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Why....

...do only people with poor choice in music feel the need to share it with the entire neighbourhood? No one in Vanier drives around with Radiohead's OK Computer blaring out of their Honda Civic sunroof. What makes you think I want to listen along to The Thong Song? Just because it was on the MuchMusic Countdown (half a decade ago!), doesn't mean it is, or ever was, any good. It just means that the record companies have you exactly where they want you. And do you really want me to know that you're a sheep with no taste? I mean, if you're baby blue Exco track suit didn't tell me that already?

Note: I realise that musical taste, and track suit choice, is subjective. But seriously, The Thong Song? And you turned it up! You felt the need to broadcast it. That just shows mental instability.

Songs that should only be enjoyed as a guilty pleasure to which you would never admit, but that I have recently heard played so loudly I thought the band was living in my teeth:

La La, Ashley Simpson (Because Lala-ing on the kitchen floor is exactly what your 12-year-old fans should be fantasizing about)
This Love, Maroon 5 (Not that anything they released this year was any better, but if you want a "classic", go further back than 2004)
Candy Shop, 50 cent (we get it, it's a euphemism, you're so clever and dirty...)
Let's Go, Shawn Desman (CanCon be damned, you need to get over the whole girl-on-girl allusion in your song lyrics, Sean; it's just not that shocking anymore)

Songs that should be played loudly, and often, to share with the world:
Rebellion (Lies), The Arcade Fire
This is rock music, plain and simple.
Sitting, Waiting, Wishing, Jack Johnson
Poppier than the stuff from Brushfire Fairytales, it still makes you feel sexy just listening to his voice.
Tiny Vessels, Deathcab for Cutie
Sometimes relationships are shallow, and sometimes that's okay, because sometimes, a beautifully sad song can be written in their aftermath.
I'll Find A Way, Rachael Yamagata
And when you are in an unshallow, wonderful relationship, you can appreciate a beautiful love song even more.
Such Great Heights, The Postal Service
Yes, electronic instruments can sound melodic and not be cheesey. They just need to be wielded by actual musicians...
We Will Become Silhouettes, The Shins (cover of The Postal Service)
...so that they still sound good on an acoustic guitar. Isn't that the test of greatness for any song?

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WTF?

I am a girl, and while I try to be fairly inconspicuous and keep my shoe collection to a minimum, occasionally that extra X chromosome starts working in its mysterious ways. I am not entirely sure what is at work here, but today I got misty eyed during an Eddy Murphy movie. And to top it all off, it wasn't the first time.
The Nutty Professor, Dr. Doolittle, and Dr. Doolittle 2 choke me up. Actually, the scene in the comedy club in The Nutty Professor makes me outright weep.
I don't know what is more sad: that if Dr. Doolittle doesn't reintroduce a performing bear to the wild, the forest animals will all lose their homes, or that I am at home on a Sunday afternoon, doing laundry in my pyjamas, whimpering over talking squirrels.

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Philosophy 101 (course exemptions: Senility 224, Randomness 305)

This is the signature file from an e-mail I received from one of my authors. This is attached to every e-mail he sends me. The whole thing. Names and locations have been changed or deleted to protect my own ass.

**********************************
Dr. X.Y. Z
Distinguished Research Professor [I don't know who distinguished him as such]
Editor, [Prestigious science journal]
Department of Biological Sciences
[Name of College Deleted]
Life Sciences Building

Who wrote these or where did they appear?

1. "Don't forget, no you, who you are and where you stand in this struggle."
2. "...a history of kitchen and bathroom doodling can give one an intuitive
understanding of population genetics."
3. "North Alabama was full of Liquor Interests, Big Mules, steel companies,
Republicans, professors, and other persons of no background." ( )
4. "I am no breeching scholar in the schools.
I'll not be tied to hours, nor 'pointed times,
But learn my lessons as I please myself." ( )
5. "If we're not follish young, we're follish old" ( )
6. "Our genomes badly need worming" ( )
7. "Meine Zeit wird schon kommen"-"My time will come" ( )
8. "Our doubts are traitors and makes us lose the good we oft might win
By fearing to attempt" ( )
9. "Beer's a food" ( )
10. "I am not aware that the tone of society [Australia] has yet assumed any
peculiar character, but with such habits & without intellectual
pursuits, it can hardly fail to deteriorate (& become like that of the
people of the United States)". ( )
11. "Thou, Nature, art my goddess, to thy law
My services are bound" ( )
12. "We can't turn back the days that have gone. We can't turn life back to
the hours when our lungs were sound, our blood hot, our bodies young. We
are a flash of fire--a brain, a heart, a spirit. And we are
three-cents-worth of lime and iron-which we cannot get back." ( )
13. "...world, world, o world,
But that thy strange mutations make us hate thee,
Life would not yield to age." ( )
14. "Men should be what they seem;" ( )
15. "I returned home, much older
after crossing the world.

Now I ask questions of nobody.

But I know less every day". ( )
16. "That year all the students seemed to mutate..." ( )
17. "Clearly, advantageous mutations should be much less frequent than
deleterious mutations." ( )
18. "Education is all right, it's the people that spoil it." ( )
19. "What I shrink from, I believe, is the shame of dying as stupid and
befuddled as I am" ( )
20. "The day was made for laziness, and lying on one's back in green places,
and staring at the sky till its brightness forced one to shut one's eyes
and go to sleep; and was this a time to be poring over musty books in a
dark room, slighted by the very sun itself? Monstrous! ( )

21. "In her winter dress, as now, she was like the tiger-beetle, which, when
observed in dull situations, seems to be of the quietest neutral colour,
but under a full illumination blazes with dazzling splendour" ( )
22. "I used to love to drift along the pale-yellow cornfields, looking for the
damp spots one sometimes found at their edges, where the smartweed soon
turned a rich copper colour and the narrow brown leaves hung curled like
cocoons about the swollen joints of the stem." ( )
23. "Sixty-seven years later, alone again, in a Jackson developed beyond her
imagining, widowed, nearly all the adventures of her life in the past,
she recalled the earlier memory of solitude. Outside, her overgrown
garden, full of trees, the ground dry, yellow, waiting for rain." ( )
24. "of making many books there is no end, and much study wearies the body" ()
25. "There is commonly less money, less wisdom, and less good faith than men
do account upon." ( )
26. "God so loved the world that he made fruit flies" ( )
27. "Uniform pleasantness is rather a defect than a faculty. It shows that a
man hasn't sense enough to know whom to dispise" ( )
28. "How I want a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy lectures
involving quantum mechanics!" = ?
29. "I never give them hell, I just tell the truth and they think it's hell."
30. "...natural history, youth's glorious study, has, by dint of cellular
improvements, become a hateful and repulsive thing." ( )
31. "That nobody should remember me who knew me in other days, is natural
enough; but there are few people who, seeing me once, forget me now." ()
32. "Whatever my hearers might do, I myself always learned something by
lecturing. And to those who have experience of what a heart-breaking
business teaching is--how much the can't-learns and won't-learns and
don't-learns predominate over the do-learns--will understand the comfort
of that reflection"
33. Noli turbare circulos meos Don't disturb my circles
34. Nullius in verba Don't take anyone's word for it
35. "You see our pretty things are all outdoors."
36. "You're bound to get ideas if you go thinkin about stuff."
37. "None of us can cast stones, for we are all fellow mutants together."
38. "It seems to me that the earth may be borrowed but not bought. It may be
used, but not owned. It gives itself in response to love and tending, offers its
seasonal flowering and fruiting. But we are tenants and not possessors,
lovers and not masters. Cross Creek belongs to the wind and the rain, to
the sun and the seasons, to the cosmic secrecy of seed, and beyond all,
to time."
39. "...Nought may endure but Mutability"

1. "So much things to say" Bob Marley
2. "Frogs, flies, and dandelions" M. Schilthuizen
3. "To Kill a Mockingbird" Harper Lee
4. "The Taming of the Shrew"
5. The Knight's Tale, "The Canterbury Tales"
6. Matt Ridley, "Genome"
7. Gregor Mendel
8. "Measure for Measure"
9. "Green Hills of Africa"
10. Charles Darwin's Diary of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle
11. "King Lear"
12. "Look Homeward Angel"
13. "King Lear"
14. "Othello"
15. "And How Long", Pablo Neruda
16. "Ship Fever, Andrea Barrett
17. "The Neutral Theory of Molecular Evolution", Motoo Kimura
18. Bartender in movie Easter Parade
19. "Waiting for the Barbrians". J. M. Coetzee
20. "The Old Curiosity Shop" Charles Dickens
21. "The Return of the Native" Thomas Hardy
22. "My Antonia" Willa Cather
23 "A Turn in the South" V. S. Naipaul
24. Ecclesiastes 12:12
25. "The Advancement of Learning" Francis Bacon
26. me
27. "A Pair of Blue Eyes", Thomas Hardy
28. ¼
29. Harry Truman
30. Jean-Henri Fabre. 1879. "Souvenirs Entomologiques"
31. Dickens "Nicholas Nickleby"
32. Thomas H. Huxley "Man's Place in Nature"
33. Archimedes 212 or 211 BC
34. Royal Society motto
35. Robert Frost "The Housekepper"
36 Joad in "The Grapes of Wrath"
37. H. J. Muller, 1950
38. Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, "Cross Creek"
39. Shelley "Mutability"

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Riddle me this...

The Running Room on Bank St. has a wheelchair-accessible washroom. This washroom is located in the basement. The basement is only accessible by a flight of very steep stairs. I know this isn't irony, unless you subscribe to the Alanis Morisette School of Literary Devices, but it's something alright.....

Today is Election Day south of the border. How many people will be wearing black hoodies to the polls?

They're showing Sex and The City reruns on City TV at 7:00 pm. I caught an episode last week. The one where Carrie tells Aidan that she cheated on him with Big. I never understood the whole "Big" thing, and especially never understood why someone would choose him over Aidan.... perfect, sweet, wonderful, strong-yet-sensitive-yet-not-effeminate, calloused-hands-because-he's-a-carpenter (and what's hotter than woodworking?) Aidan.

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