Happy May 2-4!

This weekend is the May 2-4. The 2-4 has always been my favourite long weekend. When I was a kid it was a given that we’d go to the cabin on The 2-4. Since The 2-4 is the official start of the short Canadian summer, we’d perform the rituals of opening up the cabin for the season. This included taking the canoes out of the cabin (where, for God knows what reason, they are stored for the winter), taking the battens off the screen porch, and putting away the things that were stored in an absurd “mouse-proof” manner.

The weather is never the greatest on The 2-4, Muskoka in May is still pretty cool. Even if the weekend was cold and rainy, it was always such a relief to get back to the cabin after more than 6 months of being away. Back then, waiting out the winter to get back to the cabin was sheer torture; nowadays, I’ll go years without getting up there and in the summer I find that to be unbearable. That place means more to me than the home I spent 19 years of my life in: I never get homesick for my childhood home, but I will ache for the cabin. In honour of happy 2-4 memories, I'm gonna post some cabin pictures. Isn't it beautiful?

On another note, how quaint is it that we have a holiday nicknamed for a case of beer?

The Mystery of the Bunny on the Desk

Sometime on the morning of 04 May someone came into my office (which was unlocked, and open because my officemates were in there) and left a little plush pink bunny on my closed laptop. My office mate claims she didn’t see who put it there, and so one else will admit to it. My current theory is that it was Cricket and she’s just being uncharacteristically good at lying about it.

If anyone has any information, please contact me. I really want to know why someone gave me the bunny and then didn’t own up to it.

Joel Plaskett is Awesome

Somehow I managed to go and get myself sick. It happened last Thursday. I woke up and made it to my 7am yoga class on time (no small victory, let me tell you), and I felt fine and normal. By lunch I had that getting-sick taste in the back of my throat and by the time I left school I was very obviously sick. By Friday my raw, angry throat had become the bane of my existence. I went out on Saturday night to a Joel Plaskett concert and paid for it on Sunday when I had almost no voice. I think I’m getting better now, but my throat still hates me and, oddly, my ears and eyes are sore.

Enough of my medical drama. Let me tell you about how awesome Joel Plaskett is: he’s very, very awesome. I didn’t care much for the venue: it was insanely crowded and I don’t like crowds (read: people); it was excessively loud, to the point where even JP made a comment about it. But the show itself was great. They played all the songs I had wanted to hear, and even the songs I don’t really like were great live. You could tell he was having fun: he looked like he could play all night and never tire (they played for 2 hours as it was). I would recommend that everyone see him live if they get the chance. You don’t know what you’re missing.

Something new

I feel the need to post, having not done so for a while. Yesterday was Bono's Birthday. I tend to ignore this fact as I hate to admit to myself how old he really is.

My best friend of 16 years is visiting from Ontario, so we've been doing our thing. Our Thing is essentially watching movies and TV shows and creating fictional storylines and being snarky. We've seen some good movies (Little Miss Sunshine) and some bad, bad, oh-so-bad movies (The Covenant, The Return). The bad ones are fun to talk through, the stuff we make up is so much better than the crap in the movie. When we're together we also tend to go to used bookstores and buy too many books in a fever of bibliophiliac compulsion. I also swear a lot more when I'm around her; we're really very good influences on each other.

I want to send a belated Birthday Shout-Out to Annie. I'm really bad for forgetting/missing her Birthday. Happy Birthday Annie!! Below is the only picture I have of Annie (in yellow) and myself, and you can't even see her face! It was taken on a field trip during our first year at Dalhousie.

Action

Big shout-out to Mika and Amy for doing the Walk for Dafur this past weekend.

Instead of just watching TV and telling their friends to donate money (like some people) they actually walked 15km as part of a longer, very ambitious fundraiser organized by local students.

Mika provided a picture of the walk (above), and I’ve provided an irrelevant picture of Mika playing pool.

Fishes Are King

Ecologists, like myself, tend to be very loyal to their study organisms. It’s not uncommon (it is very common, in fact) for Cricket and I to have the following scientific debate:

Me: Frogs suck.
Cricket: Frogs are awesome.
Me: Fish are so much better than frogs.
Cricket: Are not!

If Monica was in the room, she’s make some comment about how crabs are better than both fish and frogs. Then Oz would say that raptors are better than all those taxa, and Julie would start in on how great whales are, and the room would erupt in chaos. Debates like this are pretty useless, because none of us are going to convince anyone else that our animal is the best (and also because none of us have ever defined what “better” really is).

But all the debate is over. I’ve known for a long time now that fish are better than all the other animals. Not cuter, necessarily, or smarter, or more innovative, just Better. I’ve never been able to articulate it, but then last night while I watched Grey’s Anatomy, it hit me. Vandellia cirrhosa is the reason that fish are better than anything else out there.

For those of you that don’t know, this is a blood-parasite Amazon fish that will swim up the urethra of mammals (and this includes humans) presumably because it is following the ammonia in our urine. And these things aren’t small, either.

When the candirú successfully invades a human …it quickly wriggles its way in as far as possible, often accompanied by the victim's frantic attempts to grip the slippery, mucus-coated tail. In the unlikely event that the panicked victim manages to grasp the fish, its backwards-pointing barbs would cause excruciating pain at each pull, and bring a quick end to the dramatic tug-of-war. Once inside, the parasite inches its way up the urethra to the nearest blood-gorged membrane, extends its spines into the surrounding tissue, and starts feasting. (Source)

I’d like to see a Western toad try to swim up some guy’s penis! It’ll never happen; only fish are awesome enough to do it. Take that, frogs! In your face, birds of prey! Up yours, marine crustaceans! Talk to the hand, whales! Fishes are King. Debate over.

Absurd

I think, in the course of a lifetime, we do many things of which we are ashamed. Hell, in any given week I do things that I would be embarrassed to admit to. Like last night, I sat down to watch (forgive me) American Idol Cares, a very special results/charity fund raiser episode where the Idols and all their celebrity friends came together to perform and raise money for the needy people of the world. Yes, The World. Ryan Seacrest, Simon Cowell, Paula Abdul, and that Randy person are going to save The World. I watched because I had heard that Bono would be on. I love Bono, I really do, but even my brand of obsessive, fanatical love has its limits. I had to watch his appearance before I could determine if it was forgivable. It was. He had the good taste not to appear on the live broadcast. His part was pre-taped and all he did was talk to the contestants about the One Campaign, and do a little interview where he was self-deprecating about appearing on American Idol. Damn, he’s good. (I thought it was polite of him not to perform and therefore juxtapose his awesome talents with the less-awesome “talents” of the contestants.)

It was such a bizarre two hours (yes, God, two hours!) of television. The charities were completely worthy, and even I have to admit it was pretty awesome that they chose local and international charities, and causes as simple as buying arts n’ crafts supplies to things as important as literacy and antiviral HIV drugs. I commend them for raising the money, and for trying to cause some positive change in The World. I have no doubt that this money will do a lot of good; it’s just that something about it does not sit well with me.

The whole show seemed absurd. I usually like the absurd, but this was… preposterous. It was still a typical American Idol results show. So, after the video clip of the woman raising 14 little AIDS orphans in Africa, we cut to Seacrest telling some talentless hack that s/he’s “safe” for another week, because America loves them. How nice for them, to be safe and loved by an entire country. Then we cut to the people of Louisiana that America has somehow managed to forget about even though they live in slums of abject poverty. If only they could sing! If only they were willing to debase themselves for our entertainment! Then maybe America would care.

Yes! I know! I’m a huge cynic! But the whole thing was awful! Seacrest talked the whole evening about the “shocking” results that were to be announced that evening. Who cares?! You can’t aim to educate people about the plight of the poor in America and Africa, stress the importance of all of those lives, then hold the results of your stupid, trite, talent contest on the same level of importance.

The whole thing was like some bad parody of American hypocrisy. Except it wasn’t a parody. If only they had held the results another night. Then I might not have been so offended by it. I’m glad money was raised, I just wish they had gone about it differently.

It reminded me of Ricky Gervais raising money for Kenya.



Oh, and you should all donate money to some charities.

Deadmonton

So far in 2007, Edmonton is averaging 1 homicide every 11.4 days. At this rate, the city will be empty in about 30,000 years.

Arrested Development

I shouldn’t have to tell anyone how great the show Arrested Development was. Everyone already knows that it is the funniest show in the history of television. Even though it was cancelled a year ago it still lives on in our hearts and our minds. I only have to think of some of my favourite lines and I can’t stop laughing. Take the following, said by Tobias Funke:

"Are you forgetting that I was a professional twice over — an analyst and a therapist. The world’s first analrapist."

It just gets funnier the more you think about it.

French for Penguin

The other morning I was watching TV and came across this great, little computer-animated children’s show about penguins. There was a family (I assume) of 5 super-cute penguins. Their beaks and flippers were colour-coded, so you could tell them apart (kind of like TMNT). They lived on an ice floe and slept in bunk beds. The only draw-back to this show was that it was in French. Apparently my French vocabulary is ranked somewhere lower than “Toddler” because I didn’t understand a word those little penguins were saying. I watched it anyway, because I was intrigued by the plot. From what I could tell, four of the penguins weren’t sleeping well and they blamed it on the well-rested fifth penguin. They tried to get revenge by scaring him. They snuck up on him, put on scary costumes, but nothing worked; probably because a super-cute penguin is still super-cute even if it is wearing a witch’s hat. One morning the fifth penguin wakes up to find his 4 siblings gone. He looks all over for them (well, he looked under the bunk beds anyway), then goes to ask the neighbours. This is where it fell apart for me. I liked it up until this point, I really did. The fifth penguin talks to some kind of cat, like a leopard or something, then some seals, then polar bears. Sadly, I doubt this penguin traveled all the way to the opposite pole to look for his siblings. This is just bad biogeography and we shouldn’t be teaching kids that polar bears and felines live on Antarctica. Granted, the children watching this show will probably see the extinction of all those animals in their lifetime, so maybe it doesn’t matter that they never knew where they lived if they’re only going to see them in museums. But still! It’s just lazy biology and I won’t stand for it.

During my daily onset of soul-crushing boredom, I came across an observation that I don’t think I ever published. It dates back to just before Christmas:

So I was on hold with a cab company, and in between pieces of musak, there was a recording talking about all the good things about that particular company. One of the things it said was that all vehicles are equipped with GPS trackers, “for your safety.” Oddly, that does not make me feel safe, if anything the fact that they feel they need to track their vehicles makes me uneasy. The only thing that tracker is going to help them with is finding out what route the cabbie took to the ravine to dump my body.