In my little post on being well-read and well-traveled, and the overabundance of value we’ve put on it (I’ve known people who’ve gotten better marks ’cause they taught English in Japan, and better jobs cause they’ve spent a year in Europe) I mistakenly typed contentious, when I MEANT conscientious. Quite the typo.
Really though, I think if you want to be an interesting person, both are pretty important.
You should have an open mind, yes, you should be a nice person, yes.
But you should also be willing and able to stand your ground, and question others grounds.
There’s nothing wrong with being critical. We (in North America especially) need to get over the fear of being “mean” when we decide to examine something’s merits - and losses.
More than the value of just being honest (which I have gained more loyal friends from being, than lost - at this point, people actually hunt me down because they know I’m going to tell them the truth) none of us will go anywhere, and none of us will succeed if we don’t look our own successes and failures square in the jaw and examine them thoroughly.
After all, if you don’t know how you’ve failed, how are you supposed to understand where those failures came from in the first place? How are you supposed to fix the problem? How are you supposed to make things right?
It should be noted, however, that a careful warts-and-all examination of something, is VERY different from just launching into something’s (or especially someone’s) perceived flaws completely unprovoked.
That actually is just being mean. And it’s usually only done in order to boost one’s own very low self esteem. Try to avoid that.
Heath Ledger?
Really?
Seriously?
I’ve loved that dude since Roar. He’s like my teenage crush number 2 (number 1 was Christian Bale - so just imagine how excited I was to see him star alongside Batman as Joker - and now it’s just going to be creepy).
And he was an amazing actor to boot - he turned even teenybopper flicks into something interesting and inherently watchable (10 Things I Hate About You for example - and A Knights’s Tale too).
Poor dude had a baby girl.
I mean, hollywood actors implode from time to time, but when’s the last time anyone of actual worth died and left behind a little helpless baby.
Pretty much never.
Can we get Hollywood off of drugs now, please? Damn things are destroying my favourite actors, and acting’s something I actually used to enjoy and respect at one point in time.
Ok, so here’s my official: “hey look everybody, I re-designed this baby!” post (as if you needed prompting, my lovely, lovely fans).
Like always, I’m asking you out there to beta this for me - it should be perfect on Macs running Safari or Firefox, but if you are on a Windows machine running Internet Explorer, I would especially like to hear from you because I no longer have a PC around to check these things on. If anything looks weird (not like the screenshot up there) please comment!
By the way, there is no particular inspiration for this look other than that I wanted something that was fun and summery.
The many body font should be American Typewriter. According to some website I looked at it’s on ninety-five of computers running Windows or Mac operating systems. If you don’t have American Typewriter, the typeface you’re looking at should be Courier New, which, while obviously not my ideal choice (that would be American Typewriter, duh) I feel is a nice face that is seriously underrated for uses outside of coding. At very least it gives me an approximation of the old timey typewritery feel I’m going for.
In crazy and completely unrelated news, last night I had a dream that we found a drowning Staffordshire Bull Terrier while driving along a country road. It had a collar, but it only had it’s name on it. It’s name was Rock & Roll. Is that not the most awesome name for a little bull dog, ever? Now I want a Staffordshire Bull Terrier named Rock & Roll.
Tomorrow I leave for England!
*the title was written by the kitten
iBook vs kitten:
Tonight we’re headed out to Sneaky Dees for our very first visit.
Even though it’s a Toronto institution, I’ve already been told I’ll be disappointed, so I’m not expecting much (despite the fact that my one of my favourite bands the Lowest of the Low profess their love for the place, and then dedicate a song to it on their live album).
We’re going to see one of Liam’s friends from back home’s boyfriend’s band.
Their name is They Shoot Horses Don’t They (clever) and they are slowly being hyped up by indie media as we speak. Their new album (released by Kill Rock Stars) was even (badly) reviewed in a recent issue of Vice magazine.
Completely coincidentally, they also played last night in Guelph with Dollarama.
I went to pick up my desk from my parents today (yay!), and I found out something funny, but not funny ha-ha (unless you have a really weird sense of humour… like I do).
Every time my family goes somewhere something horrible happens in that locale, to an innocent bystander, shortly thereafter.
They went to London in the middle of last summers bombings, Texas right in the middle of the anthrax scare and my sister was even in New Orleans a few months before it got washed away. That’s just a shortlist.
So guess where they went a couple weeks ago?
If you guessed the Mayan Riviera, you would be correct.
But more than that, they stayed at the exact same resort as that couple that got murdered. The exact same one.
Moral of the story is, if you want to know where not to go on vacation, just ask my parents where they’re headed next.
Have I mentioned yet, that I attended a Bar-mitzvah themed New Years party in a Thornhill Basement with a real-life-honest-to-goodness Bar-mitzvah DJ, and a real-life-honest-to-goodness Vice Magazine Intern, and the Canadian representative for Japanther?
We listened to Boards of Canada, New Kids on the Block, and Faith Evans and danced the Hora.
You may think I made that all up to make some ironic statement about modern ‘hipsterism’ - but I didn’t.
100% the truth.
I have either made all the right connections, or all the wrong ones.
I just can’t make up my mind.
I think I’m going to say for now, it’s fun, so I can stand being a indie-socialite (besides, I’m moving to downtown Toronto to go to art school, so I should probably get used to it).
So I’ve officially been spammed.
Not just a little spam here and there, more like a sudden spam bomb that exploded in my comments.
It’s really not too big a deal. They spam didn’t even make it onto my web-site, because they were pretty obviously not actual human interaction. But, being previously spam free, I had my system set to moderate questionable content, so there was a moment there when my inbox was flooded with e-mails from my admin system. I implemented a handy spam blaster plug-in, and things seem to be going slightly smoother.
But I’m still not pleased.
There’s something about my own private corner of the internet being so fully assaulted that gets me all twitchy.
It doesn’t help matters that this spam was annoyingly un-generic. Every single message came from a different IP, and each message had a unique variety of links. Commercial, non-spammer links too. Telling me to visit sites I normally visit, that everybody normally visits. News sites, movie sites, just generic popular sites.
No poker, bingo, porn or Viagra.
That worries me.
I can’t figure out the purpose of it. According to Google, it doesn’t exist.
It is completely purposeless. It doesn’t sell anything.
It is spam, for spam’s sake.
What’s up with that?
It does occasionally make me pine for the days of ink ribbons.
Am I the only one kinda fascinated by Ashlee Simpson?
I mean, I’m sure I’m not, if the amount of pictures of her in the celebrity glossies at the checkout counter are any indication…
But am I the only relatively intellectual person for whom she is a source of entertainment and perpetual bewilderment?
And most people seem to get side-tracked by her (I’m totally not surprised or shocked by the break-up at all) sister.
But Ashlee… she’s just so… watch-able.
I am willing to watch her do anything - but I am especially willing to watch her flail wildly and throw temper tantrums over french-fries. I am even willing to watch her sing badly.
I used to have this kind of fascination for Paris Hilton (back when she was a little-known, but much photographed socialite). Before her it was Kelly Osbourne, and way before that I would probably even say it was Drew Barrymore (back when she was cutting her own hair; wearing lingerie to Movie Premiers; and flashing certain night-time, talk-show hosts on-air).
It’s less a obsession, or celebrity crush, and more like going to the zoo.
I mean look at them: they’ve got faces, and bodies, and hearts, and brains… but they do such weird stuff! They’re like, totally not human. You look into their cute little faces, and you think, what’s behind those eyes? What are they thinking? What would they say if they could talk like people do?
The whole Lindsay and/or Hillary thing kinda bores me though.
Should I take this as an insult? Or not?
Brock Boy/Girl madness
As a former Brock student, I have always enjoyed the Brock Press and continue to read it by way of your e-mail edition. I do, however, have one suggestion: Stop the fucking Brock Boy/Brock Girl “article”. It is not Arts, and it certainly does not fall under the classifcation of “Entertainment”. With elitist nerd Beth Maher in charge of this garbage, you at least had an opportunity to learn the names of the random weirdos in the halls. Now, thanks to Kristen De Palma, your readers are subjected to a nauseating and embarrassing display of over worn and outdated fashion. As if that weren’t enough, her questions seem only to teeter between ridiculous and irritating. Finally, and I think this is the most important point here, no one wants to be the Brock Boy/Brock Girl.
I don’t know how many ways I can say this. I do know that I’ve kept quiet about this for too long.
Just stop.
Chris Thompson
BA Pop Culture, 2004
(ed. note) The Brock Boy/Brock Girl article frequently places in the top-five in hits on our web site and finished fourth this week, far and away ahead of any other Culture article.
From the Brock Press opinion page for September 20/2005.
For those not in the know, I used to write a fashion column for my University’s paper - a semi-sarcastic style profile of a boy and a girl on campus.
Also, interestingly enough, I think I know this Chris Thompson. I’m prettty sure he was a devestatingly gay boy on my residence floor in first year.
Come to think of it, it’s pretty ironic to be called an elitist nerd by a gay pop-culture major.