Slept for a good seven hours last night, then for some reason went back to sleep shortly after waking up just to tack on an extra five. Obviously, because the only thing better than seven hours sleep is 12 hours of sleep.
Now that things are looking much more chipper, I'm going to spend my dad fiddling with a brine and roasting a chicken for dinner. I've been playing with different ideas but I think for my first attempt at brining I'm going to keep it simple and see what the bird tastes like with a basic salt/sugar/water bath. Figure I can base all future decisions (including whether I like brine roasted chicken at all) off of today's experience.
Anybody have any tips? One hour until I submerge supper.
May 28, 2009
Some people get grumpy when they're hungry.
I get grumpy when I'm sleepy. Which, in theory, should be all the time.
But I define sleepy as the point most people whould likely call "exhausted". For some reason, when I sleep 4-5 hours straight I'm totally awake, but if I get disturbed and fall back to sleep at afterwards I am inevitably incredibly tired the next day. I assume it has to do with sleep patterns or circadian rhythms or some such thing, but I'm too lazy to even google it.
The hardest part in life is figuring out what you want.
Trying to get it is basically all life is -- but you gotta have a destination before you can have a journey.
Also, in segued television goodness:
- the Glee pilot was... essentially the 4-minute trailer, stretched into an hour. You knew what was coming, how, even what songs were going to be in the show. But it was still absurdly amusing. Hopefully they flesh out some of the characters more when it returns this fall. It could be a cult hit.
- Breaking Bad is slated for its second season finale this coming Sunday. I must say, unequivocally, this is the best show on television right now. And it's not even close. The first season was equal parts amusing and morally agile, but this second season has simply been perfect television. The show is beautiful in HD, the acting is award-worthy and the writing even moreso. This show should be watched by everyone, and Sunday's final episode can't come soon enough.
As circulation numbers dwindle and advertising revenue plummets, our city's biggest daily is having to find new ways to stir up interest in itself.
From what I've seen of the website over the past month, apparently, that strategy is simple:
Print bullshit.
I used to like The Star. It was a Liberal rag, but at least it carried insightful and personal news that was relevant to the Torontonian. These days, the layoffs are showing.
From a cursory skim, almost half of the stories I read on The Star are based on a single source. This is leading to some tremendously biased and incredibly non-balanced pieces. This is basic journalism. One voice doesn't make a story.
What's even more frustrating is that they are using this half-assed approach with controversial issues seemingly on purpose; Tamil protests, sensationalizing Ruby Dhalla's situation, anything involving religion.
At the same time, they are barely covering world news or doing stories anymore that actually dig deep into the body of Toronto and teach us more about the city we live in.
They did an entire story and video where they left wallets lying around the city, then video surveyed the contraband to see if people returned them, took money, and generally were honest.
REALLY? That's what you're spending your money doing? Seeing if 20 people are willing to return a lost wallet?
I feel bad for the Star. In my opinion, their downfall came when they stopped printing Sunday comics. Hopefully, when the economy rebounds, so will this newspaper. But for now, it's little more than a joke.
When your sports section is the most serious part of a publication, you know there's some serious soul searching to do.
This is actually a pretty tight matchup. They have a very different aesthetic, but I am inclined to say that Fringe girl is definitely more of the All-American girl. If that floats your boat, I suppose you might find her more attractive. But I like Maggie's edge. Which I understand is personal, and certainly not an objective trait.
But also, Fringe girl to me is the definition of "real world attractive."
If I saw her at a Starbucks, I'd linger, but not be particularly surprised or blown away.
For some reason, I feel like if I saw Maggie Gyllenhaal, I would immediately get that celebrity aura vibe from her. She's uniquely attractive.
Also, Cammie is always wrong. Thus, if Dave agrees with her, he is also wrong.
Can you imagine actually hanging out at a physical place called Asian Avenue? I shudder to think.
I've had a few conversations recently about social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter et al. It definitely seems that within the last two months, Twitter has absolutely exploded.
My question might be whether someone's internet promiscuity is actually proportional to that individual's real-life social activity?
Is a social networking butterfly (somebody with, say over 800 friends on Facebook) by definition also a social butterfly in real life? I suppose the more pertinent question however might rather be whether exceptions are possible.
What is the correlation between real personality and one's online presence?
Technological inclination surely has a role, but how is that connected to one's self-awareness and desire to blog, tweet or otherwise make your life more transparent to those around you (or at least, appear more transparent)? Can a personality profile be created for your online persona, and are there concrete connections to reality?
In my most rudimentary of observations, I think that people who embrace social networking openly are, generally, not necessarily more extroverted, but by-and-large more willing to make new connections.
In other words, someone who tweets constantly would probably be easier to become actual friends with than someone who doesn't have a Facebook account because they are think it's cool to be ironic.
Of course, this is even more convoluted because I think there are also plenty of cases where people are extremely promiscuous online because they are socially awkward in real life. So how does one account for that faction? Hmm...
It's all very curious. Academic studies haven't seemed to really start analyzing this relationship yet and how one affects the other, but I can honestly see the future of our communications being completely integrated into social media as "the new medium" of choice... if it isn't already, that is.
This is the part of the movie where I laughed out loud in the theatre, and Irene slapped me.
There's this part in the movie Stranger Than Fiction where Dustan Hoffman is explaining the classical romance of literature, where the main protagonists usually start off hating each other before they slowly (or via an epiphany) fall in love.
I suppose in theory this makes sense. I mean, hate and love are, when distilled, just two variations (symptoms?) of intense passion. So perhaps it's rational that somebody you have strong enough feelings for to drive you insane, naturally might also be someone that has the ability to... well, drive you insane. In a good way.
This is an interesting theory. I don't currently subscribe to any such sort of axiom in real life, but for the most part because I haven't ever seen it happen, or even heard of it happening, in reality.
It's common in books, movies, television and theatre, but where did this idea come from anyways? How did the romantic ideal come to be that two individuals who hate each other might eventually (and fatefully) be meant to be together?
It just seems so practically implausible. Is that the whole point? Is the artistic idea of romance simply achieving what we perceive to be impossible?
Seriously, does anyone have an example they might be able to cite of this occurring in real life? I am very, very curious as to the frequency of this strange, rare (yet somehow cliched) happenstance.
Moreover, I've never hated anybody before. I'm not entirely sure I'm capable of hating someone, unless they were say, some sort of monstrous criminal who refused to apologize for his/her crimes.
But I am equally sure I wouldn't fall in love with them.
Was listening to CBC Radio this weekend and they were having a show discussing the relative merits of technology in the classroom.
One side posits that an over saturation of "new media" has occurred, with phones, music players, games, computers, email and social networking, so ubiquitous that learning has become nearly impossible to focus on. Notice I used little quotes around new media, since technically social networking is not a new media, but... it just might be the next evolution. As Mark Cuban succinctly put it in his infamous tweet; "the medium is no longer the message. the network is."
The other argument of course, is that all this technology is a boon to education. It is easier to learn with computers, and programs, and podcasts and ways to connect, interact, visualize, conceptualize and analyze. All the reasons we love technology in the first place. It makes life easer, and makes what might otherwise have been impossible, very simple.
The callers were of varying usefulness, particularly one girl who said she was 25 years old, and that when she was in high school she "barely had any computers," and "used overhead projectors mostly." Also, she claimed technology was making kids today dumber, according to her completely scientific opinion. Nevermind the fact that I am 26, and distinctly recall programming in a huge computer lab in high school that also included a Mac lab. Oh, and we had a graphing/CAD lab too, which naturally used computers. Slide rules can be so cumbersome, you see. But I digress.
One question that was not discussed however is the only one I have been mulling over still on and off for a few days. Undoubtedly, today's younger generation are tech savvy. But are they technologically literate? These might be defined as different things.
Sure, kids can put up myspace or blogger websites, but whatever happened to Free Hosting? With no GeoCities or Tripod like service, very few kids are forced to look at a blank page and learn to code in HTML, CSS or Flash in order to get their creation on the net. All the steps have been simplified to one-click, and thus they never have to learn the fundamental building blocks.
Isn't this the equivalent of reading to a child his whole life, but never actually teaching that child to read? Can someone be conversationally intelligent but illiterate? I don't see why not, and to a limited extent I almost feel like that's what's happening with a lot of students these days.
They understand the end product, but are sheltered from the process.
If anything, I think that's the real issue with technology in the classroom -- it's too dated. You can't be teaching stuff like "this is a mouse" to kids. There needs to be some sort of plan to actually advance them knowledge that won't be irrelevant within a year's time. Education not only needs to embrace technology, it needs to essentially become it's main driver if both are to achieve something continually useful for students of all ages.
Now I feel like I should register for some continuing education classes or something.
With everybody scampering around trying to book flights to Calgary, I find myself seriously considering the prospect of driving there. In my car.
I realize it would irreversibly devalue my baby. And I'd probably have to sleep in the car to save money.
But you know what? I feel like it'd be one of those neat, eye-opening trips that cause me to love Canada more afterwards. Like that movie with Joshua Jackson, except, probably less well lit.
Am I crazy? Is sleeping in my car at a prairie rest stop a recipe for beheading?
There's a great line by Chuck Klosterman when talking about pornography, where he wonders why it is attractive to see a girl get shot all over the face with sea-monkeys. He equates it to slapping her in the face with a fry pan.
Clearly, he is of the minority, since almost every pornographic film scene ends with the same money shot. Heck, even Kobe Bryant testified in his rape case that he enjoys it. "It's my thing," he told Colorado police officers when discussing details of his unfortunate affair. Right. And I patented the question mark.
I suppose pornography isn't a topic I discuss often, but I'm really intrigued by Steven Soderbergh's new movie "The Girlfriend Experience", which stars (in)famous porn starlet Sasha Grey.
For starters, it's a real life jump for a porn actor to legitimate acting. And, yes, I realize it's a stretch (no pun intended! eww....) to say a porn star is acting when her role is "call girl", but whatever. If Keanu Reeves is an actor, then we should at the very least acquiesce for Miss Grey as well. This is uncommon, and Soderbergh is a big time director. I'm sold.
Second, a quote from a recent Guardian article about the movie really got me thinking:
"With Sasha, you can within seconds see her do anything you can imagine with her clothes off," Soderbergh acknowledges. "What you can't see is what it's like to be her boyfriend, to hang out with her and be emotionally intimate with her. So my whole theory is that's the fantasy for those who've been double-clicking – that they want to spend 77 minutes being her boyfriend."
I find myself these days not particularly interested in pornography. Sure, send in the gay jokes, but through the years, I've found that whenever I see a porn scene or a television show about porn stars, I am more curious about the sociological commentary and semiotic relevance of the whole construct.
These women are an enigma, no? In this month's Rolling Stone, there is a feature on Sasha Grey. She is an intelligent girl, and argues that her actions are an empowering form of feminism. She points out that if equality, rights and freedom is manifested in the right to make choices, then shouldn't all choices be respected regardless of society's hollow moral pillars? Isn't telling her not to be a porn star actually an act of misogyny?
But really? Does Sodenbergh believe that internet porn surfers fantasize about emotionally connecting with Sasha Grey? That they want to argue about what movie to rent, where to eat dinner and whether it's time to move on to the next level?
Do consumers of porn consider actors to be real people?
I'm not sure. Frankly, I don't even fully believe as a whole, society extends that much empathy to normal celebrities. They are spectacles for our amusement and consumption, not vessels for our emotional plight.
So is porn really empowering then? If most of the people watching you being disrespected and degraded are willing to gloss over that fact to see you get hit in the face with a fry pan, does that really give a woman a sense of autonomy and self-respect?
I don't have answers. But I think the porn industry is one of those facets and products of our sexual behavior that has a lot to say about our society. We just never really think about it any deeper than the superficial.
Which is only fitting, I suppose, if not somewhat ironic in how absolutely non-ironic it is.
Of note: this movie isn't even about porn. But it deals with many of the same issues, in a more thought provoking way; which are all those issues we almost never want to deal with.
