raison d'etre

The apple of my eye

When scientists have WAY too much time on their hands...

I think he regrets selling his guitar at age 15 for a telescope...
Pseudo Art. Pretty irritating... I wonder if scientists feel the same sort of annoyance when we artees try to incorporate pseudo-science into our practice...

The Glasgow Miranda July

Funnnnnnnnnee

Said the Boston Globe "It's not just that Sedaris's crisp prose is humorous. What makes his work a consistent joy to read is his deliciously skewed vision of the world, and his deadpan delivery".

Here is a favorite excerpt to show this. He opens the paragraph explaining how he nonchalantly asks taxi drivers, when entering a new city, census figures. He does so rather than reading guidebooks because it's really a segway into his real question, local gun laws. He goes on and on about them and finishes with: " I ask about guns not because I want one of my own but because the answers vary so widely from state to state. In a country that's become increasingly homogeneous, I'm reassured by these last charming touches of regionalism."

Ever seen Tomb Raider?

I haven't, it wasn't until After this happened to me that I found out it was pretty much a scene straight out of the movie. Funny. It was shot close to Angkor Wat at these temples that I actually got to visit. In the movie I guess Jolie is attracted by fauna, butterflies, and a child to this secret entrance. Well, same thing happened to me. I was following these butterflies and drawn in by the beauty of the flora when this little boy popped up and led me to an entirely different and barred off area of the temples. It was So magical, he was Cambodian so we didn't speak and was like 4 feet high, but he was clearly luring me in... I happily followed. We scrambled in a forbidden area over all these broken rocks and caved in sections until lo and behold we came upon a scorpion! He laughed at my terror, it was huge and black (which apparently= harmless... it's the small white ones you have to look out for), he simply stabbed its' stinger so it was rendered defenseless. Then picked it up with this smart aleck look, by the tail, and threw it against the wall as if it was an orange peel. All of a sudden he seemed 6.4, my hero. He could read it in my body language, so the game continued... ... There were a few other synchronicities between my time and the movie. Magical. What also made it so was this feeling, there really was something to that place. Maybe it was the majesty of nature totally overtaking prideful man's attempt to build a fortress in the middle of their turf. The trees just devastated these structures, So lovely.

Why do our brains so fight against the improbable? It would be improbable to assume there is no improbable.

Naïve Urban Excavation

The artifacts one finds in the urban space of a region reveals the social nature of that place. I experimented with this in my Vancouver neighbourhood, situated right around Main and Hastings, by walking for five minutes and gathering a tally of the items I found. In my excavation I uncovered rigs, human vomit, dog poo and littered debris. Crude imagery that speaks a socioeconomic storey.

The rigs on the street signify that it is a neighborhood where open drug use is prevalent; these items are the residual icons of a class of people unable to shoot up within doors, the houseless. The vomit signifies the hipsters, who party at the local dives alongside the regulars, vomiting together when both have excessively imbibed. This mixing of socioeconomic class vomit is a point of joy for both parties. Hipsters find the bars have very affordable prices to get smashed. Or more often than not, if you find yourself closer to a skid/ hipster, a consenting place to smuggle a flask into and get inebriated exceptionally cheaply. While the locals tolerate this infiltration, they do so pleasantly as it is implicit with flirtatious energy and revealing clothing worn by these youthful revelers. Dog poo speaks of an entirely different class, those who have a living space, likely along the water. That they leave their dogs poo on the street reflects their view of the neighborhood and their unquestioned liberty within it. And last but not least, the debris, which brings us back again to the houseless class. There are disposal bins that abound in the neighborhood; albeit often overflowing, thus not using the disposal bins can infer something else. To the untrained eye, what can seem like waste is often someone's sole belongings. That it is on the street can either mean it has been abandoned, much like the various other comforts these people have had to forgo, or that there is no other space to store it in.

Best... Doctor... Ever

Gender Changing Frogs

In'eresting

What I've been chewing on, then regurgitating, then chewing on again of late: Applied Linguistics. Specifically the Soviet scholar Mikhail Bakhtin's writings, and a bit of Dell Hymes's communicative competence. Basically I'm obsessed with Bakhtin, yet there are important similarities in both their ideas: their explicit opposition to the Saussurian dichotomy between langue and parole; their belief that speech is both structured and emergent; their research on literature as well as language; and their conceptions of language acquisition.

Bakhtin analysed the intrinsic intertextuality of all utterances, and the consequences of heteroglossia for speakers and writers–notably, intrapersonal conflicts during the process of expression because of the auras that accrue to language forms from awareness of their previous contextualized use.

Daschunds, Reindeers, and Toyota Tercels

So I just woke up in the middle of the night and I remember my dream very well (usually never do).

Here 'tis. Im driving on these icy Icelandic-esque roads with this mother figure. We keep passing these views that are just BEAUTIFUL. Like these clouds that look like crystal in opacity and shale like in form, they are a strange dark smoky blue. I insist I want to get out and investigate but she speeds on. She, being too excited about the views, keeps going and we pass these crazy gothic-esque burned out tree stumps that look like a pyre/castley thing. This continues until we turn a corner that resembles the road where my cabin in Sylvan Lake is (it's a hairpin turn, super icy, so I pray we don't die), we take it Way too quick and finally careen to a stop. I had already begun to open the door 'cause I really wanted to get out and go back and look at those crazy clouds. It was about 10 meters before the car slid to a halt while I pretty much rolled out of the passenger side door... Unfortunately we were at the base of a big hill on top of which a large reindeer was, it began to stamp it's feet once I got out of the car... so I began to run, away from the road towards the opposite side of the street from the views, along a lake. So I am running and am joined by some mythical flying tiny greyhound that latches around my neck. I think it is trying to get me back in the car, but it is just up for some fun (rather innapropriately as I am running for my life and it is latched around my neck, gleefully). I've been running only shortly and the reindeer is close. In this dream I know that this type would bite you or something, so I slide underneath an embankment created on the shoreline by an overturned tree. There are lots of big river rocks around so I barricade these frantically in front of me, specifically my face. I do this really quickly as it is hot on my tail and tela-communicate with the tiny and excitable greyhound to keep running/flying as to lure the reindeer. The reindeer is pushing it's snout at the rocks around my face, as if trying to eat me. It was only about 3 seconds before this I got the final rock there in time, so my hand is still exposed. But rather than trying to bite at it, it seems very calm. The flying greyhound is still present, I tela-communicate that I expect until a priest or faery comes to charm/calm this reindeer and get it down on it's haunches (similar to the way a dog sits) and rest it's head on it's forehooves... I am stuck. But it begins to do so immediately, in front of my rock barricade (which looks allot like a hiking spot in North Vancouver I used to always bring Rosie, the little girl I nanny, to) ... and then I woke up.

Oh the exhilaration of it all. It was in black and white pretty much, or a very white snowy bleak northern climate (with ash trees, no leaves, so the trunks are black n white). But it had these Vivid almost photoshopped fake electric colours that were smoked and dulled by a cinder hue everywhere. The greyhound slightly resembled the enchanted dog dragon off the Neverending Storey, however it was the size of a daschund. The mother figure looked quite a bit like my aunt who looked like my mother. The car was an old pale blue and rusty Toyota Tercel, I used to own a coal one. Psychological. Those clouds, they were freaking cool. Wish I could go back down that road and look a time, for a Long time. Maybe I can, going back to sleep now.