"Mr. Wizard - The Legend of Speed"

I got the current issue of RES a couple days ago, and along with it came the Nike "Art of Speed" DVD containing a collection of short films (about the "speed") commissioned by Nike. I watched it my sister, and I liked it very much. I know I am supposed to throw it away in disgust or at least be very blasé about it, but I was extremely bored and all the pretty colours on the DVD slipcase excited me too much.

The best short was "Mr. Wizard - The Legend of Speed" by Friends With You. Its ending is just absolutely mind-bending.


This is the craziest thing I have seen in last three months. 

While most of the shorts were pretty good or at the least worth watching it once, a few were just terrible. Yeah, shame on you Associates in Science; your short is just crap. (These people also made the crap Interpol video. It won't be long before they find themselves on trial at the International Court of Justice.)

Meet you at the CEIT Dofasco Entrance Foyer

Have you been to CEIT lately? I went to CEIT to milk that sweet free wireless Internet connection a few weeks ago and made a startling discovery; every major part of the building has been named after a corporation. Take for example the March Networks Exhibit Atrium.


You can look at pretty rocks and then commit suicide too. 

I, for one, think it is just fantastic that a company that sells techno-fascist digital surveillance systems to civil-rights-stomping police forces around the world supports our university.


Boo! 

I don't like Hamilton, so I automatically dislike Dofasco.


What? Theater? Theater?! It's theatre, T-H-E-A-T-R-E. Jesus. 

First they change their name from Royal Bank of Canada to RBC, and now they (or the sign company) spell theatre, "theater." Argg! I have to go and vandalize the local "RBC Royal Bank" branch now.

My new favourite word

I finally got to actually reading the copy of Tokion that I bought a month ago. My favourite article so far is the one called "Megacities"; it's a discussion on the acceleration of urbanization by a group of experts (well, they sounded like experts) that included Kengo Kuma. The reason I like it so much is because the discussion panel uses words like "McMansion", "homo movents", and "Corbusierian".

The word I definitely liked the most is "techno-fascist". I've heard "fascist techno", but "techno-fascist"? It's just such a great word; I mean, you could use it everywhere. Here's an example:

Girl 1: What are you doing?
Girl 2: Taking care of my techno-fascist blackheads.
Girl 1: But, you don't have any techno-fascist blackheads.
Girl 2: Exactly.
Voice-over: Clean & Clear, under control.

Besides the crazy (made-up) words, I really liked Kengo Kuma's completely unrealistic and insanely fucked-up architectural drawings. After all, he's the guy who designed the Bamboo House.

Fun with Webalizer

If you don't already know what Webalizer is, here's a brief intro: Webalizer is an application that reads web server logs and spit out reports on the site's visitors. It can tell you who visited your site, which section of the site was visited most often, and what files used up the most bandwidth.

I was bored yesterday and decided to do a google search to find some Webalizer reports on uwaterloo.ca sites.

The most interesting reports were the ones for www.student.cs.uwaterloo.ca and www.student.math.uwaterloo.ca. According to the report on the CS student server, roughly 30 GB of bandwidth were used in August so far to transfer the sweet ballads of Bryan Adams, Jessica Simpson, and Britney Spears. The report for the Math server shows downloads of weird wrestling videos using up a bit less than 7 GB of bandwidth (again, in August so far). These files, in my opinion, need to be taken down immediately: maybe not the wrestling videos, but the music downloads are definitely abusive usages. More importantly, bad taste in music should not be tolerated.

There were some other interesting discoveries besides the above abuses. Some guy has posted a flash movie about some hockey players. I didn't get it because I don't follow hockey at all, but I thought people who do follow hockey might find it funny (or not funny or disgusting or Kafkaesque or sadomasochistic). And, Lino Demasi, the beloved leader of the Mathsoc has apparently created a nifty script to allow anyone with an Internet connection to see his mailbox. Well, thank you Lino Demasi for taking a major leap in increasing the transparency of the Mathsoc and your personal affairs.

The exams left you frustrated, and you want to die?

Well, first, please don't kill yourself. I mean, at least you didn't drive into the Kinko's. (If you're the guy who drove into the Kinko's, well, umm, at least you are not this guy.)

But, if you one day found your life completely unlivable beyond any doubt, you have the comfort of knowing that your school, the University of Waterloo, provides plenty of places for easy, quick suicide. This, in my opinion, almost makes up for the horrible teachers, abysmal co-op job prospect, and vitriolic service at the Housing Office.

Now, here are some of the fine places where you can end your life.


Davis Centre 2 has a set of special doors to help frustrated grad students make their problems go away instantly. 


CEIT has this garden thingy on the second floor. I think you can jump off from there. (I might be mistaken; it's been a while since I've been there.) 


CEIT also has a balcony overlooking the March Networks^® Exhibit Atrium^TM. 


MC balcony on the third floor can serve more than 87 people per minute. 


Jumping onto the sculptures will guarantee your death. Avoid those embarassing post-failed-suicide-moments with friends and family. 

So fucking hot

I am back in the Okanagan, the home to Sun-Rype apple juice, Big White, and, well, Stockwell Day.

The temperature outside right now (4:00 p.m.) is 36° C, and the night temperature hovers around 24° C.

Anyhow, here are some pictures from my travel home.


The old Terminal 1 at Pearson is being torn down. A part of Terminal 2 also has been torn down. 


The freaky, Disneyesque moving installations(?) at the Calgary airport. 


Background: the Calgary downtown. Foreground: a plane from the Northwest Airlines, the yuckiest airline in North America. 


The WestJet cargo bins. 


The Kelowna "airport." 

Leaving tomorrow

I'll be leaving Waterloo tomorrow. I bought Kellogg's Frosted Flakes Cereal & Milk Bars to eat on the planes. (Why won't WestJet serve meals on their planes? Arggg.)

Also, I realized that shipping my stuffs back home (by regular mail, not Priority Platinum Chrysanthemum Express Same-Day Mega-Deluxe) set me back almost two-hundred dollars.

Well, I hope my plane doesn't get delayed seventeen hours like the last time.

Anyhow, I saw a guy who looks like Morrissey wearing a Morrissey t-shirt on Tuesday. I thought it was really creepy. It was almost as creepy as the guy who looks and speaks just like Karl Lagerfeld I saw in Toronto (somewhere between Spadina and Dufferin on Queen St. to be specific).

Thumbsucker

An excerpt from Deformer, a short film by Mike Mills:

Girl:
Empty hearts lack blood. Feel with your tongue.
I love everyone; I mean I love girls and boys; I probably even love you.
Love is really wonderful, especially if you love a lot of people, just not one.
One is lonely; a lot is fun.
I like fun; I like love. Love, love, love love.

Do you know who Mike Mills is? If you answered yes, then congratulations! You are officially a hipster; you may now collect your certificate.

If you said no, Mike Mills is, selon moi, one of the greatest commercial and music video directors. Among the videos he directed are Air's "Kelly Watch the Star" and "Sexy Boy." Air loved his work so much, they named one of the tracks from their new album "Mike Mills." Also, he created the Volkswagen commercial that doesn't actually show the car (which is one of my most favourite commercials) and the Adidas "Forever Sport" campaign. Yeah, and he makes 85-dollar pillows.

Not everything about Mike Mills is fine and dandy though. He also created of one of the most reviled campaign in recent memory: the Gap West Side Story. Even more disturbing is the fact that he did commercials for DuPont (one of America's coporate Satans), the Partnership for a Drug-Free America (the propaganda arm of tobacco and alcohol industry), and American Express.

A while ago, Mills decided to follow the steps of two other commercial/music video greats Spike Jonze (who is the ex-husband of Sofia Coppola, a parter of Mills' production company the Director's Bureau) and Michel Gondry (who is a friend to both Sofia Coppola and Spike Jonze) and direct a feature film. The film, titled Thumbsucker after the book it is based on, stars Keanu Reeves and Vince Vaughn and features soundtrack by Air and The Polyphonic Spree (two of my most favourite bands).

Now, if you haven't suspected already, I am a huge Mike Mills fanboy, and I want to see the movie so very very badly. What's extremely worrying is the fact that the film has been stuck in post-production stage for almost a year when it is not rich in effects at all. Moreover, Focus Features, the movie's production company, does not have the film listed in the "Coming Soon" section. I am beginning to think the film may have been axed (or maybe not). This really pisses me off. I want the soundtrack (which I expect to be an aural orgy), and I want it NOW. If they -- I am not sure who -- kill the soundtrack, I will hit them with blunt instruments until they die.

The bizarre behive lady

As you can very well see, this lady's hair is totally fucked.

Does anyone know who this lady is or when or where this picture was taken?

And, is she singing or something? Wouldn't that be a blatant violation of the Singing-While-Looking-Like-Marge-Simpson Ban Treaty?

I can't stop looking at this picture; I think this is the most disgusting single act of human perversion I have ever witnessed.

God is dead.