Moebius Stripper

Multiculturalism is awesome

2008-07-23T17:12:22Z

for a variety of reasons, but this is the one that prompted this post. (Listen.)

isomorphisms @ 2008-07-21T14:06:00

2008-07-21T21:09:31Z

Remember the World's Most Unwanted Song?

Well, here's the survey-produced World's Most Wanted Song. While the unwanted music is screamingly funny, the wanted one is nigh-unlistenable. I think I hear that song every single time I turn on the radio.

I find it telling that a systematically-created composite of people's favourite elements of pop music has resulted in a song that is, to my ear, indistinguishable from actual pop music.

isomorphisms @ 2008-07-14T09:26:00

2008-07-14T16:37:31Z

Yesterday was the second time I randomly ran into Jack Layton in Vancouver. (The first was at a Buddhist restaurant with gaffetheorist and schlaefli and others, where he was with our MP doing a fundraiser and speech for...something or other. We were there for the food, not the politics, and left in the middle of the speech. To quote schlaefli, "I was interested in hearing what he was saying, but not interested enough to stay and listen.")

And yesterday? At a session I was cohosting at the nearby community gardens, where he happened to be hanging out (apparently just for fun; I didn't see the MP there, and he didn't appear to be stumping. Here's why he was in town.). I have updated the "miscellaneous" section of my resume accordingly to include the line "Amateur Celtic fiddler; played for Jack Layton".

(He said nice things about our music! My father was unimpressed, and asked me if I realized that he'd do anything for my vote. I replied that this was better than the other party leaders, who appear to be doing nothing for my vote.)

isomorphisms @ 2008-07-10T14:28:00

2008-07-10T21:34:09Z

I have decided to incorporate the term "bifortnightly" into casual conversation to the extent possible. In addition to being unnecessarily cumbersome, it is also ambiguous, in that can mean either "twice a fortnight" - ie, weekly - or "once every two fortnights" - ie, more or less monthly.

I should also revitalize an old plan to substitute the nautical terms "port" and "starboard" wherever "left" and "right" occur.

Genius.

2008-07-02T22:16:14Z

Ashley MacIsaac auctions off his future earnings. Here's the auction.

Thing is, MacIsaac has been so inconsistent that the starting bid of $1.5M could be the deal of the century, or a complete rip-off. At least the winner gets yearly concerts for the next decade in a location of their choosing. I hope the winner chooses their home, or a local school or something, rather than a huge concert hall.
Come to think of it, I hope the winner's local to Vancouver...

This is how publicity stunts are done, folks.

I am secretly 12 years old and am consequently finding this to be extremely funny

2008-06-30T23:18:39Z

The American Family Association, loathe to give even the faintest suggestion that it does not condemn sodomy in the harshest terms imaginable, decides to excise the word "gay" from its articles. Hilarity ensues. (via madcaptenor)

I just realized something:

2008-05-25T17:06:47Z

By symmetry, Godliness is next to cleanliness.

yes.

2008-05-05T11:35:21Z

flippin heack, it's a bit soon for goodwin's law isn't it?

...in a discussion about Irish music.

isomorphisms @ 2008-05-04T13:18:00

2008-05-04T20:29:49Z

Whenever I take the time to read anything whatsoever related to women's fashions, which is infrequently but apparently still too bloody often, I'm generally left curled up in the fetal position wondering how on earth women are expected to properly navigate a shopping expedition, or even leave the house once the implements of womanhood have been acquired. Seriously - I'm supposed to be able to walk in those? I'm supposed to spend how much money on my hair - and then how many hours maintaining it? Why the hell doesn't anything have pockets? - oh yeah, so that I can spend how much again on a handbag, no, wait, several handbags, one for each outfit, or something. And, so help me God, what is the difference between casual and business casual, and why is all formal clothing so tight?

Articles about men's fashions, however, generally amuse the hell out of me, because as far as I can tell, despite the attempts of fashion writers to make things appear otherwise, men's formalwear is all the same. $5000 suits might be better made than $250 suits, but damned if I can tell the difference by sight.

Opera rap, among other things

2008-04-27T02:47:43Z

OMG.

It's over 25 minutes long, but you really have to listen to the whole thing.

Thinking about something specific, but this applies in general too

2008-04-21T19:11:43Z

I don't claim to be able to identify, in point form or whatnot, explicitly what makes (or fails to make) something art, nor what makes (or fails to make) its creator an artist, but it seems pretty clear to me that a high level of technical control over some medium - clay, paint, wood, whatever - figures somewhat crucially into the question. Absent that, you don't have art: you have a temper tantrum; or a political statement; or a self-important display of god knows what; or a physical setup that makes no goddamned sense whatsoever out of context, context in this case being the impenetrable 300-page jargon-laden dissertation that accompanies it; but you don't have art.

Corollary: if the hullaballoo surrounding your project is centred around the involved medium, political climate, or accompanying 300-page dissertation, and not around the actual object or assemblage of objects created, then said object/assemblage of objects is primarily a temper tantrum/political statement/self-important display of god knows what, and is art at best incidentally. If you are not sure whether or not this is the case for your project, ask yourself the following question: "Would my project have elicited as huge, and as charged, a reaction from the public if I had just led them to believe that the squiggly bits on the canvas are made of dried spaghetti, as they appear to be, rather than of the entrails of the endangered ivory-billed woodpecker, which I used to illustrate the crassness of our accessibility to the fragile?" If the answer is "yes", then your project has not garnered the attention that it has garnered as art, and you are not being critically evaluated as an artist.

Corollary 2: FOR THE LOVE OF GOD ENOUGH WITH THE MENSTRUAL BLOOD "ART" ALREADY.

Forecast for today: hail

2008-04-14T16:19:53Z

which I am posting in LJ only because the icon for hail is totally cracking me up.

isomorphisms @ 2008-04-10T14:05:00

2008-04-10T21:06:26Z

via meep, fractal cookies. Brilliant.

state of the refrigerator

2008-03-30T22:02:05Z

No longer a biological hazard.

I did not expect this

2008-03-28T16:54:32Z

Members of my pottery studio are allowed to bring in friends on occasion. Often I'll see some of my former students showing their friends the basics of potting. Said former students vary in ability from "took one workshop with me, once, and never practiced potting since" to being relatively skilled with clay. So it's interesting to hear how my lessons get adapted. (In one especially amusing case, one friend of mine was earnestly demonstrating to his girlfriend how to centre clay, which was endlessly entertaining because he couldn't get the clay anywhere near centred himself.)

Yesterday, though, was the first time I had a former student of mine explain to a friend the basics of clay preparation in much the same way that I explained it a year or so ago, but in Hebrew.

"Fantastic as it may seem, it is a legitimate instrument"

2008-03-27T23:47:48Z

To hell with the nyckelharpa. My next instrument shall be the tromba marina.

A nice birthday gift

2008-03-20T18:34:49Z

Assuming this is enforced, I might be able to enter and exit my office building without choking.

Dear Law Enforcement, Punditry, and the General Public:

2008-03-17T23:31:20Z

For the love of God, can we please impose a moratorium on the use of the term "cowardly" to describe heinous acts of violence? Seriously, it's not like we'd have given this shithead a Medal of Bravery if he'd instead hung around after the attack and posed with the victim's corpse until the press and paramedics arrived.

"watermelon is overrated"

2008-03-13T23:52:13Z

I was about to throw myself at Randall Munroe and bear his children for speaking the truth about watermelon, but then I saw that the damned fruit is still above the x-axis. What a letdown.

isomorphisms @ 2008-03-13T11:49:00

2008-03-13T18:58:25Z

There is so much St. Patrick's Day tacky hair crap (most made in China!) out there, that it's a real pity St. Patrick's Day only lasts one day.

Whatever. According to various purveyors of alcohol, music, and general craic, we are now in the midst of St. Patrick's Week. So:

Thursday: part of hair pulled back with kelly green elastic adorned with green sequins and long nylon green and white braids.

Friday: part of hair braided in 4-strand (5 if I'm feeling ambitious) Celtic knot, adorned by different long nylon green and white braids that are tied off by hideous shamrocks.

Saturday: hair braided in Celtic knot.

Sunday: hair bunned, held with green hairsticks, and surrounded by godawful neon green shamrock scrunchie, NO, REALLY, and dyed green.

Monday: again with the 4-strand braid, this time decorated with shamrock shoelaces.

NO ONE WILL EVER GUESS THAT I'M NOT IRISH.

Everyone's Jewish on St. Patrick's Day.

2008-03-10T19:20:04Z

Had the time of my life at a friend's party the other night - it was a social gathering followed by a jam session, attended by around 15 people from the Celtic music school where I'm learning to play fiddle. Which is to say, I was around 30 years younger than the average person in attendance, and, no lie, the only person there with brown eyes. This made the social gathering bit a tad awkward, as the conversation quickly settled around the topic of Tracing Our Celtic Roots, apparently a popular pastime among the other partygoers, but one that really wouldn't engage me for very long. (Amusingly, however, someone from the pottery studio, who knew nothing about my involvement in music, asked me the other day if I was Black Irish. And who else is going to braiding their hair in Celtic knots on St. Patrick's Day, hmmmm? SO.)

Anyway, I ingratiated myself with the others by offering some lame, outdated, half-remembered anecdote
about saforrest's tracing of his
(nontrivial) Celtic roots from lo these many years ago, when this one British woman, H,
interrupted me and asked me what my ethnic background was. I told her I'd tell her, but that she'd have to guess first.

"Are you Jewish?" she asked.

Might have been my Hebrew and Arabic T-shirt that gave it away, but
no matter. "Indeed I am," I said.

Her eyes widened. "OH, that's so great, I LOVE THE JEWS," she declared. "Love them! LOVE THEM! Can I hug you?" - and before I could answer in the negative, she did, and then told me that the most talented people in the world are Jews, are they not? "Jews are the best writers, the lawyers, the best gynecologists" - seriously, that was the trifecta she named, right there, and then she told me that her surname was a letter or two off from a Jewish friend's surname, maybe one was a derivative of the other, and so maybe she was Jewish, and wouldn't that be exciting? At some point I extracted myself from the conversation, and left her to resume her conversation with C (who's half Scottish) about their bona fide Celtic roots.

The jam started a bit later, and it turns out that H is an absolutely brilliant musician - she'd pick up tunes at speed and be playing them perfectly by the third time around. Hopefully I'll get a chance to play with her again in a setting where we don't have to chat about things unrelated to music.

isomorphisms @ 2008-03-07T07:38:00

2008-03-07T15:40:55Z

K, so I'm really not following this Harper/Clinton/Obama NAFTA thing very closely, but am I correct in reading that Canada is actually having some influence over an American election?

Riddle me this:

2008-03-06T17:24:30Z

From an email: I AM SORRY ABOUT THE ALL-CAPS - I BROKE MY HAND!

I am trying to fathom a kind of hand injury that would make operation of the Shift key significantly more arduous than operation of any other key, and I'm drawing a blank. I'm also not sure why all caps is a better default option than all lowercase.

isomorphisms @ 2008-03-05T14:07:00

2008-03-05T22:07:53Z

OMG, this is basically Cello Hero.

My subconscious, I do not understand it

2008-03-05T17:05:09Z

Last night's dream: making hummus. With an extra ingredient: heroin. Specifically, one pound of heroin.

"Here," I said to J, "Try this. It's my hummus, but with a secret ingredient. Oh, and just try a spoonful; you don't want to eat too much of it."

J tasted it. "Not bad," he said. "What's the secret ingredient? Soymilk?"

"No," I said, "heroin!"

"Hmm," he mused, "It's ok, but I don't know that the heroin is necessary."

Next: the challenge of storing this stuff. I put it in a Tupperware container, to go into a shared fridge. I recognized the importance of making sure that no one ate too much hummus, but how to warn them? I quickly nixed the idea of writing "CONTAINS HEROIN: DO NOT EAT TOO MUCH" on the label. A simple, "CONSUME IN MODERATION" would likely arouse suspicion, and draw attention to it. So I just put it in the fridge, and trusted that no one would open it.

Later in that dream: a trip to Alaska.