The Internet may yet redeem itself

This was heralded as the End of the Internet.

This story might just save it.

Courtesy Joey Devilla and Metafilter.

The Michael Lee-Chin Crystal

I had the opportunity to visit the newly opened Michael Lee-Chin Crystal addition of the Royal Ontario Museum (the ROM) yesterday.

Most people who comment on it typically either like it or hate it. I fall in the former category. If you're far enough away on either end of Bloor, the ROM looks like either an alien spaceship has crashed into the northern end of the building or someone's chemistry experiment has gone awry (or maybe even remind someone of the crystals exploding through Metropolis in the new Superman movie...but I guess that's too pop-culturish of a simile). Either way, it's a spectacular view that grabs one's attention on the street. It'll make a great landmark and Toronto certainly needs more of it.

The ROM allowed visitors to tour the crystal without the exhibits in place, which was a great idea because it really gives you a good sense of the space itself without the exhibits as a visual distraction. As mentioned in many news items, none of the walls and such are at right angles with each other, which is both an engineering and artistic feat. There's plenty of space, though because it faces north for the most part, it lacks natural lighting into the rooms, which I would've preferred. In certain areas of the crystal, there are portions of the existing building break through the new walls, which I really liked because to me, it reminds visitors that the crystal doesn't exist in and of itself but is a part of the overall museum.

There's also a certain sense of weightlessness in the building, particularly by the windows where it hangs over the street. Not that the ROM is dark and dank, but the contemporary design of the building certainly doesn't invoke the stereotypical notion of a museum. In fact, it's more reminiscent of a modern art gallery. This is certainly the case with the Sugimoto Hiroshi Special Exhibition already installed on the 4th floor. The room feels cavernous, even with the people walking in and out and around the spartan display cases. It'll be interesting to see how the permanent exhibits are set up.

Overall, I enjoyed my tour and am very excited to see it in its completion, with the permanent exhibits, new restaurant and new public space. Toronto architecture's certainly gotten more interesting.

What I love about Summer

You know what I love about Summer? Watermelon. And fresh corn on the cob. Fresh strawberries too.

There's something about the anticipation of seasonal foods that make them that extra bit better. While it's very likely a psychosomatic effect, I definitely get added enjoyment out of the few weeks when I can, well not gorge but more feast I guess, on these delectable items. I just tend to appreciate these foods more.

It's not limited to fresh produce either. Girl Guide Cookies, Cadbury mini-eggs are both worth the wait. I somewhat wish that mini-eggs weren't also available during Christmas nowadays.

Anyways, this was mostly a post about how much I love watermelon, if only because I just had some this afternoon (though now that I think about it, the one I had probably wasn't sold in season). Hmm. Kinda throws my whole premise out the window, doesn't it?

Reflections in Edmonton

Here I am, sitting alone in my friend Tara's wonderful guest room in Calgary and I'm still thinking about Edmonton.

You know how someone had once said that we can't know or appreciate happiness unless we have sadness? While I sort of agree, I don't think anyone needed this sadness.

It's an odd and sad coincidence to be so excited for a trip to see some friends in another part of the country only to hear the night before that a friend overseas tragically lost her life a few days prior.

I only knew Emma while I was working for the Publishing and Copy Centre at Queen's University. She was the life of the party though. She was the biggest Oilers fan I knew on campus and her laugh was infectious. She had boundless energy, especially when it came to her friends. Through Facebook, I found out she had a blog. Her personality very much shines through in her writing style, and I can't help but laugh at her posts, as if she's telling the stories in person.

But others knew her much better and I'm sure they are much more devastated than I will ever be. Still, I'm shocked and saddened by this event. It definitely changed my perspective of this trip, as I imprinted my own feelings over minute details of my flight to Calgary.

Leaving Toronto on a smoggy but bright sunny day, I arrive in Edmonton, her hometown, cloudy, with scattered rays of sunlight. A bittersweet atmosphere, it seemed. There'd were streaks of rain for brief moments, which felt as if the city itself was slowly mourning her. Oddly appropriate. On the flight, I walk by a mother and her baby, and think how Emma will never become a mother. While waiting for my connecting flight, I listen to retirees meeting and talking about traveling to destinations in Greece, fulfilling their lifelong dreams. What happens to Emma's dreams now? In the gift shop, they're replaying the Stanley Cup finals between the Oilers and the Carolina Hurricanes. What will the Oilers do without their #1 fan?

I would like to think that I'm not overdramatizing what I'm feeling. I would like to think that every so often, I will think of her and what her brief friendship meant to me. I would like to think that what I'm writing now is in someway meaningful.

But right now, I just don't want to think anymore. I don't want to think about a world where there isn't an Emma around to make someone laugh.

Internerd Nostalgia-ganza!

And if you want more, there's this thread from a forum Wes showed me. From Body Break to United Furniture Warehouse to the Canadian Tire Guy, they're all here!

I don't know whether to curse him or thank him for bringing all this back...

Somebody's gotta steal this idea for Canada...

I don't know if this really is the biggest, but it's probably the coolest scavenger hunt out there. This year's list is pretty mammoth, though apparently, there've been past items that are just batshit crazy.

Clearly, this is an idea worth spreading around, since it seems it'd be really fun to partake in. And of course, I must include some youtubery of this organized chaos.

Will photos change anything?

So now we have photographic evidence that shrimp trawlers in Asia are damaging the seabed (and therefore, ocean habitats) with their clean sweeps, thus proving moreso what scientific papers have said previously.

Will this actually change those practices?


I'm not holding my breath.

How much are a pair of pants worth?

Apparently, US $65 million.

You read that right. Not $65, not $650, not even $6,500. $65,000,000. If there was ever a lawsuit that was the definition of frivolous, this would be it.



via Kottke

Euro-style communities in China

Re-creating European cities China's latest housing trend

Snarky responses:

-It's like living in Europe, but without all those damn Europeans.
-It goes to show that China is tops at refabricating ANYTHING.
-If England, England was ever made into reality, it'd totally be China, China.
-hooray for Las Vegas-esque mass production and commodification of experiences!

Thinking

It's been one of those weeks where I've been nicely distracted from the thought of my thesis defense by some big ideas being discussed. Like my moniker suggests, I've been absorbing tons of information but very little's been trickling out. Still, I've quite enjoyed being absorbed in my thinking through its implications.

1) At my friend's birthday dinner, there was a brief discussion about the wonders of Canada and the myth (in the grand story sense, not the inaccuracy that it's come to mean) of our national healthcare. This dovetailed into Andrew's post about the long wait for treatment for his friend's ACL,how unfortunate the current circumstances have dictated the long wait and what is to be done. Are we forever burdened with 'equal access to crap' as some claimed in the comments, or is it better than we think it is?

It seems like private delivery of some medical services seem not completely unreasonable, as long as those parameters are strictly defined. If however, some feel that private delivery shouldn't be based on 'medical necessity', then what exactly? Surely, a compromise can be achieved that doesn't completely undermine the public system. This also assumes that those resources freed by private delivery could be redirected elsewhere to other parts of the public system, instead of just having it shrivel away. Part of the problem is the fact that small-scale trials are nearly impossible. You can't create an industry only to destroy it completely if it doesn't meet your political objectives. So what are our options for testing private delivery? Thought exercises just aren't that convincing.

2) At the same time, I've been reading Reed Scowen's "Time to Say Goodbye", whose thesis is that Quebec and Canada should separate (for reasons explained in the book) and Canada can be the better for it. I'm only 2/3 of the way through, but I was struck by this line,

"Canada is a country of minorities"

and what he defines Canada to be:

"...we are in a state of mutual allegiance with everyone who lives within Canada's borders, not with the objective of achieving a common substantive purpose, but through loyalty to the structure that provide us with our freedom and its corresponding responsibilities, to 'the authority of certain conditions in acting'."

"A deeply felt commitment of mutual allegiance with all Canadians; a commitment to parliamentary rule; the search for fairness in our respect for basic human rights and freedoms; respect for local and regional values and priorities; above all, a respect for the Constitution itself - that's what you get from being Canadian. This is our common culture, our civil association. It may not satisfy my definition of what it is to be Canadian. Nor yours. It does not make us unique in this world. But that's all that we all agree on. And it's enough."

My first thought was, "is that enough to bind us all together"? My second thought, of course, was, "let's see Molson try to sell that.

3) The 'country of minorities' made me think of the Ontario's citizen's assembly's referendum to the Ontario public on whether to change our electoral system from a first-past-the-post to a mixed-member proportional representation (PR) system. As a symbolic thing, it seems appropriate to have a country of minorities governed by minority-based coalitions. There are much better arguments for and against switching to any type of PR, of course. I just wasn't thinking about them at the time. I have no idea how it'll turn out, and while I know what the pundits like, I'm eager to see what Ontarians' views are.

4) Finally, The provincial Liberal government has decided to follow New Jersey, Australia and others to ban 'inefficient' light bulbs by 2010. Some think this is a good idea; others, not so much. While it seems quite heavy-handed to me, I'm wondering whether energy consumption (among other things) can be decreased without such government intervention or drastic environmental degradation?

To run again

I started running again now that it's warmed up (I've a strange aversion to treadmills...)

Anyways, 5k in 27 min = a very low bar to overcome. When I used to run with Matt, we did it in 23 min. This is punishment for being a blob for 5 months...

New Layout

There wasn't a huge need to revamp the layout, but my eyes were hurting from staring at all the white, which probably means everyone else was too. I also had to update parts of my blogroll (thx Megan), which gave me the impetus to spend the last two hours doing this.

If I was better with HTML and CSS, it would've been done a lot quicker and with a bit more sophistication. But then, if you were looking for sophistication in this blog, you clearly made the wrong turn at Albequerque. Hopefully, these colour schemes will also be much easier on the eyes.

Top 5 Books (so far): a High Fidelity tribute

I've just finished reading "High Fidelity", and having been voraciously consuming books since I've been working at Chapters, it seemed like fun to write out my top 5 books I've read so far:

Top 5 Picks
1) The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan
Written like a travelogue, the author takes its readers through the different ways we grow our food, from our current industrial production system, to the 'industrial organic', the truly sustainable model and 'hunter/gatherer' systems. Along the way, he examines the implications for each of them and shows that separating ourselves from our food sources has really undermined our appreciation of the food we eat and the environment from which it is produced.

2) The Dodecahedron (or a Frames for Frames) - Paul Glennon
Imagine each of the 12 self-contained short stories as a face on a 12-sided polygon, where the vertices and edges represent the elements common to the 'adjacent' stories. Is that such a cool concept or what?

3) Stanley Park - Timothy Taylor
I think it helped that I read this immediately after The Omnivore's Dilemma, as I was still mentally engaged with issues about how we grow our food. This novel isn't just about food, but also about identity, roots and the meaning of 'home'.

4) Made to Stick - Chip and Dan Heath
On a recommendation from a co-worker, it's all about how to get people to remember your ideas after you've told it to them. It's effective because it's like the duct tape on the book jacket: easy to use, useful for almost any situation, and their ideas really stick!

5) The Road - Cormac McCarthy
I've already said my piece about it HERE. I may end up buying it at some point, especially to see if I can peel off the 'Oprah's Book Club' sticker on the trade paperback edition.

Not all my reads, however, were fantastic. While none of them were awful, there were some that didn't satisfy:

Top 5 Surprisingly Disappointing Reads

1) DeNiro's Game - Rawi Hage
A Governor General's Award and a Giller Prize nominee, I expected this book to be one of the best reads of the year. While I understand the motivations behind the main character, I couldn't sympathize with him at all. I just thought he was a giant dick for a lot of the novel.

2) Colour of Magic - Terry Pratchett
Another co-worker recommendation. It's very fantastic and well-conceived world with its own internal logic. I just didn't find the plot of the novel to go anywhere. The main characters gets thrown from one ridiculous situation to another with no logical end. Maybe that's the whole point of Discworld, but it still didn't make me like it.

3) Getting to Maybe - Frances Westley et al.
The book's premise tries to show that individuals have been and can continue to be the focal point for major social change. It tries distill those real-life experiences into general rules for how individuals might want to get involved. However, the suggestions are too vague and if the people you describe couldn't predict that they would be this focal point, how can the authors? If the authors applied the ideas from Made to Stick, maybe it would've been more effective. Or, it's just something a book can't properly describe.

4) How Happy to Be - Katrina Onstad
I read this on a recommendation by Paul Wells, who found it to be an absolutely fantastic read. I read this after Stanley Park, and while they both seemed to tackle similar issues (particularly the estrangement with one's father), I thought Stanley Park handled them much more effectively. I also found the main character of this book to be more neurotic than necessary. The not-so-subtle in-jokes and monikers like "The other Big City Lefty newspaper" (get it, it's the Toronto Star, wink wink!) and "The Annual International Film Festival" (both paraphrased, but you get the idea) made me want to scream, "EITHER USE THE REAL NAMES OR MAKE UP A NAME!"

5) Bloodletting and Miraculous Cures - Vincent Lam
It's not a bad collection of short stories. I really didn't know what to expect. It's more me than the book. I think the fact that the connections built up between the characters in the earlier stories quickly unravels in the later stories left me wanting. While I understand that this is what happens once you leave university or med school or whatever, it just left me with a neutral feeling. It does make me want to read more short story collections to see how others do it.

Honorable Mention: High Fidelity - Nick Hornby
This was entirely my own fault, having seen and loved the movie before reading the book. It's not that the book was bad, but I couldn't develop my own scenes from the descriptions in the book. Instead, all I could think about was Jack Black and John Cusack...)

Maybe I'll post again when I've found a real job and can no longer read books at the current pace and see if the list has changed any.

What Energy Savings?

I'm shocked...shocked I say, to hear that arbitrarily changing an already arbitrary method of keeping time resulted in NO energy savings.

I mean, why should we put our efforts into real energy conservation efforts when we can just keep moving time back and forth and make it look like we're trying to do something?

The Road

This is one of those few times where Oprah Winfrey's taste and mine match, if ever. On Wednesday, she picked "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy, as her new Oprah Book Club pick.

I know this because it popped up on the Chapters-Indigo website last night, but also because today we had about 900 trade paperback copies in the store (ok, so I exaggerate).

Anyways, I read it in hardcover, i.e. before the force of nature that is Oprah Winfrey picked this title out of the billions found in the masses to be placed in the sales-inducing canon that she's created. It was on a lot of top ten lists for books in the US for 2006, which was one reason why I chose to read it. And I really liked the book.

The basic premise is a father and son who's on a journey to the sea in a post-apocalyptic future where nothing living remains, except for the straggling remnants of humanity here and there. It's a tale of survival, and the bond between them that makes them desperate enough to keep on living.

What makes McCarthy's setting so terrifying is not the presence of monsters or mutant zombies or what not. It's the complete absence of life. The thought that the wide, wide, world is more or less empty just chilled me to the bone. It doesn't burden the reader with words, but it's still vivid enough that you feel you are there wandering with them, hungry with them, cold with them. It was the atmosphere that made the book for me.

But while I liked it, I don't think I could read it again for a long time because it depressed the hell out of me. It's a bleak book and to me, it's not one of those novels where there are chapters that could be read and re-read all the time.

It'll be interesting to see whether the people who tend to buy books based on her recommendations will continue to do so with this title.

More PhD Comics-related hilarity...

Danna, this is what will happen when you read my thesis...

AND

If only it was this easy to complete my thesis...

A news story that shouldn't be one...

I don't even know how to describe this story...

And yet, the only question that comes to mind is:

Will this make the elephant go blind?

I need to get out more...

Canada Reads 2007

I've been listening to the streaming audio for this year's Canada Reads 2007 (which I always thought was a great idea to introduce you to Canadian titles that a person may not have been exposed to otherwise). This year, the books in contention were:

Gabrielle Roy's 'Children of My Heart'

Timothy Taylor's 'Stanley Park'

Anosh Irani's 'Song of Kahunsha'

Heather O'Neill's 'Lullabies for Little Criminals'

David Bezmozgis' 'Natasha and other Stories'

I've listened to two episodes and 'Children of My Heart' has already been voted off. While I want 'Stanley Park' (which I loved) to be the book that they suggest Canadians read, I don't think it's going to win. Most of the panelists didn't have enough positive things to say about the novel. Listening to Denise Bombardier describe the passages about food as 'boring' just stabs me in the ear. The closest was John K. Samson's description that the novel was the most ambitious.

My prediction is that 'Song of Kahunsha' will win this thing. There were very little criticism (though the topic at the time was only, 'did this book qualify even though it was set in Mumbai') and the only opposition was Jim Cuddy, who thought the character didn't change enough (he also didn't like 'Natasha' because it was a set of short stories and 'Lullabies' because the characters weren't really affected by the events that happen in the book. It'll be interesting to see what he'll vote for after 'Stanley Park' gets voted off...

Update (Mar. 2 11:39 AM): Wow. I'm listening to Canada Reads live and I've been proven wrong. It's now between 'Stanley Park' and 'Lullabies for Little Criminals', with Denise Bombardier breaking the tie for voting off between 'Stanley Park' and 'Song of Kahunsha' and choosing the latter.

Tales from the Bookstore II: The last question I thought I'd ever hear...

Customer: Hi.

Me: Hello, what can I help you with?

Customer: These books, do you buy or do you borrow?

Me (in disbelief): Excuse me?

Customer: do you buy, or can you borrow?

Me (my mind having been blown): Um...no, you can't borrow.

Customer: Oh. okay. Thank you.

To Iris

My dear and wonderful cousin Iris,

who was welcomed into her parents' arms just yesterday. I only have this to say:

It's a strange and wonderful world. Sometimes it can be a bit messy. Hopefully, by the time you start finding your place in it, we'll have left it in better shape than when we first started looking around.


Update (Feb. 25): ...and by 'yesterday', I meant two days ago (Feb. 22). Like I said, it's a strange and wonderful world, where no one actually told me when you were born and I ended up inferring the wrong day. My bad.