Halifax Shoes

The kids pointed out to me today that there are a lot shoes in Halifax hanging on telephone lines. We counted 5 separate incidences on our drive down to the Commons this afternoon. That's not five pairs of shoes, just five sightings. One wire had two pairs and the one in the Commons had about a dozen pairs.

I'm almost afraid to ask the locals what's up with that?

New Tom Waits album

I know that he's not to everyone's taste, but this three disk set of rarities and new material sounds excellent.

Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards is in stores Novemeberish.

Here's what he has to say about it:

"Orphans [contains] rough and tender tunes. Rumbas about mermaids, shuffles about train wrecks, tarantellas about insects, madrigals about drowning.

"Scared, mean, orphaned songs of rapture and melancholy. Songs that grew up hard. Songs of dubious origin rescued from cruel fate and now left wanting only to be cared for. Show that you are not afraid and take them home. They don't bite, they just need attention."

I dig his act.

Shamless sellout

It seems that lately my market share has been dramatically dropping in the demographic "Mike's female friends, aged 29-45".

This downward trend cannot continue, so in the spirit of appealing to your most understandably base needs I give you nearly four minutes of Ewan McGregor's smile.




And as value added here, for those who are looking forward to candid videos of Ewan's motercycle trip with Jude Law (I'm looking at you Trixie), here's a taste of what you will see.

Worst piece of writing I've read in a while

Okay, so I read some pretty sketchy stuff at times, but this is truely awful. Parts read like she's aspiring to be a third-rate fantasy writer.

Read it here.

I laughed particularly loud at the opening sentance and at this: "By definition, human embryonic stem cells have the almost mythical, immortal power to grow and divide indefinitely as they become the various tissues that make up the body."

I mean do we really need the hyperbole to let us know how amazing stem cells are? And I doubt very much that they are imortal, and given that they exist they are nowhere near mythical.

Sorry for the rant. Frustrated writer's syndrome.

Cheers

Mike

The art of dancing close...

Appologies for being so far behind in my blogging (blahging?).

Last Friday the neighbors offered to look after the kids while we went out on a date. I had looked after their three boys the weekend before and they wanted to repay me. Cate and I wracked our brains for something to do with our first night out alone in months. We didn't just want to go to a pub or a movie, both of which would have been fun, but not terribly special. Finally, late Friday afternoon, on the most whimiscal of whims we decided to take a tango class.

Cate spied a poster in a cafe for a special class that night on a form of Argentine tango called Close Embrace and it sounded like fun in a lot of ways. It was really enjoyable, but fun isn't exactly the right word. We were the only rank amateurs in the crowd -- although everyone was very helpful and welcoming -- and were both very nervous.

We didn't actually learn any steps or moves, which was a dissapointment. The class was designed to be the first of 6 workshops, so actual dancing didn't occur until some other day. We mostly learned how to walk in a straight line with our eyes closed. Which is certainly useful and bestows some tangible satisfaction when it is perfected. That alone would have been worth the price of admission.

I'm serious, mostly.

The second hour was devoted to learning to "invite your partner into the close embrace" of the dance, how to stand, where to put your chin and hands, how to walk in a straight line with a woman tightly pressing her breasts against you, how to elegantly set her back on her centre of gravity when the song is over, and how to not get too distracted while doing all of the above. Oh and the teacher insisted that we switch partners every other song or so and that we never dance with someone we know.

The grand-finale/final-exam was that everyone stood in two concentric circles, leaders on the outside, followers on the inside circle. First the followers had to close their eyes and random leaders would approach them, invite them silently into the embrace, rock rythmically side to side, then set her back on her balance. After approaching half a dozen strangers in this manner, I was sort of getting the hang of it. Then the leaders had to close their eyes and the followers moved around the circle.

Let me tell you, it is rather tricky inviting a stranger into a formal embrace when you have no notion of height, body type, etc. Personal space isn't an issue because there is none in this dance. Some worked out very well -- one guy, Peter, chalked it up to chemistry -- some were like dancing with your annoying aunt. Some were a mixture of both.

When the last woman approached me, it seemed to be going well. I could feel her approach, when I made myself taller (Tango-ki, nach!) she moved into the embrace on cue and then she leaned in... and turned out to be about a foot taller than me and was wearing a very low-cut dance shirt. I was rather startled, and not entirely in unpleasant ways, when I felt soft skin on my cheek when she leaned in. Of course I immediately forgot how to concentrate. Luckily there was enough chemistry to carry me through and it didn't go too badly.

It was a rather classic movie moment -- comedy, not romance -- when the music stopped and the teacher told us to open our eyes. The awkward thank-yous followed by a quick, embarassed escape by both of us was rather funny. I hope that she saw the humour in it too. Probably. She was wearing a dance shirt, so she probably knew what she was signing up for.

Cheers

PS. It occurs to me, as things often do when I finally write them down, that she had her eyes open so the placement of her chest was not at all a shock or surprise to her. That makes me feel a bit better, I guess. Almost flattered.

Canada Post-Literacy Awards

I think that Moses Znaimer is behind this, but it was only a matter of time before all of these self-satisfied literary and film awards recieved their comuppance from those brassy but lovable new media...

Just kidding. It's all just a dream sequence based on a bad pun.

But if it did exist -- I mean an award, or awards, for new media -- what would it look like?

There are pretty standard categories for prizes in film, literature and music* but are we even close to understanding the structure and nature of electronic content? Without having this understanding, then how does one recognize excellence or achievement. To some extent we all get by with, "I know it when I see it".

Five years ago we might have conceived of a Best Website award. It probably would have been awarded to a site that has "must-have" content, presented in an interesting layout, with a balanced amount of both bells and whistles, all in a package with a half decent load time. Basically, books, movies or music by a different colour. A new wrapper on old media.

If the award were given out this week, YouTube would probably be the winner. Interestingly the content really isn't "must-have" - but the process of exploring the content is adictive. The act of surfing has always been the defining element of the web -- hypertext changed the internet from a glorified bulletin board to what it is now, whatever that is. And it is no coincidence that "surfing" was adopted early and stuck as the verb describing/defining what you do with the internet.

What I think is needed for the next phase of development of the web are adjectives that describe the the various qualities of surfing. I would prefer if they weren't totally goofy, but surfing isn't the most elegant term and it seems to have settled in well enough. Once people can talk and write about various types of surfing and various types of surfing experiences the way that they can talk about different types of music experiences(on functional levels -- protest vs dance music, or aesthetic levels: folk vs hip hop) then genres, forms and functions will eventually be agreed upon to the point where we can all complain about the acadamy being out of touch with the people and that "awardscasts" are really lame.


Cheers

*Note: Yes, I know that there are lots of disagreements over awards categories -- in music especially. But the core categories are rarely questioned. For example, why do acting or singing awards have to be split by gender? Anyways, there's enough of a common understanding of these media that we can easily and instantly start arguing about it, without defining a single term in advance.

MT

Surf Pics added.

Just a quick note to let you know that I've added pictures to the surfer post in the archives.

Quick Link

Cheers

Speaking of history

We took a short trip up to Grand Pre yesterday. I like that the province is so small we can drive an hour to the other side and still be in a region that is more different than the Ottawa Valley is from Southern Ontario (8 Hours if traffic is unusually good in Toronto).

Grand Pre is the place where the British expelled the Acadians. The origian village was torched after the expulsion but a memorial church* and information centre is on the site. Very cool. The engineering feats of the Acadians are documented -- how they reclaimed thousands of hectares from the sea to make arable land -- and the story of the expulsion, of course.

Again, nothing to feel proud of but interesting to connect to a different history in my new back yard. Even more cool, that there was a cat named Evangeline sleeping in the sunbeams streaming through the windows of the church. I'm profoundly ambivalent about the name "Thibault" (without an "e") appearing on the roll of the 100-odd family names of the expelled. My kin are Glaswegian, but it would be cool too to be of Acadian descent.

What can I say, romance is in my soul. ;-)

Cheers

*I sort of thought that it was cool that the grounds around the church were geometrically designed. Very French. Not sure if the Acadians were hip to the Sun King's predilection for divine order, but it felt more right than a pseudo-rustic English country garden. So I didn't ask about the arcitectural choices made in the design of the monument. Best to let sleeping cats lie, if they won't tell the absolute truth.

Local History Minute

In Ottawa there is a ton of local history. We stroll around parliament hill as if it were just another park, Wilfred Laurier lived down the street from where I lived here, a constitutional accord was drafted across the lake from where we swim with the kids, Thomas D'Arcy McGee was assassinated near this pub over there...

I'm trying to learn a bit about the history of my new city and just found out that a piece of the anchor from the SS Mont Blanc, that was the source (if not the cause) of the Halifax explosion of 1917 landed just down the street from my house. That's about 5km from ground zero, which is impressive. Of course entire neighborhoods in two cities (Dartmouth on the other side of the Bedford Basin, as well) were leveled -- 1,600 homes were destroyed -- windows were broken throughout the entire city, the shockwaves were noticible as far away as Sydney, and over 2,000 people lost their lives and another 9,000 were injured.

So an anchor shank isn't really anything to be proud of, but history is about connections and hopefully understanding, not jingoism. So that's cool in its own way.

Cheers

Profile Views?

So 16 people have viewed my profile so far. I assume that everyone knows me already. What sort of information were you hoping to find there that you don't already know? Don't you people have better things to do? :-)

Unless the number represents one person viewing the profile 16 times, in which case I should be really creeped out.

Cheers

NSLA Conference

Sorry I haven't updated in a while. I was at a conference down the street all weekend and I lost my rhythm.

There were two obvious reasons to go to the conference: 1) To network to try to find a job, or information that might be helpful in my job hunt, and 2) to actually learn some new stuff.

I did meet a lot of new people. Most of them were from the Annapolis Valley region, so they weren't too helpful, but they made the Saturday night banquet even more fun that it would have been. Louise is going to have a good time working with these people after her grand tour.

I was purposefully trying to not schmooze. I didn't want to come off as either desperate or a jerk (or both), so I would just socialize and talk about the sessions. Usually people would notice that my conference pass didn't have a library printed under my name so I got really good at briefly describing my situation: "I just graduated and followed my wife (shorthand) to Halifax, I've only been here a couple weeks and am looking for work." Some people asked about Ottawa (or reminisced about trips to Ottawa) and others gave me pointers and introduced me to some people they thought I should meet. I met a guy who's on the hiring committee for a job I applied for last week, so if I get an interview he will already have some sort of impression of me. But again, I wasn't trying to schmooze, so we talked about Halifax mostly.

The director of Dal's library school was really nice. She was working the room, so she introduced herself to me. She gave me her card and seemed genuinely eager to show me around the faculty and introduce me to the cataloguing professor. She even suggested that I might be asked to give a guest lecture in one of the cataloguing classes because I've worked as a tech for so long. Can't look bad on a resume.

Oh and I went to a pub on Quinpool after the banquet called the Nail and Kneecap that is really nice. Sort of smooth-around-the-edges but the music was consistently great (Velvets, Iggy, Clash, Cat Power, Feist, Robert Johnston). It's a bit too far away to just hop down for a pint after the kids are in bed, though.

The sessions themselves were good, but perhaps not great. They mostly seemed aimed at introducing the audience to things that they've never heard of before. I was expecting a bit more knowledge sharing between experts from different circumstances and perspectives (Especially in the "Cataloguing is Public Service" session). But because I had two agendae (what is the proper plural?) I didn't want to show up at sessions that would connect me with people in specialties I have no interest in, even though those are the sessions I would learn the most from.

Most of the intellectual highlights came after a session was finished and a meaty, informal discussion would emerge over coffee. I suppose if I'd been out of school longer, these sessions would have been a nice, low-key reminder of the things that I knew but were no longer in the front of my mind.

So now it's back to the actual job-hunt. Wish me luck.

Cheers

Quote of the Day

"If a germ was running through the grass to Africa, would it be faster than a person?"

-- Mika

My response: I think that they're faster over short distances, but people are faster in the long, endurance races.

That seemed to satisfy her.

Cheers