Taking a break from the grim and the grime.

This may seem odd to some of you, but when I get stressed out from essay writing, studying, reading (when and if those htings ever actually take place), I promised myself just a few hundred more words, then I can take a break and turn to reading a little Mark Steyn.

If you know Mark Steyn you probably already dislike him. A political writer (primarily), Steyn is one of the foremost commentators on politics in the Anglosphere, and well-recognized as one of the most influencial...ahem...conservative writers at the moment.

Yes yes, I read right-wing politics. The Right is generally where my political interests tend to lie (as though most of you didn't know that already). This certainly isn't by choice; God knows nobody wants to be labelled a right-winger when you're a university student studying a humanities course. "The Right" just happens to be the title that best suits how I've developed in terms of my morals.

But Steyn's witing holds a special attraction for me in that it is so damn GOOD. And once in a while, he writes a scathing, perfectly articulated film review, Broadway critique, or, as he does every week, the history behind an old musical standard (by the likes of Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sintra, Comden and Green, Rogers and Hammerstein, etc etc). These articles are such a joy to read that they are usually my break from my own sad attempts at eloquence in prose.

So, if one is able to put aside that Steyn is constantly labelled a Canadian Warmonger (a title he loves, actually) then you may enjoy as few of his articles on music. Look for his film reviews too. And should you be so inclined, his political insight is almost painfully sharp.

Cheers. (here's this week's)

Brief, and in Technicolor

You guys will love this. I'll spare you the chatter (Le Morte D'Arthur essays don't write themselves), but check these websites out if you're a pretentious music geek who loves owning things that other people will not. I weep for my lack of liquid cash, for I could easily drop $200 on these kickass rock posters.

Dan Stiles (click Rock Posters at the left)
Todd Slater
The Heads of State

Cheers all.

Like Britain in the early sixites...

Things are beginning to come, once again, full circle. Just like the 50s and 60s, when pop music was just coming out of its infancy and "single" records determined the breadth of your dominion over your peers, the emphasis these days is no longer on the full-length album.

Album sales are falling and the completion of any kind of album, in the classic album mentality, is rapidly going out of style. YouTube and the ever popular forms of music downloading only continue to foster the music industry into a singles market. Anybody know T.I. King? His album was titled the 3rd best of 2006 by PitchforkMedia, yet what do we all know him for? His one popular song, "What You Know About That?"

Don't even get me started on Gnarl's Barkley's "Crazy". If anybody has heard the entirety of St. Elsewhere, please review it for me. Let me know if it was worth the pain of watching Cee-Lo belt out "Crazy" in every eclectic style he can muster.

What of the concept album then? Think of all the recent concept albums that have made it big (and I mean REALLY been a hit). I don't think there are that many. Sufjan Stevens' Illinoise got good reviews, but it was something of an underground indie-darling.

Anyway, the NY Times sums it up better than I can. This is hardly new news anyway.

Lost in Romanian Translations

Francis Ford Coppolla, who has been missing from the silver screen since '97, is set to release a new film within the year, starring none other than Mr. Orange himself (or was it Mr. Blonde...there were so many of them). The film has an interesting plot, so I won't spoil it for you, I'll let you read.

Fantastic make-up department too. You'll know what I mean when you see it.
Cheers. Nap Time.

Q would never have allowed this

(A huge thanks to Guarav for this one!)

It's like a horrible, fun-house mirror image of that scene from Goldfinger, where Bond is driving through the Swiss countryside, tracking his nemesis with a little in-dash radar screen that eerily beeps the entire time.

Only now, as with so much of the Bond gadgetry, the eternal pursuit of the future has gotten into the hands of children, and the hands of those who prey on them. According to a new article from the Associated Press, AOL plans to release a downloadable new feature for their AIM chatting, the ominously-titled Skyhook. The feature enables chatters to locate their conversation partner physically via an online mapping system.

"So what," you say. Shouldn't people already know where their friends are? After all, this is the age of WiFi, crime-deterrant street cameras, and 12 year-olds with cellphones. This is hardly a Jetson's leap.

Yet, as Guarav correctly pointed out, this seemingly innocuous little widget only allows those same little 12 year olds to make themselves an even faster victim of online predators. These disgusting people already have a tendency to spend too much time in front of computers, so I don't imagine it's a stretch of the imagination to suppose that one or two of them have the computer know-how to hack into a Skyhook signal and find out where their target is located. Not to mention that fact that young children are often all too willing to give up personal information anyway. Adding an undesirable as a friend on AIM, or whatever they're using, might not be given a second thought.

It's a scary world.

I'm not sure what else to say, besides that science today fascinates me. We've found species we thought to be extinct, recently realized that the chicken pox vaccine will not last the average human into old age, and how this...the beginnings of human morality (a feature of humanity long thought to have been exclusively our) might be found in primates.

Have a look, this from the NY Times.

Cheers

Bonus of Sunshine!

A quick bonus for all my missed days!
Eternal Sunshine rains upon all of us in time for spring!
Cheers.

Long time

My apologies to my three dedicated readers for having neglected my posting for so long. A daily update isn't as pleasant a prospect when you're staring down the barrel of presententations, proposals, and essays as big my ego.

So we have a budget bonanza today! The recent Tory budget, while appreciated by a Tory supporter such as myself, has nonetheless received a fair amount of hollow flak from Harper's detractors, One of whom is none other than Dion, who claims the budget ignores the Aboriginal community (psst, Mr. Dion, was it not the last decade of Liberal leadership that put the Aboriginal community in an even worse state? Paul Marting wearing a headdress at one or two Aboriginal functions didn't put the money back into their state funded child care system, did it?)

Check out the latest:

Commentary from The National Post

Commentary from Chief Running Scared himself.

And this from The Post, on a new report that does its best to strike at the root of home-grown extremism.

Good luck on your work, everybody; I'm sure I'm not the only one.

Smoke or Die

I hold no strong opinion on pot laws either way. Personally I don't see the harm in decriminalization, but to take the marijuana laws to such extremes seems more than a little ridiculous. If this woman has over four different deadly maladies, is she really participating in the on-going transportation and hustle of illegal substances? She has scoliosis for God's sake.

Get the full Story here.
Ugh.

I apologize for the brief entries lately. It's been a hectic few weeks. Cheers to everyone in the blogosphere, and yes, props for Guarav for the generationterrorist.com link. You're a champ buddy.

Not on Ellis anymore

Canadians. God love us for our ability to smile at a bad situation, and to blindly ignore the havok we wreak upon ourselves. Call it pluck, as many would. It's that good ol' Canadian spirit that dominates every gaze in the mirror.

Too bad the face looking back isn't our own anymore. It's an aggregate of sorts, a constantly shifting identity. I personally fear for this future we're building for ourselves in Canada; the foundation is not stable.

A new report indicates that the Canadian birth rate is not where it should be. We currently stand at 1.5 births for every married Canadian couple. That's less than reproduction rate, keep in mind. For every two people, we breed 1.5 children. It's a new age, frankly, and the writing has been on the wall for a while. Our culture demands that we never give in to growing up - the eternally young are the idols of next year. Men and women need no longer take 9-5 jobs; they can become career students, travel the world, devote time and energy to a global consciousness, etc etc. The motivation and intentions are good, I would not deny that. But we're losing the Canadian family. No one will think about settling down to have a few kids; we've championed a rootless lifestyle that sees parenting as the last marker of no longer being carefree. Having one life to live doesn't include living for lives you bring into the world.

So we have adults that refuse to grow up, a Neverland of the North. And thus, we rely on that "highly skilled workforce" that we import from other countries, not only to build our skyscrapers and economically-friendly public transportation systems, but to build the country and its ideology for us too.

Our population growth over the last 5 years has been 5.4%, and we're not acheiving that by having 1.5 kids per scarce "cookie-cutter" family, as some would sneeringly deride them. So we continue to ship people in, relying on others to maintain the size of our wonderful country. I see something wrong with this. This is not an anti-immigration statement. I believe in immigration as a social good, both for the country and for those who desire a new home. But we rely too easily on a foreign solution to a domestic problem, and only continue to lose our validity as a self-sufficient, self-supporting nation.

Beatle Squishing

This from apple.com/trailers...

A Moulin Rouge-esque film is soon to be released that features, a la I Am Sam, a soundtrack consisting entirely of Beatles covers. Were that not enough, the story seems to float upon the buoyancy of the songs as well. Set in the 60s, it follows a group of college kis reliving turbulent times of social unrest, all the while relying on "the music, man" to help them cope. One can bet that they're social activists in only the most superficial of ways, in that they spend more time getting ready for the protest than they do protesting.

I'm tired of the Beatles being appropriated in this manner. It irritates me.

Anyway, check out the trailer.

Stolen away from Canadian glory

It seems Stephen Harper's AIDS vaccine iniative may not be as beneficial for Canada as once thought. The well-meaning merger with Bill Gates appears to have come a little too late.

According to reports coming from Atlanta's scientific community, a university there is only a few years away from developing an effective AIDS vaccine. Perhaps the Canadian front will help in speeding the process along, thereby allowing our country a tiny slice of the medical kudos.

Click here for full story.

Flow

There's a lot of news today, but I'll dispense with it and offer some different food for thought.

It's the creative faculties that are first to go as we get older. Perhaps not necessarily altogether - humans are equipped with the ability to create, and maybe even improve on their creations, with time. Yet consider the unbridled lexiconal (word?) freedom of being three and not entirely grasping the full meaning of words.

Paul Zach has an article dedicated to just such a loss. Call me a sentamentalist, but I really enjoyed it.

And further on one will find the most intimate thoughts of the most omnipotent of beings.

All these courtesy of www.generationterrorists.com

And lastly, check out the band Annuals (as far as I can tell, no "the" preceding it). Search them on MySpace or go to AnnualsMusic.com

Cheers.

Say what you will about the Western world, it's values and primary religions, but it's stuff like this that makes me so loathe to talk to people who would bash it.

The Artful Dodger of the Aughts

Michael Moore can run (for lack of a better term) but he apparently cannot hide from those who would seek to turn the tables on him.

In a bitter pill of twisted justice, Michael Moore is now at the opposite end of the camera in a new documentary being put forth by two Canadian filmmakers. The doc, called Manufacturing Dissent, was a project that actually started out of admiration for Moore. Yet Debbie Melnyk and Rick Caine, the professed left-wing authors of the film, gradually changed their point of view as "certain facts about his documentaries" came to light.

The details are in the article, courtesy of The Australian. Click here to get the whole story.

Easy To Be Hard

Morning All,

I had the good fortune to see Zodiac on Saturday, after a mad dash to the theatre and struggling my way through reams of children. It was all worth it, though, for a striking and though-provoking film from a director that seems to create nothing BUT striking and thought-provoking films (for those of you who have not see Fincher's Se7en, I heartily recommend it. I won't recommend Fight Club. Though an excellent movie, you've probably already seen it).

Zodiac won't disappoint, and it's a shame it's doing so poorly at the box office. Click here for an interview with David Fincher from Kurt Loader and MTV.com

Cheers everybody.

Icky Thump

A special Sunday update! It seems that, in their customary tendency to record an album in less time than it takes most bands to order dinner at fancy restaurants (average 4 weeks), The White Stripes are set to release a new album of material. Many have surmised that this may be their last due to Jack's burgeoning success with The Raconteurs.

You can find the whole scoop, courtesy of Pitchforkmedia.com, here.

Mars Attacks

I realize that this is an unsettling synthesis of a post I made a little while ago. But I just love this global warming conversation so damn much.

Be prepared for Al Gore's and David Suzuki to start screaming about how the Western world is threatening the existence of little green men, because according to an article at nationalgeographic.com, Mars is apparently heating up as well.

SOME, like the article's author, may wish to point out that, seeing as how Mars and Earth are neighbours in our vast solar system, the problem of global warming may be a universal concern in every sense (not simply the sense that Suzuki's affection for ruining the economy is "universal".)

This is why more investigation needs to be undertaken before a country decides to align itself with a sketchy proposal like Kyoto. The science is simply not strong enough at this point to merit massive economic changes in the interest of slowing the world's cooling rate, changes that could ultimately stick the Western world with a bill that it didn't really run up.

Granted, the article itself demonstrates that this scientist's theories are not all entirely accepted. He denies the existence of greenhouse gas build-up, for instance. I'm certianly not about to deny that humans dump massive amounts of chemicals into the atmosphere, but whether or not they are responsible for the warming, or that we mere humans could REVERSE the trend of a planet as old and complex as Earth, seems to require a bit more investigation. One must take into account other factors, like volcano carbon emissions (which could double the amount of human emission) or sun flares/spots.

But anyway, that's my two cents for today.

Give them over-sized lollypops!

Yes, the rumours you've undoubtedly heard are true. The aye-aye, a small marsupial native to the island of Madagascar, is on the very verge of extinction.

You know the aye-aye, don't you? It's that cute, cuddly little animal that eats tree bark and lives a peaceful life amoung God's greenest foliage. Idyllic, like an animal from that movie Fern Gully. I love that movie.

Still not ringing any bells? Well, I have a picture here for you...just follow the link.......OH MY GOD WHAT THE HELL IS THAT? DEAR SWEET BABY JESUS KILL IT!

The article, and slideshow, from Slate.com discussed the human tendency to be more generous towards those animals (and probably people, I'm sure) that can appeal more effectively to their aesthetic sense.

You've seen it yourself: the homeless guy clutching his sad-eyed yellow labrador retriever like they've "only got each other in this cruel world, man" probably has at least 30% more change in his Tim Horton's cup that the guy down the street wearing a garbage can lid for a hat.

Watch the slideshow at the link and see what you think.