Tears of the Sun

I saw the Cannes 2006 Adfest last night with my friend at the cheap artsy theatre. It was totally awesome. You sit there are watch an hour and a half of commericals, but I loved it. Most of them were funny, a few weren't and took a more serious side. I didn't like all of them, a few I gave a brief "boo" to, but I think most other people in the vicinity of my person were in agreement. I couldn't find the commerical on YouTube that had the biggest impact on me, it wasa incredible. But oh well, I'll give you the same below instead.

This one got a big laugh:




This one was very clever:




This one looked way cooler on the big screen, I just love the distinct points of colour:

Collection Connexion

My office-mate gave me a kinder egg the other day and guess what was inside…. a PUZZLE. Who the frick wants a puzzle? I want a toy, you know, with the little picture directions that you put together yourself. My favourite part was always adding the stickers, which could be facial features if it was a creature, or racing stripes and a license plate if it was some sort of vehicle. I’d always try my best to put them on perfectly aligned with the carefully handcrafted plastic contours. I hated it when part of the sticker would fold over the edge, even just a little bit. The racing stripes were the worse for that because they were long and needed extra precision for success. I also didn’t like the toys that didn’t snap together properly and always fell apart. I threw them out after a short period of time anyway, not really a collector for such things.

I did collect thing as a kid. Like stuffed bunnies. My favourite animal during my youth was a rabbit, and my favourite toy was a rabbit, and I read books about having a rabbit as a pet, and I knew about different kinds of rabbits (like angora that you brush and their super soft hair is ready for collection…..). I never did get a rabbit, there was discussion with the rents about it, but it never materialized. I had to make do with the rabbits at my friends houses, but they weren’t the nicest rabbits, some of them outdoor pets.

I also collected pennies. My grandma gave me and my brother these loonie shaped plastic piggy banks this one time, and I mean, they were huge. So it became my goal to fill it with pennies. I had a few other piggy banks going on at the same time, one in which I stored all the pre 1970 pennies along with the memorial quarters and loonie-bins and stuff. So now I have this 10 kg loonie shaped piggy bank full of copper and fake copper. Actually, I’m proud of it.

Currently I collect mini art. That is post cards, greeting cards and little posters of art that I like. Right now my mini art collection is dominated by the Group of Seven (with a little Tom Thompson) but I also have a few artistic photographs from Alberta and BC and a few things that I picked in Scotland. I love the mini art because it lets me own the art that I love, and it also isn’t hard to store or display. I use tacks mostly.

For all of undergrad (starting 2^nd semester of 1^st year) I collected trident gum wrappers. It really annoyed me when they started doing the cross over into chicklet style gum, but you can still get the paper wrappers when you buy the super packs. I collected the wrappers to make a gum-wrapper chain, which my dorm-mate taught me how to do in first year. Now the chain a quite a few metres long and I feel it represent my life through undergrad. Or something. I could make a whole mushy explanation about growing and expanding beyond who I was before, making my leap into actual independence. But I won’t, because really, its just a gum-wrapper chain. I stopped adding to it after graduation, I decided it was time to move on.

I could also tell you that I ‘collect’ earrings, but seriously, we all know what that’s all about and it’s not a bona fide collection. Ok. That’s all for today.

"I reckon I could well be in"

Shout out recipient, you know who you are.

I’m a little out of it for the moment. I’m in a very passive tired stage, I’m not really upset or frustrated about being tired and swamped. I’m just tired and keep going, keep doing it. I was hoping I could sleep in tomorrow, which now looks like a possibility since my 3 hours semantics class just got cancelled for this afternoon and I now have time to do my phonology assignment for tomorrow.

I want to travel. I want to go back to India and do Nepal, Thailand, Bangladesh, make my way over to Vietnam, Hong Kong and the Philippines. I know it’s a massive stretch across the face of the earth but I could do it. I would just need money and lots of time, that’s all. Those are totally things I have in gorging quantities.

One more PhD application to go. That will be good, when they’re all finished. It should be my last grad app ever, unless I do a post doc, and the way things seem to be going that’s probably likely. So not last one ever, last one for 4 years. That’s good enough.

My friend treated me to lunch at the vegetarian restaurant across the street, it’s pretty awesome. I had lentil soup and chickpea curry. Brown rice is so much better than white rice… what is up with the sudden popularity of the saying, “Like white on rice”?

I marked 62 first year phonology homeworks last night. Hurrah. Some of them did really well, others clearly did not read the questions. And it was like, seriously, the easiest homework in the history of life. However their marks were inputed into excel using number versions of check and check plus (and a few check minuses). I’m not sure if I’ll like marking. I had so many nasty comments I had to hold back on. There were 3 that weren’t stapled, and a bunch of handwritten ones that were not exactly neat and tidy. One chick attached her rough copy to her computer print out. I don’t frickin care about your rough copy, keep that to yourself. Another genius thought that the bottom of the page was the perfect place for their name and student number. All little, inconsequential things, but I guess they’ll slowly learn as they continue in their university careers.

Now I’m just ranting. Back to phonology.

You put the boom-boom into my heart

So procrastinating right now. I’m supposed to writing an abstract right now, and it also has to be really good. I’ve never written an abstract before, and these guidelines aren’t super helpful. So far I’ve completed a) Title. That I already had. Now I’m working on b) A clear and explicit statement of the research question to be examined. c) through e) are not any better.

I’ve got a few points and few not very clear sentences (I’m a huge fan of vagueness, but clearly that’s not going to cut it here). Really all I have at this point is potential.

Maybe I should just do some homework so I actually use the time I have rather than wasting it, but I need at least a rough draft tonight! Tomorrow I’ll have to fix up my rough draft to make it acceptable for professor to read and make suggestions. If I come up with total crap I’m not sure my prof will be super impressed, even though he is helping me with it.

I guess once I’ve written one abstract then it won’t be so bad the next time. Whatever. What-mac-frickin-ever. I, as always, have lots of reading to do and two assignments for Monday and Tuesday. Actually this is just me making excuses and trying to convince myself that I should do something else, but its all lies, lies I tell you! I need to write the ABSTRACT. The very name of the project should be an encouragement to me.

Ok, now I’m going to search for a random image to tack onto my post. I haven’t put any pictures up lately, I need a little more colour to brighten up the white space.

…maybe its actually white noise……

Cotton

This is where we separate the wheat from the chaff, the men from the boys, the oddly feminine from the possibly Canadian.

Anyone? Guesses?

Of course I read critically

Since basically my entire undergrad education was all about critical thinking I’m shocked to hear that others didn’t have the same experience.

My head has been all over the place this week. I forgot to do homework for 2 different classes (but with my nimble pen and blank paper at hand, was able to remedy the situations) and this is something that rarely (but sometimes) happens to me. I’ve been keeping up on the reading though. I think this week is around the 3 hundred page mark, and it’s not over yet.

The stinky dog is here again. My roommate sometimes share’s her dog with her brother, and this thing has the most unbelievable stench growling in its belly only to come out with every breath. It’s a smell 17 years in the making, as my roommate would say.

I thought I had something funny to say but apparently not. Although you should all check out Dinah’s blog (see sidebar) for her awesome post about Stephen Colbert.

Maybe I’m never funny and you’re all humouring me.

My nasal cavity is experiencing perma-frost

Mmmm, I love pulp free orange juice not from concentrate. It’s so good and refreshing. I really hate pulp in my orange juice, that’s how you ruin the whole juice aspect of the experience. If I wanted pulp I’d eat an orange.

So I think I might add up all the pages of reading I’ve had to do for this week and give you the grand total, which I know will be a few hundred. I don’t know how I’m still going, my mind must be in its proliferic stage right now, I don’t know what I’m going to do when I still have a lot of reading to do but I just can’t concentrate. I’m mailing the last of my UBC application tomorrow, then I get to not think about it for a while.

Tomorrow I have like a 4 hour gap between classes, and on Wednesday its about 5 hours. I don’t know what I’m going to do all semester in this time. Of course I’ll say, “Its ok, I’ll just do work.” But seriously people, there’s no way that’s going to last all semester. I’ll have to find somewhere close to my building that’s not my office so I can switch it up for a while.

Hmmm… I’m tired. And I think I’ve done enough reading this weekend. Its not all done but I read 2 syntax, 1 phd phonology and 1 first year phonology (which I’m TAing) article already. I still have one more syntax and a semantics to get through but my brain will start throbbing any minute now.

I think I’ll go to bed.

And me, one cool guy

We’ve hit the ground running and I have never seen so many pages of mandatory reading in my life. Two of my classes are hardcore on the article reading and digestion, one of them ridiculously so. It’s too bad I have 4 classes this semester (3 is normal for the grad program) but I wanted to take French, I want to get that fluency in so what else can I do?

Anyone every heard of CLA? Two professors (and one office mate) has suggested that I submit my paper to it, which terrifies me, absolutely. Not only does it mean my amateur research paper will be out there for the world to see (and thus be subject to fair criticism and ridicule) but if I actually do have to present at a conference I think I will die. I already turn bright red and struggle to ward off full body convulsions in my class presentations, imagine having to do it in front of actual professional linguist people. And then they get to ask questions, which I do not feel prepared to answer at all. I don’t know enough yet, I need more time!

Maybe they’ll just reject my paper and it will be all good. Yeah, that works for me.

In other news, I sharpied the cat. I tried to write ‘CAT’ on his back but it’s hard to make it legible on the shifting fur. My roommate who owns the cat is away for the weekend so me and my other roommate are “looking after” him. We thought of buying purple dye and throwing him into a vat of it. You know how cats like to be wet, and how their owners love the tabby-purple visual combo.

I don’t care if you think it’s cruel, he’s a jerk-cat. He’s not very nice. He never wants to cuddle when you do, only when he wants to. And he bats my roommate in the face while he’s sleeping. There’s lots more he does but I’m not going to list it all here.

Duff Gardens… Hurrah!

That's not set theory

I saw Children of Men with my roomie on the weekend – two words: In-Tense. But good, I think it was good. I am currently in a very good mood, loving what I do, soaking in the sunshine and catching big fluffy snowflakes on my tongue. Do you believe in global warming now? Its like those people who tried to say nicotine isn’t addictive… morons.

I don’t actually have a lot to say, except that I can’t find the question mark or the apostrophe on this stupid French Canadian keyboard (apparently they are different in France). I actually had to use in Insert Symbol function to get the question mark seen in the about paragraph and the auto correct for the apostrophes. Seriously, no question mark. What kind of crazy declarative language is it anyway? (That one was a copy/paste.)

Like a cat tied to a stick

I’ve lived in several areas around Canada (Owen Sound, Langley, Muskoka, Toronto, Ottawa) and I have a few favourite places. I will tell you about them now…. go!

When I go home to Owen Sound its usually a refresher, getting away from the city, back to my roots in the boonies, letting my inner hick out for a breather. I like to go to Inglis Falls, which isn’t too far from my house, and listen to the water falling. I usually go at night when nobody is there – mostly because it’s illegal to enter a conservation area after dusk – but I haven’t been caught yet, so good on me. I especially like it in the snow, it just seems soft and ice palace-y. I was there over the holiday’s with some friends and we were climbing over the rocks we weren’t supposed to be climbing on. Good times.

I don’t know if I particularly have a favourite place in Muskoka, it’s all kinda outdoorsy and fresh and what not. I lived there for the summer I worked at camp, but I’m gonna go ahead and say that I love the interior of Algonquin. Canoe trips are what it’s all about.

Toronto, as the big metropolitan area that it is, got to me sometimes because you could always hear the cars and see the lights. My favourite place there was on campus. I liked to stand in the middle of King’s College Circle at night because the university buildings surrounding the field blocked out a lot of the extra noise and it was dark. You can see the CN tower and cool buildings from there, and it wasn’t too far form where I lived.

Today I think I found my favourite place in Ottawa. I climbed up to the Samuel Champlain monument which is behind la Musée des Beaux Arts on this hill where you can see Parliament Hill, Hull and the Civ Musem and the river. I love the Ottawa River, it’s so wide and cool. You can see all these different currents working themselves out together and eddying around the locks and under the bridge.

So, that’s it. All the places that feed my loner-dom, where I go by myself. I’m satisfied with that.

It feels good to be a gangsta

Whoever left that random comment on my last post, I don’t know who you are. You don’t sound like my actual friend named Ben, even though you seem to be familiar with Arrested Development. Do you mean “Hector, Hector”?

Anyway, I’m back in our nation’s capital, I flew in from Toronto yesterday. Seeing Toronto makes me miss it all the more, its just fun and big and sparkley. I decided that the main reason the T dot never lost the basis of its charm for me is because I rarely had to drive in it – its all about the walking and subway. What kind of large city doesn’t have a subway? A ridiculous one, that’s what.

I thought I had class tomorrow but now it seems that I don’t have anything to do until Friday, which works for me. I watched Office Space again today because my roommate when on a DVD rampage so we have a bunch of new ones. “PC load letter?!?.....”

Hmmmm, that’s about it. Holiday’s are over, I get to mark freshman homeworks this semester, tons of fun. I don’t even notice the general weirdness of Radiohead anymore.

A wholly unentertaining post.