Bros at Halloween

someone quite awesome who lives in my basement reminded me that I haven't been blogging lately. well here ya go. this made me chuckle for a good 10 seconds. enjoy.

At last, actual NEWS

***monologue inside my head***
deep breath... don't write slanderous comments on the internet that can be read by anybody... preserve your professional identity... don't call the people who you may see again some day stupid, bandwagon jumping, intellectually stunted, atrocities of humanity. They will likely take unkindly to these remarks. Instead, use general language and positive words... deep breath... now go.
***monologue ends***

The social media campaign du jour is the popular Kony2012. Of course, unless you live under a rock (in which case, power to you) you already know this. You have felt the social pressure to repost, retweet, and profess your support for the 30 minute video that has swept our nation. If you are like the handful of incredibly intelligent, wonderful people I have the honour of calling my best friends, you heard about the campaign, hit up the google, read between the lines, thoughtfully questioned the information, and created your own independent opinion on the issue. You then texted your friends to share, re-evaluate, and discuss like an adult. For you handful- I love you. Never change.

Now, for the rest of you that don't fit in my hand (and therefore are not part of my loving handful) I will use my available hand to smack you collectively on the side of your head... which like any good blogger means a few verbal lashings coupled with a point in the right direction.

I would like to highlight 2 key points that for some reason our society has forgot to teach you. Side note- shame on society.

1) Awareness does not equal Action. It can be a precursor for action, but it unto itself is not action. In fact, the bloggers of "Stuff White People Like" may have said it best and therefore I will point you in their direction. Awareness- Stuff White People Like
If you are moved by the story, you have an obligation to society to action it.
Options- find a charity to donate to (but for gosh sakes people, research the bloody charity first... READ THEIR BUDGET BREAKDOWN. More on this later.) OR support a government or government official who is in the position to make real change. Romeo Dallaire is an interesting Canadian making a real difference on this issue. And he has been well before Kony2012 captivated the country. Read up on him. Support him.

2) A good cause does not a good company make. All should approach investing in a cause with the same level of cautiousness that you would an investment in a company. Imagine a company that provides necessary and life-dependent resources to hospitals, emergency response personnel, schools, universities, and military projects. The company provides these services and resources unbiasedly allowing open access to their products at a well-regulated market price. Do you want to support this company? Well, yes. Who would say no to supporting a company that helps children, the needy, and all who ask for help? Buy stocks now, right? This description fits almost perfectly to oil companies. All the Exxons, BPs, Totals, and Shells of the world. Still want to support them? Right.
The same hesitations, judgments, and considerations that prevent you from openly supporting big oil should also be applied to whether you support a charity. Do the ends justify the means? When the ends are related to a hot topic such as child soldiers, the examination of the means should be no less stringent, fact-driven, and consciously made than any other decision you make as a functioning adult. Don't let your support of a cause dilute you into thinking you should support the charity. Keep the cause and the charity separate and make decisions to support companies with the same level of stringency that goes into making investments. Look at the budget breakdown of "non-profits". How much money goes towards actually helping your cause versus overhead? National organizations such as the American Institute of Philanthropy have benchmarks that they hold charities to. Research your favourite organization on their website Charity Watch. A simple search of the google will help you make your decision to help a smart investment.

All this rambling to say that if the Kony2012 campaign struck a chord with you and you are motivated to help, please do. Social media is not social action unto itself. Awareness must be coupled by agency. And not all actions or charities are created equal. Make the best decision for you.

Finally- let us all celebrate that news that the conviction of Thomas Lubanga "firmly establishes the use of children in war as an international crime." If you support Kony2012 then you should be elated to learn that the international community is acting on this issue, real decisions are being made, and villainous hate-mongering humans are being brought to justice. Share this news. Share this link.

Congolese War Lord Convicted of War Crimes- New York Times

A Walk Through the Park

Photos by Meg, January 2012, Assiniboine Park, Winnipeg Manitoba

Easy as Apple Pie

Ever find yourself half way through a task and wonder how the heck you got yourself into this mess? I found myself asking this very question making this mess- uh- pie. By following the simple steps below you as well can bake your way to the largest apple pie for 2 you have ever seen.


Start by going to the google.
Find recipe.
Ignore recipes with -complicated ingredients, complicated tools, and overly pretentious comments in the description of the product.
Print recipe.
Grocery shop.
Realize you don't know where the shortening is located (you thought it was beside the butter, but apparently beside the butter is margarine and beside that is cheese).
Say screw it and go back to the google to find a recipe with ingredients you already have.
Print this recipe.

End up with a stack of recipes that may or may not get you where you need to be.



Unpack apples.
Wonder why the same apples have 3 different stickers.
Debate opening bottle of wine to help baking.



Decide against the wine.
Wash delicious apples.
Wonder if maybe you bought too many...



Get apples naked. Well, not completely naked. Like apple lingerie.
Decide you hate peeling.



Start arduous task of slicing apples "thinly".
Seriously begin to wonder if you bought too many apples.
Who measures apples in cups?
8 apples = 8 cups?



Begin to lose interest in pie.
Remember he recently admitted that you have started snoring, but he didn't mind.
Back on track.

Cube butter.
Looks nothing like picture from recipe.
Contemplate wine again.



Discover instructions such as

"With pastry blender or 2 knives, cut in butter until in coarse crumbs with a few larger pieces."

are clearly less descriptive in practice than they are in theory.
Wonder if dough has too many larger pieces.
Realize it is the best you are going to do.



Hot damn, you can roll it.
Place in pie plate you bought while grocery shopping.
Celebrate with booty shake.



Get liberal with filling ingredients.
Confirm way too many apples have been purchased, washed, peeled, and thinly sliced.
Modify recipe to include brown sugar, not white sugar.
Wonder who would not use brown sugar.



Sigh with happiness at complete pie.
Debate creating national holiday or dubbing it a national treasure.
Complete by placing in oven.



Burn self on oven checking on pie.
Glad you were sober for the burn.
Return to the google for first-aid advice.
Call Mom for reinforcement.
Pat self on back with good arm for pie well done.


Decide what you are going to do with all the extra apples...

Dynamo Vocabulary

Dear http://dynamo.dictionary.com/,

Where the hell were you in 2007?

Kindly invent time machine so I can use you for personal gain in my GRE vocabulary score.

Sincerely,
Meg

P.S. No, I will no accept your current awesomeness as an excuse for your absence just 5 short years ago.

Ponderables- Michael Ondaatje

discover that you can become curious

modesty enthrals the listener

being told we are insignificant prompts us to act so

know who you are by outside imprints of yourself [looking glass self]

Steven Alan

the mens wear...
the length of pant...
the non apologetic vintage [circa WW1] theme...
the use of colour...
the shoes...









love, love, love.

Style.com

Word of the Day: Iconoclast

noun
1. a person who attacks cherished beliefs, traditional institutions, etc., as being based on error or superstition.
2. a breaker or destroyer of images, especially those set up for religious veneration.

"the youthful person I came to know was very much an iconoclast."

Update in TIME

As noted here, my list of books to read has been determined and now I am fighting my way through! Complete to date are:

* Animal Farm (1946), by George Orwell
* Atonement (2002), by Ian McEwan
* Gone With the Wind (1936), by Margaret Mitchell
* The Great Gatsby (1925), by F. Scott Fitzgerald
* Lord of the Flies (1955), by William Golding
* Possession (1990), by A.S. Byatt
* The Sun Also Rises (1926), by Ernest Hemingway
* To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), by Harper Lee

It took me 25 years to learn to read and then get 8% complete... oh boy.

Ploughman's Lunch

While eating at a Gastropub you may want to order this delicious meal. Simply wiki to find out more.



Note: You will get bonus points if you can say this name out loud without giggling. Just try it.

Gastropub

Gastropub or Gastrolounge refers to a bar and restaurant that serves high-end beer and food.

Coined in 1991, this quintessential yuppie term was coined by the owners of The Eagle in Clerkenwell, London.

Back At Em

You can't hit a home run if you do not step up to the plate.

To celebrate... I am back bitches.

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Nice... no, not unnaughty

Everything it needs to be....

word of the day

mon·i·ker
   /ˈmɒnɪkər/ Show Spelled[mon-i-ker]
–noun Slang .
a person's name, especially a nickname or alias.

Winnipeg

-Marcel Dzama


One of Canada’s more fascinating cultural features is the spectacular international success of the Vancouver art scene. But that’s old news. More surprising is Canada’s No. 2 spot. It belongs neither to Toronto nor Montreal, but to Winnipeg. These days, when foreign art lovers talk about Canadian art, they generally mean western Canadian art.

The success of the Winnipeg scene is hard to explain because it’s exceptional in so many ways. For example, as a rule, the biggest cities harbour the liveliest vanguard art communities: New York, London, Paris, Berlin…So what’s the deal with Winnipeg?

The capital of Manitoba is known for being rough around the edges and yet, art-wise, you couldn’t call it disadvantaged. For starters, the University of Manitoba runs a decent school of art (est.1913); then there’s the Winnipeg Art Gallery, a centenary art museum now new and improved; and Plug In, a one-time artist-run centre now pushing 40, just morphed into an Institute of Contemporary Art with fancy new digs. There’s also Border Crossings, a classy art magazine that keeps a sharp eye on the home front.

If you’re into the hard-core cutting edge, though, look away. Artists here don’t go in for newfangled media much, let alone brainiac “out there” art. They like handmade representations of people, places and things. Like the Inuit art for which the WAG is famous, the local non-Inuit artists are busy describing their world simply and plainly. At least on the surface.

Winnipeg swims against the current in another respect as well. The character unique to art scenes has been evaporating for decades, scorched by the cult of originality. These days, artists are largely on their own. Not so Winnipeg; its artists demonstrate that you don’t need to sacrifice your individuality for the sake of genius loci. Aside from figuration, this “personality of place” seems to be based on humour.

Marcel Dzama is the best known of the Winnipeg-bred art stars. When I saw his recent show in New York, it was packed with people concentrating hard. There were few smiles for so darkly funny an exhibition with its depressive pull-toys and Aztec-like scrolls of modern slaughter. Recently, Dzama upped the ante with dioramas in porcelain and some scratchy satirical dance films.

Another export, Jon Pylypchuk, manages to fashion beauty out of the inane. A typical painting is an abstract mess that looks like the day after the Big Bang. Lost in the swells of genesis will be one of his goggled-eyed munchkins with collaged words coming out of its face, fortune cookies that feel clipped from the pages of Nietzsche. They make me dizzy (in a good way).

Although Karel Funk doesn’t go in for weird humour, he certainly shares the local penchant for pictures of people. Like a 15th-century Flemish hyperrealist, he makes close-up portraits of his buddies that take months to paint. The New York Times called his work “spiritual,” by which they also meant his technique: he paints hair one at a time. In the newer work, the sitter disappears completely behind obsessively rendered parkas. In this day and age, it’s comforting to see art defending privacy.

Winnipeg’s new kid on the international block, Sarah Anne Johnson, marries snapshots with modelling clay figurines. In a recent work, she accompanied a group of conservationists to the Galapagos Islands to eradicate the non-native species. Interspersed among her photos of the expedition are shots of plasticine caricatures of the same group, only this time the artist mostly makes it up. Did someone really snuggle up to a sea lion after an underwater pas-de-deux?

There are plenty more artists who live near The Forks worth knowing about, and an exciting new generation is emerging.This summer, a major French contemporary art centre, La Maison Rouge in Paris, is mounting My Winnipeg, a show that takes a broader look at this hot town. Organizers borrowed the title from a mo vie by Guy Maddin, yet another local artist with an international fan base. Move over, Vancouver!

~by Marc Mayer on Wednesday, April 27, 2011 10:40am

outdoor music...

I'm going to put "go to more outdoor music festivals" on my list of things to accomplish in 2012...

Why not start with the hollywood grand daddy of them all?

COACHELLA

Any one interested?

Food Fight

Organized food fights need to happen more....


Scratch that, food fights in general need to happen more.


winning

Second Base

Thank goodness for:

a) Chipper Jones 1502 RBI home run (without which the camera spanning to this area of the diamond would not be possible).

b) a PVR that I could rewind to make sure I saw correctly, then pause to capture to share

c) other people... I would love to know what was running through their heads...

Kevin Bacon

It looks like Ryan Golsing's abs just got one degree closer to Kevin Bacon...



I postface this post by noting this movie is a guilty pleasure not my movie genre of choice.

Word of the Day: COMMAND

com·mand (k-mnd)
v. com·mand·ed, com·mand·ing, com·mands
v.tr.
1. To direct with authority; give orders to.
2. To have control or authority over; rule: a general who commands an army.
3. To have at one's disposal: a person who commands seven languages.
4. To deserve and receive as due; exact: The troops' bravery commanded respect.
5.
a. To exercise dominating, authoritative influence over: "He commands any room he enters" (Stephen Schiff).
b. To dominate by physical position; overlook: a mountain commanding the valley below.
v.intr.
1. To give orders.
2. To exercise authority or control as or as if one is a commander.
n.
1. The act of commanding.
2. An order given with authority.
3. Computer Science A signal that initiates an operation defined by an instruction.
4.
a. The authority to command: an admiral in command.
b. Possession and exercise of the authority to command: command of the seas.
5. Ability to control or use; mastery: command of four languages.
6. Dominance by location; extent of view.
7.
a. The jurisdiction of a commander.
b. A military unit, post, district, or region under the control of one officer.
c. A unit of the U.S. Air Force that is larger than an air force.
adj.
1. Of, relating to, or constituting a command: command headquarters; a command decision.
2. Done or performed in response to a command: a command performance.


Get out there and command something people!