it rings very similar to Jim Cramer's (of the epileptic "Mad Money") response to buying stocks in profitable, but morally questionable nations and enterprises, "Some is going to make that money, why shouldn't it be you." Although superficially, Cramer and Fish are talking about different things, beneath the surface they are talking about the same thing: the compartmentalization of society and the ultimate subservience of morality to finance. If capital is always privilged over morality, then morality can never win a battle where it is set at odds with capital. For Fish to tell universities that the morality of investments isn't their business is for him to say that capital should be privileged over morality and that universities are a vocational device for the creation of good workers for the national economy. This level of brutal pragmatism is already at work to a large degree in universities. this is a cynical and flawed view of universities but one that rings the same tone insidiously oversimplified common sense as much of conservativism.

monkey vs. robot

2006-10-07T20:03:00.000-04:00

(patches vs. zoe)
this picture was taken last spring by tracey. it blows the mind.

that is the foal of a miniature horse breed in a standoff against a pug. all sense of perspective has been shattered.

the customer is always and asshole

2006-10-06T17:55:00.000-04:00

gold star if you get the title.

This article as about how the Kremlin is attempting to screw over Shell and ExxonMobil and gain oil hegemony by enforcing environmental regulations on the Sakhalin projects on Sakhalin Island. (Sakhalin is that big long island north of Japan. Russia owns it.) The case is framed by NYT to sound a lot like the sort of selective enforcement that the kremlin performed on Yukos to renationalize energy resources; however, the article treads lightly on the fact that the multinationals have pulled some pretty dodgy moves of thier own including jacking up the production cost estimates which according to the terms of the leases delays the russian government's acquisition of profits significantly as well as raising the percent stake requirements for voting above the 25% stake purchase Gazprom was negotiating only a week before the deal was to be signed. Basically Shell has bait-and-switched the russians twice, and now the russians are pissed and are using questionable environmental enforcement to regain their bargaining leverage. And Greenpeace is playing the dupe to this geopolitical oil conflict by cheering on anyone who puts the screws to the environmental enforcement of oil extraction (as though Gazprom is going to do a better job after russia nationalizes the Sakhalin projects).

This is interesting because it touches on a major trend in world economics which is the nationalizing of western oil projects by populist or anti-western governments. We have seen similar strains of conflict in Nigeria as well as more bald-faced grabs Venezuela and Bolivia. And this argument is far from one sided. The nationalisers are breaking the agreements signed with the multinationals which harms their globalized economies in the long term by breaking trust, but if these incredibly lucrative resources are orders of magnitude more valuable than anything else your country produces, attempting to recoup your only resource seems reasonable. In addition, is the western economic model where large corporations gain favorable extraction leases because smaller gov'ts can't produce the infrastructure and capital outlay to extract it themselves. Oil politics is dirty stuff.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/06/business/worldbusiness/06sakhalin.html?ref=science

vice--the hipster lads magazine

2006-10-05T14:54:00.000-04:00

rare is it that I bother with vice magazine past the "do's and don'ts." But today I did and came across an amusing series about high school. They asked folks from different age classes to recount the cliques and styles in thier highschool. Pretty funny, and also fairly accurate. I am impressed by the clarity and detail of recall. keep an eye out for the 1996-2000 section. and play "spot yourself." Most fun place to play it since "I am charlotte simmons."

http://www.viceland.com/int/v13n9/htdocs/hier3.php?country=ca
http://www.viceland.com/int/v13n9/htdocs/hier1.php?country=ca

Ellipsoids!

2006-10-04T17:00:00.000-04:00

I love eggs. Always have. I have been known to consume piles of scrambled eggs intended for two people without batting an eyelash. (Ask springydog.) My feeble defense to such an act of gluttony was "They're so fertile." So it brought me great happiness to see a big article about eggs in NYT. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/04/dining/04mini.html
better than that, the article, instead of just being a trend-watch about restaurants 1200mi away that are too expensive for me to eat in, includes tips on ideal soft-boiled and scrambled eggs and thier use at all meals. Not rocket science, I know, but eggs are one of those things to seem so simple taht you don't consult an expert (at least I don't). but the right combination of time and heat makes a huge difference.

you may now be jealous of me and the dozen fresh eggs I get sunday nights from the family farm of my wonderfully kind friend and classmate . And don't get me started on the tomatoes. or the hutterite pickles.

Ensalade caprese deserves a whole separate post.

2006-10-03T14:21:00.000-04:00

Went to go see Thunderbirds are Now! and You Say Party! We Say Die! last night at the Collective. Tickets were cheap. YSP!WSD! (http://www.myspace.com/yousaypartywesaydie) were a hyper-caffeinated group of canadians playing new wave dance punk. I know new wave dance punk is over, but it was still superfun and they were cute and enthusiastic. It raised an interesting question of what it means for kids who never saw new wave to dress/dance/sing like new wave. I also didn't experience new wave, so I don't know what it meant culturally which compromises my ability to analyze the trend. I thought the onstage kitsch could have been left behind, but having a band explode your tempo paradigm is always fun. They really were infectious. Music par excellence for cooking, cleaning, or dancing around your apartment.

Thunderbirds Are Now! were a bit of a surprise. (www.thunderbirdsarenow.com) A 4 piece all-male group from detroit, they also played high energy rock and were hyperactive on stage, but they had a undercurrent of of raw jack white detroit guitar that placed them in a different catagory from YSP!WSD! The combined the positive aspects of pure boogie that uptempo music gives with a bit more grime. The keyboardist doesn't have quite enough to do and winds up roaming the stage being self-consciously weird (they often use loops in lieu of keyboard), but these guys are rockers. I recommend them for highway driving.

Good clean $8 CDN fun all around. Have a listen to their music on their sites.

2006-10-02T13:17:00.000-04:00

Rarely do I read an article that makes me physically grimace. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/02/world/africa/02ivory.html.

For those of you too lazy to read, it is about the disposal of toxic waste from a European oil services company. The disposal price was too high in europe, so they shipped to to cote d'ivoire where it was disposed of by local companies by simply dumping it it local landfills. Brutal stuff. But not suprising. Global opportunities without global regulation is going to lead to the "offshoring" of of tasks that are expensive in countries with tight environmental regulations to those with little or no enforcement. This story is noteworthy because it is glaring and involves injured babies, but it is part of a paradigm that is much larger.

2006-09-29T13:35:00.000-04:00

well, the Terrell Owens Might Have Committed Suicide event seems to be over. The Owens camp is denying everything. The police are a little bit angry that the Owens camp has lamely claimed a police conspiracy to make him look bad. but it looks like he will go back to playing football, probably way too soon. (http://select.nytimes.com/2006/09/29/sports/football/29araton.html)

Senor Beavis (coefficient of relatedness = 0.5) spoke well about the complex and awkward relationship our society has to depression in light of the Terrell Owens incident. (http://banthetubetop.blogspot.com/2006/09/we-hope-you-choke.html). In his piece he also discussed the fact that we are having trouble generating opinions because no one is sure what if anything took place.

My first night in my first apartment out of college in San Francisco, my craiglist roommate/master tenant was taken away in an ambulance. Her friend who had been on the phone with her determined that she had intentionally overdosed on NSAIDs and called the cops. Upon her return the next morning, she claimed she had a bad reaction to a combination of meds and a head cold. I don't care which it was, it isn't my business, but the point is that suicide isn't like pregnancy. Often times, it cannot be determined objectively.

There has been an swirling undercurrent that this whole event might have been staged as a publicity stunt/ploy to make the nation feel sorry for him. (For the non-sports-inclined, Terrell is a famously self-centered wide receiver and about as close to a national villain as we have. Even Tom DeLay has partisan support.) If this was a publicity stunt, it is so ill-conceived and poorly executed, that it displays a fairly serious detachment from reality. and if it wasn't and his actions were suicidal, it shows a similar level of unwellness. I feel sorry for terrell owens. But I always have. The whole event reminds me a little of "Network" and"Rollerball." I guess it is just the public death of public figures aspect.

2006-09-28T13:35:00.000-04:00

I want to take a moment for Clinton Portis. Has anyone crafted a more offbeat, yet likeable football persona? I don't know his motivations and I don't pretend to, but the costume chacters (Bro Sweets, Jerome from Southeast, Dr. I Don't Know, Sherriff Gonna Getcha) simply exploded the paradigm of the formulaic sports interview. (For the not sports inclined, Portis made a habit of dressing up in different costume-shop wigs, glasses and fake mustaches every monday when he was obliged to be interviewed about the previous day's game. It was mind-blowing)

I also support his Charles Oakley throwback hairstyle. I think the understatement of his hair when juxtaposed the chad johnson's self-aggrandizing version of a nearly identical haircut explains my fondness for Portis well. He is incredibly fun without being distracting. (see phil ford on RBs vs. WRS--http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/columns/story?columnist=forde_pat&id=2587400.) On top of that he is incredibly good. Adios Champ Bailey.

It is very possible that I am heartbroken after the departure of LaVarr and this is simply a rebound. but Clinton Portis, we salute you.

Just Give [him] the Damn Privacy

2006-09-27T15:34:00.000-04:00

We should all leave terrell owens alone right now. Any more commenting about the incident would imply that this is a story right now which it isn't. it might be in a week, but it isn't right now.

however, the fact that Odell Thurman was the SIXTH Bengal arrested this year is a story. are they the new blazers?

2006-09-27T13:16:00.000-04:00

Billy Bragg is cool, but old. He played Peg City last night. It was just him and an electric guitar (and several mugs of tea) which made for an interesting show. solo electric just about sums up Bragg's positioning in between punk and croony singer-songerwriters. The whole show had a feel of a leftist rally which I found a little distasteful. I can't help but wonder what a right-wing balladeer show would look like. Then I remembered just how amazing and ahead of it's time Bob Roberts was. Hello World posted about the corporatization of viral/guerrilla marketing (http://www.en-dash.com/blog/2006/09/22/im-lovin-in-dude/), which I think is relevant to the ethos of modernity. and Bob Roberts mastered that idea16 years ago.

The opener was Geoff Berner (http://www.geoffberner.com/lyrics.htm) who played funny and innappropriate songs with his accordion. I was particularly struck by his piece "Lucky God Damn Jew" which was meant to be provacative but I thought it sat nicely in the Roth/Allen (Woody, not George) tradition of laying forth the bitter, sarcastic, and possibly conniving side of judaism and/or aggressively mocking people's preconceptions about it rather than presenting an idealized picture for the betterment of the race (see Ellison's "Invisible Man"). It is also relevant to an article I read recently in salon called "cool jews" (http://journalism.nyu.edu/portfolio/bestof/2006/001837.html) about the fact that contemporary jews in cinema and television were nebuschy and neurotic (Ben Stiller, David Schwimmer) as opposed to the 60s and 70s when they were tough, cool, or both (Lou Reed, Dustin Hoffman). I applaud Berner in his efforts. Bragg suggested (before playing Eisler on the go) that the HUAC hearings were actually an anti-semitic purge. I think these issues are important in a time when the world at large is turning against Israel for a poorly executed but not unprovoked war. Berner also plays pure humor well including "Don't play cards for money with Corby Lund"which is sadly absent from his album. (Btw Corby Lund is the lead singer of Corb Lund and the Hurtin' Albertans--big stars in Canadian country music).

2006-09-26T11:06:00.000-04:00

I had a crazy thing happen last night. For those of you who don't know, I have been attending nigerian evangelical church. it is really fun. There is lots of singing and dancing and if you ignore some of the more strident sermons, it is a good time. I think I started going out of curiousity and kept going because it is basically an immigrant community church (mostly Nigerian with some Ghanaian and Rwandan) and I am basically an immigrant here. the really involved community feel was really nice. I actually have a nigerian immigrant staying in my spare room right now. he was in a roach motel.

but that's not what happened last night. I got invited (maybe because my english is good and I understand economics, or maybe just because Ike thinks a white guy will give him credibility, I don't know) to go to a meeting between an NGO that nominally specializes in home ownership for immigrant communities and the church (it was me, the pastor (Ike), his wife (Grace), and another guy (Immanuel)). This NGO is called Heart Housing, and it seems to consist of 4 christian bankers with guilty consciences and a new age-y preist. they have this vision of selling houses to "immigrant communities." only problem is: you can't sell a house to a community, you can only sell it to an individual/family. so they are trying to use the pastor to get to the immigrants in the church to buy houses (but it is totally unclear if they help wiht money or just advice or what they do), and the pastor wants them to help finance a church. He has presented a business plan that just doesn't hold a drop of water in western financial circles. I spend this time feeling a little embarrassed for him and wondering if this is a cultural difference (he is pledging his word, but with no savings and no prospect of significant income) or just Ike not having a lot of business sense. so that gets nixed pretty quickly.
then we get to the obvious idea that this NGO help Ike and his wife buy a house which they can hold church in if they want. this seems like a good idea. the guy I've never met before keeps talking about how god sent him a vision of the logo of Ike's church, but not the name and he had to seek it. and the banker's keep wanting to talk him into buying a house. and the priest keeps speaking slowly and making gestures and talking aboutb being able to save money by buying a 50lb bag of rice to share between the families. It is obvious that he is either experienced with immigrants with poor english, or has polished this shtick past reason, because all the nigerians speak fine english. We all feel good. I try to push the NGO about what it actually will do--they stammer and equivocate.
oh, and the whole thing is in an office at the big downtown mall (Portage Place) where we are served dinner, and Immanuel refuses to eat and gives the excuse of being overweight and one of the bankers keeps trying to tell him that losing weight is about portion control not skipping meals. again big glaring cultural differences. and the meal is all homemade by the preist and consists of a salad of raw kale, tomatoes and nesturtium flowers as well as garam masala beef stew and tang. and at the end Ike wants to end with a prayer and a song. The prayer tkaes 8 minutes and has an intensity that makes the NGO lutherans look at each other, and for the song, in trying to think of a song everyone will know, we wind up sitting around the table, heads bowed, singing "Oh come all ye faithful." we might as well have been the soldiers at the end of full metal jacket singing the mickey mouse theme for all the absurdist incongruity.
it was interesting, because I have certainly been on the side of the helpful establishment white folks when helping the "needy" (soup kitchens and clothing drives and whatnot) but it was weird to actually be on the immigrants negotiating team and see the NGO through their eyes. it was also sortof funny to see all the good intentions and handwringing and fuzzy planning to famously typify non-profits. I don't know. I haven't fully processed the experience, but I wanted to share because it certainly was memorable.

Other People's Junk

2006-09-25T12:29:00.001-04:00

So after ridiculous mike, my cougar-trapping roommate moved out and took all the furniture, blue truck, the internet, and I have conspired to refurnish the place better than ever. this is exhausting as it all takes place during the hours after work. but the project is going well. particularly well given that instead of craigslist, the preferred sales site here is usedwinnipeg.ca (this is not nearly as sexually explicit as it sounds).

I purchased a barbecue given as a wedding present to a couple who met on the internet on september 11 after which she moved from the US to Winnipeg to marry the guy. I feel a little silly given the cultural associations of grill ownership and hollow false suburban masculinity, but it is a very nice grill and embarrassingly cheap. it is a shame I won't be able to take it back to canada.

my dining room table came from a older couple. neither man nor wife was taller than 5'2". It was very strange for me to be around them. they had just sold their cottage on lake winnipeg, and were moving the furniture out so thier house was chocked full of duplicate furniture. These tiny people bustling about thier overstuffed house made me feel like I had stumbled into a fairy tale.

My bed came from a mixed Argentine/canadian couple. The husband had finally prevailed and was moving the family back to his homeland. it was thier guest bed I was buying; therefore, they could part with it before they moved.

pots and pans are from value village. their stuff is solid, but they don't give it away. if you sift, you can get good quality used stuff for about the same price as low-quality wal-mart new stuff. I prefer it, but there is very little magic here. only solid buys.

My couch came from using the truck to move chintzy leather furniture into the house of a nigerian minister in my department. he was going to throw out his pink, plush loveseat, so I offered to take it.

my creamsicle-colored chest of drawers came from a yardsale as did the lamps, microwave, toaster, and plates. (6 yardsales in all. One of those sales also yielded unused hockey skates for $10 and a copy of 'appetite for destruction for $0.10'.

There is definite yardsale season here, like duck hunting or berry picking. it is localized temporally and very intense. you can tell a lot about people by what they sell and how they price it. there are those who simply want it gone (wholesale underpricers--the best kind). those who mistake their junk for something better (overpricers--run), those who are selling only used baby items (run), and people selling mostly nick-knacks (It is worth sifting through these sales in the hopes of finding a hipster treasure or something that is more valuable than the owners know, but don't expect much--low yield on effort).

2006-09-19T12:41:00.000-04:00

is there anything less attractive than watching ivy league graduates ruminate on the meaning of attending their alma mater.
http://news.blogs.nytimes.com/?p=45
I think not. I said this last spring, the NYT's school girl obsession with Ivy League gossip is one of its biggest black marks.

Peg Ska City

2006-09-18T11:34:00.000-04:00

It was a busy weekend on the Manitoba front.

Went to see local heroes, The Weakerthans, play a sold-out show at the 2,500 seat Burton Cummings Theater.

For any readers born after 1975, Burton Cummings was in "The Guess Who" and is a Winnipeg native. In a charming gesture he saved the Walker Theater (a delightful midsized venue that every market needs). Souring that charming move, he renamed the theater after himself.

The Weakerthans are hipster faves in the states but play 500 person clubs like TT the bear's in Boston and Down the Hill in SF. But in winnipeg they are voice of a generation and they embody a strain of hope for the kids with a bit hipster who are stranded in the prairies.

They made a point to play all their songs with winnipeg geographical references. and one of the encoures was, of course, "One Great City (I Hate Winnipeg)." Their stage presence could best be described as "silly rock stars." There was a lot of self-ironic knee-slide guitar playing, but it was all part of the self-effacing charm that is winnipeg. And it was clearly fun for them to play a show where they could do no wrong. I find it curious that two of my top five musical influences of the past year have been Neil Young and the Weakerthans. Do I listen to Winnipeg music by social reinforcement because I am in Winnipeg, or does the emotional tone of Winnipeg music resonate because I am here?

On Sunday I was lucky enough to see an exhibition NHL game between the Coyotes and the Oilers. (BTW the Phoenix Coyotes used to be the Winnipeg Jets until 1996 when they relocated. WInnipeggers have never gotten over the loss.) I asked upon entering the arena if having the team that left come back for exhibition was sortof like going on a date with your exgirlfriend. Apparently so because the Oilers (who were bitter rivals when the jets were in town) were clearly the crowd favorites. There was an undercurrent at the game which both cute and bizarre. It was "If we cheer loud enough, the NHL will give us a franchise again." The exhorations from the announcers made it pretty clear. But on top of that was a genuine love of hockey. The MTS center was sold out (15,015) at $50-100/ticket (we lucked into some comped tix) for an EXHIBITION game without full rosters. The fans gave a standing ovation to both teams when asked to thank them for coming. Can you imagine that in Carolina or Dallas or even Washington.
This display by the hockey faithful of winnipeg brings up an intersting question: Why did the NHL take hockey to the sunbelt? Does the corporate and economic strength in the US (Luxury Box revenue) really make teams financially successful in non-hockey markets? Or are those teams doing poorly and no one wants to admit their mistake. Globalization is brutal stuff. Especially when it is your recreation getting outsourced due to competitive advantages.

2006-09-15T16:21:00.000-04:00

movies for 20-somethings are officially ridiculous. "The last kiss" a remake of an italian movie starring Zach Braff as (surprise!) a confused 29 year old who struggles with the theory and practice of being a grown up. Starring opposite as the alluring but naive college student is the painful Rachel Bilson. arggh. Has the line between actor and type-cast monkey become this blurry or does this sort of synergistic role selection help to reinfornce the suspension of disbelief?

Adding insult to injury is a film adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri's "The Namesake" starring Kal Penn (the guy from Harold & Kumar) as Gogol. Ms. Lahiri apparently makes a cameo as "Aunt Jhumpa" in the movie. I am disheartened.

2006-09-14T11:10:00.000-04:00

that's right. I'm back. Now you can all stop staring at the apostrophe I misused in the previous post. Is the correct use of the apostrophe (and maybe quotation marks) the gang sign of the overeducated or what? Anyway, I saw it and decided to leave it up there as a feeble middle finger to SNOOTitude.

amazing things seen since returning to Manitoba:

an angry looking 30 year old who had spray-painted over the "friendly" on her license plate that normally reads "friendly Manitoba." adolescence run wild.

a promotion on campus led by the industrial food provider called "Rollin' with Aramark." just keep working that one around in your mind and see on how many levels this is absurd.

a $300 class to hone your soap carving skills. This is not a joke. The DAT (dental aptitude test) in Canada has a "soap carving" section where they give you a bar of soap and ask you to make a specific shape and size. I guess you don't want clumsy dentists, but that is pretty bizarre.

a girl stopping a lecture with 800 (that's right) people in it, and mind you, this was not a Socratic-style lecture with a lot of audience participation, to ask a question that simply proved she had no idea what was going on. now 800 people think you are rude, but also know you are an idiot.

time for clovers' bookclub:

I am Charlotte Simmons is a truly hateful book. Unlike "A man in full," Wolfe creates no sympathetic characters. Now the idea of a dystopic youth culture isn't new, but Wolfe's vision of elite college stocked with stereotypes (the dumb jock; the ambitious jewish nerd; the promiscuous wannabe banker frat boy; the sarcastic elitist boarding school roommate; the ignorant, powerful athletic coach, the liberal jewish professor who misses the '60s) that simply make the author appear to be a doddering fogey rather then capturing any sort of zeitgeist of nihilism. Now these classes of people do exist in modern colleges, but where Wolfe's novel fails is in exploding their subtlety. Nobody plays against type. He takes the behavior (particulalry that of the boorish males) at face value without allowing them motivation or internality, and this makes the novel flat. Charlotte, the protagonist, is not so much a stereotype as a figment of Wolfe's imagination. She is academically brilliant, from very rural north carolina, possessed with beauty an a budding sexuality which are hugely understated due to her heavily religious upbringing. I know somebody misses the '50s ideal of womanhood, but trying to cram her into a modern character and make it believeable is absurd.

Reading "a man in full" and I am charlotte simmons" back to back reveals the formulaic weaknesses in wolfe's writing. Both contain an extended passage of the generalized behaviour of those suffering mild depression in relation to the protagonists' responses to bad situations. Both contain flourishs of Greek philosophy which are used as clear and beautiful beacons in the murky immorality of modernity. Wolfe is overly fond of the construction "Bango!--..." to express a quick occurence. MOst unfortunate are the passing allusions to rappers in the novels. "man" includes the work of a fictious rapper "Dr. Rammer Doc Doc," while the collegians in "Simmons" are endlessly listening to "Dr. Dis." The music of both is characterized as liscivious and degrading. One must assume that these are awkward references to Dr. Dre; however, the there repetition reveals Wolfe to be out of touch stammering like James Traficant or Ted Stevens about "Beaver and Buffcoat" and "the tubes of the internets."

The only redeeming quality of "Simmons" is the ability to play the game "who am I and or my friends and aquaintances in this college landscape?"

There is a strong tradition of American men writing slightly sexists novels in the last 50 years (Roth, Bellow, etc.), but there is a lack of subtlety, a lack of believability, and most crucially a lack of empathy in Wolfe's writing that makes the common sins of these authors seem more glaring in Wolfe. That being said, his novels do turn pages. They are easy reads that bob their heads just above the abyss of pure trash to allow readers to read them. There is a place in this world for good old fashioned yarns that don't teach us too much about ourselves or others but sure do pass the time. I place Wolfe happily in this catagory. I hope he does not aspire to escape it.

Zadie Smith's "On Beauty" is another modern novel about a university setting (a thinly veiled Harvard). Smith also creates few likeable characters within the university setting. SHe paints most of the professors as irrelevant, power hungry and/or petty and most of students are posturing and pampered; however, she does show some respect for and understanding of hip-hop. She loves Levi (the youngest son of the protangonist family) and is deeply sympathetic to his conflicted relationship to rap music as a middle class child with one african-american parent. This exploration of Levi's urban culture is the high point of the novel. Smith is guilty of a number of sins including incomplete mastery of the Americanness and a willingness to engage her own long-shot cliche in the form of Charles the brilliant street poet. This novel probably attempts to take on the internal worlds of too many people (upwards of 10) which was also a problem in White Teeth, but her writing style is much closer to the great novel as insight into others which isn't even visible in the distance of "I am Charlotte Simmons."