Engrish

I love Engrish.

I found some notes I took in Greece in 2005. Among other trivia were some Engrish expressions from a menu in an Athens taverna:

"Fresh proposals to escort your drink" (appetizers)
"Spicy Suggestion" (a hint of spice)
"Hot Meet Collection" (spicy meat entrees)

Prayer in the workplace

I happen to work from noon to 20:00. It's an annoying shift because evenings are essentially spent at work. Less importantly, I love the 24h clock and that's why I wrote "20:00" instead of "8:00 p.m.". The whole "p.m." bit is annoying to type all the time. 20:00 is unambiguous and modern. Disorienting? At first, yes. But then you remember a few landmarks and everything falls into place. For me it was that 6 p.m. is 18:00. Or just remember: 3 p.m. is 15:00, 6 p.m. is 18:00 and 9 p.m. is 21:00. After that, add or subtract an hour to get appropriate times. One hour before 18:00, when normal people get out of work, is 17:00. One hour after is when crappy TV gets into full gear: 19:00.

I was at work the other day. It was 18:00 and everything was quiet. Most people except those with retarded shifts had gone home. All of a sudden I hear what I believe to be a heated discussion coming from one of the rooms no one usually uses.
I listen more carefully and it's someone chanting. I get up and stroll by, and I discover that it's someone praying. To Allah.

I'd always wondered if my company had a prayer room. But maybe this was just some dude catching a quick one while he thought no one was looking. Maybe that's part of the thrill...

In any case, I don't know where I stand on the issue of prayer rooms. Part of me rejects the idea outright as an appeasement measure for the religious fundamentalists. But maybe it's just a question of being tolerant: it doesn't hurt anyone to pray, even if it seems completely arbitrary and out of place to me.

Anyway, the picture above is a bit of religious vandalism that I caught on camera at Sheppard station.

fetus in fetu

There are probably more important things to talk about in the world, and after such a long silence, I feel somewhat guilty to break the ice with sensationalism... But this simply has to come off my chest... Or rather, out of my stomach.

What an absolutely amazing and horrible thing. It's as if Alien and South Park's Conjoined Fetus Lady weren't completely far-fetched after all. (Were they?)

Eerily, I bought a copy of Alien very recently from Vortex, a reliable used media store. I almost never do that anymore, but I really love that movie.

Tres Tacos

"Best"
Originally uploaded by martyloo.

Commercial signage should always be checked by many people who are preferably literate.
Or have pride in the product they sell. If it's the best, be proud of it. Or lie. Own it, baby.

warhol

I know it's been mentioned in other blogs, but if you're in Toronto in the next couple of weeks, you should check out the Warhol exhibit at the AGO. The exhibit is guest-curated by David Cronenberg. This means that you listen to Cronenberg's commentary from a handheld museum listening device as you walk through the exhibit at your own pace. It is very, very interesting and deserves much props, even if you have no interest in Warhol or Cronenberg. Cronenberg's anecdotes and discussion are well worth the admission price. It sounds corny but I felt like he was giving me a personal tour. It's obvious he is a huge fan and that Warhol has influenced his film making. I'm thinking of the "Disasters" especially. This exhibit is probably the best thing I've seen at the AGO.

Fried

I visited my grandparents in Tennessee last week. Both were well, my grandfather will be 98 on August 28th. He is amazing and still sharp as a tack, despite being very frail.

Aside from good times with my grandfather and grandmother, I mostly caught up with my parents. A week with one's parents can be a long time, but in my case I was happy to be with them. I feel like I've really caught up with them, even though I live only 10 minutes away and I see them almost every weekend. 32 hours of driving, a large part through the most boring landscape on earth, Ohio, tends to bring out subjects rarely discussed otherwise. My mother, in particular, was in good spirits. They had been in France for 5 weeks prior to this trip to the USA. In Tennessee, I managed to do some cool things with their France pictures on my new MacBook, which I had purchased the day before the trip. Je suis un geek.

In Nashville, we saw 2 great exhibits at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, in beautiful downtown. Yes, there's more to Nashville than the Grand Ole Opry and the Nashville Predators... Not much, but still.

The Quest for Immortality was an ancient Egyptian artifact collection, brilliantly narrated by Jeremy Irons. Yes, the gynecologist twins from Dead Ringers explaining how the Sun God's earthly form is a dung beatle is quite a powerful experience. The objects were very beautiful.

The other exhibit was a collection of the top Pulitzer prize winning photographs of the last 100 years. It was very, very good. The picture of the starving Sudanese child crawling towards a refuge camp and away from a lurking vulture was very chilling. It's what awaits us all if we don't smarten up.

I ate fried foods and pork throughout most of the trip. Tennessee peeps need some slimming down. A majority of people are overweight. They need to snap out of it. At some point, if one is already a mastodon, it's a good thing to realise that it's suicide to eat chicken fried steak. Try a salad, some greens, some delicious tomatoes that are produced in your own back yard. (We ate tomatoes all week too.) Not eating quite as much can still be patriotic and "country", all y'all don't worry.

ethics

I'm reading a very interesting book about a dry subject. It includes the following tale:

On a very cold morning, a farmer is walking in his field and hears some very loud chirping. He bends down and it's a bird with a broken wing. Because it's very cold, the farmer picks up the bird and places it gently into a steaming cow dung then moves on to his busy day. The bird keeps chirping. Alerted, a fox arrives and eats the bird.

There are so many ways to interpret these events. For example:

a) Someone who puts you in shit doesn't necessarily mean you any harm
b) Someone who takes you out of shit doesn't necessarily mean you well
c) If you're in shit, the best thing may be to shut up

Comments?

Veuve Pourrie?

Veuve Pourrie?
Originally uploaded by martyloo.

What do you think of this? Is it funny, creepy, gross, or cute?

Coupe du monde

I don't want to give excuses for my absense on this blog in the last month, but I'm going to anyway. I’ve been watching the FIFA World Cup rather obsessively, and I’m just barely coming down off the Sunday final’s low. Yes, I was rooting for France. I am a French citizen in addition to being 100% Canadian. I am completely bilingual, although I now find translating to French is more difficult than translating to English.

More relevantly, I love football (the world variety, not the american variety, in case it wasn’t clear). I play every week in a recreational league here in Toronto. I played when I was a kid in a house league and at school. I’ve watched the FIFA World Cup since 1990, when it was held in Italy and Germany won it all. The symmetry of this Cup is amazing: unless you have been living under a rock, you know that Italy won it’s fourth cup in Germany 2 days ago. I watched the English Premiership games and the Serie A Italian games far too frequently this past year. I read Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch and enjoyed it. I saw a bit of myself in it and it was scary. You’ve seen the Adidas commercials with José, the little kid from a non-descript (Spanish speaking?) poor neighbourhood who selects a series of current and past professional players for his game of pick-up… I've dreamed like José. That clip does a great job capturing the joy of the game. There’s a freedom, joy and creative element to playing football that is just unmatched by any other sport I’ve played. That Joga Bonito stuff is true.

I’ve been a French national team fan since the victory against South Africa in 1998, the first match of the world cup that year. (The next World Cup will be hosted
in South Africa in 2010.) I liked what I saw and followed les Bleus through victory and defeat until now. I follow the players, I read l’Equipe online and
off. I was embarassed when they lost in 2002, not even scoring a goal.

However, the World Cup is much more than just the sport, isn’t it? There’s the politics, the business, the giant party that grips the world for a month every four years. The cup generates a lot of emotion, a lot of it wrapped up in nationalism.

There’s the good nationalism. The consciousness of being a part of a larger community, the nuggets of wisdom found in our parents' culture(s). The knowledge of an older country’s social and cultural insitutions and all the good things that brings and/or hopes to bring to the world, but also the warnings about the bad things. The Cup teams are an advertisement, of sorts. I love to see the “good” nationalism. I like it when Mexican families go to the pub and cheer on their country (but not when they call Argentina's goalie a faggot), or the cab driver from Ghana light up when I tell him how I think Appiah is a better player than Essien. I like that a guy from Djibouti or Brazil starts a conversation with me on the Vomit Comet because of my French jersey. And as much as I didn’t like the endless honking of the Italian fans on Sunday, I liked the fact that the victory coincided with the Italian fest here in T.O.

Then there’s the “bad” nationalism. It’s unerving to see fans taking the result so seriously but not caring about the game being played or being in any way realistic and/or modern about what a national soccer team really is. It's frustrating to see people have hopelessly vague and dangerously confused notions of race and culture. In 2002, I went to little Italy to watch a few games, and I thought I’d attended a giant funeral. It was awful. And driving around in a car honking your horn if you are 1/8th Italian or Portugese or Croatian and you haven’t watched the game is not cool. It’s pathetic. The whole “it’s in my blood” argument has pissed me off for a long time now. Is Serie A match fixing in the blood too? (Tomorrow, Italy’s biggest club will be relegated because its administrators were involved in a match fixing scandal.) The worst aspect of the "bad" nationalism is outright racism. For now I'll just say to those who thought the number of blacks on the French team was somehow inauthentic or a dubious outcome of mercenary colonial recruiting: all the black players on the team are 100% French and you're racist for not thinking so.

Aside from whatever Materazzi said to Zidane, I don’t want to take away from a hard fought campaign by the Azzurri. Most of those guys are consummate pros and they deserved to win the world cup 2006. You’ll notice how Buffon gave Zidane a genuinely sympathetic embrace after the game in which Zizou ended his career in shame… Those are some amazing moments in sport. Pirlo was superb throughout the tournament, like Cannavaro and Grosso. Gattuso, the guy who looks like a rabid dog, was
simultaneously a monster and a clown in midfield. Couldn’t care less about Totti, Iaquinta and Materazzi, they were wankers.

On the French side, the games against Spain and Brazil were superb. They attacked and defended as one tough and fast unit. Arguably, the final against Italy was in French hands for the end of the first half, the 2nd half and extra time before the penalty kicks. Henry, Ribéry, Malouda, Vieira, Sagnol and Zidane (before the headbutt) were fantastic. The gargantuan play of Thuram in defense was simply unbelievable for a player who many thought was too old to be selected on the national team. Thuram was a extra goalie for France, more of a goalie than Barthez. If France had won, he would have been man of the match. Both France and Italy moved the ball, attacked and defended as a team and it was great to watch.

Of course, in the end Zidane threw the match away in one of sport’s most bizarre gestures of violence. Italy had the extra confidence it needed in the
penalty kicks. Barthez, who should never have been selected (Gregory Coupet of Olympique Lyon should have been the #1 French goalie) seemed lost while the
Italians hit their penalties flawlessly.

Zidane broke my heart. The headbutt was so unzidanesque I thought it was a bad dream. Whereas Zidane lifting his second world cup on the last day of his illustrious career would have been a peak in the ongoing history of football, the result instead shocked the world and ended his last match and otherwise stellar career in shame. Materazzi is probably a piece of garbage for what he said to provoke Zidane. But Zidane is the one who is suffering most now, I'm convinced of that. And if he’d just kept his cool, like everyone thought he would, like we were accustomed to see him doing, everything would have been OK, even in defeat. Tragic.

For me, Zidane is still up there with Pelé and Maradona. Despite the headbutt incident, he is:

- Classier than the drug addicted melodramatic midget known as Maradona
- Right up there with Pelé
- The best French player there ever was, dethroning Platini
- A great ambassador for the game
- One of the reasons the French got to the final of the 2006 Cup, and possibly the reason they didn't win.
- The FIFA golden boot winner.

Today the (slimy) French president Jacques Chirac had these words for Zidane and the rest of les Bleus (quote translated by me from article in Le Monde):

"You are a virtuoso, a world football genius. You are also a man of heart, commitment and conviction. That's why France admires and loves you" he declared in the gardens of the Elysée. To all the players, the president said: "You have made
us live a sports epic of tremendous proportions that will remain deeply ingrained in the memory of the men and women of France. You have demonstrated to France that it is strong when it is united in its diversity and confident in its own ability."

http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-669420,36-794181@51-793747,0.html

sleeping elephant

Net neutrality: is it worth fighting for? You'd think there would be a bigger buzz around this issue.

No one's given me any argument why we should mess around with the way we send packets flying around the net currently. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

For example, when I make my mockworldcup.com site for 2010, I want to be competing on equal footing with the big boys. Whatever that means.

Update: I've got other plans in life aside from one esoteric website. Well, I should, anyway.

google ads

I've checked my google adsense account and I've made $0.04 on the advertising on this blog. Yay! Hilarious! I love Google. Those ad pimps.

Creative Tree Pruning

Creative Tree Pruning
Originally uploaded by martyloo.

Why cut down a tree if you don't have to?

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

world cup diplomacy

My patience for totalitarian, authoritarian or theocratic regimes, while it was never really there, is at an all time low. My patience is in general at an all time low. That's why a dubious report about religious labeling made me nod in agreement as our Prime Minister "blasted" the Iranian government.

The fact remains that the international community is too tolerant to regimes like Ahmadinejad's. Regimes that are simply stupid: those governments continue to deny their citizens anything but a marginal future despite existing in a global community that isn't fooled by antics and childish propaganda. Unfortunately, they tend to ruin things for everyone else. Party-pooper is Ahmadinejad's middle name.

There's one diplomatic card that no one wants to deal in the Iran Nuclear stand-off for reasons that are probably not valid, given that the alternatives are surely worse for all parties if Iran continues to drive down the fascist road at full speed. (I don't care if the clothing labeling report was false, Iran's is still a fascist regime.)

It was suggested that Iran be banned from the FIFA World Cup. I think this is an excellent idea. It's a diplomatic measure, largely without humanitarian or economic costs, but it's embarassing. Embarassment is the least that idiotic governments deserve. And football is just a game ...

V-Dub in da haus

My blog makes me look like a serious, frustrated person. I am these, but I also like to laugh.

Check out this.

I have to watch these commercials at least once a day to hold down my sanity tip.

Also (indirectly about Deutschland), the FIFA world cup is coming in 36 days. If you like football/soccer, this is not news, and you're getting more excited by the minute. However even for you non-footballers out there, nike soccer has a bunch of videos that are absolutely insane.

The dorky French promoter guy in the clips is Eric Cantona of 1990s Manchester United fame.

"scream" for Darfur

On Sunday I went to an anti-genocide protest called "Scream for Darfur" held at Queen's Park in downtown T.O. The turnout was rather pathetic contrary to the organisers' insistence on it being fantastic. More importantly, you would think the monumental humanitarian disaster that is occurring in Darfur (400000 people dead and counting, 2 million people displaced) would mobilize more citizens. It's been all over the news and recently George Clooney jumped on the bandwagon and proclaimed his outrage (though he didn't scream into the microphone, like Jack Layton did). There has to be at least as many diehard Clooney fans in Toronto as there were demonstrators.

I don't think the Clooney crowd showed up. The folks assembled were mostly of the "Kumbaya" left: the love-not-war, white-peeps-with-dreads crowd. I was mostly annoyed by them, but in fairness, they did show up (the event was kickstarted by highschoolers) even though it seemed most people didn't really understand the depravity of the issue. Also, at every opportunity, the organisers insisted on asking if we were having a good time, telling us what a good time they were having, what a nice afternoon it was, and urging us to relax and party, which seemed highly inappropriate considering we were there to protest a genocide, and a clearcut failure of the international community. The local Darfuris (Darfurians?) stood by stoically, perplexed by this display of vacuous freedom. A band consisting of a rapper, a guitarist and a congo player, droned on endlessly before the speakers lined up to talk. The lyrics (delivered with an Eminem Detroit accent) were mostly about how we should stop oppressing all organisms of the earth. The guy insisted on using the term "organisms" over and over. It would be nice if we first stopped oppressing homo sapiens.

You can get pictures and an accurate summary here.

TV

I've always had a problem watching too much TV. Ever since I was little I was always the one to be completely mesmerized by it. I'm not someone whose critical thinking goes into overdrive when sitting in front of the telly. In fact, I can barely maintain my brain's basic state of passive attention. I become extremely lazy and my ass can't move itself. It's now a convenient excuse for explaining why I'm not an accomplished musician or haven't developed the cure for cancer. I probably don't have the talent and I'm not smart enough however I like to think I just watched too much TV as a child.

Actually, for several years, roughly from 1995 to 2005, I rarely watched. I had better things to do and didn't want to spend the monthly. Then I moved into a new apartment. My roomate wanted TV and I wanted an internet connection. We got a digital "bundle" and saved our dollars. The outcome has been that I've watched a lot of TV in the last 6 months. Hours that I will never get back.

The shame of it is also the manner in which I watch TV. I become a zombie. Practically all my friends have more knowledge of what shows are actually playing and worth watching. They seem to be able to filter the good stuff. I can only zap from shitty to shittier. I merely take my friends' advice, rent the good shows on DVD (haven't downloaded them ... yet), then continue to watch regularly scheduled crap on top of that. My blog (and state of mind) suffers tremendously. Have my posts become dumber? I wouldn't be surprised. I can't judge anymore, I'm too stupid. Anyway, if I'm not posting, it's surely because of TV.

Lately, however, I've been cutting down a lot. I've become extremely bored by it. Bored and digusted to the point of discomfort. If only my brain could vomit! It's Spring, and I think that my soul is full of dust and bile. All thanks to TV, I take no responsibility. My hate-on is in full force. The incarnation of my disgust is currently CNN Headline News anchor Nancy Grace who looks demented and has the personality of a hyperkinetic ghoul. I think the satirical show The Wrong Coast derives considerable material from this maniac. Her makeup crew must be doing it on purpose: there's no way they're attempting to make her look saner than she really is. I can't look at her or listen to her for more than 5 seconds.

It's mean, but someone needs to tell her she looks like a witch. OK I'm done.

I heart Spring

The warm weather in T.O. is arriving. The sun is out and my ankle hurts. Good weather signs.

it's about time...

I'm posting this on martyloo, not nerdyloo, because it ain't nerdy. It's about time, folks, and time is something everyone should care about on some level because life is too short. That's not a complaint, by the way. I'm trying to say that I.T. is about time: faster, smarter, better. Your computer is supposed to make your life more enjoyable, by furiously automating all the mundane and tedious tasks that make you unproductive and grumpy. In many ways, information technology is in a constant struggle to live up to this expectation.

Calendar/scheduling software has been one of the most fruitful application areas in which computers were morphed into useful, ergonomic, effective and productive tools in addition to being specialised and nerdy calculation machines. Just like e-mail, calendar software is a "killer app", the expression used liberally by I.T. folk to refer to applications that economically justify sets of related but independent technology and industry. However, until recently, calendar/scheduling has been almost exclusively the domain of desktop PC applications like Microsoft Outlook, confining the calendar to a particular machine, corporate network or suite of proprietary tech. Face it: as far as ubiquity is concerned, the good old paper agenda book was superior to any silicon tech before Microsoft released Outlook Web Access or the ical standard started to gain market traction.

OK, that was nerdy. Let's just say that I continue to be amazed at how cool Google is, by how they respond to organic technology and market needs. I guess that's a bold statement because I'm not an economist and have only a subjective idea of what general I.T. needs are. Nevertheless, despite not being a typical computer user, some of my needs are run-of-the-mill and Google takes care of those brilliantly.

Philosophy aside, Google has created Google Calendar, yet again scratching my computer itches and proving, in my mind, that they just get I.T. (corny pun intended). Does anyone have to develop anything anymore when Google just cranks out the killer apps for free, and better than you could have imagined? We are truly spoiled.

Here's the google blog announcement.

magic ass

The locks on my building are unlocked by those magnetic cards that you wave in front of a square area mounted on a wall beside the door. These things are great: the satisfaction of unlocking the door, as if by magic, never ceases for me.

My usual habit is to put the card in the front pocket of my bag and I wave the bag in front of the magnetic square and just like that, beep! clink!, I'm in my building a la James Bond checking into MI-5.

Occasionally, I put the card in my back pocket. The magnetic squares beside the doors are at about the level of my buttocks. So I'll casually turn around, point my ass at the magnetic square, and beep! clink! the door is unlocked. Today, an old lady was sitting in the lobby when I did this, and I swear the look on her face was of absolute astonishment. She must have thought that a) my ass had magical door opening properties or that b) I was blowing a fart in the intercom.