Everything Changes

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.

Damn You Some More, Written Language

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.

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

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!

James Howard Brings the Content

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!

Je ne comprends pas

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!

Resent This Article, and Future Considerations

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.

Oh Well Look Who's Alive

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

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!

Augh People Seriously

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!

Happy Almost New Year

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!

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

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.

Whoo Weekend Yes

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!

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

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.