Wax Mannequin

Last week, The Grad Club put on a great show featuring Spiral Beach and Wax Mannequin. Spiral Beach was the headliner, but I was mostly there to see Wax Mannequin, and he did not disappoint.

Wax Mannequin is actually just one dude (real name: Chris Adeney) from Hamilton, Ontario. He's been through Kingston a few times, but I'd never heard his music until I caught one song on CFRC a few weeks ago, at which point I became very interested in seeing this guy live.

His music is pretty unique and very creative, but sort of hard to describe... some of the best efforts at describing his style use phrases like "Tom Waits fronting a viking metal band" or "a rock opera exploding inside your brain". Those are both pretty good descriptors. If "over-the-top" were a genre, this would be it. Judging from the super-intense rock drumming, prog guitar riffs, and gruff high-drama vocals, I think this is probably love-it-or-hate-it music, but since my musical tastes lean pretty heavily towards eclectic craziness, I love it.

Also, the Wax Mannequin MySpace bio is the best rock band biography I've ever read. Here it is, along with the picture referenced therein.

Do you know the painting that you see on some greeting cards where all of the animals are sitting together, stoic and proud in the forest, and there in the background, rising in the sky, it's the earth? You have to ask “why aren't the animals trying to fight and eat each other? They are fucking enemies!” and “why is the earth rising into the sky? If the earth is in the sky, then where the fuck are we?” That shit is Wax Mannequin. Kind of lame... but so important and gripping.

Worst Movie Scenes of All Time

These are pretty great, it's the top six worst movie scenes of all time, featuring such categories as "Worst Stunt" and "Worst Acting Ever". The stunt is my favourite, that dude is one excellent horse rider.


http://view.break.com/295152 - Watch more free videos

A useful tool

Is it Christmas?

(link courtesy of Laura A.)

In Event of Moon Disaster

I've spent the better part of the last week watching The West Wing, Season 1, to which I've become hopelessly addicted. As a result, I've also been much more interested in all things presidential lately.

With that in mind, I found this speech very interesting, in a morbid, what-could-have-been kind of way. It's titled "In Event of Moon Disaster", and it was written by presidential speechwriter Bill Safire on July 18, 1969. The speech was intended to be read by Richard Nixon in the event that Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin made it safely to the surface of the moon, but found themselves unable to leave.

Aside from being a fascinating snapshot of the White House's inner workings during one of the United States' most ambitious ventures, it makes me wonder... how many other worst-case-scenarios does the US have speeches ready and waiting for?

The Most Serene Republic

This Wednesday, The Most Serene Republic is playing the Ale House, along with Dragonette, for $12. Based on the MySpace clips of their new album (one-word review: awesome), and how much I enjoyed them the last time they were in Kingston (playing with local legends and media darlings Fat Robot), this could be one of the best sub-$15 shows of the year. Broken Social Scene + Prog Rock + Jazz = The Most Serene Republic.

If you're in Kingston and want to go, let me know. We'll rock out.

A Monument to Ridiculousness

I can't remember who pointed me to this, but the Ryugyong Hotel in Pyongyang, North Korea is one of my favourite buildings in the world. Not because of engineering achievement, or architectural beauty... as a matter of fact, it's one of the ugliest buildings I've ever seen, and was horribly engineered. Nope, the Ryugyong makes my favourite buildings list for its unrivaled combination of audacity and ineptitude.

The story goes something like this: In the late 1980's, North Korea was starting to get jealous of South Korea's increasing prosperity and shiny skyscrapers, so the government decided it was going to outdo them, and commissioned the construction of a Super-Hotel. The Hotel To End All Hotels! 105 stories of communist glory, with five... no, six! No, SEVEN revolving restaurants! Seriously, seven revolving restaurants. When finished, it would have been the tallest hotel in the world, with three THOUSAND rooms. Three thousand rooms in one building, for a country that only lets in about 130,000 visitors a year, nationwide.

Alas, no one ever got to spend their luxurious North Korean vacation in the Ryugyong, because it was never finished. For starters, the building was so massive, concrete shortages plagued the construction from day one. Secondly, it was such a huge building that its construction actually contributed to electricity shortages in Pyongyang. I'm guessing it is hard to build a 105 story hotel without power tools. Finally, the concrete that they DID get was so poor that once the whole concrete frame was poured, the building began to sag under its own weight. All this for the low, low price of SEVEN HUNDRED AND FIFTY MILLION DOLLARS. This, in a country with a food shortage. As a result of the sagging, the building needed $300 million in repairs, which the government didn't happen to have lying around. And thus, the world's biggest almost-hotel was born. Here's what the building looks like as of today, which is basically how it looked when it was abandoned in the 80's, with one lonely crane forgotten on the roof.


Fig. 1: Ridiculous.

Seriously, THAT was your design for a world-class hotel, North Korea? It looks like a giant cartoon supervillain lair.

One of the best parts of the whole story is the fact that the government was so embarassed by its failure that it essentially forbid people from talking about the tower. It gets airbrushed out of official photos of Pyongyang. It's not on any maps. There have been reports of people asking tour guides questions about it. Questions like "What's with that giant concrete pyramid over there?" typically receive responses like "What giant concrete pyramid?". In their defence, it is kind of hard to spot.


Fig. 2: I don't see it.

With some perspective, Vegemite is not so bad

I was discussing Vegemite earlier today, and was directed to this article detailing how it is supposedly banned in the US because of FDA laws that only allow folic acid in bread. It turns out, however, that no such ban is in place, and the Kraft spokesperson cited in the article was wrong. Well, according to the Wikipedia article on Vegemite, anyways.

I started to do a little digging around to see if I could get to the bottom of what Vegemite is, exactly (sure, it's a "brewer's yeast extract", but what exactly does that mean?). What I came across next was so shocking it made me completely forget about my Vegemite-based curiosity.

Behold, the edible monstrosity that is... Bovril.



This little culinary gem is described as a "thick, salty beef extract". And if that doesn't instantly get your mouth watering, you might be interested to know it was originally marketed under the name "Johnston's Fluid Beef".

Mmm, fluid beef.

Apparently it's quite popular in Britain as a sort of meat-based tea, especially at soccer games. Yum. Apparently many, many British people enjoy their meat-tea... check out this interesting tidbit, courtesy of Wikipedia:

Bovril was based in Argentina, and at the height of the Bovril empire, the company owned ranches in Argentina that were equivalent in size to half of England and sustaining over 1.5 million livestock.

Equivalent to half of England! Oh, also, Bovril ads are some of the craziest things I've ever seen. Check out these marvels of persuasive advertising:



Nothing gets my appetite going like thinking about exactly how the cow in my meat-tea was killed. Or, for those of you who prefer to consider your meat on a more personal level:



And finally, perhaps the most ridiculous ad I have ever seen:



That's right, the only two infallible powers in the world are the divinely appointed representative of God on Earth, and meat-tea.

Heat Vision and Jack

This has been floating around for a while now, but I just rewatched it, and it is too good to not post. If you're apprehensive about committing half an hour to a Youtube clip, let me just put the premise out there and let you decide for yourself: It is the story of Jack Black as a superintelligent rogue astronaut, with Owen Wilson as the voice of his talking motorcycle.

New Weezer/Rivers Cuomo

Rivers Cuomo has a sort-of-new album coming out in December. I say sort-of-new because it's actually a compilation of acoustic demos recorded between 1992 and 2007.

I'm pretty excited about it, mostly because of the huge timespan it encompasses. As much for academic interest as for musical curiosity, I'm interested to see how the Rivers Cuomo Songwriting Style has evolved with the times. Maybe we'll be able to pinpoint the exact moment when Weezer switched from being a songwriting superpower to a forgettable pop-rock band.

Speaking of which, Weezer (the whole band) has a new album coming out next year, and the band claims that it's a daring and experimental record. I really want it to be awesome, but the last few albums have me wondering whether I should still be excited about Weezer, or if it's going to be another album of Beverly Hills. Time will tell.

So you think you can prance?

Upon watching the following video, I had three thoughts:

1 - That dog is very, very impressive.
2 - That is kind of sad.
3 - I am worse at dancing than a dog.

How do I take my tea? Standardized.

Today marked the release of a CP article extolling the virtues of tea, and its ability to help prevent Alzheimer's and Parkinsons disease. This is the latest in a seemingly endless parade of recent studies which claim that tea consumption can do pretty much anything. Currently, the literature seems to indicate that tea will improve your memory, densify your bones, shield you from cancer, help you lose weight, make you more attractive to the opposite sex, and allow you to jump slightly higher than usual.

The catch with all these studies is that the positive effects are only statistically significant with fairly high consumption levels, on the order of 3-5 cups per day. My initial reaction was "Sweet, an excuse to consume more caffeine". But then I wondered, what exactly constitutes a "cup"? Are they talking one Imperial cup? Does my large Tea Room Hojicha count as one cup? Two? Four? Man, healthy tea consumption is hard.

ISO Standard 3103 to the rescue! Yes, there is indeed an international standard for the brewing of tea. Not only that, but the standard even allows for "Large" (380ml) and "Small" (200ml) cups of tea! Furthermore, a large cup of tea should be presented in a serving vessel weighing 200g (±20g), while small cups should weigh 105g (±20g). In addition, cups or bowls must be white or glazed earthenware. Finally, it should be ensured that a ratio of "2 grams of tea (measured to ±2% accuracy) per 100ml boiling water" is used. 2% accuracy! ISO3101 is a ruthless taskmaster.


Fig. 1: Scientifically admissible tea vessels.


Fig. 2: I can't even begin to describe how wrong this is.

Acoustic Kitty

The Cold War was a great motivator for innovation. Cold War research was responsible for such useful research developments as the microwave oven, GPS, and the integrated circuit. And then, there's Acoustic Kitty, a covert CIA research project designed to train cats - cats with implanted microphones, that is - to conduct espionage.


Fig. 1: Normal cat. Suspect nothing.

The Wikipedia entry is so great, I'm just going to let it speak for itself (emphasis added).

Acoustic Kitty was a CIA project launched in the 1960s attempting to use cats in spy missions. A battery and a microphone were implanted into a cat and an antenna into its tail. Due to problems with distraction, the cat's sense of hunger had to be removed in another operation. Surgical and training expenses are thought to have amounted to over $20 million.

The first cat mission was eavesdropping on two men in a park outside the Soviet compound on Wisconsin Avenue in Washington, D.C.. The cat was released nearby, but was hit and killed by a taxi almost immediately. Shortly thereafter the project was considered a failure and declared to be a total loss.

I wonder why the cat was so quick to get hit by a car? Maybe because they surgically removed its sense of hunger.

Indexed

My great dorky find of the month for October has to be Indexed, a regularly updated site featuring witty index cards and mathematical notation, as applied to everyday life.

Some examples:





Also, sometimes there are Venn diagrams. Sweet.

Turkey is perfect, no more questions.

There are some interesting things a-happenin' with our friendly neighbour (or "neighbor", if you will) to the south this week. Most interestingly, Al Gore won a Nobel Prize, and the US House of Representatives has finally acknowledged the mass killings of Armenians in Turkey, which took place from 1915-1923, as genocide.

I was intrigued by the genocide acknowledgement mostly because of the response it provoked from Turkey. Apparently, the ethnic killing of hundreds of thousands (maybe even up to 1.5 million, depending on who you talk to) of Armenians is a bit of a sore spot, and they'd kindly ask that you not bring it up, thank you very much. They're so enraged, there's talk of them backing out of their currently friendly agreement that allows US forces to pass through Turkey on their way to Iraq.

This all seems a little ridiculous to me, especically given how long ago the genocide took place. Does the Turkish government think it can eventually convince the rest of the world that it wasn't genocide? It's not like they're denying the killings; there's too much documentation to get away with that. Rather, what they're arguing against is the specific use of the term "genocide". I guess there's some other term they'd rather use for the systematic elimination of a race of people.

For a country jockeying for a position within the EU, Turkey doesn't seem very committed to getting its human rights record cleaned up. In fact, as recently as 2005, they were enacting laws like the infamous Article 301, which states: "A person who, being a Turk, explicitly insults the Republic or Turkish Grand National Assembly, shall be punishable by imprisonment of between six months to three years."

Because, as we all know, the best way to solve a nation's problems is to pretend they don't exist, thus solving the problem forever.

Aesop Rock

I've been listening to Aesop Rock almost constantly for the last few weeks. I've had some of his tunes kicking around my computer for a while, but never really invested the time to get familiar with them until recently. I feel like an idiot for not listening to them earlier.



On the surface, it's underground hip hop, with quirky beats and incredibly articulate vocal delivery. Once you start listening to the lyrics themselves, though, it gains a whole other dimension. He takes a very stream-of-consciousness approach to writing, and the result is sort of like the hip hop equivalent of impressionism. You can get a pretty good feel for the ideas he's laying down by listening to the whole, but if you try to pick apart individual lines to squeeze literal meaning out of them, it all becomes kind of nonsensical. Every once in a while though, he drops great straightforward lines that stand out all the more as a result of the abstractness of the rest of the lyrics. It's a wicked awesome combination of literary delivery and unstoppable flow.

The best example of his lyrical style is the "Daylight/Night Light" song pair. The first song has a sort-of-melancholy feel to it, but seems kind of optimistic at times. Nightlight, on the other hand, is Daylight's evil twin. The lyrics are almost identical, but where Daylight is optimistic, Night Light is negative and furious. Listening to them consecutively makes for a pretty cool effect. Best lyric pair:

Daylight: "I'll lay my boots to rest when I'm impressed, so I triple knot 'em and forgot 'em".
Night Light: "I'll lay my kicks to rest when I'm impressed, so I'll staple gun 'em to my face."

Intense.

Toynbee Tiles and Markovian Parallax

Today's theme is "weird mysteries".

First off, the case of the mysterious "Toynbee Tiles". These tiles of unknown origin have materialized in several major US cities and South American capitals, embedded in asphalt. Most of them contain a similar crypic message, along the lines of:

TOYNBEE IDEA
IN KUBRICK'S 2001
RESURRECT DEAD
ON PLANET JUPITER.

Uh, yeah. No one knows who's responsible for these tiles or what, if anything, the message means. Perhaps the most mysterious tile is one in Santiago de Chile that references a street address in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The couple who live at the address in question don't know anything about the tiles, and apparently get quite annoyed when people ask. Legitimate response, or crazy conspiracy coverup?


Figure 1: Toynbee Tile embedded in crosswalk


Mysterious internet thing number two is the "Markovian Parallax Denigrate", a cryptic series of messages that got posted to Usenet in 1996. Like the Toynbee Tiles, no one has been able to figure out what the post means, if it means anything at all. There are a few strange indications that it might be something more than random words, though... The person listed in the "From" field, Susan Lindauer, was arrested for conspiracy to commit espionage in 2004. Could the words in the Markovian Parallax Denigrate posts be some kind of secret spy code? Mysterious!

Thanksgiving trivia

I'm feeling festive, and yesterday's turkey-themed trivia round at The Grad Club got me thinking about Thanksgiving-related info, so I dug up a few interesting tidbits for the weekend:

-The first official Thanksgiving celebration in North America was Canadian (take that, USA!). It was celebrated in Newfoundland in 1578. As noted on the Wikipedia entry, though, that is a bit of a Euro-centric fact, since Native American cultures had probably been celebrating informal harvest-time festivals for quite a while before Martin Frobisher showed up and put a name on them.

-Tryptophan, the chemical compound in turkey widely held to cause drowsiness, is probably getting a bad rap. While it is present in turkey, the concentration isn't much different than most other meats. The most likely culprit of the post-meal coma: stuffing your face with food until you can barely move. A little wine certainly doesn't help the alertness, either.

-At the end of "Strawberry Fields Forever", John Lennon repeats the same thing over and over, which some conspiracy theorists (who claim Paul McCartney died in 1966) interpret as "I buried Paul". The actual lyric is "Cranberry Sauce".

-Wikipedia's entry on cranberry sauce has the following to say about it's sauce status: "Despite being called a sauce, cranberry sauce is most often consumed as a food itself, not as a garnish for other food items (a fact which has confused generations of American children)." Apparently, American children confuse easily.

-The terms "sweet potato" and "yam" are often used interchangeably, but they are not the same thing. Yams are way bigger (up to 2.5 metres long!), and not as sweet.

-Cornucopias are incredibly impractical-looking baskets. That's not really trivia, just an observation.


Figure 1: This basket is supposed to carry what, exactly?

Sgt. Rza's Lonely Hearts Club Band

Big news over on Pitchfork yesterday. Not new-Radiohead-album-big, but pretty big.

In the world of hip hop sampling, pretty much everything has been covered. Diddy's sampled Bowie, Ghostface Killah has sampled Schoolhouse Rock, and everybody has sampled the Knight Rider theme.

However, there remains one giant, glaring omission in the world of sampling. No one has ever legally sampled The Beatles.

Yesterday, it was announced that the longstanding Beatles resistance to sampling had ended, and the first group to obtain legal permission to sample their music was... The Wu Tang Clan? I'm not making that up.

It was reported that the song to be sampled was "While My Guitar Gently Weeps", which will make up part of "My Heart Gently Weeps", a track on the upcoming Wu Tang Clan album. "Finally!", I thought, "the tastefully brilliant, understated guitar melodies of George Harrison's songwriting and Eric Clapton's soloing will be accompanied by The Rza spittin' game all over yo face."

Alas, it was not to be. Today, the Clan posted a note on their MySpace stating that they were very sorry, but by "sample", they meant "interpolation". And I'm pretty sure by "interpolation", they mean "interpretation", but I'm not going to correct them. They own guns, and are apparently nothin' to fuck with.

In any case, the Pitchfork correction has a link to an mp3 copy of the "interpolation" if you feel like checking it out.

Tomatoes: the debate rages on

I've heard many different arguments on the topic of whether tomatoes are a fruit or a vegetable, but today I decided to see if I could find a definitive answer. It seems that botanically, they are fruits, specifically berries, which blew my mind. However, they are also made into sauce and served on pasta, and I have never heard of a pasta served with fruit sauce. Though, now that I mention it, that might be delicious. Maybe I should pioneer a line of dessert pastas... Raspberry cannoli? Chocolate caramel lasagna? Could be delicious.

The definition for vegetable seems largely culinary. Some definitions call vegetables any edible plant or plant part, which would mean that fruits are a subset of vegetables. However, some other definitions specify that vegetables are any edible plant or plant part that is not a fruit. Therefore, if all fruits are vegetables, and to be a vegetable, you must NOT be a fruit, fruit does not exist.

We are no closer to an answer.

Luckily, in 1883, the Supreme Court of the United States of America stepped in to end the chaos once and for all, and legally declared tomatoes to be vegetables. This is a US-specific law, though, so if you're eating an American tomato, you're most definitely eating a vegetable. However, if that tomato happens to be Mexican, it could well be a fruit. Barring a UN-backed global tomato standardization effort, the debate may never be settled.

Some more interesting tomato trivia:

-The tomato's latin name, Solanum lycopersicum, means "wolf-peach". So next time you're ordering some spaghetti, don't forget the wolf-peach berry sauce.

-"Tomato" was popular slang for an attractive woman in the United States from the 1920's to the 1940's.

-Tomatoes used to be considered poisonous due to their botanical relation to the "nightshade" family of plants, many of which are indeed poisonous.

-According to American legend, the tomato's poisonous reputation led a British national to attempt the assassination of George Washington by serving him a dish laced with tomatoes. Sinister!

Happy 50th birthday, Sputnik!

I was flipping through the fantastic Mental Floss blog this morning, and I found a link to a pretty interesting article over on Wired about the scientists who were responsible for the development of Sputnik, which was launched 50 years ago Thursday.

Apparently it wasn't a very meticulously planned scientific instrument. Rather, the Soviets designed an intercontinental ballistic missile with the goal of being able to hit the US with a hydrogen bomb, and just happened to notice that the result was a rocket with enough thrust to put something into orbit. Some dude pointed this out, and said "Hey, we should use this to launch something into space".

They then proceeded to cobble together a satellite in three months, and blasted it off into orbit. Three months! I prefer not to itemize what I have achieved in the last three months, but it falls somewhat short of putting the world's first artificial satellite in orbit.

One more interesting tidbit: Sputnik had no scientific instruments on board at all. Just 2 radio transmitters and four antennae. All it did was beep.