2K10

I hope everyone's Twenty-Ten is off to a grand start!

It's that time of the year again. Let's take a look at those old resolutions:

1. Re-try my third resolution from last year: Every week, I will have something creative constructed to show for my effots throughout that week. To maintain this, I'll keep a weekly record to be posted on my other blog, here.
2. Up my GPA by two points for next term. (This shouldn't be too hard. For our non-Laurier readers, our school works on a twelve point system.)
3. Be healthier in these respects:

• Eat less grease. (i.e. Switch to margerine instead of butter and limit my use of the deep frier.
  
• Make a five minute effort towards physically demanding excersize each day.
  
• Floss daily.

This has been the most epic failure of resolutions to date. I haven't made a post since June; I switched out of my program to avoid resolution number two; and though my grease intake is down, I have done nothing for my body or my gums.

Yet, these are largely not my concerns for the new year. My resolutions for 2010 will be as follows:

1. Make use of the little moments for some personal development. For example, when I have nothing to do at the office, I should try some creative writing.
2. Speak with clarity! Too often, people tell me that they don't understand my accent.
3. Be generally more conscious of my health. I know I won't hit a gym, but I could certainly walk to the slightly further convenience store to buy my Rudbull. (It's the little things that count, right?)

I wish I gave that more thought, but I didn't.

--

D. Phillips

Be yours to hold it high

Unless you've been living under a rock - and good for you if you have - you know that the Olympic torch has been making its way across southern Ontario for the past week-and-a-half.

It was in Brantford on the 21st, where loudspeakers and scared dogs congregated at City Hall, before it departed from Harmony Square the next morning en route to Paris. It wound its way through the southwest over the holidays, finally hitting Kitchener no the 27th.

Then yesterday in Guelph, controversy struck as a young torchbearer was attacked and knocked to the ground by protesters. And in all the media coverage I've seen of this, I've been led to an alarming truth: the Olympics are everything that's good with the world, and if you're the least bit skeptical about that, well, that's quaint and all, but you can go off and do your silly little protest stunt after the Olympics have finished.

Yes, I'll admit that Julian Ichim probably isn't the best person to be the face of any protest movement at all. I'll also admit that the protest shouldn't have turned violent, and Ichim's group shouldn't have done any more then run alongside the torch.

But there's a bigger problem here, and it's the same one I saw with the torch protests in Caledonia and north of Toronto. In news coverage of these events, the reasons for the protests are either buried deep in the story or, worse, not mentioned at all.

I more or less expect this from CTV and anybody else who is paying enormous sums of money for the right to broadcast the Olympics - they're interested in protecting their property, and stories that reflect badly on the Olympic movement could ultimately be detrimental to their ratings (and thus profits).

But the Waterloo Region Record? They, like most newspapers, have absolutely nothing to gain from sucking up to the IOC. And yet they still swallow the Olympic propaganda hook, line and sinker - if the torch route is adjusted, the story is that there was a minor hiccup, not whatever was being protested about forcing the adjustment. If a torch-bearer is attacked, it's the torch-bearer who the focus is on, not the grievances of the attackers.

Why were there so many stories about how the Olympics will force China to start coming in line with Western rules regarding human rights, and why are there so few following up on what really happened (or didn't happen) there?

Funny thing about this is that I'm overall pro-Olympics. I just don't think that their activities and propaganda should be treated with kid gloves in a way that no other organization would ever be treated.

--Ryan

Don't forget to hang up your sock

It's the holiday season (the holiday season), and I have neither the time nor the motivation to be insightful, thought-provoking, or hilarious. So I'll let others do it for me.

First up, three Muppets get us in the Christmas spirit:



This one has nothing to do with some Christmas, but was made by some very funny Russians:



Graeme Perrow explains why Y2K wasn't the non-event we all think it was.

And while the Olympic torch makes its way around this part of the country, former CBC producer Howard Bernstein lays out the corporate propaganda we don't realize we being subjected to.

Some nice holiday reading for you.

--Ryan

Update: Oh, and here's some Facebook hilarity!

Talkin' tech

I'm really not much of a techie.

I probably know more than most people about computers, but that's mainly in the vein of diagnosing problems and knowing why Chrome or Firefox is better than IE as opposed to 'it just is!' or 'you can make it look like whatever you want!'.

When it comes to being on the cutting edge of technology, knowing what's about to hit the mainstream, I'm not that guy. I spent months thinking 'netbook' was just another synonym for 'laptop', I get nostalgic for floppy drives, and despite living with Dan talking about them for several years, I didn't know what a tablet was until just recently.

But over the next few weeks, that's changing.

Slightly.

I'm upgrading several key pieces of my technological arsenal, and after I explain why, I think you'll agree that it's long overdue.

Let's start with my printer. I don't have a printer.

At least not one that works. In first year, I mooched off Dan. But before year two, I was gifted a never-used bubblejet printer from the mid-90s. Nothing fancy obviously, but enough to print school papers and such.

This past spring, the bubblejet broke - I can't really explain how. Since I'd already spent more time trying to fix it than it was worth (considering even new I could probably find it for $5), I didn't bother to pursue it.

When Dan moved out, he left behind an old all-in-one printer - the one I'd used in first year oddly enough - with instructions to trash it. Remembering my predicament, I asked him if it would work. His answer, it might if I changed the ink, but nothing's for certain.

I guess I never got around to getting a new ink cartridge. All my assignments this year were printed through mooching of friends and WLUSP. Over the break, I'm finally rectifying this thanks to those deals where you get a cheap printer with purchase of a new computer.

But before I get to the computer, the iPod. My current iPod ("Ryan's iPod II", after the first one was rendered unusable back in high school by forces beyond my understanding) was the victim of my poor understanding of technology. In first year, I left my iPod connected to my computer almost 24/7. This was a bad idea on many levels - it took my computer an extra minute or two to boot up every time I switched it on because it had to load iTunes, and the constant charging of the battery ultimately left me with essentially no battery. I can currently get through about ten minutes worth of music (provided I scroll through the list, as shuffling kills the battery) before Ryan's iPod II goes kaput.

So I'm also getting a new iPod. Not a Touch, not anything fancy - just an MP3 player that can hold a whole crapload of music, so that I'll never, ever, be able to fill it. I've already got a cell phone and a laptop that are trying to be my all-in-one technology source, I don't need the same thing from my music player.

(Incidentally, that's probably a good sign of my unwillingness to adopt new technologies - the future is clearly a device that combines all these things, yet I'm refusing to accept that reality and trying to keep them all as separate as possible.)

I'll also be getting some sort of iPod-car adapter, because I'll be doing a lot of driving between Brantford and Waterloo and the radio gets boring.

And finally, the new computer. A short (and by no means exhaustive) list of complaints I have with my current computer:

-The monitor only displays a picture if it is held open at certain angles (fewer and fewer as time goes on)
-Probably related, a decent chunk of the cover (maybe two inches by half an inch) has fallen off
-Something is trapped inside one of the memory card slots
-Runs very loudly (not just the fan)
-Takes long time to boot up (and this is after running CCleaner and a dozen other programs provided on a free CD from some British computer magazine)
-Will not open PDFs in Chrome
-When I open IE (only for a PDF now), approximately 60% chance IE will not be able to open any page and I'll have to keep closing and opening the program until it does
-Opening My Computer, My Documents, or even the programs tab on the start menu causes unbelievable lag
-When I close iTunes, it opens itself back up automatically
-If I click over to another open program, might cycle through one or two others before stopping at the one I want
-When playing Solitaire and placing card from deck in a stack, image of card in deck sometimes remains that of old card (I assume that when Solitaire is messed up, that's a good sign that something's wrong)
-CD drive doesn't always work properly, I blame Dan

And probably quite a bit of other stuff I'm not thinking of right now. The monitor's the big thing though.


The replacement? Look to your right.

I'm actually not sure it's the same thing, but it definitely looks similar at least.

I wanted a real laptop because I use it too much to deal with a netbook's tiny screen. From there it was a matter of brand name more than anything else - a Consumer Reports survey put HP, Gateway, Toshiba and Acer near the top of the quality pile. My current computer is a Gateway, so you can guess why I eliminated that one. Dan had even more problems with Acer, so that was out. It was between HP and Toshiba, and this particular Toshiba received excellent reviews. Plus it's ridiculously cheap considering its power.

New computer, new MP3 player, new printer.

I'm not sure why you needed to know any of that.

--Ryan

What's up? Doc!

On those days when I know I want to blog but I don't know what I want to blog about, it's rare for something big to come along.

Today, that wasn't the case.

Sports Illustrated was the first to report that the Jays, Phillies, and Mariners have agreed in principle to a three-way trade which would see Roy Halladay end up in Philadelphia. In return, the Jays will get prospects from both teams.

I'm not here to judge the merits of the trade - I don't know the prospects well enough to comment, and predicting how prospects will end up is an exercise in futility at the best of times anyhow - but rather to give my thoughts on Doc leaving town.

My earliest memories of the Blue Jays are from the 1994 season - Darren Hall emerging as an unlikely closer, Carlos Delgado's huge April and subsequent fall off the face of the Earth, Shawn Green and Alex Gonzalez making their first attempts at being real big-leaguers. Unfortunately, despite retaining pitching standouts Juan Guzman and Pat Hentgen, plus all of WAMCO sticking around, the Jays never again reached the glory of the 1992 and 1993 World Series teams.

So from my perspective, the Jays have always been trying to recapture the magic (and popularity) they had before my time. And they've never done it. Roger Clemens' two years came close, especially when paired with Dave Stieb's unlikely comeback. Tony Batista caused a mild stir in 1999. And Carlos Delgado was always appreciated, even if he never got the sort of reactions his place in Jays history deserved.

Then over these last few years - but far more pronounced in 2009 - Roy Halladay did it. He got people who normally need the Jumbotron (and/or fireworks) to cheer without any sort of prompting. He got non-Jays fans to be, at the very least, Roy fans.

He was the best pitcher we'd ever had, and everybody knew it. So what if the rest of the team sucked, so what if Roy got the lowest run support of any pitcher anywhere, so what if a comet fell from the skies and struck the entire infield dead. Roy would still find a way to win us the game.

I have two specific memories of Roy's time in Toronto. Back in September 1998, in only his second major-league start, Roy came within one out of no-hitting the Detroit Tigers (damn you, Bobby Higginson). Finally, it was looking to Jays fans that the days of marginal pitching 'prospects' like Huck Flener, Edwin Hurtado, and Jeff Ware were over - we had this Halladay kid, plus Chris Carpenter and Kelvim Escobar who were both a little further along (all three did in fact become very good pitchers).

The other memory is from this year - I usually only make it to one or two games a year in person, and I always miss Doc and get stuck with a Ted Lilly or (then-average) Shaun Marcum. But on July 19, 2009, it was Toronto against the Boston Red Sox, with me in the house and Doc on the mound.

The Sox countered with a tough pitcher of their own in Jon Lester, and a formidable lineup that included Dustin Pedroia (who can't hit a high-inside fastball), David Ortiz, and Jason Bay.

Halladay was more than up to the task - even though the Jays only scored three runs of Lester, Roy held the Sox to one run on six hits.

Congratulations, Philadelphia fans. You're getting the best pitcher in the game today, and a future hall-of-famer. Enjoy him.

--------------

I know I said it's an exercise in futility, but I was curious. The Jays have (in my opinion) never traded away a player this good at this close to the prime of his career, but I took a look at other times they've traded stars in my lifetime.

December 1990 - Tony Fernandez and Fred McGriff are sent to San Diego for Joe Carter and Roberto Alomar. This was a different sort of trade - stars for stars, with Toronto's reasoning being that the team needed a personality transplant. It worked, but it's hardly comparable to this.

July 1995 - David Cone, himself a very good pitcher, is sent to the Yankees for highly-touted pitching prospects Marty Janzen, Mike Gordon, and Jason Jarvis. Janzen is the only one of the three to ever make the major leagues, and he never does all that well before ending up in Tampa Bay via expansion draft. This is the worst-case scenario for losing Roy.

January 1999 - Roger Clemens' demand to leave Toronto results in him going to the Yankees for David Wells, Homer Bush, and Graeme Lloyd. Wells is a strong pitcher but no Clemens, Bush is the best second baseman the Jays had in the nearly-ten-year-stretch between Alomar and Hudson, and Lloyd is a serviceable middle reliever. But other than maybe Bush, none of them could be classified as prospects, so again nothing to learn here.

November 1999 - Shawn Green also asked for a trade, so he was sent to Los Angeles with Jorge Nunez for Raul Mondesi and Pedro Borbon. Mondesi was a disappointment, and Borbon did exactly what was advertised, but that wasn't enough to make it a good trade.

January 2001 - After two seasons, it's time for David Wells to want out of Toronto. In exchange for sending him to the White Sox, the Jays get proven major league starter Mike Sirotka, backup outfielder Brian Simmons, mediocre pitcher Kevin Beirne, and minor leaguer Mike Williams. Sirotka turns out to be hurt and never threw a pitch for Toronto. One of the worst trades in franchise history.

So overall, the Jays have not had success trading great players. Hopefully this turns out to be the exception.

--Ryan

Talkin' tube

This year, I've been a good little pop culture junkie and have found myself watching four shows regularly (positive this is a record, at least for the past few years). Modern Family almost makes the cut, but I just don't quite enjoy it as much as I feel like I should, so I skip it most weeks.

What I will talk about in more detail are those four shows - starting with the one in that picture on the left.

Scrubs

Scrubs is back! Again! Although these eleventh-hour additional seasons have been going on for a few years now, this year is the least Scrubs-like yet - Carla is gone, JD will be soon, the other regulars are down to just guest appearances, and the only familiar faces on the main cast are Cox, Turk, and last year's addition of Denise.

Also gone (or at least performing a diminished role) is show creator Bill Lawrence, who had hoped the show could be retitled 'Scrubs Med' or something similar. I think that might have been a wise choice - people have been trying to compare this year's show to classic Scrubs, even though it's really quite a different show. A new name would have helped reduce some of the comparisons.

Trying to evaluate the show on its own merits, it's pretty good (and I suspect will get better once JD leaves and it can develop its own identity). It's a little less crazy, a little more grounded in the characters, their development and interactions.

Most of the new additions are good, although I'm very confused at why they didn't just stick with last year's new cast (who I assumed were being groomed to take over the show). Lucy originally seemed like a clone of Sunny from last year, but as it turns out she's closer to JD from the first season, only less crazy and slightly more confident. Drew's a neat addition even if I'm wondering where they can go with his character after this week's episode.

Hate Cole though. I know that's the point, but I don't hate him because I'm supposed to hate him. I hate him because I'd rather just not see him on the show in the first place.

V

If it seems weird for me to be opining on Scrubs after three episodes...well, V has only had four. And now it's on a break. Until March.

Long break.

My knowledge of the original V is very little - I read one of the books in high school - but even I still knew the pertinent details. Evil lizards disguised as humanoid aliens invade Earth, most people believe the lizards' propaganda that they're only here to help us, some lizards rebel against the leadership.

So I'm kind of glad that they got all of that out of the way in the first episode - most people already knew the twists one way or another, so give them to us quickly and then get to the real storytelling.

I have to say, I quite like this show (at least for a sci-fi). The pacing is great, the revelations are coming out naturally, the distrust between the main rebels feels real, we're still left with lots of mysteries...I don't necessarily like the portrayal of the media (easily duped, refusing to ask tough questions), but I think that's because of my personal interest more than anything.

Flash Forward

The other sci-fi I've been watching, Flash Forward is clearly the inferior show yet (maybe because of that) I'm almost enjoying it more.

Whereas V intentionally doesn't drop much in the way of clues, preferring to have us learn things as the main characters do, Flash Forward leaves me with the impression I could figure out the entire puzzle if I tried hard enough. I don't know why I think this, considering they also introduce new plot points completely out of the blue even though the characters have known them all along.

The characters are easily to relate to because we see their flash-forwards roughly a million times each - Dimitri seeing nothing, his bride-to-be at their wedding (well, his funeral), Mark being assaulted in his office while drunk, the now-dead guy working on a case with some British intelligence agent, etc.

I still don't understand how some plot points fit together - Mark's daughter is seen in the flash-forward of Lloyd's son, clearly in Olivia's kitchen, yet she also must have encountered D. Gibbons at some point in her 2.5-minute glimpse of the future.

And that's without getting into the incredibly cheesy revelation of the evil genius behind the flash-forwards being hidden by the Persian woman in the last episode.

Still, I'll be watching when it comes back in the spring.

The Office

Finally, we come to the show I've blogged about more than any other. The Office has taken a drastically different direction this year, and I for one don't really like it.

The biggest changes involve Jim - the everyman character who we were all drawn to in the early seasons because of his "island of sanity in a land of bizarre office-mates" personality. In theory, this season should have been his crowning moment - marrying Pam (whom we also all liked), and getting promoted to co-manager, finally able to temper Michael's unpopular side.

Problem: none of that has happened. Instead, Jim and Pam have turned into what they never liked about everybody else they work with - caricatures who have lost sight of their old perspective on life and suddenly care about something else (each other) instead. They're part of the office's problems, rather than surrogates for the audience, reacting at the absurdity.

If we want somebody to empathize with, we now have to go to Oscar (who overreacted to things in early seasons, apparently the least offensive trait the writers could find). Even worse, we almost had a complete 180-degree reversal in Jim and Dwight.

Dwight had become one of the more popular characters by being unbelievably weird, to the point where you'd assume the rest of the office was laughing at him behind his back (which they were). Now, the writers are playing to his popularity by making him funny and while still weird, weird in a much cuter way. It's nowhere near the same character he was originally.

On the one hand, I'm glad the writers realized what was going on and have tried to get us back to not liking Dwight by having him undermine Jim. On the other hand, why is Dwight so upset that Jim got promoted and not him, especially considering that when Jim was named Assistant Manager, Dwight barely caused a stir? Why the sudden change?

There's actually a lot to like about The Office this year - Andy and Erin, Angela becoming a background character again, Creed getting more good lines (although I wish he'd have never been seen again after the murder mystery episode). Even the storyline of Dunder Mifflin having financial woes and ultimately being sold was a great idea considering its current topicality.

But all of these are overrided by Jim, who seemed smart enough to be a decent boss, making absolutely bone-headed decisions, and Michael, who we'd been taught to believe was a horrible manager, being the wise sage. Too many role reversals for me to be enjoying the show as much as I have in the past.

--Ryan

If I could be partisan for a moment...

Trying to be objective (or at least non-partisan) in my writing about politics this term has led me to some interesting discoveries.

For one, no matter how appalling the government's treatment of Afghan detainees, or Canadian citizens abroad, or the Canadian public's intellect, may seem at any one moment, these charges will slide off the government like so much Teflon within a few weeks (at the most). They might be - and in my opinion, are - legitimate grievances, but there are simply too many of them, and the opposition transitions from one to the next so quickly, to create any sort of public stir.

Contrast this to Ontario's provincial government, where the opposition seems to have a one-note tune with the HST. While the HST is good policy which many assume PC leader Tim Hudak would even support if he viewed it through conservative (rather than Conservative) eyes, the Ontario opposition has been enormously effective at mobilizing public support in opposition to the HST.

A tax change that will save the majority of Ontarians money overall is meeting vocal opposition, but a government that is quite transparently doing nothing but looking out for itself (and, when necessary, its supporters) raises barely a peep.

Funny, that.

I don't know if the problem is that the Conservatives are too good at spinning their message or that the opposition isn't good enough at spinning theirs. In either case, it's a horrible reason - politics have become more about managing public opinion than about any actual governance.

Journalists aren't helping. If a newspaper reporter interviews a Liberal about something, he is pressured into interviewing a Conservative for 'balance'. Could you imagine this applying to any other type of journalism? "I'm going to interview this executive from a company, but I'd better talk to an executive from their chief rival too." "It's not enough to talk to these people who had their house burn down, I'd better talk to some people who didn't have their house burn down."

Even worse is the acceptance and complicity of journalists who know they are being spun - it's okay to report political spin even if it didn't answer your question in the least. It's better than nothing. There have been a few instances of reporters fighting back and demanding that politicians actually answer the questions asked, but these show up rarely and don't make any tangible difference.

The political talk shows on CBC and CTV's cable news networks aren't any better - they're so afraid of being accused of bias that they have panels of an MP from each major party, a Senator from each major party, a strategist from each major party. These panels are more theatre than journalism - everybody involved and everybody watching knows that nothing will come out other than the party lines, but they do them anyhow.

And to those who say 'the people are too smart to fall for spin'? They're not. I've been following the current CRTC hearings related to the relationship between TV networks and cable service providers for another class. The CRTC recently opened up a website to solicit public opinion on the matter.

The result is extremely disappointing - form letters copied and pasted directly from the pages of the interested parties, and people whose understanding of the issue seems to be solely either the 'Stop the TV Tax' commercial or the 'Local TV Matters' commercial (whichever they saw first) - neither of which, of course, are about public good or anything other than making more money for the people behind them.

I have my doubts that the CRTC will even bother to sift through all the spin to find the handful of insightful, worthwhile, intelligent comments. Won't be much longer until politics goes the same way.

--------------------

So what's next for this blog? My class requirements are done - with one extra post because this and a couple of others have skirted the bounds of what I was supposed to be doing. Also finished is my latest "hey guys, here's the music I'm listening to aren't I all hipster and awesome?!?" series.

The blog will probably slow down over Christmas, as it always does. Maybe worse, because The Sputnik is my first priority this year. Plus Dan has a job now, so he'll be posting even less than usual.

But we'll carry on, with a mix of news commentary, pop culture analysis, and cool/bizarre things we found on the Internet.

In that spirit, this lady is painting herself having sex with every American president, chronologically. (Not safe for work, obviously.)

--Ryan

Twenty albums you should hear (Part IV)

(For historical sake, Parts I, II, and III.)

Slow Club - Yeah So

This album is just fun. There's no other way to describe it. Which is kind of weird considering that once you get past the harmonies, high tempos, and bubbliness, the lyrics are really full of hopelessness and despair. They sound like normal indie falling in love songs, but they're not.

Unfortunately your expectations might be a little much because the first two songs - "When I Go" and "Giving Up On Love" - are probably the two best on the album, but the rest certainly holds its own.

"It Doesn't Have To Be Beautiful" is a frantic it-is-what-it-is tune, while "There Is No Good Way To Say I'm Leaving You" is just a little too slow for my liking.

"Come On Youth" is actually a pretty good song that I think I'd like more on its own, it doesn't really fit with the rest of the album. "Our Most Brilliant Friends" is ten minutes of craziness that serves as a nice closing.

I think if you were to play this for somebody else, with neither of your attention focused completely on the music, you'd think it was an awesome indie album you should really listen to again. Then once you listened to it on your own, you'd realize that the upbeat nature is betrayed by the depressing lyrics, and ignore it for a long long time thereafter.

Go on, give it a try. See if I'm right.

Sunset Rubdown - Random Spirit Lover

It's hard for me to label any album as my favourite, but if I had to pick it just might be this one. Dragonslayer has grown on me a ton since I first heard it, and Shut Up I Am Dreaming has the incomparable "The Men Are Called Horsemen There", but from top to bottom, Random Spirit Lover is simply amazing.

You've got the catchy, Spencer Krug vocal insanity, catchy guitar hook-laden songs like "The Mending Of The Gown" and "Up On Your Leopard, Upon The End Of Your Feral Days" which get people perking up and saying "hey, that's not bad!"

You've got the darker, instrumentally-heavy tracks like "Colt Stands Up, Grows Horns", "Stallion", and "Magic Vs. Midas" which harken back to Shut Up I Am Dreaming only with better vocals and a more epic feel.

You've got the harmonic vocals of "The Courtesan Has Sung" and "Child-Heart Losers" which will be stuck in your head even if they don't really make that much sense.

And you've got the hauntingly amazing back-to-back of "For The Pier (And Dead Shimmer)" and "The Taming Of The Hands That Came Back To Life", two songs which I haven't tired of despite dozens of plays over the last few months.

Add it all up, and it's just a great album. My only real complaint would be - and it's something Spencer Krug is guilty of in everything he does - that each song bleeds into the next, forcing you to either listen to the entire album or wonder 'what was with that last 30 seconds that sounded nothing like the rest of the song?'. But then again, it's not like listening to the entire album is a chore.

The Wave Pictures - If You Leave It Alone

What you intially think Slow Club are, these guys actually are. Maybe not quite as bouncy, but more genuine in their expressions of love and longing. Fun songs that you only need to hear once to remember for months. Neat instrumentation too.

"If You Leave It Alone" provides a bit of a misleading opening - once you're a few minutes into the song, it picks up, but it's a little slower than most of the album.

Something seems weird about the melody of "My Kiss", but it's nonetheless enjoyable. Also enjoyable are the following few songs - "Tiny Craters In The Sand" through "Bye Bye Bumble Belly" is probably my favourite run on the album, and those also happen to be my two favourite songs.

The last three songs are maybe a bit of a step down - at least once I've stopped listening at "Softly You, Softly Me" - but I think that's more a matter of taste, or just me not being able to take too much of this stuff at once.

Good album. Worth your time for sure. Assuming of course that you're into the same pretentious indie music that I am.

Why? - Eskimo Snow

Apparently Why? are classified as a hip hop band, which confuses me to no end as there's practically zero hip hop here. It's slow, brooding, Airborne Toxic Event-style (and they'd have made this list had I started it later, by the way) indie where it's more talking over instruments than singing but still good.

(Confused yet?)

There's not a lot to distinguish these songs from each other, really, although "This Blackest Purse" is my favourite and is the one where everything seems to go on just a little longer than you'd expect.

"Against Me" is another strong recommendation, although like everything on this album it's the instruments, and not the vocals, that clue you in to where the chorus is.

I'm generally not a hip-hop fan, but I'm feeling like Why?'s hip-hop might have a bit more energy to it than Eskimo Snow but not really be what I consider hip-hop, so it's probably worth checking out at some point.

"Berkeley By Hearseback" is another strong song and probably my second-favourite on the album - like Fake Surfers, this is an album which picks up steam as it goes along.

You Say Party! We Say Die! - XXXX

Yeah apparently I'm a few years late on this bandwagon. But then again, I didn't like YSP!WSD!'s early dance punk as much as the more recent and more towards pop stuff.

According to an interview I heard with the band on CBC Radio 3, it's still a little hard for these guys to admit they're singing about love, so 'XXXX' in several song titles (and the album title) is code for 'love'.

It does almost seem like this album was written on a dare - something like 'can you guys actually write songs about love if you wanted? can you even feel love?'. "There Is XXXX (Within My Heart)" answers this question in the opening track.

Some of the other songs - "Glory", "Make XXXX", and "Cosmic Wanship Avengers" come to mind right away - sound like the band enjoyed recording them, and are definitely more pop, more dance, less punk. Probably my favourites.

On the flip side are songs like "Laura Palmer's Prom" and "Heart Of Gold" which almost go too far in the other direction - there's no backbone to them, they're somewhat generic female pop. They're not bad for what they are, but it's kind of jarring considering who's behind them.

And that makes two female-fronted bands in this list of twenty, not counting Slow Club's dual vocalists and plenty of female backups. For me, that's an improvement.

--Ryan


will I gain weight in later life?

Enough about me, let's talk about you

(This was the most interesting GIS result I found for 'interactivity'. It's not the type of interactivity I meant, but it'll do.)

Why do I blog?

I've touched on this before, of course. I like to write, and I have an interest in writing about current events - thus, a blog would seem to be the best outlet for combining both activities. And it is.

But more to the point, I'm interested in hearing from people who either agree or disagree with me. That's why I have comments open (and unmoderated if on a post from within the past two weeks, moderated past that only so I can track new comments on old posts). That's why I link to this blog from pretty much any profile I have anywhere on the Internet (for the first year or so, it was even my MSN status message).

Not everybody follows this line of thinking though. Some people in my class have turned comments off completely, and others leave them on but try to avoid seeking them. Their reasoning is that they're not sure they would respond well to negative feedback - either they're not emotionally able to handle it or they're not going to be able to rebut.

I understand their feelings to a degree. Especially because they were forced to blog - they wouldn't have done it on their own, and they're not going to keep it up once the semester ends. However...it's a journalism class. They're all journalism students. Presumably this means they want to be journalists. And maybe I'm wrong in my thinking, but it's my understanding that working journalists will get feedback from people they've never met. Usually negative feedback - strangers are more likely to tell you you're doing something wrong than you're doing something right.

So if they can't handle negative feedback from complete strangers now, what makes them want to pursue a career where they're virtually guaranteed it in the future?

There's also the matter of people - and I'm not sure our class had any of these - who disable comments because they want you to know what they think, but they don't particularly care what you think. People who would rather have their opinions be thought of as fact than have any sort of debate. This is possibly the biggest turn-off I ever see in a blog - and I wonder if there's something to the fact that most of the time I see it, it comes from people with a political ideology somewhere to the right of mine.

I've generally been pretty lucky with the feedback I've received on this blog. Most of it comes from friends, fellow bloggers, and assorted other people I already know. These people read almost everything, comment on only what interests them, and are always respectful and (aside from one devout supporter of Ughur freedom) leave political biases aside.

Aside from that, there's a smaller group of commenters who are dedicated to a particular issue (the concept of micro-news comes into play here, I guess), and only visit my blog as often as I talk about that issue. For example, the person who commended me for pointing out that Maple Leaf and Maple Lodge are not the same company, even though they sound similar and even grocery store workers (like I was at the time) can get them confused.

Finally, we come to what everybody is afraid of: the malicious comments tearing apart everything you say. I can only recall one instance of this happening to me, and it's a recent one - the maliciousness blunted quite severely by the fact the attack came from the Esperanto lobby of all people.

It's very hard to take organized attacks on your blog seriously, because to me it means that provoking that attack means you're doing something right. If what you say causes an entire group to respond, especially if the responses all seem to be along the same lines, they're probably doing it because something you said is not in the best interests of their group.

*insert segue here*

I've always felt like the intelligence (and quality) of feedback was inversely proportional to the reputation and popularity of who was receiving it. I'm far from the first person to independently come to the conclusion that Youtube comments are the lowest form of Internet-based discourse, but there's definitely a ring of truth to it. Youtube is immensely popular - at this moment, Alexa ranks it as the fourth-most-visited site on the Internet - and so the people who comment on Youtube videos are those who don't have anywhere better to offer their opinions. I suspect that most of the 'stupid Youtube commenters' are nine-year-olds who really are doing exactly what you'd expect of a nine-year-old. Most of these people may have migrated from AOL.

Then you come to the obvious legitimate news sites - the Globe and Mail, TSN, CBC, et cetera. These are a step up from Youtube in the sense that people commenting on stories at these sites are at least a little bit engaged with the news, able to string together coherent sentences, and understanding that these are reputable websites. However, whatever they type into the comment box is exactly the same as what they would say to the newspaper or the television set had they seen the story on those media - still not exactly well-thought-out, and certainly not about to engage in anybody in serious debate.

Finally, blogs. Nobody just happens to stumble upon a blog. Nobody kills time by going to an unknown blog the way they do going to CBC.ca. If you're reading a blog, it's because you're already interested in what is being said, and who is saying it. If you're commenting on a blog - and I'm talking about a real standalone blog here, not a 'blog' written by a Toronto Star reporter for the Toronto Star's website - it's because you're interested in the topic, want to make your own thoughts known, and are interested in having a debate.

In that sense, blogs are the best form of journalism when it comes to fostering public debate, ergo blogs are the most democratic form of journalism.

--Ryan