Gone East to Western

Redirection Notice (or, Went West from Western)

2009-09-16T00:00:00.001-04:00

James Howard has concluded his work on this blog following the completion of his Master's of Library and Information Science at the University of Western Ontario.

With his return to Winnipeg he has resumed his original blog, Slurpees and Murder, and can be found at that site unless, or until, otherwise noted.

This blog will remain in place as an archive for the foreseeable future; he is currently looking into creating a standalone website that will house and duplicate the content found here, but acknowledges that such a site is probably a long way off.

Thank you for your patronage, and please enjoy all contents responsibly.

Everything Changes

2009-08-31T23:38:00.003-04:00

Good evening, everyone, and Happy almost-September!

Remember where I was with my lot in life a few weeks ago -- living in London, attending the University of Western Ontario, and surviving mainly on cheap ramen? Well, pretty much everything has changed since then; I'm now living in Winnipeg, working at Red River College, and surviving mainly on premium ramen. Movin' on up!

Yes indeed, it's been quite the busy stretch for me the last little while. After much wailing and gnashing of teeth I wrapped up my two gigantic final projects, which were due the second-last and last days of my final term; thirty to thirty-five per cent of two different classes went right down to the bitter end, and I went bitterly along with them. So instead of pausing thoughtfully, hand to chin, and ruminating wistfully upon the experiences and transformations that I had so earnestly and poignantly undertaken in my travails as a graduate student at the Master's level and as a burgeoning professional in a critically important but oh-so-misunderstood discipline -- instead of any of that I was barrelling through piles of textbooks, and rifling through journal articles, and occasionally stopping to swear and throw things because the word processor is not behaving itself. Ergo, by the time I realized that I was actually finishing my degree I had already finished my degree, and it was only then that I realized there were a total of three days left after that before I would be hopping a Greyhound bus.

Yes, the noble Greyhound! It may sound like kind of a strange choice -- especially given the typical mental association that people now make between "Greyhound" and "Winnipeg" -- but I had some solid and sound reasons for selecting the bus over other available modes of transport. Price, for one thing; booking the trip well ahead of time made it considerably cheaper than a plane, bus or rental car, and cheaper still when considering the baggage that I was travelling with.

Add in the two garbage bags of stuff I took to Goodwill before the trip and that's my whole apartment, right there.

At this point you may stop, bewildered, and ask yourself aloud: how on earth did he carry around six bags with him at once? I'm gigantic and I'm awesome, that's how. Backpack on back, around both shoulders; laptop bag on right hip, over left shoulder; guitar on left shoulder, over left shoulder; black equipment bag on right shoulder, over right shoulder; red canvas bag carried in left hand; green suitcase, equipped with wheels, rolled with right hand. It wasn't a particularly easy arrangement, but it was strangely satisfying; with all six bags equipped I couldn't help but assume this was what it must feel like to be a tank.

But, I digress.

You're only allowed such-and-such number of bags for free -- two stowed and two carry-on, each of which must be under a certain weight and dimensions limit -- but ultimately this array of luggage pictured above (including the giant green suitcase, which was so staggeringly overweight that the drivers made me load it onto the bus myself at a couple of transfer points) only cost me a total of an extra sixty-four bucks after taxes. Now consider that a single extra bag on the Westjet flight from London to Winnipeg is seventy-five bucks before taxes by itself, not including overweight fees, and you start to get a better picture of my thought processes on this one.

Besides, I had never been up through the fabled (Canadian Shield?) of Northern Ontario, and what better time then the present? I happen to enjoy rocks and trees and water, and it made a lot more sense to see the sights from a bus than from a rental car. Car rentals can get pretty expensive, especially considering the trouble I have squeezing into smaller cars -- and then I would have had to pay (and pay, and pay, and pay and pay) for increasingly expensive gasoline -- and then I wouldn't have been able to give the scenery as much attention as I'd wanted, because driving means you're supposed to pay attention to the actual road -- and then the trip would have taken a lot longer because I would have to stop somewhere to sleep -- and then, because all rental places charge hideously exorbitant fees for renting a car in one province and dropping it off in another, I would have had to drive the damn thing all the way back. So, you know what, no. Let's take a bus.

Oh. Uh. Guess I'll pack a book.

So I set out from London Tuesday morning, and I arrived in Winnipeg Wednesday evening; I took a good couple hundred pictures along the way, but those can be a post for another time, so suffice to say that the trip went about as well as you would expect from thirty-four hours and fourty-seven minutes on a bus. (But, who's counting.)

But was I now here to rest and relax after such a grueling Greyhound grind? Hell no, son! That bus trip was my rest and relaxation! I had a meeting with two prospective employers set for the very day after my arrival and the day after that, so the day and a half of bus travel was spent chilling and vegetating as best I could before it was time to put on big-boy clothes and hit the ol' employment line.

Now, one prospective place of employment won't even be contacting people again for another four to six weeks, but the other needed somebody as soon as possible to fill a three-month full-time term -- so hands were shaken, introductions were made, and here I am. So, until the end of November, I am serving as the interim Librarian of the John and Bonnie Buhler Library in the Princess Street Campus of Red River College. I nominally head a department of five people and I wear a tie. It's very exciting!

So as you can tell from all of the above, the past few weeks have been a time of extreme upheaval. Don't think I was shirking my writing duties, however! (My blogging duties, yes, clearly. But my writing duties, no.)

Go Uptown Magazine, and leave the driving to us!

A few weeks back I penned this fine column, which has a very good chance of standing as my grand masterwork of sarcasm. When I die they will clip this column and throw it in with my corpse, just to see if it poisons the grass I'm buried under. That is how good this column is, and I hope you enjoy it very much. (And I've got a column in the Uptown issue coming out this coming Thursday, so watch for that.)

But that wasn't the important project, no, no! The really awesome, fearsome, time-consuming, all-devouring beast that I really want to mention is available for your perusal through this hilariously unflattering picture of Mackenzie King, at:

Shake hands with PRIMED: The Twenty-Two Prime Ministers of Canada!

This was one of the two final MLIS projects that I'd mentioned above, and you can see how it left precious little time for much else. The assignment was to create a website between eighteen and thirty pages long (I went over, but there are no penalties for that) which displayed an understanding of the core skills and accessibility standards taught in this Web Design and Architecture class, and after I finally got the whole thing reasonably completed I decided I liked it well enough that I intend to run with it.

So what you're looking at up there is the first release, a sort-of-beta incarnation. It doesn't yet have hand-drawn art for all the Prime Ministers (only for four so far, in fact), I wasn't entirely happy with the way that some of the layout ideas turned out, some of the pages could do with more jokes, and so on and whatnot. And I have absolutely no idea how long things remain on the University of Western Ontario IMC webspace, so once I've revisited and retooled some of the site content I imagine I'll ultimately be establishing it on my own website.

"A website?" you might blurt out at this point, raising both eyebrows to express your surprise. Yes! Now that I have a grown-up job and wear grown-up clothes and earn a grown-up salary, I'm starting to come around to the idea that it's finally time to bite the bullet and shell out the dough for an actual website. With content management and storage space and its own domain name and everything! It could include the PRIMED site, it could include my Uptown columns, it could include songs and videos and what I've written here and what I've written at Slurpees and Murder; heck, if I were really feeling gung-ho about the idea, I could archive all the hilariously awful old stuff I had on GeoCities way back when. (And since GeoCities is going to close for good in October, the stuff may as well go somewhere.)

Of course, let's not get ahead of ourselves here. I don't know thing one about what a fair price is for hosting, much less who I would host it with. And I really should be keeping my expenditures as low as possible for the next little while, considering I still have a pile of student loans that will grow and gain experience and shamble around if I don't address them quickly.

So, no, my big dream of finally carving out a chunk of internet to call my own may have to wait for a while. What will I do in the meantime? Well, I don't know. Continuing to write stuff on this blog, the intentionally temporary University of Western Ontario one, doesn't seem to make much sense now that I've graduated -- but I only have guaranteed employment for the next three months, so relaunching my Winnipeg blog doesn't seem to make much sense either if I don't know that I'll find enough work to actually stay here into 2010. Continuing to write for Uptown in the meantime is a given, of course, because they'll have to pry that gig from my cold dead hands -- but beyond that, I have no idea what my next move is.

Whatever it will be, though, I'll keep you posted. Uh, eventually. If I figure it out.

Exit Strategy (or, James Howard Has Chance to Survive Make His Time)

2009-08-11T19:26:00.001-04:00

Almost done! Almost done.

I've got two major projects left, sitting right on the last two days of the term -- one worth thirty per cent due this Thursday and one worth thirty-five per cent due this Friday. What a terrible time to be unmotivated! But unmotivated I remain, less than enthused to be working during the only spate of nice weather this town has seen all summer.

The end is nigh, however! Not only am I less than a week away from completing my MLIS degree, but I'm just a week away from packing up and leaving town entirely. I'll be hopping a Greyhound the morning of the 18th and rollin' on out of London, finally arriving in Winnipeg the night of the 19th because that's how Greyhound works. (Good thing this was significantly cheaper than a plane ticket, or I would have made some very elaborate grumpy noises!) I might or might not be back to Ontario soon enough, depending on how the ol' employment search turns up, but if nothing else this'll be a nice emphatic end to my tenure as a Master's student. Unless I come back for another one-year degree, but pfft, let's see me afford that right now.

Not that I ever got a solid posting schedule on this blog -- certainly never as frequent as my last blog -- but I'll stick to this one for the foreseeable future, until I figure out where I'm actually even going to be living or working or what have you. I'm figuring that once I have a job -- a real life grown-up job, unlike most of the places I've worked previously -- I'll have both the knowledge and the capital to finally set up a real life grown-up website, with its own domain name and hosting space and everything. Won't that be exciting! What an idea.

Speaking of websites -- I happen to be creating one, as one of the two final projects mentioned above, so I'll be sure to link you to it once it's completed. I think it'll be pretty swank, so watch for that. And if you happen to be in the London area and want to score some quality free stuff, I've put up a little Facebook thing so folks can make off with the stuff I'm not taking. Act now! Supplies are limited!

Almost done. Almost done!

Ninety-Two Much Email (or, If You Often Drop Waffles at the Beach You'll Have Common Sandy Eggos)

2009-08-02T15:12:00.000-04:00

So I had an assignment due this past week of classes, wherein I was to create a video in Camtasia Studio 3; the software is up to version 6 by now, mind you, but the computers in the labs were last updated with version 3 so version 3 it was. The objective was to create content of our choice using only the tools available in the studio suite, and evaluate its strengths and weaknesses from there based on our previous experiences with other editing software, so I came to largely the same conclusions that you will from watching the following -- the software is great for recording video off the screen, but ass terrible for recording and mixing audio from there.

With that said: do it, Rockapella!

Like I said, not a good program for audio management; there are some pretty egregious clipping errors in this video that make me kind of mad about the whole thing, so I don't think this is as good as my previous output, but it's still a solid enough outing that I figured I would drop it here for any interested passersby. Can't tell me I haven't been doing important work towards my degree!

Speaking of which -- the arrival of August means that I'm into my last calendar month of graduate school, so within a couple of weeks I'll have completed my Master's Degree. Capitalized for emphasis because, wow, what the hell. That sounds a lot loftier than anything I'd normally be expected to be involved in.

On the one hand it seems like I just got here -- and since I got here last September, I guess it wasn't actually that long ago -- but on the other hand there has been a lot of everything at once going on around here while I've been in the program. And if you don't believe me, check out the state of my university email account a day or two ago:

On the left is the client sidebar, and on the right is the list of folders and filesize totals. You can note from these images that A) I've received two hundred and thirty-one megabytes' worth of email since activating the account eleven months ago, and B) fifty-eight megabytes' and five hundred seventy four messages' worth of those were completely and entirely meaningless to me. And I'm not even talking about spam as we tend to understand it, with its Nigerian bank accounts and enhanced penises (penii?) and random bursts of Russian; any and all of that kind of thing was well filtered out, so that folder appropriately marked 'Meaningless' up there was reserved solely for stuff that was supposed to be relevant to my FIMS interests but just straight-up wasn't.

So why didn't I jettison that crap sooner? In fact, I didn't delete anything until this point precisely to see if I would hit the mailbox limit (which at 250MB is no small pile of textfiles) before I graduated -- and since the sysadmins sent me a notice at this point that I had to delete stuff or lose my incoming mail privileges, I guess we know what the answer was. How much program-related mail does a graduate student need to worry about in a school year? About a quarter of a gigabyte, give or take! Glad I'm studying to be an information professional or that would sound a little ridiculous.

In conclusion: Camtasia Studio 3 has some serious issues, I finish my degree in the middle of the month, there are way too many emails flying around at this school, and we still have no idea where in the hell Carmen Sandiego went. Important points all!

Damn You Some More, Written Language

2009-07-23T22:28:00.000-04:00

Uptown Magazine! Ribbed, for her pleasure!

Tying into the frustrations of modern English language communication that I touched upon yesterday, my column for this week is a rumination on the newest big fascination of the social media set. I can already tell that, unless I get a job somewhere that mandates I maintain its feed, I'm never going to be able to convince myself to join up with Twitter and Tweeting the Twits that I'd Twite or whatever the hell is going on here. Yes, it's become an extremely popular worldwide phenomenon in a very short span of time, but so did boy bands and first-person shooters and I never really got into those crazes either.

I can understand its appeal, and I can respect its potential, but even still I look at the medium in action and I just go "nope". Shaking my head to myself, brow furrowed in consternation. Is this it? They wrote an application exclusively for Facebook statuses? Huh! What a world.

But, anyway. I've got a metric crapton of assignments coming down the pike shortly, but at least one of them has the potential to generate some pretty quality blog content -- so I'll keep you posted.

Damn You, Written Language

2009-07-22T22:55:00.001-04:00

Before I jump into the main thrust of this post, let me get some otherwise unrelated administrative business out of the way. I'd received word that the podcast I put up last post has some end of file errors, or something, that render it unplayable in Quicktime Player and potentially in other players. Rather than run the related rigamarole of recompiling the thing and converting it to umpteen potential formats, I just went "man whatever" and threw it up on YouTube. So if you couldn't play it last time, here it is:

There! That's much easier. On to the main topic of the day, which is: the written English language, and its inherent dangers!

This afternoon I was killing time at the North Campus Building, which the Library and Information Science program shares with the Journalism program (under the combined Faculty of Information and Media Studies); this coexistence means, if nothing else, that there are almost always free copies of the London Free Press and the Globe and Mail kicking around. The London Free Press -- owned by Quebecor Sun Media -- is worth about as much as you'd expect given that knowledge, but surely Toronto's National Newspaper remains a solid and sturdy bastion of quality, right?

Right?

This is page B2 of today's paper, which gave me a bit of a chuckle after I'd finished reading it. Not because of the content, mind you; the actual article itself was pretty rubbish, but that's what happens when you try and stretch a pejorative eight-hundred-word column out of a twenty-two-word throwaway comment. But I read through it regardless, because that's what one does when killing time; at its conclusion I looked back to the top and laughed a little, because what is a Political Philospohy column even doing in the business section?

It took me another couple seconds before I did a comical doubletake at that.

Philospohy?

That's weak, you guys. Come on.

It's a little thing, of course -- and we all make mistakes, although not all of us have the benefit of editors who will later look over the mistakes and then leave them in there anyway -- but it does subconsciously shake the credibility a little, doesn't it? Like when somebody has that one lone misspelled word on a PowerPoint presentation and then you just can't stop lookin' at it? It may be a little cruel, but for better or for worse the presentation of an idea can be compromised severely by a single mistake in the written language.

Which is why the linguist bit of my brain had itself a little conniption fit when I went to the bus stop near the Biological & Geological Sciences Building that evening and passed this critical missive on a construction fence:

agghhrblbrgaghhrrrbrbll OH GOOD I FEEL MUCH SAFER ABOUT THIS NOW THANK YOU

Do you suppose they handed the important task of creating the necessary signage over to the first guy they saw, because he was closest to the markers? Or did they specifically pick this guy to write the sign because everyone decided by consensus that he was their best writer? Maybe he's the promotions department! You never know! All I know for certain is that, when the President of the University or some other major higher-up of this accredited post-secondary institution walks past that construction site, he or she can nod approvingly and walk confidently forward knowing that they have the work in capable hands with the absolute best people for the job.

In conclusion, the written word is pretty much dead. But if not properly monitored, it can spell complete and unmitigated disaster for one's reputation -- so check back here tomorrow, when my next Uptown column hits the press! Bizarrely enough, it ties into this discussion pretty well!

Yo!! James Howard Raps!! (or, Why James Howard is Never Allowed to Rap Again)

2009-07-19T23:15:00.002-04:00

Uptown Magazine! For fast, effective pain relief!

This column is a couple of weeks old by now, and as such I've my next column coming out this coming Thursday, but allow me to include it in my catchup posts nonetheless because its issues remain as timely and as topical as ever.

I neglected to include it in the column, but David Harper -- the aforementioned Chief who took the initiative and bought the sanitizer himself rather than wait for Health Canada to get its act together -- also busted out the line of the campaign about the story. "They know that there's hand sanitizer wipes that are available, which are alcohol based," he noted; "what are you saying? We're going to start chewing on them?" Ah, sarcasm from public figures! Nothing better. I like the cut of this man's jib.

Also left out of the column, more for space purposes than anything else, is the internal reasoning I followed in order to decide on making the hypothetical ban city-wide. The spraypaint ban in the city has failed miserably and hilariously, as I will be the first to remind anyone within earshot at any given moment, but honestly that plan had more holes in it than John Dillinger after a night at the movies. Limiting the mouthwash ban to downtown would not only draw some political gerrimandering and squabbling about the boundaries of 'downtown' but would also be completely useless, because either the abusers would move to where the mouthwash is being sold or unscrupulous car owners would buy up stocks elsewhere and sell them downtown. And a ban on selling it to anybody who 'looks Native', as was suggested earlier this year for yeast (seriously), is just asking to be shot down in flames by the judiciary within days. (And it was the reserve councils pushing for that profiling ban, no less. Manitoba is a complicated place sometimes.)

Owing to the dualistic nature of this blog, of course, my Winnipeg content is once again offset by my accompanying London content -- so get a load of this action! A follow-up assignment to the audio song I'd posted here, my next work in that class was to create an audio file with embedded images suitable for distribution as an iTunes podcast. It runs fine as a standalone audio file, but opening it in iTunes (or in VLC, or a similar player) gives you the full experience and also probably goes a long way towards demystifying the lyrics.

With that disclamatory preamble out of the way, feast your eyes and ears upon:

James Howard - LCCR 100.1 (Main Author feat. Dewey DC - Let's Go to the Library!)

This is how I'm making my way through library school! Assuming I don't fail out for this!

"But James," you're no doubt asking aloud as you read this, "what in the hell is this, and why on earth did you do it?" Good questions! Let me give you a bit of background on the various factors that combined to cause this.

Last September or October, in the program's mandatory management course, the professor brought in as guest speakers the team of IT workers that redesigned the Western Libraries website. They talked briefly about the importance of buy-in and bringing higher management on board, then regaled us with this promotional video they had created to lobby for (and ultimately secure!) the necessary funding. The repeated refrain of "Let's go to the library!" struck a chord with all who attended that day, and I know this for certain because many of us still turn to each other at random intervals and blurt out "Guys! Let's go to the library!"

It's pretty funny. I guess maybe you have to be there.

With that said! Another, and an otherwise unrelated, source of inspiration came when I first touched down in Calgary for my Reading Week vacation. Renting a car from the airport and following the driving directions I had scrawled on the boarding pass, I was rotating through the available radio stations (and it turns out Alberta isn't too bad for radio variety) when I encountered this song for the first time and nearly had to pull over from laughing so hard.

Is this a real thing? Yes it is a real thing, and it is supposed to be taken seriously. Jay-Z releasing Death of Auto-Tune within three months of its release says probably everything that you need to know about it, but just the idea that A) somebody genuinely recorded this and B) it made it to #1 on the hip-hop charts is both awful and awesome. Awful because, Jesus Christ, what is wrong with you people -- but awesome in a bizarrely uplifting way, because I came to realize that nothing that I might ever record in my life could possibly be worse than this.

Then! Then came another assignment for my class in Internet Broadcasting for the Public Sector, and as I was contemplating my next move I happened to stumble upon a YouTube video of some random British guy demonstrating how to create an autotune filter in Garageband. Then it all kind of snowballed from there, like a perfect storm of really bad ideas, to the audio-with-images file you see and hear before you.

"Yes, that's all well and good," you again ask out loud, "but what in the name of Doug Flutie made you decide to rap the verses? Not only are you notoriously untalented, but you're whiter than a marshmallow in a snowstorm!"

That's... a little hurtful, but a reasonable question. You see, the first thing I did playing around with the autotune was come up with the chorus, which I then wrote the accompanying music for (and the beats! That's right, no canned tracks in this composition -- all programmed by hand, baby!). From there I fleshed out the background music to accomodate the minimum length requirement of the assignment, spacing in verses and a bridge and pretty much charting out the layout of the song from there -- but that's when I hit the obvious and ensuing problem of what to actually put in those verses. Regular singing? Considering how out of tune I was for the last assignment, that probably wouldn't work too well -- and it would probably sound even worse against the choruses, which of course are in tune as a complete side effect of the autotune process. (The whole point is to get the goofy robot effect; using it specifically to save your tuning is not only discouraged but actively shameful. In other news, I'm a complete music nerd.) And doing the entire song from within the autotune filter would get old real fast, as I'm sure we've all encountered in one form or another by now. So from a production standpoint, stylistically, the only answer was to have rap verses -- but I don't know any rappers in London, assuming there are any, and by this point the assignment was due the next day so I just caved in and did it myself. I'll grant that it could have been a lot worse! Which doesn't actually mean that it's any good, but for a white dude I guess it went okay. For the first rap verse I channeled some weird combination of Chuck D. and the yelling guy from the Teddybears, and then for the second I shrugged and went with a Snoop Dogg caricature because A) sonically it sounded convincingly different enough from the first verse that a casual listener could believe it was two different people, and B) Snoop is pretty much a caricature these days anyway. (Oh, come on, he is. Let's not kid ourselves here.)

I'm rambling, aren't I? Beg your pardon. To conclude, I think the assignment file you see above is somehow entirely entertaining despite itself; I'll own up to having got my own chorus stuck in my head several times on this one, and the song actually hits its stride in its own strange way about halfway through the 'Snoop' verse, so all in all I think it was a pretty decent showing. Don't expect an underground rap career out of me any time soon, however; I think it's pretty obvious I'm more suited for the production side. The accompanying images were selected by going straight down the lyrics and Google Image Searching for a direct literal correlation, but they really do make the piece that much better; the part at the end with the close-up on the Nietzsche pic gets me every time, even though I wrote it and should really know when it's coming.

Let's go to the library!

I've Been Everywhere, Man

2009-07-19T03:49:00.002-04:00

What it is, cats and kittens! I'm dead tired and I'm broker than broke, but I'm down to my last month's worth of library school and if they haven't thrown me out by now I'm forced to assume that they're not going to.

My apologies for not posting anything in a few weeks, but I must confess that I've been a rather busy brother over the past little while. What was I up to? Let's do as quick a rundown as I'm capable of managing! A lot of these items would best be expressed as invididual posts all their own, so feel free to ask for further information on any of these, but in brief here's what I was up to.

My last post was shortly before my Reading Week kicked in, which meant my first major enveavor was flying to Calgary to spend a good nine days in Alberta.

This included a trip to the Johnston Canyon Falls in Banff National Park, where I saw clear blue water for what might have been the first and only time in my life at the Johnston Canyon Falls --

-- and killed a tree in one punch when it looked at me funny, because I am manly beyond anybody's wildest expectations.

Bam! Suck it, nature!

After a brief pause in leaving the park, because some elk decided it would be funny to hog the road --

-- it was off to Banff proper and to Canmore, which come across respectively like any other tourist trap town and any other small community except for when you happen to look up past the buildings and go "oh, yeah, right".

Canmore is named for a ninth-century Scottish ruler, and translates roughly from the original Gaelic to "Big Head". I'm guessing that's supposed to be the explanation for this thing --

-- but I'm not going to lie, my first thought was that it was going to go Gradius on me and start shooting energy pellets. This is a valid concern!

So after that little jaunt into the mountains I spent the weekdays of the trip in Calgary, which just happened to coincide with A) Canada Day and B) the beginning of the Calgary Stampede. Canada Day being first, I took in a show at Olympic Plaza and slapped some skin with Emily Murphy --

-- and then it was Stampede time! Having never been, I knew that I would be in for an enchanting evening of every unfortunate stereotype at once rising to the forefront -- so naturally, to avoid suspicion, I went incognito.

Espionage!

The opening day of the festival kicked off with a parade, of course, and you know how I love parades. (Knowing me, this would be normally be a post all its own -- but we've got lots to cover here.)

hee hee hee hee hee tiny horses

I like to think of myself as a man of worldly sophistication, but I'm not going to lie to you; you show me a couple of midget ponies pulling something much larger than they are and you're going to get a laugh out of me.

And this being the blog of a library student, special mention must be made of the Calgary Public Library entry into the parade:

Go figure!

Then it was time for the Stampede itself, which -- if you've never been -- is best imagined as a giant-sized exhibition carnival (like if you ran into a carnival in World 4 of Super Mario Bros. 3, if that helps) with some western-themed events and the most stupid hats you have ever seen in one place. Also drinking!

Well, maybe not. This was the line to get into the on-site bar and country karaoke stage (yes seriously), and it only got longer every time I passed by it that night. So screw that! Let's go get some mini-donuts instead, I swear I could live off them things.

No, your eyes aren't deceiving you; the mini-donut kiosk is actually larger than at least two different places that I've lived in. Everything's bigger in ~~Texas~~ Calgary! You could buy a bucket of some ungodly number of mini-donuts from here -- thirty or thirty-five, I can't even remember -- but I had to pass because I had to acknowledge that the experience could potentially kill me. Well, that and I couldn't figure out how I'd get the souvenir bucket home on the plane.

Some aerial shots, taken from the ferris wheel. The rides were a good time, but I had just as much fun with the unfortunate naming scheme of the ticket administration centres:

OH MY BROTHERS TESTIFAHHH~

This was the last picture I took before I left, and that's just as well because there's clearly no way to top that. Look at that sucker! Unedited from its original form except for resizing and compression purposes; no fanciful Photoshop effects here! I don't even have anything meaningful to say about it, it's just cool to look at. What a neat shot.

As fun as the Stampede was, though, there were far more awesome Albertan attractions to attend -- and so before I left I made a point of renting a car and driving out to Dinosaur National Park, out east in the Badlands near Drumheller.

Yeah, wow. Pretty impressive! Of course, not so impressive that I can't conquer them!

Onward, fellow adventurers! We shall claim these lands for our own! Glory and fortune await our names, and we shall be hailed as--

Oh. They looked a lot smaller from up there. Man, forget this.

So I had a pretty great time in Alberta, all things considered, but of course I came back with still half a term left to deal with. I've completed about half a dozen assignments since then, including four due in three days (!), and it has generally been back to the grind.

However! The monotony was lightened by a field trip, when our Children's Materials (Birth to Seven Years) Evaluation and Use class loaded into an old school bus and rolled fourty deep to Toronto to visit the Canadian Children's Book Centre and the Osborne Collection at the Lillian H. Smith branch of the Toronto Public Library. FIELD TRIP~!

Of course, the trip had been scheduled back in May, so by the time the trip date actually arrived Toronto was three weeks into a city-wide garbage strike. And the Lillian Smith branch is basically in Chinatown, so you can imagine how pleasant the walk around the area was.

Excited passerby included for emphasis.

Props to whoever threw out the computer monitor from like 1987, though! It takes a man or woman of true character and vision to save a yellowing, ten-inch monitor for decades just in case the opportunity will arise to throw it out at the corner trash can of a major intersection at the height of a garbage strike.

Magnificent, whoever you are. Bravo.

Thankfully, all is not dreariness and gloom back here in London; each weekend there've been a variety of cheap or free things to do, which has been nice for me when I've been able to get out of the house. Just last night I popped by Victoria Park to take in Jill Barber, at the (free!) Home County Folk Festival, and that was good times because Jill Barber is nothing if not heartfelt and adorable and lovely. She writes swing and soul tunes, her voice always reminds me of Lily von Shtupp, and one hundred per cent of her setlist last night was songs about love. An evening well spent, I would say.

So, yes! If you were wondering where I was, and I am willing to acknowledge that this is a pretty big 'if', now you have a better idea of where I've been since my last communications. But what have I been doing? Well, let's just go ahead and split that into its own post, because I'm about to drop some killer content on you. Never a dull moment, baby!

This Just Bothers Me

2009-06-23T16:34:00.002-04:00

So about ten or eleven months ago I moved from Winnipeg to attend the University of Western Ontario, in London.

This is where they put the University of Western Ontario.

I live a ten minute walk west of the campus of said university, and the vast majority of my courses to date have taken place in the recently-built North Campus Building.

This is where they put the North Campus Building.

You will note that there are about twenty different education buildings north of it, and approximately zero education buildings east of it.

What the hell, Ontario. You were a have province for a hundred and fourty years and you never dropped the cash to put compasses in your schools? Step up your game, come on.

James Howard Brings the Content

2009-06-20T23:26:00.004-04:00

Yes! I may have been absent from blogging for the past couple of weeks, but they were a productive past couple of weeks! And frightfully busy, of course, but what else is new. So what sort of shenanigans and goings-on have been shenaniging and going on? Well, let's start with my strong point and talk about what I wrote:

Uptown Magazine! The heart, hustle and soul of the game!

My article for the previous week's edition may be accessed here, and superficial facetiousness aside I think it does need to be understood that A) each province is ultimately the architect of its problem-gambling population and B) no, they are not going to do anything about it.

Does it make sense to bring in increasingly captivating gambling machines and then act surprised when increasing numbers of gamblers are addicted to them? Common logic would seem to indicate otherwise, but I've yet to see a government anywhere that runs on common logic. No, governments run on money, and that means grabbing it no matter how stupid or disastrous the outcome might be. I suppose the ensuing argument in defence of provincially run gambling (or liquor or tobacco or whatever) is that people seem hellbent on blowing their money on these things regardless, and that at least this way the money goes back into the government coffers where it can help people instead of going to the evils of private industry (brrrrrr) -- but then who actually gets helped when helping people would derail the gravy train? Would there be more support or less support available if the government weren't profiting directly off these things? And if governmental control is the best answer because of its ability to turn otherwise dirty money towards nobler goals, then why haven't we -- to crib from Jeffrey Rowland -- legalized pot and taxed the crap out of it? These are all very important concerns, and I put aside all of them to crack a joke at Sophie's expense because seriously fuck that show.

Writing! Yeah! And with that out of the way, let's all watch the quality of this post careen downhill and talk about what I drew.

During a group presentation in the Evaluation of Children's Materials, Birth to Seven Years class -- god I love this faculty -- in that class the presentation was on wordless picture books and it was brought up that, while there may not be actual narrative text written in these books, there may be environmental exceptions such as 'STOP' written on a stop sign or sound effects like a snowman going 'brrr'. These were offhand examples, but then I couldn't stop thinking about that last one; if a snowman is going 'brrr', wouldn't that mean he's cold? Wouldn't that actually be unspeakably awful if a snowman was capable of perceiving freezing temperatures as unpleasant? What can he even do about it? He can't go inside to escape it, because that would kill him, but then he has to weigh that against the continued torment of being made entirely of a freezing substance, and--and this went on for a while until eventually I doodled it in the margins of my notes, which drew some laughs and some astonished glances from classmates later.

Poor snowman! I'm sorry, little dude, but I don't make the rules.

Drawing! Yeah! And now, because this post isn't terrible enough already, let's break out the headphones and talk about what I... recorded?

Yes, another class I'm taking this term is Digital Publishing for the Public Sector -- god I love this faculty -- and one of the assignments due earlier this week was to use audio creation and editing software to produce a short audio recording suitable for podcasting or other digital distribution. Other submissions made by peers for this assignment included poetry readings with background effects, picture-books-on-tape, discussions of the interplay between books and music, and all kinds of interesting ideas. I went in somewhat of a different direction, because I am an incurable goofball.

James Howard - LCCR 100.1 (Station ID -- DJ Segment -- Wolf Hope, Ranganathan)

ha ha ha ha ha ha what on earth is this

My original idea was to write and record a song about Ranganathan, who pops up in library schools like Marx pops up in history faculties, but some issues soon arose with this. Firstly, the song as written was not long enough to fill the requested time by itself; secondly, the guitar I have in this town has no electronic pickups in it (I bought a while back at a downtown pawn shop that was going out of business -- I was lucky it had pegs on it), so the recording process was severely compromised; and, thirdly, I have barely played the guitar at all in the past year or so and I am stank awful at this now.

So I effectively built an imaginary radio station around the song, and I think all things considered I did a pretty effective job of replicating the charming but irredeemably awkward nature of campus radio. I thought this was a particularly good idea because then I could write off the song as a 'demo', which is a music term for a 'recording that is going to suck'. I threw together the background tracks for the radio segments in GarageBand, because this class takes place in the one room of the building with all the Power Mac G5s and keyboards and stuff in it, and recorded some obnoxious and/or incompetent chatter over it -- which was pitch-shifted for effect, so no my voice doesn't sound like that shut up. Of course, then the GarageBand background music was sonically far superior to the actual meat of the assignment, but hey -- demo.

You will note, as I cringingly did and do, that there are a few extremely wonky notes in the singing of the actual song. I had intended to go back and correct these, or re-record them, or anything that would make me sound like less of a tool, but I couldn't replicate the recording conditions of the original sufficiently convincingly to substitute audio and then ultimately I had to cave in and submit it by the, you know, due date.

So this is quite dramatically awful, which at least is partially on purpose, but it's also still pretty funny and I liked it well enough that I figured it should at least be heard. There were also other parties who had expressed interest in hearing it, as well, so here it is and remember that you brought this on yourselves.

You know, I probably should have saved the Uptown article to end the post with, but too late now! I need to get on with the rest of the week; I have intramural softball, a Linux evaluation assignment, a reading-week paper about the publishing industry and a reading-week trip to Calgary (!) to prepare for. Never a dull moment!

Let Me Guide You to the Pope-Pole Reign

2009-06-06T10:39:00.009-04:00

My secret projects -- let me show you them! One of them, anyway.

What was I up to in the extended break between my last post and the post prior to it? A variety of things! I took many naps, for example. But in my waking hours I found time to throw together about four and a half thousand words, not for academic pursuits, but for more leisurely interests. Remember writing for pleasure? Neither do I!

Some old pals of mine run 4thletter, the finest of fine comic blogs you'll find, and I had the opportunity to accept a generous invitation to submit a guest article. And submit I did! So if you'll head over yonder you'll be able to read my guest review of Marvel Comics Presents The Life of Pope John Paul II, split into a part one and a part two.

A couple images appear to have been misplaced with the second part, so the later half may seem a bit jumpy, but otherwise I think that this is a pretty solid outing. It helps that the comic book in question (and yes, this is a real thing, I'm not making any of this up) is so interesting, both on its own and contextually; there isn't a whole lot I can think of to add to what I've already expressed in the article, so have a look at that and let me know what you thought of it.

With that -- back to work! The break was nice, but academia calls!

A Fine Vintage

2009-06-04T03:52:00.004-04:00

Happy June, everyone! Let me tell you about a store I visited recently.

Doesn't that look inviting!

What we are looking at in this picture is actually the back entrance; the front entrance to the store is inside the Cherryhill Village Mall, a small one-floor shopping centre surrounded entirely by retirement communities. This probably goes a ways towards explaining why most of the rest of the mall closes at 8:00 on weekdays, at 6:00 on Saturdays and at 5:00 on Sundays. In fact that's why I even went into this convenience store, Bob's Westown Varieties, in the first place; I wanted to buy some cough drops, and the Shoppers Drug Mart (as well as most everything else) had already long since closed.

It's not the prettiest architecture, as you can tell from the above -- and as you could probably figure out by noting that there are zero pictures of the mall on its own website -- but inside these walls you will find hidden treasures. Mystical, ancient, mysterious artifacts of eras since gone by. The store may not have had cough drops, but along its hallowed walls I did find something interesting enough to warrant further comment.

Behold as I beheld what curiosity and two dollars can find you in a London, Ontario convenience store:

Happy Birthday! (Well, I'm sure somewhere it's somebody's birthday, anyway.)

Along one of the walls in the back of the narrow store, mingling with various hand tools and sets of cheap pencils, was a peg of Sesame Street and Muppet Babies candles. Pretty retro-looking, right? They may not be the prettiest things, but I admired the initiative that (I assumed) the Disney Corporation must be taking to revive its franchise holdings by targeting the nostalgia market.

A reasonable assumption, right? Right! It just wasn't the right one, because when I flipped them over to see when they had been made I found out that they aren't retro -- they're just amazingly, amazingly old.

This is no Disney product; in fact, this even predates the original attempt to sell the Jim Henson Company to Disney, and that was in freaking 1990. This predates the Jim Henson Company name! These candles were manufactured in 1988, back when Muppet Babies was actually still on the air -- and somehow they have managed to sit, unpurchased and undetected, on the wall pegs of a London, Ontario mall convenience store for the past twenty-one years.

Until I bought two. Hell, why not? They were a dollar each, and I'm sure I'm bound to run into somebody having a birthday eventually. Besides, a little misshapen though they may be, they're actually pretty fun to look at:

Relics of a bygone era, aren't they? I was giving Disney (or anybody, really) way too much credit when I initially assumed that they were modern products, because just to look at them you can feel the eighties practially radiating off of them. The half-French packaging is how you can tell they were intended for the Canadian market, if the Toronto address didn't also give it away; even the sticker on each candle cheerfully proclaims "Bon Fete", even though you're expected to just cover it up with one of the cardboard numbers on the back of the package.

This may sound like an implausible story, but candle aficionados need not take my word for it; there are actually two more of these still hanging in that store, one of each character. So if you're in London, Ontario and want to surprise the crap out of somebody on their birthday -- or want to hock them on eBay, I guess, if you think you can turn a profit on them -- get on down to Bob's Westown Varieties! For all your hilarious twenty-one-year-old birthday candle needs!

This Blog Post: Much More Than a Blog Post

2009-05-24T23:14:00.002-04:00

I don't think I understand why people do this.

For the benefit of anyone who may have trouble reading the sign -- and, to be fair, in real life it's a little bigger -- the highest signboard on this tower reads:

"THE BREAD STORE®
MUCH MORE THAN A BREAD STORE!"

What? No. That is not how that works in the slightest. Something has gone wrong here.

Yes, I know, some stores out there make a point of building a caveat right into their signage; I'm sure we're all familiar with "The Dollar Store With More!", for example, where the "with more" is actually what you're paying because most of the crap in the place is priced over a dollar for no good god damn reason. But this, this is a stretch even beyond the already distended borders of the concept.

"The Bread Store: much more than a bread store". Okay. Follow me on this one and see if what I am saying makes sense. If you have a store, and you would describe it in one sentence as being 'more than a bread store' -- are you still with me here? -- I would think that, in this particular circumstance, it would be reasonable to conclude that you don't name it "The Bread Store"! No! Stop that!

I can understand, given the limited amount of space on a retail sign, that it could be difficult to convey the store's concept of 'bread and stuff' succinctly. (Let's assume for the moment that "Bread and Stuff" is already taken.) "Get Baked" wouldn't really focus enough on the 'bread' part; "Loaves Around" wouldn't really focus enough on the 'stuff' part. "The Bread Store With More", besides being a possible trademark violation, would make me want to hit you. "Bread & Circuses" is cute, but runs the very real risk of flying over the heads of your audience (a feeling I'm quite accustomed to, so I know what I'm talking about here) -- and it would shut out any potential future expansion into Winnipeg, where the name is already taken. I got a strange hometown, man.

Anyway! All I'm suggesting here is that you could have given this a little more thought, because it seems entirely counterproductive to cultivate a public image that stops and contradicts itself before anyone can even get through the door. It's like when a pizza place puts out an advertising campaign for their chicken wings that never once mentions the pizza they sell. As first impressions go, "what were they thinking" is probably a bad start for luring in customers.

This post was originally going to have a lot more content in it, but now I'll have to put up the rest of it tomorrow because I have a headache about the whole thing. Thanks a lot, The Bread Store Much More Than A Bread Store. Now I've got to go lie down.

Je ne comprends pas

2009-05-21T22:49:00.000-04:00

Gimme a break; gimme a break! Break me off a piece of that Uptown Magazine!

I can't imagine there's a lot that I would want or need to say in support of this column, because quite honestly it speaks for itself. In one language, because that's all it knows how to do.

I'm quite rubbish at French, as anybody who has ever witnessed me speak or read it can attest to, and I've hit the point where I have to acknowledge that this will probably never change. I've had my best intentions many a time of maybe going back and learning it, but let's be honest -- I'm twenty-five years old and already I routinely find myself standing in the kitchen and trying to remember what I went into the kitchen for, so what the hell chance do I have of picking up an entirely new (though not entirely 'foreign' -- lol see what I did there) language.

Alas! Alas. Not all is bleak and dreary around here, however -- I went to the Value Village yesterday to pick up some intramural softball equipment (read: I bought track pants) and came back with information, which of course is the commodity I enjoy dealing in the most. Check it!

Value Village half-off sale this Monday! Oh hells yes! I have class that morning from nine 'til noon, unfortunately for my purposes, and I have two (!) papers due the next day -- so I'll just have to work ahead a bit first, I guess, because no way am I passing up on this.

I've made no secret of my penchant for thrift stores, and even less of a secret of my enthusiasm for thrift store sales. I've had tremendous luck with the Value Village half-off sales in the past -- most notably finding a badass long suede coat for fourty bucks last fall and a tube organ (!) for ten bucks (!!) last spring -- and even if I don't find anything as dramatic as that, it's always (always) worth a look when a place like this holds a sale like that. This is important! Check your local listings!

Only Two Rounds to Go in the Stanley Cup Playoffs

2009-05-18T19:43:00.001-04:00

In the past two days I have had three different conversations with non-hockey fans who expressed dismay and flabbergast... ment? Flabbergastation? They were surprised, is what I am getting at, that hockey is still being played. Well, surprise! They keep playing hockey, and I keep watching it, and I enjoy myself despite the inevitable defeat of whichever team I decide to pull for.

That second round was awesome hockey, and I defy anyone out there to tell me that it was anything other than awesome hockey. There's no way the third round is going to top it, nor is it going to overshadow the ridiculous and awful ongoing saga of the Phoenix Coyotes, and somehow I suspect that the third round isn't even going to try; at least one of these series is bound to suck out loud, and I think you and I both know which one is the more likely culprit.

So let's just go ahead with the:

Western Conference

(2) Detroit Red Wings vs. (4) Chicago Blackhawks

Yeah, this series started already. I was out and about last night and had an assignment due this afternoon, so in the time it took me to get those out of the way and write this Chicago has already managed to drop game one by three goals. A team scores seven goals on the one goalie who captains his team and they get a little overconfident, maybe. Or maybe Detroit is just that universally god damn good forever and there isn't even any point in discussing this. Where's a pitiful eighth-seeded team to catch them napping and upset them when we need them the most? HELP ME OBI-WAN COYOTES YOU'RE OUR ONLY HOPE

Ha ha ha ha just kidding, the Coyotes are never going to win a playoff series no matter where they end up. Ever. Twenty-two year drought and counting, baby! The Curse of the Jets lives on! (The 'Curse' in question: we were never any good.)

What I'd Want: Chicago in six, wherein they overcome adversity and defeat a Detroit team that is unequivocally at the top of their game so that there can be no accusations of fluking the series victory.
What I'll Guess: Detroit in four. That first awful goal that Khabibulin gave up in game one turns out to be the TSN Turning Point for the entire series, Joel Quenneville lights himself ablaze and lets himself burn rather than face the realization that he has blown it all against Detroit yet again, and I slowly but surely grow to loathe the Red Wings and anyone who has ever held them dear.

Eastern Conference

(4) Pittsburgh Penguins vs. (6) Carolina Hurricanes

Let's not mince words, that Game 7 between Pittsburgh and Washington sucked pretty bad. I left a scoreless game around the middle of the first period to go get some cold medicine (Halls syrup-filled cough drops and Crown Royal whisky, both of which were on sale and both of which I am now out of) and when I got back it was four-nothing Pittsburgh and quite intensely over. (If it makes them feel better, however, I watched the Magic-Celtics game last night and that one was even more of a dog.) The Carolina/Boston series, on the other hand, now that's the kind of game seven I can get behind! What a crazy, up-and-down eventful week Scott Walker had, huh? Starts the week with nobody, even in Carolina, having heard of him; lands the single best one-punch knockout of the season; gets suspended for a game because the one-punch knockout was on a guy who didn't see it coming; comes back from suspension and scores the series-winning overtime goal; finds out almost the day afterwards that his wife has been diagnosed with cervical cancer. I mean, where do you even go from there?

Anyway. When Staals collide! I hope they go Mark and Dale Hunter on each other and just brother-fight for like eight periods straight until it spills over into the kind of hilarious Canadiens-Nordiques epic super-brawl that always makes me grin for a variety of reasons. Here's hoping!

What I'd Want: Oh, who even cares. The last two Stanley Cups that the Red Wings won were against these two teams. I have such hilariously low hopes for either of these squads that it doesn't even matter any more.
What I'll Guess: Pittsburgh in six. Evgeni Malkin fails to show up at all for at least four games and somehow it doesn't even matter. Crosby further cements himself as a superstar, not because of the goals he beats Cam Ward with, but because of the goals he scores to make up for having Marc-Andre Fleury in net behind him.

Playoff hockey! It'll go right to June whether you like it or not!

cookiieee aahhhhhh

2009-05-15T14:47:00.002-04:00

I am twenty-five years old and I still draw Cookie Monster on my school notes.

My art had a reason this time, though! (Not like last time, I mean.) You can see in the snippets of scholastic notetaking above that the professor of this class brought up Cookie Monster first, specifically to mention that she likes to introduce herself to the first-term reference students by showing them the old clip of Cookie Monster at the library and building from there. (Please note that, aside from a cute example of a reference interview, this is also a good snapshot of the hilarious old-fashioned librarian stereotype. Look at him shush! Look at the bow tie! That's adorable!)

So the notes above are from the first day of Evaluation and Use of Children's Materials, Birth to 7 Years, and I cannot begin to tell you how happy I am to have gotten into this class. The peculiarities of the University of Western Ontario graduate registration system meant that I had to go right down to the wire on today's add/drop deadline to get into this course, and now that I've successfully been enrolled I can A) avoid taking the alternate course, Human Resources Management (and no offense to whoever the prospective professor would have been for that one, but I think we can all agree that I'm more suited for children's librarianship than for high-level management) and B) finally draw up my assignment schedule for the term and find out when I get to sleep this summer.

Yes, it's another big term! A brief cross-section of the reading lists across the five courses: Kay Vandergrift, Marshall McLuhan, Beatrix Potter, Michael Geist, Eric Carle, Raymond Williams, Scott McCloud, Dorothy Kunhardt, The Law Librarian blog, the NoveList electronic database, Adobe Photoshop CS4 How-Tos: 100 Essential Techniques, Don't Make Me Think!: A Common Sense Approach to Web Useability, Podcasting for Dummies, and multiple sections of the Canadian Copyright Act. A strange clump of readings, perhaps, but not as strange as having an assignment due this coming Monday! For one thing, the term just started this past Monday; for another thing, Monday is a holiday. But! If I ever need a morale boost, at least I know that I can always count on stuffing several cookies at once into my mouth and making audible chewing noises while cookie fragments go flying from my terrifying, gaping maw.

In the meantime -- for those of you who happen to be in London and reading this right now, UWO Librarians Without Borders will have a fundraising crafts table set up tomorrow at the Western Fairgrounds' weekly London Farmer's Market. Who doesn't love a good farmer's market? That's where I'll be spending the day, so let's see how long it takes for me to abandon my tablekeeping duties entirely and skitter off to find farmer's market stuff. Fellow table attendants, consider yourselves warned!

The Medium is Paint and the Message is Mixed

2009-05-14T22:44:00.002-04:00

Okay. I need to bring this up, because I have been in London for like eight months now and if I don't bring it up soon I am going to go out of my mind. Let me put aside the Terrible Crossover Fanfiction Idea Generator for a second ("Your challenge is to write crossover fanfiction combining Doom and They Might Be Giants. The story should use a blizzard as a plot device!" haha what) and talk about this item of interest, because I have come face to face with it so many times that it practically demands my attention.

This is the mural painted outside the entrance to the Cherryhill branch of the London Public Library, taking up a sizeable chunk of wallspace within the Cherryhill Village Mall. The single-level indoor mall is populated almost entirely by captive elderly people from the surrounding... er... 'retirement communities' and the whole building has this sublimely depressing aura that seems to leak from its very pores, but that's a topic I can get into another time. Look at this mural! Behold it!

I understand the intent of the mural, and I'm sure you do as well. Combating the long-held stereotypes that surround a library -- especially important when dealing with an audience that may have held these views unquestioningly for half a century now -- this mural seeks to emphasize the diversity, the vibrancy and the sense of community spirit that a public library serves to foster and enrich at all times. This is funny to begin with because this particular public library branch is, and I'm not kidding, attended at all times by packs of territorial seniors who will give you funny looks if you try and befoul their periodicals with your grubby young-folk hands -- but the thing I like most of all about this mural is that it seeks to tout the vim and vigour and vibrancy of libraries by portraying actions and behaviours that would make a librarian from any era seriously consider stabbing you.

Let's go around the mural and consider, one-by-one, the items pictured here that are either passively discouraged or straight up disallowed within the library environment.

Please don't bring your cat, for starters. Please don't bring a cat into the library. I love cats dearly, let's establish that right now -- but even putting aside the incredible allergy and health risks involved, the basic fact of the matter is that if you put a cat on top of two library books you will have a cat and a pile of confetti within about thirty seconds. And then the sheer number of people around in any given public library (nineteen people in this picture, as an example, including five small children) would probably incite a bout of running away and/or freaking out in the poor cat, because any cat of any size in the entire world is fully capable of cloaking and weaponizing itself in a matter of milliseconds. (This is even if you'd had the cat declawed previously, but since declawing also involves the wholesale amputation of critically important paw bones it's safe to assume that the cat is god damn angry at you to begin with.) So while you've got a scared cat hiding somewhere in the stacks and dive-bombing unsuspecting passersby, let's see what other trouble you can get into.

Oh. Yeah, please don't eat while you're handling the library books. I know this may seem like kind of an old-fashioned position to the non-library set, but I've yet to run into a practicing librarian who looks forward to cleaning apple residue out of hardcovers. This isn't as bad as having to corral an aggravated cat, or anything, but all the same I'm not sure how promoting this is a good idea.

Speaking of bad ideas! The VHS tapes aren't too egregious, because they're sort of stacked in some sort of careful manner and they're a pretty tough medium to begin with, but if I ever catch you removing CDs from their cases and strewing them about upside-down for the entire world to scratch and destroy I will you murder you myself. This isn't a sentiment motivated by professional obligation; in fact it goes double if you ever pull this shit in my house, so commit this to memory. Who even does something like this?

Crimson Viper does, apparently. This is another important point: while cellphone use is no longer strictly prohibited in many public libraries, it's a safe bet that extended cellphone use while hogging an internet terminal is going to get you shanked by the other patrons long before the library staff can step in.

Not pictured on this mural are the other computer stations, where patrons plunk themselves down and masturbate to internet porn for hours on end; I think this is left unpictured for reasons that are entirely obvious, but in our library school program they've brought in public librarians who have literally assured us that we will run into these people far more often than we would like (which is to say, ever). This is actually part of why they have hand sanitizer stations on every floor of each branch! These are the kinds of high-level considerations that they prepare us for in the Library and Information Science program; perhaps now you understand why these jobs tend to pay so well.

I don't know if there are any enshrined library rules specifically outlawing a spirited guitar rendition of whatever this champion of cool would be playing (ten bucks says he's playing Clapton to try and pick up women), but if you pull this stunt in a library I'm reasonably certain they'll draw up some form of justification for siccing security on you within the first five or ten minutes. Especially if you're stomping your foot that hard, or bracing your foot on a stack of books like that, or... whatever he's doing. If I look at his legs for too long I start to seriously lose my sense of depth perception, so let's move on and see who else is--

Oh hell no. You have got to be kidding me. Free-range accordions are frowned upon just about everywhere; outside of certain festivals there are a very small number of people in the world whose performance on an accordion in public is tolerated, and none of those people are so desperate as to have to perform in public libraries between a stack of books and a guitarist with one rapidly melting leg. I don't care if they won't let you take the sheet music outside the branch, you photocopy that shit. Put away the accordion and take off that silly-ass hat, you banana-pudding-suit-wearing freakshow.

Well, at least I can take comfort in knowing that things can't possibly get any more ludicrous here at the local public l--

WHERE DID YOU GET A TREE. WHERE.

I can't tell from this artistic rendition whether the small child dumped one of the potted plants on the floor and meticulously arranged it to look like it belonged there or if this kid somehow managed to cut a hole in the floor and plant a small, somehow surviving tree into the ground below without anyone noticing and making an attempt to stop him or her.

Dear prospective patrons: please do not attempt to establish new plantlife installments inside the library building.

Your local public library! You never know what you'll find! I'm going to down a litre of whisky and lie down until I've forgotten that I ever saw this, just so I can react to it anew the next time I drop by. Stay strong, readers!

Resent This Article, and Future Considerations

2009-05-10T20:52:00.004-04:00

Uptown Magazine! The surreal adventure that will become your world!

I'm a little late in getting around to mentioning it, but I'd written a reasonably timely column about the untimely future passing of Geocities. I was pretty sure that the column conveyed my nostalgic, if irrational, sense of loss and disappointment in the oncoming disappearance of the site -- or at least I was pretty sure until I received this actual, unedited, one-hundred-per-cent-serious reader response to it:

"I resent your Uptown article. Geocities rules."

It went on like that for like three pages (!), but that was -- and I'm not kidding -- the word-for-word opening statement. So for any readers out there who may have been confused or misled, rest assured that my affection for GeoCities has endured to this day. Part of it is the amateur content aspect, of course, but another part of it is the archival function that it has faithfully served right up until, well, now. Aside from the most flagrant of flagrant copyright transgressions, nothing has been deleted off of GeoCities in the past decade or so unless the original creator went in and deleted it; you can go back and find hundreds of thousands of old GeoCities pages left frozen in time and exactly as you'd remembered them, save for the occasional advertisement that Yahoo! added to them retroactively because Yahoo! is headed by useless, gibbering morons who are seemingly incapable of making money off of anything.

I ran a few randomly inspired Geocities-themed Google searches, just for kicks, and ended up with all kinds of various GeoCities pages. (For sanity's sake, make sure that your speakers are turned off if you decide to open all of those at once.) Some of these pages are just flat out way better than others, and back in the day it seemed that for every one great page there were a hundred intolerable ones, but you can feel the effort that people put into them -- and it's all going to be gone, poof, the work of millions of people from all over the world just like that. What the hell, Yahoo!, what the hell. The Internet Archive, marvelous as it is, can only do so much at once; you couldn't give them a heads-up first?

Somewhat related to this topic, it was about half my life ago (!!) that I originally started puttering around with webpages on GeoCities; its impending closure coincides with my ultimate acknowledgement, in my old age, that it's soon going to be time for me to bite the bullet and actually pay money for webhosting. Not with Yahoo! Ha ha, oh goodness no. But in the two and a half years or so that I've been on Blogspot -- is it seriously like two and a half years now? -- I've written a lot of feature-length items and image-heavy posts, and it's always irked me that they couldn't be properly condensed for skimming them. I've heard similar complaints from people reading the blogs; it's hard to check them frequently if doing so brings up hundreds of images, but in their current enclosure there's no way to index or present them without having to load the entire thing every time. That, plus the soon-to-be-sudden disappearance of my hilariously awful old Geocities pages that I haven't touched in a decade, is making me strongly consider the prospect that it's time for me to cough up the dough and establish something somewhere that is both flexible and permanent.

This is all fruitless musing right now, of course! This is something I'll have to look into in the future, because right now I have neither the money nor the time necessary to further the thought. I start my third, and assumedly final, term of library school tomorrow! It's crunch time! (Note also that my classes this term include a web design and architecture course, a publishing and media course, and a public sector internet broadcasting course; it might be smarter to make big internet decisions after I've been exposed to these.)

In conclusion, GeoCities! You were a miserable piece of crap, but I'll miss you all the same.

Travellin' Man

2009-05-08T11:57:00.002-04:00

Hi, guys! I'm back in London again, having caught yesterday's flight out through the rain and muck; I don't know where all of my break time went, but it's definitely gone now. My next (and theoretically final!) term starts up on Monday, so I intend to enjoy this last weekend before it's back to the grind.

With that said: bye, guys! I'm off to Toronto for today and tomorrow, in part to check out the Toronto Comic Arts Festival and in part because, hell, why not. It'll be fun! The city was quite relentlessly ugly the last time I was there (I never got around to posting those pictures, did I? Man, I should go back and do that sometime), but I've been assured that the place is slightly less gray this time of year.

When I get back late tomorrow, late enough to technically be early Sunday, it'll be my third straight day of travel and my fifth change of locale in a week. (Remind me to post the pictures I've taken of Oak Lake, Manitoba before! Those pictures were awesome.) I've been told that I have a reputation of being hard to contact sometimes, so this week I've been doing what I can to earn it. Rest assured, though -- you haven't heard the last of me yet! I'll be sure to crank out some updates when I get back, and I know I've said that before but I totally mean it every time and my intentions are always pure of heart. See you guys Sunday, probably!

The Stanley Cup Conference Semifinals Started Already

2009-05-03T22:52:00.003-04:00

Go figure, I took a while to start writing about hockey because I spent a lot of today watching the hockey instead. (A triple-overtime session in the early game didn't help matters much.) This, you see, is the danger of not getting one's predictions for the round done before the round starts. The other danger might normally be that the already established results could colour the predictions -- like "oh, this team is already two games up, sure whatever" -- but since three of the four series are at 1-1 after two games, and the fourth series is completely capable of being 1-1 after the next outing, that isn't as much of a concern here.

So let's ruminate, starting with the:

Eastern Conference

(1) Boston Bruins vs. (6) Carolina Hurricanes

Boy, good thing the Montreal Canadiens fired Guy Carbonneau when they did or they'd really have looked pathetic in that four-game sweep Boston gave them! HUNDREDTH SEASON YEAH BABY

So Boston had plenty of cooldown time after their first round, whereas Carolina took it right to seven games with the Devils and drew out as entertaining a series as you're ever going to get out of New Jersey. (Augh, the Devils. I'm always glad to see them eliminated, because if they have their way they bore me and everyone else in the entire world to tears.) And the long rest helped Boston win Game One, but then the scrappy enthusiasm of Carolina's continued playoff grind helped them win Game Two, so who the hell knows.

Full disclosure: I think of this every time I see Rod Brind'Amour and it still cracks me up, every time. ("I bet his mom thinks he's ugly." "Probably.") But that doesn't compare to the elation that Tim Thomas always inspires in me, and he makes me smile real wide when I think of him because he's always really entertaining. He makes gigantic sprawling floppy saves as his trademark, he gets mic-ed up and narrates his own goaltending during the All-Star Game, he curls up and spins himself on his back like a turtle when a snazzy shootout goal gets by him (yes, really), and occasionally he just loses his temper and punches dudes in the face when they skate by. My kind of goalie! He's like Ray Emery, except with better team chemistry; he's like Dan Cloutier, except he makes saves. (Ha!)

Full appreciation to the Hurricanes for eliminating New Jersey, but I don't think this is their year. Boston has been pulling the Team of Destiny routine all season, and I'll be surprised if they manage to choke that away this quickly. They're not San Jose or Dallas, after all. So:

What I'd Want: Boston in five.
What I'll Guess: Boston in seven. Carolina's tricky!

(2) Washington Capitals vs. (4) Pittsburgh Penguins

Hey, sports media: shut the fuck up about Sean Avery, seriously, no one even cares any more. I know somebody somewhere mistakenly believes that Avery equals ratings, but he's a thoroughly mediocre player who has only ever functioned passably on one team and nobody appreciates your constant efforts to try and make us pay attention to him. It wasn't even subtle, either; the promotional blurbs inevitably read something like "Tonight, it's Avery and the Rangers versus Ovechkin and the Capitals!" and guess how well that went for the Rangers. There was only the one player on the New York side that brought his A-game in the series; fortunately for them it was their goalie, because Lundqvist on his A-game is all a team needs to steal three games by himself. (On a side note, it's kind of weird to know that I can correctly spell 'Lundqvist' in one try without having to look it up. Same way I've always felt about the name 'Tchaikovsky', but that's a different post entirely.) But the Capitals ultimately prevailed, being the appreciably better team, and now we get the big money match against the only other team in the League that mainstream America pays attention to.

Pittsburgh versus Philadelphia had all the potential in the world to be a tremendous classic battle between hated rivals and then it was only a sort of okay series until the Flyers inevitably rolled over and died. Alas! But this really should be the awesome series that the last one wasn't, the kind of bitter slugfest between teams with a history of animosity towards each other that makes my violent Canadian heart sing.

Besides being the most marketable playoff series that the NHL has had in, what, decades, the series should be really fun because the two teams are largely similar and about evenly matched. Both the Capitals and the Penguins feature a couple of game-defining top superstars, strong bases of young talent, a rapidly aging former-Cup-winner, a gigantic stupid goon, and hilariously spotty goaltending. Both teams are great fun to watch, but I think I'd rather see Washington prevail here; the Penguins had their shot at the Cup last year, so it's only fair that the Capitals get their turn next.

What I'd Want: Washington in seven, all of the games dramatically entertaining, and with at least three fights between superstars who make their coaches really nervous when they get into fights. (A shame Jerome Iginla went out so early this year; he was always good for at least one of these kinds of scraps.)
What I'll Guess: Washington in six. Malkin, so far, is not known for showing up in the playoffs when he's needed.

As for the:

Western Conference

(2) Detroit Red Wings vs. (8) Anaheim Mighty Ducks

Detroit swept the Columbus Blue Jackets without any particular effort, then took a collective nap because the team's average age is like seventy years old. Anaheim fought and clawed with the San Jose Sharks for six games until the Sharks finally remembered that they're the Sharks and just rolled over and died in the playoffs. So nothing much is new here; Anaheim is playing gritty playoff hockey like they've been doing for months, and two rounds in the Red Wings still have yet to need an elevated effort beyond the regular season level. (Four straight casual games against Columbus? Is that any different than a regular season stint for Detroit? Especially when the deciding goal in the deciding game comes off a Too Many Men penalty in the final two minutes?)

Detroit is so god damn good at everything that they don't even understand what losing is like, having won four Cups in twelve years and having been first in their division for the entire decade. Detroit is a phenomenally talented team and almost absolute perfection on ice to watch, and even despite that I am so incredibly tired of seeing them win that I can barely even express it in human language. One might expect that the Ducks would be a good match against the Red Wings here, because Detroit's goaltenders are both incredibly suspect and Anaheim's strong-checking physical play is a good quick way to wear down older players, but the Red Wings are all rested up to resume their absolute command over the intricacies of the game of hockey and I am slowly growing to hate them. It won't be easy -- in fact it'll most likely be a continuous string of one-goal games, because this is the Western Conference -- but Detroit is probably going to emerge the winner here.

What I'd Want: Anaheim in six, credited mostly to Randy Carlyle's mad-science line-matching wizardry.
What I'll Guess: Detroit in five, because all that Detroit ever does is win and it makes me mad.

(3) Vancouver Canucks vs. (4) Chicago Blackhawks

It was nice to see St. Louis in the playoffs, wasn't it? That was nice. Good for them! They were a feel-good story and I was rooting for them, so of course they lost in four games. Cough cough thud. Chicago had a considerably tougher time with Calgary, because nobody in the Northwest ever goes down without a fight any more, but here they are and good for them. The Blackhawks deserve better than the past twelve or thirteen years.

Honestly, both of these teams are good fun to watch and have some solid Winnipeg connections behind 'em, so I don't have any particular loyalties or preference. It's not like either team has won anything in the last decade or so, either, so it'll be a neat change to see either of them advance. Some fast skaters, some solid goaltending, some hostility left over from the regular season -- good times! I can get behind this kind of stuff.

What I'd Want: Oh, either team is fine, I like 'em both. Whoever's more likely to beat Detroit, I guess.
What I'll Guess: Vancouver in six, when Roberto Luongo Hulks Up and justifies his captaincy. Like the letter, get it? Captain-C? HEY-YOOOO~oh, don't give me that look, that's gold and you know it. If it would have been good enough for Foghorn Leghorn, it's good enough for me.

Playoff hockey! It's what's for dinner!

Oh Well Look Who's Alive

2009-05-01T14:45:00.005-04:00

Hi, everyone! Who's really good at blogging? THE ANSWER IS ME I AM SO GOOD AT BLOGGING.

Yes, it has been a while, you might have noticed. Last I'd posted, back in -- February? Jesus Christ -- back in February, I had expressed my intentions to write more often and in retrospect that was tremendously funny. Oh, I ended up writing more often, all right; my assignment load when printed could probably be expressed in tons, especially given how many assignments in that last stretch were A) twenty pages in length, B) worth 40% or more of the term, or C) both. Ah, graduate school.

So it was mostly radio silence from me around here; we'll call it an extended March Break! I didn't get a March Break in real life, so I'll retroactively apply it here. That it extended to encompass April is unfortunate and pretty awful, but in my defence shut up I was busy raarh grr etcetera. (Defence attempts like these exemplify why people should stop trying to get me to go to law school.)

Yes, times were rough; assignments ran high and frequently, pretty much everyone I know in London packed up to leave on co-op terms, and I turned twenty-five which is probably about halfway to death for me. But it isn't all bad news for creative content around here! I diligently continued my column for Uptown Magazine during these trying times, and now that I'm back in Winnipeg for a bit I was able to go and track down paper copies of my published work ~~because I am a relentless egotist~~. The columns are also in helpful electronic format, which makes them easier to share -- so let's have a look and see if I can't find some content for you guys to read!

Uptown Magazine! Beware of imitators!

It seems like so long ago, now, but I wrote this column shortly after the Obama visit to Canada as a reaction piece to express how incredibly sick I was of hearing about the Obama visit to Canada.

It was all that the news media talked about for the week prior, it was pretty much all they talked about for the week after, and for the very short time that he was actually in Canada it wasn't even worth going near a radio or television. I like him as much as the next Canadian (and we Canadians love the crap out of the guy) but I get it, he came to Canada, stop talking about it.

To give you some perspective, the Obama visit got more coverage proportionally on Canadian television for that week or two than swine flu and the economy combined are getting right now. And we're all already sick of hearing about swine flu as it is! You can understand my frustration.

And speaking of getting sick and fed up:

Uptown Magazine! The Great Valley Adventure! My column from this issue can be read here, assuming it does not explode and kill you first.

You may think to yourself "how hard it is to produce a product that will not murder people outright?", but that is because you are not a major business. Major businesses can't help it! It just naturally comes with the territory that someone will have an allergic reaction, or use the product in an unsafe manner, or... fall ill and die for otherwise unexplained reasons, or get choked to death by majestically unsafe components. Or whatever. It's always something! Quite literally, always something; there's no telling what the next consumer good will be that abruptly keeps consumers from observing their next birthday.

And, well... speaking of birthdays...

Uptown Magazine! Fight the powers that be!

The thrust of this column is that I am old and busted and all washed up, because I am old and busted and all washed up. Twenty-five? Seriously? God, that's pretty much it for me. Surely if I was going to accomplish something it would have shown up by now; now it's too late, my best years are all behind me, and it's just a steady decline of getting older and dumber and fatter from here until the slow crawl of decay sends me to my grave. Happy Birthday, me!

There's another column in this week's Uptown that'll be online pretty much any second now, I think, so I'll keep you guys posted. And there are Stanley Cup Playoffs to talk about! God, I love the Stanley Cup Playoffs. I've done predictions in the past, and they've never been right, but I've always enjoyed doing them; my extended break unfortunately meant that I didn't get to predict the first round, but rest assured that I would have been mostly wrong.

No time for predictions right now, unfortunately! I'm heading out of town shortly, and I won't be able to come back and post anything until Sunday. So Sunday it is; I'll make (slightly late) round two NHL predictions, direct passersby to my latest Uptown column, and basically just fart around because that sums up the vast majority of my writing. Good to be back!

Sort of Like Guy Fawkes Day But Newer

2009-02-11T01:44:00.001-05:00

Uptown Magazine! The blanket with sleeves!

I had a column published in the latest edition, discussing in brief the upcoming Louis Riel Day in Manitoba; it's only the second Louis Riel Day ever, so there's still lots to get sorted out with this holiday. Readers more familiar with my oeuvre will recall that I also wrote a column last year on the subject, when the Day was fresh and new -- and I'm happy to report that my Louis Riel Day tradition will continue this year, by which I mean I fully intend to spend the day reading Manitoba history and drinking steadily. I've already got the book picked out, in fact! What an organized fellow I am.

Speaking of organization, the big Toronto-themed post that I've promised previously should be coming down the pike by the end of the week. I've whittled the pictures down to about seventy, which is half the number I started with but still quite a handful to download at once; I may post them in two smaller chunks, if only so they'll travel down the main page faster and make life easier on everyone's modems in the future. And it wasn't until I got near the end of the whittlin' process that I saw and remembered that I took relevant video footage, so right now I'm also working on editing and encoding and uploading and--okay, yes, I see you're thrilled. Point taken, we'll move on.

Manitoba's Louis Riel Day is the third Monday in February, meaning that it coincides with Ontario's Family Day. And because universities tend to be run by clever people, damn their eyes, the Family Day also coincides with our upcoming reading week -- just to ensure that we don't get any extra days off anywhere, or anything. I'm quite looking forward to it! So expect my blog posts here to come fast and furious over the next calendar week; yes, I'll also have a metric crapload of schoolwork staring me down, but a brother's got to take his relaxation where he can get it. Fight the power!

Dig That Car

2009-02-03T10:52:00.001-05:00

Well, hello there! Toronto was very interesting, and I have many interesting stories and pictures to share. (It isn't everyday that I exit from an underground concourse to find myself smack in the middle of a thirty-thousand-person protest march, for example.) In fact, I appear to have taken about a hundred and fourty (!) pictures over the course of the trip; selecting and editing them for presentation is going about as quickly as one would expect, and I'm trying to figure out how I might post them here without completely clogging the internet connection of anybody who tries to visit this blog ever.

With that said, I'm afraid that the extended exposition about my recent getaway will have to wait. I know, I know! I said that I'd tell you all about it this week, and I had said that in good faith. But my scholastic endeavors are not going extravagantly well for me in the scheduling department right now, as it turns out; I've got more commitments than Roddy Doyle this week. (Ha ha, oh geez, sorry. A little book humour, there! I'm, uh... I think I'm losing my mind.)

In considering my position for this week I was reminded of a few photos that I took last Wednesday night, while on my way home to pack for the trip the next day. The weather in London never gets very dramatically cold, but it definitely loves to snow a lot around here -- and while I'm sure the locals must be used to it by now, it appears that some people still get caught unawares.

Yeah, wow. Good luck digging your vehicle out, gobsmacked car owner! It looks pretty bad from here, but it's nothing unmanageable; you just have to start digging, wherever it strikes you as best to start, and then keep going from there until you're able to free yourself and move on with your life.

Right? Am I thinking unreasonably here? Well, apparently I must be, because I walked home from school again today -- and that car is still there.

It hit temperatures of zero yesterday and the day before (zero! It was flippin' spring out here!), giving the previous snow some time to melt and congeal into ice, and then it snowed like crazy again overnight so this car is even worse off now than it was before. Whoever owns this vehicle has moved on from being surprised by the weather conditions to either A) being completely incompetent or B) having given up entirely on the idea of driving anywhere.

This is what motivates me, right now. There is no way I can let myself end up like this car.

(If you're in London at the moment and want some motivation yourself, feel free to go look at it and regard it with wonder; it's in the parking lot of the UWO store, just south of Sarnia and Western. I don't think it's going anywhere, just drop by whenever.)

So I've got a lot of work to do, and the Toronto trip recap will have to wait for now. But! In the meantime, let me pass along information that you may find useful. Certainly I find it to be very interesting and important information, but I am willing to accept that not everybody is as gung-ho about these sorts of things. To wit:

It's on, suckers! Next Monday it's half-off at the Value Village, and you can expect me to be there bright and early just to see what I can get my hands on. I did the same with the last sale and ended up with a coat so impressively swanky that I couldn't possibly have ever afforded it under normal circumstances; I doubt my luck is so strong as to set up a feat like that twice, but hey, you never know.

Will James Howard survive his gauntlet of assignments and obligations? Will he return to report on his adventures in the big city? Will someone dig that car out? Tune in next time!

Come On O-62 Come On Come On Let's Go O-62 God Damn It

2009-01-27T22:58:00.001-05:00

It was a difficult and unsettling transition from Winnipeg to London when I first arrived out here, not knowing who anyone was or where anything is or what to wear in a winter environment that doesn't involve a constant bombardment of minus fourty-five. But what helped me find my feet and get acclimated were the similarities between the two cities, of which there are quite a lot despite London being half the population.

Both Winnipeg and London have sad, crumbling, decaying downtown cores of empty (but architecturally fascinating) old buildings; they both have thriving outside pockets of sprawl that centre around gigantic malls, any of which require a good half an hour of bus ride to reach from downtown. Both cities feature brazenly inconvenient transit systems, uninspired Quebecor-Sun Media owned newspapers, and very new arenas downtown that host NHL exhibition games in the fall. And both cities play a significant role in the history of Labatt Blue beer, London the hometown of the company and Winnipeg the city that had the beer named after its football team. (A shame how badly Labatt Blue sucks with all of that in mind, but alas.)

That list established, I recently turned on my television and found one more similarity that I wasn't expecting:

Television bingo! Oh, well, sure!

The local Rogers station is very committed to community coverage (actual tagline: "Local Matters"), when it isn't mocking lawyers or whatever, so naturally it hosts Optimist TV Bingo each Monday and everyone gathers around their television sets with glee.

Winnipeg is, of course, the Bingo capital of Canada -- maybe it's one of the only games we can afford to run, I don't know -- and the city's televised bingo has been a popular local institution for over twenty years, as ludicrous as that idea sounds.

I never quite understood the appeal of the... sport?... but I have to admit that the old television commercials always kept my undivided attention, when I would see them as a kid, so I imagine these people must know something about maintaining an audience.

Yes, old television commercials. You know I wouldn't be nearly as likely to bring it up if I didn't have an example handy, because people often openly disbelieve me when I say something like this without proof immediately at hand. Well, disbelieve this:

STILL ON THE AIR. It might even still be in the exact same timeslot, for all I know.

It's the little homey touches that make a visitor comfortable in a new city, it really is. If I ever need to play some bingo in the comfort of my own home, I know what to turn to!

I'm off to volunteer at the Ontario Library Association Super Conference, later this week, which will coincidentally put me in Toronto for only the second time ever. (I was once there for a week and barely ever got out of downtown, although I don't imagine I'll get much farther this time.) The library and publishing conference in question is usually described as 'gigantic' when I ask about it, but beyond that I really have no idea what I'm in for. So drop by next week, gentle readers; I'll be sure to let you know how it went.

Liveblogging the Inauguration of Barack Obama (or, Wow That's a Lot of People)

2009-01-20T09:33:00.032-05:00

I got up comparatively early this morning! And since I'm going to be watching the entirety of the inauguration ceremony anyway, I figured I may as well be typing about it while I'm doing it.

Those of you who've seen me liveblog before know what to expect, so you're probably rolling your eyes at me right now and going off to grab some food instead. That's fine! Not going to argue with you. In fact, that's a pretty good idea; I'd better grab myself a bowl of cereal or something before the thing legit starts at the top of the hour. Liveblogging to begin shortly!

9:45 AM

Oh, wow. Yup, that's a lot of people out there.

I'm watching the CNN coverage of the event, at least for now; I can usually only take a small dose or so of CNN at a time, so if they try and trot out a studio hologram of will.i.am or whoever I am totally flipping to somewhere else. I have a hunch they might be showing the event on other channels!

Shots of the motorcade puttering towards the site; Wolf Blitzer rambles about the choir brought in from San Francisco to sing for said motorcade. I assure you this is more riveting than I'm making it sound! (haha not yet it's not)

9:53 AM

I forgot to mention -- just before I went to grab breakfast, they showed a close-up shot on the crowd wherein Don King was milling around, looking very excited and wearing what has to be one of the ugliest jean jackets I've ever seen. I mean, yes, Don King, but even still. The jacket has this gigantic American-flag-and-eagle on the back, like he's been taking fashion advice from Billy Kane, and then it has faux-fur frill around the collar and... oh, dear. Well, so long as he's warm out there, I guess that's the important thing.

Shot of Joe and Jill Biden exiting the limousine and entering the White House; Jill Biden's choice of red coat, exposed legs and thigh-high black boots is sort of an unfortunate look. It's a weird combination.

Barack and Michelle Obama arrive immediately afterwards, both dressed very sensibly, and Michelle -- carrying a nice white box with a red ribbon -- very nearly trips on the stairs as she walks up to hug Laura Bush. Watch that first step! It's a doozy!

9:58 AM

The CNN scrollbar at the bottom reads the following:

"FACT: The Obamas and Bidens are having coffee with the Bushes in the White House."

I would have believed you if you just said the coffee part, dude. You don't need to arbitrarily blurt out 'FACT', you aren't the internet.

"We've got a lot of new technology that we'll be showing our viewers," Wolf announces, basically warning me in advance that they are going to annoy me today. Another wide shot of the National Mall and, yep, lot of people. A pocket of Canadian flags is visible off in the left background, which is kind of funny.

10:06 AM

Not much happening yet. More crowd shots, including a funny spot at ground level where a bunch of flag-waving people whoo-ed a bit at the camera in their faces and then began saying the word 'Obama'. Not chanting it, like you'd expect; just blurting out the word 'Obama' amongst themselves, like a lost take of Being John Malkovich.

Holy shit, Muhammad Ali in the VIP section! Awesome! WAIT A MINUTE WASN'T HE A SECRET MUSLIM OH GOD

10:14 AM

Another shot of the White House front doors, and another declaration from Wolf Blitzer that yes they are still having coffee as though it is the most important thing in the world. This is why they pay him the big bucks.

Dustin Hoffman in the VIP section? I liked Wag the Dog as much as the next political junkie, but I don't know if I'd put him on Ali level. One announcer, as if reading my mind, blurts out "Why Dustin Hoffman?" right after I finish typing that. Whoever handled the VIP invitations must still really like Tootsie!

10:18 AM

Jimmy Carter arrives, apparently with the Clintons expected close behind him. Oh, Jimmy! Poor Jimmy. Historians always love to make a specific point of pooping on him from a great height, don't they? You try negotiating with Iran sometime! And the part where he had been attacked by a deadly swimming rabbit, well I mean that could happen to anyb--pffffff ha ha ha ha okay the swimming rabbit thing was really funny. Sorry, Jimmy!

Speculation about the future makeup of the Supreme Court goes on for entirely too long, as we watch what must be the entirety of the Court walking towards the building. CNN then--goes to commercial? Again? Okay, maybe I didn't need to wake up this early.

10:25 AM

"Get your CNN.com inauguration t-shirt today! At CNN.com!" Okay, that does it, I'm switching channels.

I flip over to CBC and am greeted with xylophone music and a very close shot of a seahorse as small children discuss their love for it. "I think seahorses are really special!" "The beautiful seahorse!" "The beautiful seahorse!"

So I flip over to CBC Newsworld, right, and they're interviewing some kid in a suit who looks kind of like Chris Nowinski. Guy runs a Canadians for Obama group, or something? I don't know, I just got here.

A short report follows to note that the New York Stock Exchange opened on the steps of Capitol Hill, as Obama-mania grips the stock market! Then the market numbers are shown immediately afterwards to indicate that the Dow has dropped a hundred and eleven points so far today, because the market cannot be bothered to behave in a way that anyone expects or wants.

10:34 AM

Quick shot of the military orchestra practicing, including a zoom on what appears to be another xylophone. This better not be my enduring memory of the event! When my children and grandchildren ask me about this day, because according to the media they are guaranteed to ask me about this day, they are going to be bitterly disappointed in me if all I can remember are xylophones and Jimmy Carter.

10:39 AM

Fred Burton, of Strategic Forecasting Inc., explains to CBC Newsworld how the giant crowds represent an administrative and security nightmare and how the streets are swept for 'chem-bio hazards' and all the counter-sniper measures set up for each inauguration, and blah blah blah. The CBC scrollbar at the bottom sums it up as "THE INAUGURATION: Washington under state of emergency until tomorrow", which doesn't really make it sound like something you would want to attend.

10:45 AM

They're still talking to Fred Burton, which I'm sure is deathly interesting to somebody somewhere. Could we please just put Don Newman on the air for a while? This ceremony needs a good "KABOOMBA!" or something to fill all the downtime.

I hit the 'Last' button on the remote control to check the CNN footage, completely forgetting that I had ended up on CBC a while back, and now there are Doodlebops on my television screen. Oh. Huh.

Just as I flip back to Newsworld the Obamas emerge from the White House, hop into one of the Cadillacs and drive away. "THE INAUGURATION: Obama leaves White House after coffee with President Bush", the bottom bar announces. So far this is an hour of my life that I will never, ever get back.

Steven Harper, we are told, sent a couple of ministers in lieu of attending the ceremony himself; Margo McDiarmid then talks about what a great opportunity this new administration is for Canada, although clearly not that great if our Head of State would rather sit around and tidy things around the house or whatever he's up to right now. (Parliament isn't even in session. What in the hell.)

10:54 AM

"We're about thirty-five minutes away from the inauguration ceremony," oh dear. Maybe I should start cooking a frozen pizza or something.

The inauguration bar at the bottom helpfully contributes "Barack Obama will be sworn in as 44th U.S. president today", oh man have you seen this have you heard about this

Commercial break, trying to convince me to leverage the equity that I don't have on the home ownership that I don't have either. Thanks, CBC.

11:00 AM

Top of the hour, and a montage finally rolls Peter Mansbridge into the event. "He (Obama) faces two major wars and the worst economy in at least seventy-five years," Mansbridge's voiceover reminds us; he's apparently holed up in Washington's Canadian Embassy right now. Mansbridge, that is, not Obama.

I don't mean to harp on the point, but Jesus Christ there are a lot of people at this ceremony.

Something looks... off about Peter Mansbridge today. Maybe it's the change of lighting from the studio to the embassy, but he's looking decidedly pink today. And has he always worn a gigantic metal ring on his pinky finger? Has that been there his whole career and I'm only just now noticing it?

A politics professor from Princeton (blurt that one out five times fast) gushes about how amazing it is that a black President was elected just three years after the Katrina disaster. Okay, sure, but we're three weeks into 2009 and we've already had one American city break into race riots after an unarmed black man was restrained and shot in the back by police; let's not immediately assume that everything has been solved here, and--

OH JESUS IT'S DAN QUAYLE

HOLY SHIT DAN QUAYLE IS ON MY TELEVISION DID YOU SEE THIS

Dan Quayle, Al Gore and Walter Mondale all just entered the ceremony in quick succession, forming their own little line of politically unsuccessful former Vice Presidents. Quayle and Gore are practically Bizarro versions of each other, so I'm left to assume they threw Mondale in with them to keep the opposites from clashing and destroying reality. (He likes to think that he's somewhere between the fire and ice, like... lukewarm water.)

11:12 AM

CBC reporter Christine somebody is at a Toronto high school, interviewing the principal and then a seventh grader. The seventh grader says something that I'm sure she thought was poignant but will inevitably make her cringe when she rewatches it decades from now.

To hear Mansbridge tell it, it turns out the high school principal they just interviewed is the father of PK Subban. Small world! Go figure.

There's Jimmy Carter again, looking both very happy and very old; Bill and Hillary Clinton follow him down the hall a short time later, and neither of them remember to smile until they're almost to the stairs. Then the both of them wait around to go hug George and Barbara Bush, which is nice of them. George Senior ain't looking so hot today, wearing two scarves and walking with a cane and looking very gray indeed.

11:21 AM

"It's probably going to be a while before they estimate the number of people here," Mansbridge announces. Well, hell, I would imagine so! I know I would go mad if I had to try and count them based on the crowd shots.

Retrospective montage of Presidential inauguration speeches; Roosevelt, Kennedy, Reagan, Clinton. Three of these four men are quite dead, because President is not a job for pantywaists or sissies.

Exiting Vice-President Dick Cheney is in a wheelchair today, apparently having hurt his back while packing his shit into boxes and moving out. "I would have thought they had people to do that for him," Peter Mansbridge half-laughs. Peter Mansbridge is awesome.

11:29 AM

Directly related to Peter Mansbridge being awesome, he trots out one of my favourite Presidential-history anecdotes. (And I did an Honours in History, so you know I have a bunch of them.) The longest inauguration speech on record was that of William Henry Harrison, who insisted on delivering his speech in the deadest cold of winter; he didn't bundle up very well, delivered the longest speech in history without wearing proper winter wear, came down with pneumonia three weeks later, and died within a month of his taking office. William Henry Harrison, you magnificent bastard.

Shots of George W. Bush walking alone through the hallways, his wife having entered earlier; he slaps hands with one coordinator woman along the way, but nobody else appears to be willing to look him in the eye. Today's going to suck for him, oh man!

11:33 AM

Other fun historical fact: of the thirty-nine words in the Pledge of Allegiance, only the first thirty-five are officially recognized. "So help me God" was thrown in as an ad-lib by George Washington when he was inaugurated, and every single President after him has included it as a point of tradition. Go ad-libbing! Yeah!

Ooh, damn! The baritone voice working as the announcer for the inauguration ceremony stumbles over his own lines for a second, taking a second of sputtering before spitting out "S-Senator Mitch McConnell" as the Senator in question walks out. Bad day to get the jitters, dude!

Then Smilin' Joe Biden walks out and Mansbridge literally bursts out laughing when he sees him, musing aloud to himself that "Nobody in the world has looked happier for the last month than this man has all month." And he's right! Joe Biden is like a golden retriever, or whichever breed you prefer, one of those creatures that always looks really happy about something and makes you laugh and shake your head whenever you see him poking his head around something.

11:42 AM

Obama finally walks out, and the crowd goes batshit. Then he sits down and the entire crowd shuts up. Remember the old Looney Tunes routine where Bugs would appear on stage to thunderous applause, then everything would go silent again upon Daffy's entrance? That is exactly what it must feel like right now to be Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, who walked out immediately after Obama sat down and the entire ceremony went dead quiet. No pressure or anything!

11:48 AM

Pastor Rick Warren from Orange County reads the invocation prayer; the cameras cut to a shot of the Obamas, particularly the two daughters shuffling in their seats and looking antsy. It's cute! They're eight and ten years old, of course this part is boring to them.

Hell, this part is boring to me. Speed it up, Pastor! You guys like Jesus, I get it. (lol i am being insensitive about religion on the internet what a tough guy)

Aretha Franklin! Yes! Now this I can get behind! She's wearing the goofiest hat I have seen all day, a gray beret with a gigantic sequined gray ribbon the size of her head on it. The instrumentation behind this rendition of "My Country 'Tis of Thee" leans way too heavily on the strings, and at one point the backup singers do this ridiculous chant of "ring ring ring ring ring ring ring ring ring ring ring ring" behind her, but it is god damn Aretha Franklin and she blows the song out of the water just like she is supposed to. Good ceremony so far!

11:57 AM

Joe Biden takes the ~~Samurai Pizza Cat fanclub~~ Vice-Presidential oath, on a bible that is really a lot bigger than it needs to be. A march follows! Everyone sits down again.

11:59 AM

Well, hello there! Yo-Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman and a couple of other people that I don't recognize (somewhere my grandmother and aunt are being very disappointed in me) form a quartet to play an original John Williams piece composed just for the occasion.

It starts out simple and understated, very nice, but gets a little ridiculous a minute or two in where it employs the modern style of evoking percussion by having everyone else play structured squawks and bonks at once under the main line. Listen to that violin part in the middle and tell me otherwise! The piece comes together after that to function as a more traditional quartet arrangement before trailing off again to conclude. Not bad, but nothing really spectacular either.

12:04 PM

Everyone stands for Chief Justice John Roberts, to swear in Obama as President. Obama actually begins a little early and has to restart, then loses the second line and needs it repeated. Big grin when he does that, though! Aww, he's all nervous, look at him!

He takes the office, so help him God, and Hail to the Chief plays while cannons fire the 21-gun salute and everyone cheers their heads off. Hear tell from Mansbridge at this point is that the Chief Justice screwed up the reading, leading Obama to screw it up as well; I'll take his word for it, I guess.

12:07 PM

Inauguration speech! Polite applause for Bush at his mention; they cut over to him and he looks sad, probably for the obvious reasons. Obama reminds everyone about what a pickle America is in, vows to restore the confidence of the nation, hope chosen over fear -- nothing you weren't expecting, I imagine.

He quotes scripture, briefly: "the time has come to put aside childish things". My dad pulled that on me once to try and get me to quit playing video games, but I brushed him off and look at me now! Top of the world, ma!

"Starting today we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of rebuilding America!" So far that seems like the most likely quote for the future retrospective reels, but then again the speech isn't over yet.

What is that little rectangular pin he's wearing? Is that the American flag? The light keeps bouncing off it, so I never get a good look at it. (Colin Powell sighting in the VIP section, by the way.) Obama talks tough to the terrorists at this time, threatens the warmongers and the dictators, can't break the American spirit, that sort of thing; America is willing to work with anyone who wants to work with America, is the general thrust.

Brief exposition on the American character, as the camera pans around to show that there are even more people crammed on the rooftops surrounding the National Mall. (I hear he's popular, this Barack guy.)

Speech concludes at just over eighteen minutes long, standing ovation, Mansbridge dubs the speech a "call to action" and a "condemnation of the Bush years", both of which sound about right.

12:27 AM

Still more ceremony! Poet Elizabeth Alexander, whoever that is (yes, yes, I'm uncultured, I know), reads a poem that totally fails to grab me. Then it shows the crowd shots and you can actually see some people filing out of the Mall; sorry, Elizabeth Alexander!

Reverend Joseph E. Lowery, the old civil rights leader, is up next to preach a bit; "you got the whole world in your hands," he reads; "deliver us from the exploitation of the poor". He thanks and praises the lord for sending Obama as the President; thank God this isn't McCain, is what the speech basically boils down to.

Also some rhyme play about the yellow being mellow, and the red man gettin' ahead-man, and... what? Anyway, he concludes, and the Marines come out to sing the anthem.

12:38 PM

Hmm... yup. That's their anthem, all right.

You know what I love about the Marine Choir singing the anthem? They sing it with discipline, like it was written, the way it is god damn supposed to sound. Most every time you hear the Star-Spangled Banner it is being belted out by somebody who insists the procedure be all about them, about the embellishments and extended notes and stretched meter and cutesy tricks that they want to pull on an audience who specifically did not come to hear somebody take forever singing the national anthem. The Marines sing it, keep it short, and go about their day. Good. We need more renditions like this.

The Presidential Party departs, apparently bound for a ceremonial inaugural lunch; some milling around occurs amidst the VIP section. Some deconstruction of the speech is ventured; the Princeton politics professor from earlier describes Obama's inauguration speech as "Jeffersonian" with a lot of Greatest Generation influences shown.

We are told that Harper has extended his first statement immediately following the inauguration; he had time to sit on his duff and write up a welcoming statement, but he couldn't be bothered to catch a flight down to Washington? Are we just not being told that he's in Mongolia or something right now?

Mansbridge notes during a shot of Bill Clinton that he "rarely leaves an outstretched hand behind". Quick sightings both of John Kerry and John McCain in the VIP section; I've noticed that political failure crops up in bunches on telecasts like these.

"It was kind of a quiet crowd, for a crowd that ran upwards of two million," Mansbridge remarks.

12:48 AM

The incoming and outgoing Presidents walk down the stairs together, wave a little for the media, wait for their wives to join them. The Bidens walk past them on the way, and Jill Biden's bright red coat is still completely distracting. Cheney, I guess having taken a ramp somewhere, is at the bottom of the stairs in his new wheelchair. They roll him up to one of the Cadillacs and around the back of the car, leading me to briefly envision them stuffing him in the trunk -- but no, they wheel him all the way around to the passenger side and away he goes.

Hugs all around between the two Presidents and First Ladies, the Bushes wave goodbye to whoever is around, and away they go on the Marine One helicopter. Joe Biden shows up and his smile is gigantic and hilarious, because Joe Biden.

12:56 PM

George W. Bush's immediate post-Presidential plans are, apparently, to begin writing a book and make coffee for his wife. No, really.

Mansbridge notes that Marine One is a variant of the same base helicopter body that the Canadian Sea Kings use; he also notes that the American counterpart is far, far better taken care of. (In other news, duh.)

For reasons I don't understand, we go back to Christine whoever at the Toronto high school; she opens by asking the students what they thought of the speech and they all chorus "YES WE CAN" and urghhhhhh

A smaller boy claims that the speech has inspired him to be Prime Minister when he grows up, and the reporter just fawns over this precocious little statement, and then she asks another boy "Who's cooler -- Barack Obama or Kanye West?" Oh god I hate this woman and I hate these kids and I hate this entire segment.

1:03 PM

Because we've run out of things to talk about, we're briefly whisked to England to be shown one of the eight wax Obamas newly created by the Madame Tussauds Museum.

Cut to live footage of Michelle Jean, giving a speech about the new President and the hope he represents and--where is this taking place? Oh, Rideau Hall. Anyway, she wishes Obama much success on behalf of we the Canadians, in both languages, and we transition back to Mansbridge (who is still looking crazy pink today). More from the Princeton prof (Melissa Harris-Lacewell, says the chryon) about the meaning and tone of the speech.

"Time to wrap up," Mansbridge intones, although he notes that there is still much more about the event to watch on Newsworld if I decide I have nothing better to do today.

Telecast ends at 1:10 PM. (Newsworld immediately launches into the news, and the first thing it re-broadcasts is the new President and the Chief Justice combining to screw up the Oath, but what can you do.)

Well! Big day so far. As fun as I'm sure it would be to sit and alternate between the different news stations all day to rewatch snippets of everything I just saw, I'm afraid I'm going to have to get dressed and actually go out and about today. Wish me luck!

Augh People Seriously

2009-01-15T23:22:00.005-05:00

Weekly updates! Well, weekly-ish. I'll see if I can't give weekly (-ish) updates a try, at least until my academic schedule roars defiantly and drags me off into the night.

In the meantime:

Uptown Magazine! More bounce to the ounce!

I return this week with another fine column, and even despite my characteristic good nature and boundless optimism I am sometimes forced to ask myself just what in the stone damn is wrong with us. (As a species, I mean. I'm sure you're lovely, and I think it's usually pretty obvious what's wrong with me.)

The part about roughly half of all Canadians fifteen and older being staggeringly unable to name a single Canadian author is one of those rare times where I just run out of words to describe my exasperation; when the story originally dropped I was reduced to moving my mouth silently and holding my hands up in bewilderment any time someone asked me about it.

Seriously? A sample size of fifteen hundred and half of them come up with nothing? I'll cop to being a half dozen years or so removed from high school by now, but I clearly remember that they make a very specific point of putting their students in contact with the work of at least one Canadian author.

Which school does this, you ask? Oh, well, you know, ALL OF THEM

WE LIVE IN CANADA PERHAPS YOU NOTICED

The news story linked above also insists on providing a short list of authors that nobody named, because the National Post exists to make me angry. Okay, I am reasonably willing to accept that nobody mentioned Leonard Cohen, what with him being known best as a singer and second-best as a poet. (Wait, do people even still acknowledge poets as 'authors'? Poetry is so dead now that it makes pinball look like a viable medium.) But, ye gads, Lucy Maud Montgomery? Michael Ondaatje? Well okay I guess Anne of Green Gables is only a definitive cultural institution, and it isn't like Ondaatje has ever earned a Booker Prize or won five Governor General Awards or seen the movie adaptation of The English Patient win nine Academy Awards or--

I actually won a game of Trivial Pursuit once by coming up with Michael Ondaatje as the answer to the last question; granted that we were playing the Canadian edition, but shut up that is not the point here. The point is, how in the world have so many people lived their lives in this country to this point without encounting a single Canadian author they can remember by name?

You couldn't remember the line about a Canadian being someone who knows how to make love in a canoe, or who the really old guy was that rolled a joint with Rick Mercer on the CBC a while ago? You never heard the story about the crazy author in Newfoundland who shoots at American planes flying overhead? You never had any Gordon Korman books in your school, or those lame Scholastic flyers that had maple leaves plastered on every available Canadian book? You weren't anywhere near a radio in 1993-94 when Moxy Fruvous made it big by singing a bunch of author names?

"Who's a funny fella? / W. P. Kinsella!"

"Who needs a shave? / It's Robertson Davies!"

Oh, that's gold and you know it. Don't give me that look.

And! And, this knowledge isn't even the lowest of the low points of human accomplishment mentioned in the column I wrote for this week. Bite down on something, this one is going to hurt.

Perhaps you may have initially believed, as some incredulous London listeners may have when I told the story, that I was completely making up the part about people phoning in to 911 with whatever ridiculous bull pucky popped into their heads at the moment. But, ha ha, nope! Behold as I beheld and hear as I heard:

Winnipeg Police Service - AM or PM (CTV Winnipeg Presents: 911 Calls, 2009)
[alternate link | source]

That is majestic, isn't it? Holy smokes. (More calls are available alongside the CTV report, but there is really no topping that one.) The aforementioned Winnipeg 311 line is set to launch this Friday, and I can't decide whether I envy these workers their upcoming jobs or not. I know I would end up going completely and irreversibly mad if I had to put up with people like this all day -- and I have worked a lot of unfortunate customer service jobs -- but at the same time my unkillable curiosity is just longing to hear all of the otherwise unbelievable shit that is no doubt going to come over the wires right from the second the service starts up.

Anyway! Enough on this for now. I have class bright and early tomorrow morning. And since I just now discovered that Les Dales Hawerchuk will finally play Winnipeg -- while I'm not there to see it -- I figure I had better just go to bed before I end up punching holes downward through my desk. It has been a... long day.

Until next time, true believers!

Everyone Knows Birds Love Sports and Doughnuts

2009-01-08T02:07:00.002-05:00

I'm flying back to London in the morning! My goodness, where does the time go.

My vacation time in Winnipeg seemed a lot shorter than it actually was; granted, this may be because I slept through a lot of it, but in my defense I really did need a lot of sleep. I was tired! This graduate school stuff can take a lot out of a guy.

Fortunately, I did get out and about from time to time to see some of the sights, haunt the old haunts, that sort of thing. I went to the city's premiere vinyl store, for example, and blew half of my GST cheque on goofy obscure records. Be sure to ask me about the records another time! This post is about something else entirely, but those are a good story too.

Anyway -- one of my favourite weekend curiosities in the city is Mulvey Market, a big ol' flea market that convenes every Saturday and Sunday south of Osborne Village to engage in the sale or trade of antiques and knick-knacks and memorabilia and paraphernalia and whatever else you might be looking for. (It's very quaint, to the point that it doesn't even have a website. Dude, I know! What century are we in? You'll just have to take my word for it that it exists, strange a practice as that is in our modern times.) Mulvey Market is an entertaining destination (to me, at least!) because the possibility always exists that I will walk in there and see something that surprises and astounds me with its very existence. That's the kind of possibility I like best!

Because I stared at it for a minute and ultimately decided that it was worth five dollars, I dropped five dollars on this thing:

Check out this handsome copper and plaster plaque! About a foot across in diameter and weighing as much as my little sister's dog, a stampprint on the back identifies its manufacturers as the "Modern Artistic Plaque Co.". (Whoever they were.) This is actually the third piece of Winnipeg centennial commemorative stuff I own, behind a very nice coffee-table book on the history of the city and a 'bumper sticker' that is actually like two feet long. This is the curse of an Honours in History, or of being interested in history to begin with: everything is god damn history, so it's hard to avoid getting wrapped up in things that any sane and reasonable human being would walk past without a second thought. Still a nice plaque, though! Very decorative, very charming.

"Oh, Jesus, that was thirty-five years ago," the greying gentleman behind the table announced absently, half to me and half to himself, when I lifted the large construction-paper '$5' sign off the plaque and inspected it. "I remember it like the other day. Wow."

The optimism of centennials is always a hoot, isn't it? All of your problems safely disappear well behind you when your age hits a round number! You can see the clean streets and thriving trees and streamlined skyscrapers rising from that second zero on the plaque, in contrast to the churches and oxcarts of the zero before it, because Winnipeg has finally shaken loose its humble agricultural origins to become a teeming megalopolis! A city of tomorrow! A true leader in global prosperity and inno--haha whoops we're bad at everything brb

I figure this was five dollars well spent, and when I one day have enough money to buy a house I'll be sure to hang this plaque with pride above wherever I keep the beer.

This, however, was not to be the biggest surprise of the day! No, my main source of shock and awe arose from another stall at the opposite end of the market, where I found myself staring dumbfounded at a pair of matching items that I had never so much as conceptualized before.

Behold as I beheld, then purchased for fifty cents a pop:

What? Wait, what? whaaaaaaaaat

I realize some among you may not recognize what this represents, so humour me my exposition. Pictured here are solid rubber figurines (in the grand old California Raisin style), about three inches high, produced as mascot-themed promotional material for a peculiar little C-list restaurant chain named Robin's Donuts. "Who?", some of you may be asking, which is sort of my point. Robin's Donuts had room in their promotional budget to produce toys? Robin's Donuts had money?

For the unfamiliar or uninitiated, I would best describe Robin's Donuts as a palette-swap of Tim Hortons except smaller, sadder, brazenly downmarket, and completely irrelevant to the national discourse. The coffee and the food are unassuming, but really no worse than anything else you've ever eaten out of a coffee place; what usually comes to mind when I think of Robin's is that I don't believe I've ever found one that struck me as attractive, where I've walked in and gone "oh well this is nice". It always seems to be dark brown ceramic tile, depressingly low lighting, and impossibly garish yellow paint; I routinely eat in random street-corner diners, because I enjoy the ambience of little rundown eateries, and even I find Robin's Donuts dingy and unpleasant.

Claiming a hundred and thirty locations on its website, Robin's Donuts is a pretty common sight in Winnipeg and other areas across the country (particularly in northern Ontario where the chain was founded) -- but I suspect that many of this blog's readers will have never heard of it before, especially because there are a total of zero Robin's Donuts locations in London. Or in Toronto. Or, uh, anywhere in Quebec. A hundred and thirty locations don't go as far as they used to, I guess.

Robin's Donuts was apparently bought up wholesale in 2006 by Coffee Time [PDF], so its glory years clearly must be far behind it. Certainly they don't sell toys there any more, which brings me back to my original confusion -- when in the hell did Robin's Donuts sell toys? These aren't cheap-quality toys, either; these are some pretty well-made and respectable toys, which seems quite strangely out of character for the franchise.

So to recap, as you can imagine, I'm still quite surprised by the whole idea of there actually being Robin's Donuts figurines. The next mystery is why the hell they appear to be playing sports, but I think anybody who could provide me the answers I seek must be long gone by now.

Do you suppose the mascot is actually named "Robin"? And which of these is actually the mascot? There are two here, after all, obviously sculpted to represent different genders. If you look again at the franchise logo, the facial features and goofy white scarf are consistent with both models -- but the logo doesn't have prominent eyelashes drawn along the sides of the eyes, so I have to assume that the boy robin is the actual franchise mascot. What would the girl robin's name be, though? Would they both be 'Robin'? But then, if they're both robins named Robin, why is the "Robin's" in "Robin's Donuts" singular and not plural? And why did they even make two different AUGH I AM THINKING WAY TOO HARD ABOUT THIS

Here's a closer shot so you can better appreciate the detail on the male robin, who for now I will suppose is the mascot and then refuse to contemplate the matter any further. The sweatband is so we can tell he is playing basketball, because we are stupid and can't figure out why he has a basketball in his hand. Admittedly, the dude's got the Allen Iverson look going pretty convincingly, which is no mean feat considering that the toy might actually predate Iverson's NBA career. Well, that and he's an anthropomorphized bird rather than a black guy, but I figured you gathered that part already.

So if the boy bird loves basketball, what sport does the girl bird enjoy? Well, a lot of little girls are big into soccer, but both softball and volleyball have really taken off in the last couple of decades, but then again tennis has prominently featured women athletes for a long time now, so I guess the--

Ha ha ha ha, who am I kidding. Figure skating ahoy!

You can't see them, because my fingers are in the way, but the figure skates actually do have blades molded at the bottom. This would be a nice touch, except that -- ha ha -- the blades mean that the figure can't stand on its own, which is why my fingers are in the picture to begin with. This is a reasonable interpretation of actual skating, but is still bothersome to deal with. (The initial picture above of the two toys together was taken by propping this figure against the other one, which stands up just fine with no problems. The stunts I have to pull sometimes!)

Both figures are branded on the back, incidentally, in case anyone might doubt their legitimacy:

Is it just me, or does that ponytail look exceptionally painful? Why do these birds even have hair? Isn't that--no no shut up not thinking this over

It's more obvious in the first picture than the second one, but both toys are datestamped; each toy has "© 1996 Robin's Foods" printed on the butt in embossed lettering, which at least tells me when (although not why) these toys came about. I could have tried for a better picture of the copyright information, then I envisioned a scenario where I would have to explain to somebody why I have pictures of rubber bird ass on my blog and ultimately I decided to save myself the hassle.

Flight in eight hours! Perhaps I should finish packing.

Happy Almost New Year

2008-12-31T17:35:00.003-05:00

Thrill as I update in a frequent and timely manner! Ha ha ha ha, the hell is wrong with me. Oh, dear.

Regardless, good afternoon, friends and countrymen! I'm safely through the first term of graduate school, and have currently squirreled myself away on vacation -- and I use 'vacation' very precariously loosely -- back home in Winnipeg. I arrived home just in time for the weather to hit minus fifty with windchill, although A) what the hell else is new here and B) this meant I had the luxury of mostly avoiding the whole 'snowmageddon' nonsense that suddenly gripped Ontario. What a painfully awkward portmanteau! I'm a man known by my contemporaries for enjoying a good Frankenword (which is, itself, a portmanteau! Yeah! Spread the love!), and even I couldn't get behind the 'snowmageddon' noise. Just as well; I'm sure if I had been there, I would have driven everyone mad with multiple pained attempts to work a Willi Williams reference into the discourse until somebody would have finally up and assaulted me.

So another year is nearly done and gone, my goodness. Where does the time go? (He asks rhetorically, having not updated his blog in a month.) But before I get all wrapped up in ruminations, humour me my backlogged administrative archivism.

I'm late in mentioning it, but better late than never:

Uptown Magazine! The tasty treat that can't be beat!

At the beginning of the month the paper ran my contribution of a piece on Black Friday, which this year was a bizarre and deadly affair across several major metropolitan areas despite nobody having any money to be buying things with in the first place.

You can imagine the madcap time I had writing this article; just as everything consumerist and awful was unfolding on that eventful Friday, the news reports of the morning also brought word that A) the Canadian political system was collapsing, B) the economy was tanking even harder than it had been tanking in recent weeks, and C) Mumbai was on fire. It was more and more difficult to limit myself to the one topic, but increasingly apparent that tacking everything that day would require far more than the five hundred words I am traditionally alloted. But I stuck with it, as best I could, and here we are. Such are the dangers of fast news days!

And as that was published at the beginning of the month, another column would soon follow to close out the year:

Uptown Magazine! Oh, what a relief it is!

My most recent article, published this past Thursday (oh, Merry Christmas, by the way), was obviously inspired by the increasingly strange tale of Iraqi journalist Muntadhar al-Zaidi. What an odd story! This was the biggest shoe-related incident to hit the international community since Nikita Khrushchev went to the United Nations and beat the shit out of a desk. And given more time and space, I would definitely have made a point of including the Sock and Awe game somewhere in the column -- but, alas.

Anyway!

Two thousand and eight, huh? Dear oh dear. Another year down the tubes! What a miserable and terrible year for just about everybody and everything. The year was a marked improvement for me, but I had figured it might be. I would like to pretend that my upward mobility was because I keep myself diversified and drive endlessly forward in pursuit of bettering myself, but the truth of the matter is that there had been really nowhere to go but up. I started off the year unemployed, pissed off, and increasingly broke -- and since that was how a lot of people ended the year, I guess I was lucky to be ahead of the curve.

It was a wild and dramatic year for me, to be sure. In no particular order, 2008 was the year that I:

-- entered graduate school;
-- pulled up almost all of my roots and moved out of the province for the sake of entering graduate school;
-- began a stint in student-group administration;
-- dabbled with video-blogging (for an intended year-long Winnipeg project, which I ultimately elected to abandon upon the news that I wasn't even going to be in Winnipeg all year);
-- bought a tube organ (!);
-- established a new annual tradition, if only for myself;
-- earned a shout-out in Winnipeg's newspaper of record (!!), from its City Hall Reporter;
-- blogged about the phone book;
-- became a voice-actor (!!!);
-- wrote a comprehensive event and concert review for the dorkiest possible thing, which remains far and away my most viewed blogging item thus far;
-- and, near the end of the year, saw my Double Honours in History and Political Studies finally pay off when the stupid Canadian government began to implode and everyone else took a sudden interest in Canadian politics. You can't imagine how stoked I get to see normies take interest in this crap!

So here's to two thousand and nine, whatever misshapen sort of beast it ends up being; I'll be hidden away in the ivory tower for the foreseeable future, but rest assured I'll keep in touch now and again. Happy New Year, one and all!

Eat Fresh: Why Student Newspapers are Always Worth a Look

2008-11-24T01:17:00.003-05:00

Hey, guys! Know what are always a good time? Student papers! Yeah!

Some people may feel that university student newspapers can be amateurish, irrelevant, sophomoric and perpetually dissatisfied -- and they can be! I'm not going to argue with you on this one, sometimes reading student papers can be a bit of a headache. But! Wherever I go I make a point of grabbing any student press I come across, alongside the more mainstream news sources, if not for alternative viewpoints then just for the high hilarity that results when a bunch of young'uns throw a paper together without corporate supervision.

That established, let me talk to you briefly about the Gazette. Published four days a week by the University Students' Council, the Gazette has been a fixture of the University of Western Ontario since its 1906 inception as "In Cap and Gown", a handwritten literary newspaper that must have just been adorable. And, like many papers, it contains an opinions section with space devoted to Letters To The Editor and a solicitation underneath for such letters.

Now, this isn't the funny part. (omg you guys they wrote the bad word for doodie in the newspaper lol oh man) We as a culture have been sneaking curse words into print for as long as we've ever realized that we could get away with it, and admittedly I speak from personal experience on this one.

No, the funny part about this setup is that students these days occasionally treat the Letters section the same way that people used to treat it in the days of yore -- as a great place to publicly complain about minor issues and argue with or ridicule others, which honestly is what the section was all about back before this whole 'internet' thing was invented.

Behold as I beheld, from the November 13th issue of the Gazette:

The pressing issues of our times, brought to the forefront by hardhitting analytical review! This letter also works way better if you picture its author finishing it by rolling her chair away from her desk, throwing her head back to the sky and screaming "SUBWAAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYY~!" like either James Kirk or Orochi Iori Yagami depending on how big a geek you want to be with the gag.

Now, I'm no big fan of Subway; I was willing to roll with them for a little while back when they had Jon Lovitz onboard, but when they dumped him from their ad campaign I went "pssh whatever" and gave up on them. Why are we picking on Subway when Tim Hortons and their stupid nonbiodegradable cups are a vastly more prominent, more frequent offender? She really likes double-doubles, I don't know, your guess is as good as mine.

(Tim Hortons cups make up twenty-two per cent of litter in Nova Scotia, and the grapevine alleges that it comprises one-fifth of Toronto's waste as well. Oh man, wait -- wasn't it in London where that one woman got fired for giving out a Timbit? Haha, holy crap, it was. Small world! Anyway, I digress.)

So was this the rallying cry that brought a coalition of likeminded ecofriendly folk together to fight the power and take a wasteful multinational conglomerate to its knees? Well, er, not exactly.

From the November 20th issue of the Gazette:

Ha ha! Ouch! Geez, dude. Psychology majors can be real dicks sometimes, I tell you what.

Student newspapers can be real quality entertainment sometimes, and I'm not just saying this as somebody who used to write for one. (I got so many CDs as a volunteer CD reviewer, my goodness. And some of them weren't awful!) Next time you're near a campus paper, no matter which campus it is, grab it and have a look at it; I would be shocked to hear that there isn't a single interesting thing in it, and sometimes you'll luck out and come across a surprise explosion of vitriolic overreaction like the above. Good times await!

What a Busy Guy (or, Long Time No See)

2008-11-19T05:31:00.005-05:00

Hi, everybody! Good to see you again. You look good! Probably lots of interesting things going on for you lately.

Sorry I haven't posted in a while, it's been all kinds of hectic. Nobody even hears from me any more, most of the time; my little brother left a message on my Facebook account at one point just to ask what the hell happened to me.

What? Oh, nothing. No, no! Nothing that exciting, I'd hate to bore you. All I do now is schoolwork and sleep, it's sort of sad.

Oh! But actually, you know, now that you mention it. Remember that project I mentioned that I was working on with a couple buddies? Well, guess what was just released this past November Sixth:

Hecklevision presents -- Superman in: Japoteurs!

My goodness, look at that. Look at it! It has been completed, and the audio issues in the preview clip have been addressed, and now it is up and published and available. Ninety-nine cents buys a wonderfully animated, staggeringly racist Max Fleischer Superman short -- with our hilarious audio commentary already added and synched up beforehand, for your convenience and viewing pleasure.

Not to brag, but this is awesome.

Why, I'd buy that for a dollar -- and so can you! But, don't take my word for it! Have a look at the front page of the iRiffs site:

Top Short, baby! Yeah! Sales figures and peer reviews agree -- our Japoteurs iRiff is true value through and through, a dollar's worth as ever you've known it!

I'm not laying it on too thick, am I? I'm sorry, I've got a bit of a headrush going. Nothing perks a brother's attitude up quite like hitting the big time and being published in a brand new medium.

Ooh! And speaking of being published! (God, I'm good at segues.) Feast your eyes:

Uptown Magazine! Solidarity Forever!

With the conclusion of the sixteen-day sixteen-day press union strike that was holding up the papers back home, Uptown has resumed its publication schedule and includes a column of mine in its latest edition. Pretty cool, right? Pretty good times!

For consistency's sake, the column series has continued to bear the same name as my Winnipeg blog; the intention is still that I'll return there, once I've earned this Masters I'm working on, so I figured why not. Besides, no point in arbitrarily changing what works; even in my absence Slurpees and Murder has remained a very popular blog and a very popular title, certainly far more popular than I personally have ever been. (Now there's a humbling consideration.)

They don't mention me by name a lot back home, and they never did to begin with, but damned if the Slurpees and Murder tag isn't still making the rounds over there. To wit:

It was brought to my attention that the Comments Editor of the University of Manitoba campus paper, the Manitoban, went on at length a few weeks ago about the largely negative self-image of the city in a piece he titled "Enough with the Slurpees and murders".

I found this out through correspondence with a contact, and--what? Never mind how I found out. It was an... anonymous source. A tipster, placed very high up in the... political... okay, it was my mother. My mom emailed me to say that she saw a nice article in the school paper that mentioned me, and she clipped it out for when I come home. Yeah, yeah, yuk it up. That's not the point. The point is, it's nice to still be recognized.

I spent two years as a volunteer CD reviewer for the Manitoban, back in the day, although you wouldn't know it to visit the site. Their archives are down right now, probably due to the site redesign they've obviously done since I last looked. So with that said, I don't think anybody else remembers (or could now easily prove) that I wrote there, and it's neat to find out that my name popped up in the ol' campus paper completely independently of my input or my proximity to the city.

Okay, granted -- it isn't my name in there, it's the name of my blog. Such is usually the case. And the reference to my blog is indirect, though obvious and repeated several times for effect. And the article actually seems to be written in vehement opposition to my previous work, holding the combination of nouns as some defeatist self-esteem disease that threatens to permanently tank the attitude and the reputation of the city. Hmm. Whatever! I take my exposure where I can get it. The blog's been mentioned previously by musicians, activist sites and even legitimate newspapers; nothing wrong with being able to blot out "student publications" on the big metaphorical bingo card of media outlet shoutouts. I'm on my way, baby!

So, anyway, yeah. That's what's new with me.

My word, what a long post! I should get back into the habit of making shorter posts at more regular interviews, if only so people back home stop assuming the worst. In the meantime, I'll do some more schoolwork and then get out and enjoy the, uh... enjoy the weather.

The hell is even going on here. "Snowsqualls", yeah, okay. This town is screwed up, man.

Brain Food (or, The End is Nigh)

2008-10-29T13:41:00.000-04:00

What it is, cats and kittens! I'm now into my Research Week, which means (almost) a whole week's worth of classes taken off the schedule to better grant me time to alternate between working on assignments and sleeping in until sunset. (It's really satisfying, if you've never tried it.)

Of course, I can find time in a busy schedule like this one to partake in merriment and celebrations. Did you know, for example, that Sunday was World Zombie Day? It was! And it nearly went past me unnoticed -- just as Talk Like a Pirate Day usually does when I'm distracted -- except for the notices that I saw posted up all across the downtown on Saturday.

To wit:

My goodness! What a charming poster. And anyone who knows me knows well my appreciation for zombies; my ~~main?~~ ~~old?~~ ~~other?~~ Winnipeg blog specifically had a 'Zombie' tag for any and all undead-related content, allowing visitors quick and easy access to posts like this one or especially this one.

So, seizing the opportunity to get out and actually do something during my week 'off', I grabbed my faithful old digital camera and headed out that fine Sunday afternoon to see what sort of hijinks a bunch of people dressed and behaving like zombies can get up to.

I got there early enough that there weren't a lot of folks gathered; the march was scheduled for a bit later, so to this point it was just some folks milling around and looking various degrees of undead.

Note the cameraman interviewing the lead zombie while the crowd congregates. Slow news day in London, Ontario! Okay, granted, it's not as though I've yet seen a fast news day in London, Ontario -- but still. Good on the local news media to turn out, at least. It's neat to see that happen.

Figuring I had plenty of time before any actual zombie-walking happened, I took some pictures of buildings for giggles and then went up a block to go find myself an early supper. I splurged and dropped the eight bucks on a Chinese food buffet, because obviously that's the sort of health food you need for a downtown jaunt. Three plates and about twenty minutes later, I hit the streets again to see how far the zombies had gotten away:

Not too far, as it turned out. The parking lot that they were starting their route from is immediately to the right of that shot, so they weren't exactly flying down the street. They're very slowly getting away!

I went a couple of blocks down and found a good spot, and in due time the procession turned the corner and went right by me for some good shots.

If the dude on the left there doesn't seem terribly convincing, that's because he's actually an OBO security guy. (Not a zombie! At least, not yet.) The walk was buffered at all times by a small handful of security, likely just to make sure that nobody would get way too into their role and start biting things. You never know! Some people act, and some people method-act.

Not sure why they needed security, though, it's not as though there are many zombies in these pictures yet or--

Oh. Well, never mind, then! Pretty good turnout after all. My word, that is an awful lot of facepaint in this picture.

Oh, and there were lots of other folks taking pictures as well, so that was kind of neat.

Why were there Japanese kamikaze zombies? Well, why not? Surely there were a great many World War II air battles fought bravely across the skies of Ontario. I've got a History degree, don't even bother questioning me on this!

Also, the knowledge that zombie parents brought their zombie kids to the zombie walk makes me smile really wide and I can't really articulate why.

Heyyyyy, zombies can't work cameras! Zombies can't work cameras!

Again with the tiny zombie kids, which I'm sure should be terrifying the longer I think about the concept but I'm still really pleased that so many kids were excited to get made up like zombies and run around outside. That's awesome! The future is in good hands, as far as I'm concerned.

Okay, cross the street, cross the street, everyone hang on to your zombie buddy, green light, cross the street--wouldn't this picture be so much better with all the zombies holding onto one of those twisty polypropylene yellow cords? You were thinking it, admit it.

A nice shot of the Honest Lawyer bar and restaurant, framed accordingly by a gaggle of zombies and one ridiculous pink metal tree. I think I could get used to living in this town, it's got a certain charm to it.

To recap, there were a lot of people gussied up like zombies and strolling through the downtown. And though they may have resembled undead hordes of moaning, shambling corpses, it is very important to note that they all still made a point of following the traffic laws as directed.

See? Very important. Alright, buddy up, time to cross again!

See the green car at the intersection? This green car really just wanted to turn right, this didn't have to be such a big production. Poor guy probably had places to be, sitting there with his right turn signal on and waiting patiently while a hundred zombies very slowly shambled across the street. Bad day to be driving downtown, dude! Don't know what else to tell you.

The zombies continued down this road for a while and went past Victoria Park, the big charming park sitting right in the heart of the downtown area. So of course, me being me, I got distracted and wandered off to see what the squirrels were doing instead.

There was a cute conversation amongst a family of three while the zombies were going past the park, with a small boy about six or seven years old explaining zombie lore to his parents.

"It's a zombie walk!" he said, matter-of-factly, as though these things happen every day. "They're zombies!"

"Why are they walking in the daytime?" his dad asked. "Don't they only come out at night?"

"That's vampires," the boy huffed indignantly, which was really funny.

But the zombies aren't what we should be worried about, let me tell you that right now. Zombies, pfft, zombies we could all handle pretty easily. But if the squirrels ever decide to rise up and overthrow us, then oh man, we are boned. Not only are the squirrels faster and harder to see in the dark, especially the crazy gigantic black squirrels that seem ubiquitous in London, but there are a lot of them -- as you can see from the above picture, where they dot the landscape repeatedly and continue long past the horizon. I even ran into a squirrel who kind of looked zombified, which was awesome and off-putting and hilarious all at the same time.

Those are terrific markings. What a great squirrel, oh man. And then I ran into a little baby squirrel who walked right up to me and strutted around like he owned the place, and that was just all kinds of adorable.

D'awwwwww. Look at the little guy! The other squirrels in this city are (I am not joking) legitimately the size of small dogs, but you could have picked up this little squirrel and fit him in your shirt pocket if he let you.

What on earth was I up to again--

Right! Okay, now I remember. Zombies afoot. This guy had taken up residence at the park entrance, and every minute or so would loudly proclaim that the end is nigh. He also helpfully posed for a photograph when he saw me lift my camera.

"So how nigh is the end, exactly?" I asked him, walking up after taking the picture.

"The apocalypse -- is UPON US!" he blurted out, and it was clear he was having a lot of fun being in-character.

"Okay, cool," I said, holding up the camera. "So, which way did the zombies go? I was following them up along the park, and I thought maybe they'd come back down this cross street."

"Oh. They're going down a bit further so they can come all the way up Richmond," he explained, breaking character briefly to point along as he explained the route.

"Awesome! Thanks," I said, walking away to pick a good spot while he went back to his waving of signs and declarations of oncoming doom.

I sat down on some steps and had plenty of time to look at the photos I had taken so far, because as it turns out there were a good five minutes or so until the zombies came around the corner and back into view.

I don't know, do you think that's them? It might be some other--

No, no, that's definitely them. Good! They're heading up the street, they're...

...they're still heading up the street, okay, here they come, they're just on their way, they're...

Hurry up, already! Friggin' zombies.

Oh! This is important, this was a real hoot. Do you see the two girls standing at the corner there, waiting to cross the street?

I didn't see so much as hear these two go past me, when I was walking backwards up Richmond, because the girl on the right with the bag did not like the idea of a Zombie Walk at all.

"Oh, god," she moaned, appreciably on her way to freaking out a little. "I can not deal with this right now."

"This is, what," her friend on the left said as they passed me, "spooks? This is a spook walk, right?"

"I don't like this," the first girl complained. "Let's cross the street, let's go."

"Do you think that guy is with them?" her friend asked, which if you were wondering is what she turned in this picture to point at.

Yep, still there.

"I don't know," the perturbed girl replied. "Oh, god. This is not cool."

But, back to Sign Guy Dudley over here. He had increased the frequency of his "The END is NIIIIGH" calls as the zombies came up the street, repeating it several times as the zombies drew closer and closer until finally they reached the entrance of the park.

Now, you may be wondering: did they eat him?

Oh, yeah. They ate him good.

Still shots don't capture this at all, of course, but they had outfitted Sign Guy with some spurty 'blood' packets or something at the outset so that when the zombies took him down and munched him there were these picturesque spurts of red liquid shooting six feet into the air above the crowd. I know there was a video camera or two on hand, so maybe it'll be on YouTube shortly; it isn't yet, as best I can tell, but hope springs eternal. (Why, Hope's my middle name!)

Is it just me, or does that crowd seem smaller than it was? Did something happen to the rest of--

God damn it, zombies. Cross the street! There's nobody coming, you can go across just this once! The light is green, just cross the--what am I even doing, zombies probably see in black and white anyway.

There we go! That's better. It wouldn't do to get split into two zombie groups, that would just be unseemly. The very idea!

Waaaaaaaait a second, hang on now--is that a headcrab I see there?

It is! Ha ha, holy crap, one dude came as a headcrab zombie. That is brazen! That doesn't even fit into standard zombie continuity, but hell with it, it gave me a good laugh. You go, headcrab guy!

"Nice death scene!"
"Thanks. Nice headcrab."
"Hey, thanks!"

Being newly undead, of course, does not remove one's instinctual ability to pose in place for a photograph. (Not pictured: my grinning and giving him a thumbs-up from behind the camera. Well played, Sign Guy!)

You can see what I was talking about earlier with the red liquids, I assume. Dude got wrecked! Such are the perils of World Zombie Day.

And off they shambled down the road, in search of sustenance, on this their day of celebration. I kept the camera rolling. They were beautiful, those zombies in the mist. Okay, yes, there's no mist in the pictures; humour me, will you? I'm being dramatic.

So, yes! Happy belated World Zombie Day, one and all. You may have noted above that the poster at the top listed a website; the Zombie Walk also had a Facebook group and a spot on A-Channel that evening, because nothing says 'fetid shambling corpse' quite like A-Channel news.

(I'm being mean, aren't I? I'm sorry. A-Channel is sort of an extended running joke where I come from.)

My Research Week continues! Check back here soon; I've got another long post on the backburner that should be ready shortly. If you're not careful, you might even learn something from it!

Is This a Trick Question

2008-10-21T22:17:00.001-04:00

Yeah, yeah, I know, just hours ago I mentioned all the work I have to do for tomorrrow. Humour me my brief lapses into procrastination.

Having just returned home to avoid the prospect of walking half an hour through the oncoming freezing rain, I elected to settle in and kill a bit of time by turning on the television and having a look through the channels. I'm as yet unfamiliar with the general tone of the 'community' television here in Ontario, but when I flipped past channel thirteen -- helpfully named "Rogers TV" -- I had to flip back again and peer quizzically at the screen.

Behold as I beheld:

haha what

I'm pretty sure at this point that future exposures to Rogers TV programming are going to underwhelm me, because my current understanding of this channel is based around a sarcastic question at the bottom of the screen and a dude who looks like he's about to crack up laughing any second now.

Scheduled future topics for this guy's show include:

"How about this weather we're having?"
"Does anybody still shop at The Bay?"
"Who even bothers to recycle their empties?"
"Are there any Maple Leafs fans left?"
"Shorts with socks and sandals: what are you, ninety?"

I am completely setting myself up for disappointment, aren't I? Ah, well. Dare to dream, I always say! But, back to work.

Wait No Hang On Where Did October Go

2008-10-21T16:02:00.001-04:00

Has it really been eleven days since I last updated? My goodness. My entire understanding of time has gone out of whack since I got here, both because every week brings a handful of new assignments and because I live underground in a dude's basement.

(My basement apartment has a lone, tiny window; it opens into the garage. The Sun and I don't really hang out much anymore, these days.)

But fear not, gentle readers! Writing for fun may be a bleak proposition for me right now, but once I get these two assignments in tomorrow afternoon I'll be almost into research week. (Am I really almost halfway through the term already? My goodness.) I have plenty of work to do during the research week, of course, but the break from classes should grant me the opportunity to get up some of the awesome posts I've been wanting to write.

Check back here in a few days! You know I won't let you down.

Excitement Abounds

2008-10-10T21:53:00.005-04:00

I slept in like crazy today, oh man. The workload is pretty ridiculous in this program -- I've got another three assignments due by next Thursday, oh man -- but I don't have class on Fridays during this term, so the end-week option of sleeping all day and working all night is a nice one to have.

I've kept surprisingly active, though, workload aside. I get out and about every so often, or chip in on some other project entirely, or find something in this big new world of Ontario that makes me smile real wide. That parade last weekend, for example! Remind me to post the parade pictures later. It wasn't a particularly exciting parade, mind you, but I'm a brother who finds ways to enjoy parades whether they're any good or not.

In the meantime, it would be completely out of character for me to not mention this next item. You may recall our new good buddy, Picnic Jesus, from a previous post; he was on a poster a month ago, smilin' and bringin' food to the hungry, and even the very idea that somebody out there earnestly (and without a shred of irony!) drew a festive anime Jesus on a campus poster made me shake my head and laugh despite myself.

Well, you'll never guess what:

He's back! He's so happy! And once I go out and buy some thumbtacks, he'll be adorning my wall!

Amazingly, despite the poster having been for a September 7th event, the poster had remained in place and mostly undisturbed for well over a month. The very idea! So when I exited class last night and walked past it, beholding in amazement that posters apparently just don't get removed in this building, the power of Picnic Jesus compelled me to roll it up and take it on home. The only thing on my wall to date is a small LOLA festival poster that they were giving out with any donation, so hell with it! I need to decorate, I'm notoriously thrifty, and I grin real wide every time I look at this.

Oh, dear. I'm boring you, aren't I? Well, okay, maybe this will prove a bit more interesting.

I watched a lot of Mystery Science Theater 3000 in my younger days, and the modern internet incarnation -- RiffTrax, written by and featuring members of the MST3K cast -- fills me with glee every time I check it out. Hell, at one point they brought in Weird Al Yankovic to riff on Jurassic Park! Older readers will recall my frothing lifelong loyalty to Weird Al, given that it took me two posts to encompass how much I enjoyed his last concert tour.

My old buddy Gavin Jasper contacted me a little while back about the RiffTrax site, because the site had just recently added on a new feature -- iRiffs, a section devoted to letting people send in their own submissions for publication. The very idea! Jesus, this is something that he and I (and a bunch of other people) used to do to terrible fanfiction way back in the earlier days of the internet -- this is right up our alley!

So he, I, and a friend of his put our heads together and got to work; we've got a couple selections of material that will work well (and, without question, definitely deserve some old-fashioned mockery), but we started off by testing on an old wartime Superman cartoon short so racist that it boggles the minds of audiences to this day.

The title? Wait for it -- wait for it -- Japoteurs! Haha, holy shit, I'm not even kidding.

So our very first iRiff short will be out soon enough, once the audio is balanced and the submission details are aligned. But in the meantime, it turns out I've actually got a preview available for you guys; the original audio is kind of soft for now, so a couple of the gags might not make sense, but behold nonetheless!

I'm the second voice you hear, if you were wondering.

Exciting times, you guys! Thrill as my influence and reputation as a dangerously sexy media superstar continue to expand ruthlessly! I'm the face of new media, baby!

raarh oh noo

2008-10-09T22:22:00.007-04:00

I am twenty-four years old and I still draw dinosaurs on school handouts.

A Baby Dinosaur Visits Statsville, ink on paper, 2008. This is art, god damn it! Don't you judge me!

A bigger post will follow tomorrow, so drop on in. I'll see if I can't whip up some neat stuff.

Whoo Weekend Yes

2008-10-03T23:08:00.005-04:00

Uptown Magazine! While Mom and Dad sleep in!

This week you can call me Willi Williams, because it's armagideon time. I know I may have mentioned this previously in passing, but my goodness I do not understand what the Canadian Press is thinking sometimes. What was this story even doing in the news that day, let along appearing in newspapers across the country ahead of financial collapse and ravaging hurricanes and killer food and everything else going on in the world? Is this supposed to be our feel-good distraction story? Man alive.

Gentle readers, I know that my last post had promised you a couple of neat things -- and that Uptown column is one of them, obviously, but unfortunately the other one isn't quite ready yet. Alas! So in the meantime, here's something I had picked up at LOLA but hadn't yet shown off to you all:

Yesss! Ha ha, oh man, what a great shirt. I was originally intending to buy a Plants and Animals shirt after the killer set they played that night, but since their shirts only ran in Large or smaller (and I am, to put it mildly, an extra-large dude) I waited to see what the Holy Fuck shirts would look like. And lo and behold! If a bandolero housecat in a cowboy hat and neck bandana on a t-shirt isn't worth fifteen bones, then I don't know what is.

Also in the "neat things" category, but placed squarely in the future: tomorrow at around noon the University of Western Ontario will apparently be throwing a homecoming parade down through downtown London, and anybody who knows me (or has read my work before) knows how much I love a good parade. I'll see if I can't take some pictures for you guys while I'm out there!

Just Start Wailin' on Each Other

2008-10-01T23:20:00.000-04:00

So the big Leaders' Debate was tonight! I had originally intended to just flip through the channels and then take a nap, resting up before working on the third of three scholastic assignments due in the span of a day and a half, but when I landed on the debate my ol' politics-junkie instincts took over and I ended up watching it all the way through. Strangest thing, though -- the debate actually had to be translated into English by the network, because all five candidates were speaking some kind of moon language or something.

Ha ha! Okay, I know, it was French. The French language debates were tonight, and they went the same way that our modern multi-party debates always go: the current leader in the polls goes in, under duress, and the other three or four parties -- four, this time around -- take turns sniping at him to try and knock him down a few percentage points. (I could have said 'him or her' just now, for the sake of argument, but let's not kid ourselves here. We only ever had the one female Prime Minister, and in her one actual election she won two seats.) It may not sound interesting to you, necessarily, but my interest in politics has always been in how the game itself is played; I approach it like high entertainment and draw a whole lot of amusement from the ensuing shenanigans, watching to see who makes the more hilarious missteps or which party meets with failure and derision despite its best efforts or what gigantic, egregious lie someone tries to get away with. It's fun! I've got no party loyalties to begin with, so I get to enjoy myself and treat the Canadian political system like an elaborate sport. Which it is, really, if we're being honest about it.

So I kicked back, and lay around, and watched the debates a half-second behind while they were translated from a language I do not understand for the life of me. (You should see me try to speak French, it's hilarious. BONE JEWER JUH MAPLE MILLE NEUF-CENT QUATRE-VINGT DIX-HUIT pamplemousse pamplemousse pamplemousse) It's all good, of course, but my favourite part was the obligatory be-nice-to-each-other segment; the moderator had each candidate turn, smile politely, and say a few nice things about one of the other leaders. Layton complimented Dion's willingness to collaborate, Dion complimented Duceppe's passion for Quebec advocacy, and so on around the table. Then Elizabeth May's assignment was to say something nice about Stephen Harper, and ha ha ha oh my god is she ever bad at being diplomatic. "You... you're a... a loving father, you have wonderful kids... and... uh... you're very principled. I don't like your principles, but you, uh..."

Making the leaders of each political party stop and be nice to each other, however briefly, is a really nice touch. It's something we don't see very often, and it's a fun little exercise to watch.

But! Me being me, here for the entertainment and fireworks, I think that we as a nation are missing out on a golden opportunity for some high quality awesomeness. Memorable, era-defining, oh-my-god-what-did-we-just-see moments of brilliance and passion and glorious animal savagery. We have the designated thirty or fourty-five seconds where each candidate is nice to each other, yes, but if we really want to capture the imagination of the voting public -- and lord knows we have been awful at that for the last couple of generations -- then what we should include in each debate is a full minute for each candidate to launch into the most bitter, vindictive, mean-spirited assholishness that they can muster right there on the spot against whoever is sitting directly to their left.

We'd all watch the debates for that, god damn it! That'd be must-see TV! All through the rest of the debate, they're obliged to be civil to each other; for a few shining moments, they're even (obligated to be) genuinely nice to each other. But then, right after that, we would watch on the edge of our seats as they turn to each other and go no-holds-barred Strong Style on each other.

"I hate you and I hate everything you stand for, you remorseless mouthbreathing shithead. Your policies are ruinous, your platform is bullshit and I want to projectile vomit every time I see your face on TV. I am picturing you dying and it makes me smile."
"You scum-sucking communist douchenozzle! I hope you get cancer of the everything, and when you die I hope they roll your bloated corpse out into a field for farm kids to shoot at!"
"Do you even realize how monstrously ugly you are, you assheaded hellspawn? Your entire face looks like the right side of Jean Chretien's mouth!"

And then right after that they have to go back to playing nice and quizzing each other pointedly about the environment, like nothing just happened. Wouldn't that be great? I'd pay money to see this! If we started doing this, maybe people would actually give enough of a crap to go out and vote!

Ahh, a man can dream. Come on, Canada, it's worth a try!

Dang, I still have to finish that cataloguing assignment. Well, back to work, I guess. Check back here sometime Friday, though! I'll have some neat stuff to show you.

Living in the Past

2008-09-26T05:50:00.001-04:00

Hey, everybody! What has two thumbs and no internet access at home? THIS GUY RIGHT HERE. The joke doesn't translate all that well into the medium of text, since you can't see me pointing at myself with my thumbs -- but rest assured that it's much funnier in person.

Anyway, yeah, it's been a good few days since I was able to get online from my basement dwelling. Not good news for me! My internet access has been limited to sporadic bursts of computer time at school, which is troublesome for a variety of reasons. Not having a cellphone out here yet, and with no landline in my building, my contact back home has been limited to emails and outgoing VOIP calls on (quite majestically limited) free trial programs. The Library and Information Science program, being particularly concerned with the continuing advancements of modern technology, has online communication specifically woven into its character; several course assignments have their materials online, are to be submitted online, and/or require online readings and research to ensure an understanding of the curriculum. And you'll recall that I still fancy myself a blogger and Uptown columnist, but research and submission only go about as smoothly as you would expect from a wireless connection that consists of futile flashing lights and Local Only notices.

Hell, just keeping up on the outside world has been a task and a half; I didn't even have a TV until Monday, and I only got my hands on one (for ten bucks!) when I finally found out where the Value Village is in this town. But I got it just in time, mind you: preseason hockey has just started up, and the federal election campaign has hit the part where it inevitably devolves into hilariously ill-thought-out verbal miscues. This is always the best part of each Canadian election, isn't it? Just people going out there and coming up with increasingly ridiculous and terrible things to say. How do you top a Liberal candidate claiming that the Jews had inside info on 9-11, or an NDP star candidate claiming that his favourite animal is the "shut-the-tar-sands-down", or a Conservative candidate insisting that immigrants are criminals? Well! With the granddaddy of them all, of course -- the leader of a recognized federal party openly insisting that another party's crime policies will surely lead to underage buttrape!

These are the people that lead and shape our nation! We vote for these people!

Ahhhh, Canadian politics, what a trip. Where was I? Ah, yes. So I'm currently sitting alone in the dead of night, squirreled away in a graduate lounge on campus just for the sake of being online and actually getting everything accomplished. I've got three (!) assignments and an Uptown column due within the next week, plus the now-tricky task of trying to keep in contact with... well, anybody, really.

Ah, well. Minor setbacks! I'm sure I'll be up and about again in no time.

Looks Like My Weekend's Planned

2008-09-18T04:37:00.000-04:00

I was going through the London pictures again just now and re-noticed something that will demand my immediate attention.

This was one of the sights that I'd photographed while out and about the day I took all those pictures, because I was pleased by the prospects of a healthy arts community kickin' around in the city. (It would later emerge that I have evening classes until 9:30 on Tuesdays and Thursdays, which kind of pooches any events on those nights -- but I don't really have the disposable income to be blowing on concerts anyway, so alas and alack.) One particular bill at the time had caught my notice, probably because it was bigger and shinier than all the other ones:

Why, it's LOLA! The London Ontario Live Arts Festival, which I hadn't even heard of until I walked past and saw this poster that day! Scuttlebutt has it that it's a free (!) live outdoor festival, and the lineup looks so intriguing that I can't help but want to investigate.

For example:

Holy Fuck! Yes, the band. (I would later hear fellow students come across the poster, having apparently never heard of the band, and remark excitedly to each other about what a great name that is.) I bring this up because the organizers made a specific point of leaving Holy Fuck's name uncensored, even though anyone of any age or sensitivity threshhold might happen to pass by. That is awesome! I'm so used to seeing it written as "Holy F--k", "Holy F**k", "Holy F@#k" or what have you -- and I saw them written a lot, what with mainstream media sources trying to report on the Polaris Prize nominees -- that I'm actually strangely elated to see the name written out in full, as though the world is a better place now than it used to be. What a marvellously inappropriate reaction! I'm almost proud of myself.

(You'll note I linked to their MySpace above; from the looks of things, they forgot to pay the bill for their website. Whoops!)

Here I was going through the photos, I saw these ones again, and noted -- as you have no doubt already noted as well -- that hey, wait a minute, September 18th to 21st is right now! The promise of free mainstage music and entertainment on Friday and Saturday evenings, plus a walking tour of art installations? They've got my interest!

So, yeah, I've got my weekend lined up. Working on the last batch of photos will thus take a bit longer than I'd originally anticipated -- and I'm no doubt about to be taking new ones, which will only compound the situation. Regardless! These are the noble sacrifices that a young man like me must make, sometimes.

Holy Fuck! Oh boy!

Wait, Where Am I (or, Three Quick Posts in One)

2008-09-16T01:39:00.001-04:00

I've got a pair of gigantic London picture-posts coming, sometime soon. Big big posts. With lots of pictures, numbering into the triple digits. But those will be sometime soon, meaning not right now; resizing, uploading and webcoding that many images goes about as quickly as you'd imagine. Plus, uh, the part about being a full-time graduate student now and everything.

As a bit of transition (or filler, depending on your outlook), I'll post up a few of the pictures I took during the big ooh-life-changing plane ride over here. Winnipeg to London is only a couple hours or so, but I hadn't been on a plane in a good couple of years -- note to self, renew passport -- so everything seemed new and exciting all over again. Hey, do we get a meal, or--oh, uh, cookies. Thanks, they're kind of like food, I guess.

I left Winnipeg on September 2nd, so as you'd expect from Winnipeg in early September it was twelve degrees and raining. I did make an attempt to get some shots of the city as I left, but you can judge for yourself how well that went.

If you squint a little, you can--ha ha, no, no you can't. Don't bother.

Modern aircraft technology is such, of course, that they have goofy little satellite TVs in the back of each seat. It's a pretty handy feature, if you're the sort of person who prefers to watch sports highlights or whatever instead of looking out a window or reading or napping or thinking to yourself. I'm sure they're a hoot, but I didn't really get to check them out.

This was what my screen did for most of the flight, with brief and intermittent bouts of working properly so I could watch this instead:

Hey, guess what? This is better picture quality than I've ever had on any TV I own, so I'm pretty galled by the idea that these things are what the company is buying with my money. This is the same reason why I don't go into Tim Hortons very often, incidentally. If you've got twin widescreen LCD televisions installed in the menu for the express purpose of showing me what a sandwich looks like, what the hell do you need my two dollars for?

Anyway! I digress. I wasn't up there to watch TV anyway, so no great loss. I'm a pretty big proponent of window seats, after all.

Ah, scenery, good times.

The airport in London is a pretty teeny place, so it didn't take too long to find my ride; the woman whose lease I was taking over came to pick me up and drive me to my new apartment, because I was taking over her lease and she probably wanted to make good and sure that I got there to take it.

So, dropped off after a good long drive, there I was. Plunked down in a basement apartment deep within an unfamiliar city, not a friendly face for miles around, no transportation, no phone, and no idea where I was or where anything was located in town. What was I to do in such a situation? Well, write an Uptown column, of course!

(Killer segue! Yes! I've still got the magic!)

Uptown Magazine! Remain seated until seatbelt light is extinguished!

Here's my column from last Tuesday, and it's a pretty good column if I do say so myself. I'm still in talks with the editorial staff about further contributions, because writing for Uptown is one of my very favourite things ever; in the meantime, I'll keep sending in columns like always (albeit maybe not as solely Winnipeg-themed as before) and then wait to see if they hit print. Here's hoping!

So, yeah, great big London posts will be forthcoming. Before I go back to that, though, let me show you a notice that I got a kick out of when it was posted on campus:

I have no idea what this says, of course. Aside from the few helpful clues like "B.B.Q.", "LONDON JEIL CHURCH" and "When", I'm pretty much useless in the face of this poster.

However! As a unilingual Anglophone, I'm well accustomed to working around language barriers by gleaming information from visual cues. And what have we here, in the bottom right corner of the poster?

Why, Picnic Jesus, of course! And look at how happy he is, the little scamp! He's got his ladle, and his soup, and what looks like a little burger... what a cutie! The robes say "I died for your sins", but the hat says "I could sure go for a pick-a-nick basket!"

"Hey, c'mere," I said to a classmate who happened to be passing by. "Is that Jesus in a chef hat?"

"It... yeah, it looks like," he agreed. "Wow."

"Pretty cool!" I gushed. Then, after a second: "Can you imagine if it were Mohammad instead?"

"Yeah," he said, "I really don't think that would go over too well."

And he's right, it probably wouldn't. Still, though! Picnic Jesus! Don't you just want to scratch his little beard? What a great guy.

Anyway. Tomorrow's another big day, so I'd better get back to the books. You'll all hear from me soon enough.

An Introduction

2008-09-08T21:47:00.000-04:00

Good evening. My name is James Howard, and this is will be my blog for the next sixteen months or so.

You may recognize me (ha ha no you don't) as a blogger and columnist, a figure of ~~great repute~~ ~~high regard~~ passing notice in my frozen and dangerous hometown of Winnipeg. But that was last week! This week finds me alone and isolated, many miles from home, sniffing hesitantly at my surroundings to get my bearings in an unfamiliar new environment.

Just last month I was accepted by the University of Western Ontario into their Masters of Library and Information Science program, and it's been a lot of scrambling and scraping since then; it was just over this past week that I packed up a computer and clothes and moved to the bright lights and big city of London. Ontario, that is. The other London.

So here I am, abruptly a graduate student in Ontario, and here as such is my second blog. This blog won't be updated as often as my last one, or at least it really shouldn't be -- because I'm here as a graduate student, after all, and graduate students traditionally have a lot of work to do. So this site can be considered a sidestory, or a second season, or a blog-away-from-blog. Take it as you will.

I'll get further into the details of the city later; this post is just here to get the ball rolling, because everything has to start somewhere. I'm a graduate student, you guys! Yeah!