02.27.06
Posted in Nerdy at 8:36 pm by Aaron
…a billion dollars worth of disabled music.
What a lot of the debate surrounding digital music and digital rights management (DRM) seems to ignore is that through the use of built-in limits on how people can use the music they buy, content providers are setting the boundaries on music that we used to rely on laws for. Remember those? Now, when you download a song from an online service, you are automatically signing up for an End User Licence Agreement (EULA) as well…which I’m sure you read.
Ugh. Stinky. Let’s hope this isn’t what the future of music is going to be like.
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Posted in Movies at 7:46 pm by Aaron
So, as I may have given away in my last post, we joined Netflix not too long ago. Holy. Crap. It’s amazing. It’s staggering to suddenly have access to just about any movie you can possibly imagine.
But then the “Christmas List” syndrome sets in. Every year, despite thinking of the multitude of things I want but can’t afford, I come up blank when asked what I want for Christmas.
Same goes for Netflix. I have now almost exhausted my mental list of obscure samurai films I want to see, and Laura can’t think of any more Woody Allen movies.
Now if I had friends down here, I would likely ask them for recommendations. But I’m waaayyyy too cool for that, so instead I’m going to ask people on my blog. Much cooler indeed.
So hit me. Favourites? Hard to get movies? Weird ones that I probably haven’t seen? Or must I subject Laura to the rest of the “Lone Wolf and Cub” series?
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Posted in Random at 7:39 pm by Aaron
Last night Laura and I watched Musashi (the one from the 50’s with Toshiro Mifune)…an awesome flick! Believe it or not, it was Laura that put it in the Netflix Queue. I was compelled to immediately add the other two (it’s true, there’re three of them).
Both Laura and I have read the book the movie was based on, predictably named Musashi, and based on the life of – you guessed it – Musashi.
What I thought was really cool about watching the movie was that, because of when it was filmed, they were able to film it all in Japan. The bit in Himeji castle? Shot in Himeji castle. Sekigahara’s still there. Really, what was most remarkable was that it was all still there, resulting in the feel of the film being lush and authentic.
What also amazed me was the casting. For those unfamiliar with the story, it’s filled with characters that have become virtual archetypes within Japanese culture, so I was amazed at how perfectly the actors had been cast for their roles. After having seen a disastrous made-for-tv version on NHK while I was in Japan, I was beginning to think that the story – however marvelous – just might not be translateable to the screen.
I love being proven wrong!
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02.26.06
Posted in Food at 3:13 pm by Aaron
If you chew potato chips and then spit them out, you get all of the flavour, but none of the calories.
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02.21.06
Posted in Photos at 5:08 pm by Aaron
For all the travelling we’ve done, Laura and I haven’t accumulated too many souvenirs…largely because our belongings seem to spend more time packed in boxes than anywhere else. What we have always done, however, is try to take pictures to mark the places we’ve lived or the towns that we’ve travelled to.
We were talking about it the other day, when we realized that I haven’t taken a single shot with my SLR; the only shots I’ve taken are little throw-away ones with the digital camera – good for the web, but not much else.
In other words, it was about time to dig out the good camera and do a little walking.
This was our destination: the Brooklyn Bridge. Laura’s always wanted to walk across it, and we thought we might as well do it before she’s too pregnant to do so. All we had to do was to pick up some film before we went…which apparently is not so easy to do these days. I went to a store that sells professional camera equipment downtown…only to find out that they didn’t sell film. Does that seem strange to anyone besides me?
Luckily the hunt didn’t take too long, and I laid my hands on a couple of rolls of good quality BW film. I snapped off almost a full roll just walking on the bridge, and geek that I am, I took a few digital, too. Instant gratification has its place.
The city was looking particularly nice today, with lots of clouds floating around in an otherwise sunny day – a fun mix where you get both the highlights from the sun, but some of the brooding clouds of a darker day.
The Brooklyn Bridge is also a great walk as you get the most marvelous view of midtown where you can see both the Empire State Building and (my favourite!) the Chrysler Building.
I can’t wait to develop my film!
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Posted in Food at 2:16 am by Aaron
Whew. Know what I always hated? Having the colour of meat in the supermarket relate to its freshness. Boy, did that ever bother me. Luckily, I don’t have to worry any longer. Thanks to the wonders of science, carbon monoxide isn’t just used for gassing you in your sleep any more. No, now it can also be used to keep your meat red…for weeks.
According to the NYTimes, “Processors say treated ground meat can be sold for 28 days after leaving the plant, and solid cuts for 35 days. The agribusiness company Cargill says it has sold 100 million packages in the last year”
Now, as someone accustomed to eating ground meat on the same day it was ground, I can’t quite express how profoundly disturbing the idea of 28-day-old ground meat is. Yuck. And don’t get me started on “agribusiness”. Sheeyit.
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02.20.06
Posted in Random at 2:21 pm by Aaron
Laura has a week’s reprieve from her duties in the public school she’s teaching at for this week, as the kids go on a week’s holidays. The break couldn’t have come soon enough, I think. Laura’s been doubing up on her hours in order to give herself a break next semester, after the baby is born.
She’s been doing really well, but it seems that spending that much time in a New York public school is starting to wear on her a bit. As she tells me, the one consolation is that when she’s done, she’ll be going back to Canada to teach.
In her grade one class, the kids get in fist fights. Not the sissy name-calling I remember, but real, ass-kicking, grab-the-kid-by-the-hair-and-bash-his-head-into-the-floor fights where the kids are really going after eachother. At least one of her students has a sibling in jail for murder, and in her school, there was a kid who mysteriously dropped dead in class a few months ago.
In short, it’s a rough school. And this is elementary school. We went to a lecture a few months back where we heard that New York loses 6000 teachers a year, which suddenly explains all the ads I used to see in the Globe and Mail for all-expenses-paid teaching felloweships in New York, where they’d cover your education and everything.
The other day, while I was tooling around with Google Earth, Laura asked me to find her school. I did, and what I saw from the bird’s eye view explained a lot.
The arrow points to Laura’s school, and for those of you who can’t quite see what all those buildings to the northeast are, let me give you a hint; they’re not luxury apartments.
Last semester, when one of the students went missing after school, the teacher Laura was working with had to go with the police to try and find the kid. The police pulled up to the building in the projects where the kid lived, then looked at the teacher and said they’d have to drop her off a couple of blocks away before they went up to see if the kid had gone home. They said that it wasn’t safe for her to stay in the police car, nor could they protect her if she came with them.
Think about that; that’s where the kid has to come from and go back to every day. I couldn’t believe that one.
The worst point of last week for Laura was when she had to pull a kid out of class because he smelled so overwhelmingly of vomit. Laura said it looked as though the kids clothes had never been washed, and the smell was so strong that everyone in the class had to cover their noses. Wow.
The way we look at it, though, is that no matter where Laura goes to teach from here, it’s going to be easy. We think of it as a trial by fire.
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Posted in Books at 1:34 pm by Aaron
I just finished reading Robert Penn Warren’s novel All the King’s Men last week. I’m always intrigued by novels with near-ridiculous claims on the jacket. My copy of War and Peace says “Probably the best novel ever written”, which seemed like a challenge I couldn’t refuse (it turned out to be true…holy crap, what a good book!). Then, over Christmas, I picked up All the King’s Men in the book store and saw it, right there on the back cover: “considered the finest novel ever written on American politics”. How could I not read it?
Well, I suppose such claims are not made lightly. This was a masterpiece of a novel, and the author has an almost exhausting descriptive style that always left me wanting to read him out loud, unable to contain myself about this or that line in the book. I drove Laura nuts for the first few days that I was reading it, bowled over by how damn clever the guy was.
The short of it? Read this book. It’s not often that a novel can cut so perfectly to the heart of its characters, opening them up in a way that is gritty and uncomfortable and real. Truly amazing, though I don’t know if I’ve read enough novels on American politics to say if it’s the best or not. It seems like a safe bet.
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Posted in Writing at 1:10 pm by Aaron
Work is chugging along on my novel, with last week seeing the first actual writing since I’ve been down here in New York. The progression went a little something like this:
- Did I really just move again?!? Didn’t I just move four months ago? I’m sorry, I thought I just got back to this country…did someone say I was leaving it again?
- Wow. I’m in New York. My clothes are torn and dirty (literally!), I have no friends and no money, and everyone here looks like a model. WTF?
- Hm. I should probably do some work on my book. As I recall, I was about to edit the first draft.
- This thing is how many pages? I have to edit 550 pages?!?
- Wow, I sure am happy that I managed to write so much without actually covering everything I was supposed to. How come this character disappears for five chapters?
- Oh sweet mother of God…I need to ammend my outline.
- I’m bored. I wish I was an accountant.
That pretty much brings us to the present. After some pretty intense one-on-one sessions and lengthy arguments with my editor (read: myself -ed) I hammered my stuff into a new, improved, shinier, better outline and have resumed the almost-forgotten task of writing.
Is there still a lot to do? Hell yeah. But things are looking much better…I swear.
Of course, the one thing I’ve gotten best at is giving a short answer as to what my book is about. It’s been tested over a good amount of time and is calibrated to the average attention span of the inquirer (about 2 seconds) who – as it turns out – doesn’t actually want to know what my novel is about despite their somewhat misleading question of “So what’s your novel about?” which, at first, can easily sound like a sincere inquiry.
I now say “It’s a historical fiction piece set in Greece” which is more than ample for most, and even impressive to some, despite the fact that my book isn’t actually historical fiction. I have learned enough to know that if I should try to explain something like “it’s ahistorical, and probably set in the future, as it’s meant to be something of a commentary on the immutability of human nature despite the ostensible veneer of progress which technology implies – you know, like why we could cure cancer but don’t, why we believe in universal human rights, but don’t mind if that only applies to our own.” I have to remember that that’s part of the reason I’m writing a book: because nobody will listen to you if you talk for that long.
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Posted in Food at 11:54 am by Aaron
I have now, after some preliminary investigations, determined that New Yorkers don’t actually know what Canadian Bacon is. I had several disappointing brunch encounters at swank New York feedlots that advertised the precious meat as being the point-man – so to speak – of their eggs-benedict team, only to find a thin slice of what I can describe, with as much derision as can be inflected in such a word, only as ham.
With all due respect to ham and its many variations, as an on-again-off-again ex-patriate, I tend to get unduly excited at the mention of this rare and beautiful only-child of ‘Canadian cuisine’ (with its equally exciting and oft misinterpreted cousin, Maple Syrup). Thus, when in the land of fancy tidbits, I see Canadian Bacon invoked by name, my hopes are raised to what are, admittedly, unreasonable heights.
So it was that – while at brunch on the weekend – that I was lead to ask the waiter “Is your Canadian Bacon actually Canadian Bacon, or is it ham?”. Everyone present looked at me as though I was completely bereft of any vestige of human intelligence, but I pleaded my case with such fervour that even the waiter was forced to admit that though it was Canadian Bacon to the best of his knowledge, he would defer to my opinion after the meal.
In this case, we had an esteemed panel of Canadians assembled for the judgement, as both Laura and her mother ordered the eggs benedict. It is for this reason that I am confident in saying that what was finally served was not – by any stretch of the imagination – Canadian Bacon. It was pretty good, for ham. But let’s be honest, ham is to back bacon as Aunt Jemima’s is to Maple Syrup.
Take that, New York.
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02.16.06
Posted in Random at 2:10 pm by Aaron
Here’s one reason that robots will have a tough time overthrowing and enslaving the human race; they can still be beaten by magazines.
It seems that everytime I come home after leaving Roomba going, he turns up in some dark corner, making the morose beeping sounds that mean he hasn’t quite been able to do what he’s been asked.
In this case, I came home to find him in the middle of the living room floor, his rollers jammed with magazine pages and the dirty evidence strewn all over the room. It’s really more of a rascally puppy than a cleaning robot…but you just can’t stay mad at the little guy.
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Posted in Random at 2:02 pm by Aaron
For those of you who hadn’t heard, we had a pretty sweet blizzard down here over the weekend. There haven’t been that many snow storms that I’ve seen that bury cars in a single day.
It’s hard to believe that it’s thirteen degrees right now, given that just a couple of days ago this city was looking like a scene out of “The Day After Tomorrow”.
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02.15.06
Posted in News at 1:59 pm by Aaron
I’ve been in bed all day, feeling a little under the weather, and this has somehow lead me to watch the senate panel grilling Michael Chertoff over the hurricane Katrina debacle. There are a few salient points coming out of this;
1.) Chertoff screwed up
2.) Chertoff is much smarter than the senators
3.) The senators all mumble.
One of the senators just had to correct himself because he referred to one of the emails in the evidence as ‘a wire’…people must feel much better that these astute men and women are looking into things.
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Wow, the House of Representatives came on next…”These five C’s, really, I’d like to give it an ‘F’”. Well said. I need to get well soon.
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Posted in Nerdy at 8:15 am by Aaron
This all seems to have gone much more smoothly than I was expecting; I thought my email might be down for a day or two, and my website unreachable for the same amount of time. Last time I switched providers (from Network Solutions) it was a hellish, drawn out process. It’s pretty nice that now all I have to work on is the mechanics of my actual site.
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02.14.06
Posted in Nerdy at 11:12 pm by Aaron
If you’ve noticed some shenanigans while trying to access my site, it’s because I’m in the midst of a pretty huge overhaul. I’ve just switched hosts, blogging programs and – well – just about everything else. I’ve been thinking about doing it for ages, but finally decided that it would be best if I just broke my site so that I’d be forced to fix it.
This blog is now on Wordpress, and I’ll be working to migrate my old posts soon. I’m going to have to do a lot of work on the look and feel…we’ll see how it goes. Again, I’ve been meaning to practice my css, and now I’ll have to, or this site will continue to look absolutely miserable.
For anyone looking for a good host, I recommend the guys I just switched to: bluehost. Pretty damn amazing what they give you for the price.
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