I've been sick with the flu. Fortunately, it was one of those high-intensity fizzle out kinds that doesn't linger, so I feel much better after just 24 hours. Nonetheless, I'm not recommending anyone visit for a few days, as it seems to remain virulent for a little while after symptoms have gone away (we're going on the assumption that it was imported by our Rochester guests last weekend who had similar symptoms earlier in the week and had been symptom-free for about 48 hours before they visited).

 

So in the meantime, we've had an election that I couldn't vote in due to illness. I was thinking I'd vote for the Green party candidate because I'd like to see Dianne Haskett move her sorry ass back down to the US. She had quite the nerve to show her face here again after her stint as mayor, where she was spending half her time out of the friggin' country but didn't feel it appropriate to resign her post. Rick Mercer had plenty to say about her the other day on his blog. It made me laugh. I would have considered voting for the NDP candidate, Megan Walker, except her campaign people kept calling the house. Repeatedly. Over and over. Sometimes in the same evening. Rebecca's theory is that she fared so poorly because we were the only voters that her campaign supporters were canvassing. I suppose the Liberal guy who won isn't such a bad person. At least he's got a track record doing good stuff with the food bank. I think I'd take him over Joe Fontana. My grandfather used to be the city clerk, so he knew everything that went on at city hall. My theory that Fontana stepped down because he thought he saw an opportunity to become London's mayor would apparently not be inconsistent with reports of his behaviour when he was at city hall. And he lost. "Ba-ha-ha-ha" as Alan would say. Looks like he was the one without a seat when the music stopped.

 

Let's see ... is there anyone else's misfortune I can take pleasure in? ... no, that's pretty much it for now.

I'm talking with Brad and Paul on MSN right now, which reminded me that I wanted to post something. This is actually Rebecca's observation. But she doesn't blog, except to post pictures of Jude and update her Christmas wish list.

So a couple of months back, Steve Irwin was killed by a wild animal. Sure, it wasn't even an animal that he was antagonizing; by all accounts, he was completely oblivious to the stingray that he just spooked. So I guess, it was kind of ironic. Like rain, on your wedding day, or something. Nonetheless, I'm sure everyone had an inkling that a wild animal would be somehow involved with his death. Well, the other day, we were watching Survivorman on OLN. Basically, this guy has a helicopter drop him off in the middle of nowhere, equipped with a utility knife and a boot (and 100 lbs of camera equipment). Settings have included a desert, the far north in late fall, and a swamp. Basically, I'm just waiting for the day where he's been dropped on a glacier, and gets buried in an avalanche. You should catch an episode some time, if the show is aired in your area. The thing that impresses me most is that, because he's there by himself doing his own camerawork, when you see him walk off into the distance, what he's done is set up the camera, filmed himself walking off, then come back to retrieve the camera then walked off again (carrying all that freakin' equipment while living on whatever crap he can forage for). It's insane.

 

I put this under the heading "Entertainment", but really, it's kind of the opposite. It used to be, back in the day, that Transformers toys were marketed with a 30 minute cartoon that aired after school. That's one of the reasons I got to be a decent runner: school got out at about 3:45, and the good cartoons started at 4:00. Running all the way home got me in front of the TV in time. I watched GI Joe, followed by the Transformers each day, and had a decent collection of both toys.

 

The toys disappeared for awhile, then came back. They had already gone to 100% plastic, but the rereleased line had no aesthetic value at all. No longer did they resemble any vehicles in particular; they all just became generic futuristic vehicles/machinery, though there was some group of animal-themed ones or something. I had stopped paying attention by that point, so this is just sort of a general impression, but whatever the case, they looked like cheap ugly crap. An aside: the He-Man toys would have been much better had they not been redesigned to look like humans with about 6 or 7 extra neck vertebrae.

 

Anyways, back to what prompted this entry: I came across the Transformers cartoon on YTV just now, and it is so crappy, I had to vent about it. I feel like that pleasant childhood memory has been touched in a naughty place by some dumbass marketing executive. You would think that, since they're using CGI technology that it would look at least as good as the old-school cartoon from the mid-80s. No such luck. Holy crap. They used animation techniques from conventional animation (you know, where the 'actors' do repetetive actions so that the same several frames can be used over-and-over to cut down on the amount of drawing that has to be done to fill one second of programming. It's CGI, people! The drawing is done by computers! Jeez. Also, holy crap was the voice acting lousy.  First off, it appears that the Autobots are now all Australian. But that's nothing compared with the voice actors' abysmal timing. It sounds like all the actors came in on different days and recorded the dialogue separately. The only other comparably bad dialogue timing is in the Ultramatic adjustable bed (sorry, no youtube reference) commercial where the actors are clearly reading cue cards, and seem to be inserting superfluous punctuation. I just can't express how crappy cartoons are these days. You'd get better production value if you just hired some decent voice actors to narrate as some kids play the Transformers video game that is almost certain to accompany the film that's slated for release next year.

 

Note, this I think, is my record for using the word 'crappy'. It is just that bad: It's the crappiest crap that ever crapped a crap.

I learned this term  (a.k.a., F***ing the Dog) back when I lived in a Toronto storage closet and worked at Nelvana Animation Studio in the Digital Ink and Paint department. For the uninitiated, digital ink and paint is a fancy name for colouring within the lines for cartoons. Basically, you get a bunch of frames, and treat each frame like a page out of a colouring book (except you don't get to choose what colours you use -- those are very specifically laid out, and you actually would have to go to alot of trouble to use a *different* palette). Keeping within the lines isn't even that difficult because it's more like using the Paintbucket tool that alot of digial paint programs use than using a crayon/paintbrush.

I mention my time at Nelvana because it was a sort of fun and carefree time in my life, made more carefree by the frequent lack of anything to do. You see, the actual animation was done by (presumably) underpaid classical animators in Korea. Their handdrawn art was then scanned and sent on a digital tape to Toronto. They had a contract that specified the number of digital tapes that had to be sent each week. Funny thing was, the letter of the contract apparently only specified the number of tapes, not the content of the tapes. For weeks at a time, Korea would fulfull their contractual obligation by sending blank digital tapes.

Yes, those were good times indeed. We would come into work each morning and find out whether we were getting 7.5 hours of pay to play cards in the kitchen. Or sometimes we would go walk around the neighbourhood -- it was really close to the CNE building. And of course, there was always going for coffee. Yes, that, my friends, is what Screwing the Pooch means, and that's why I first learned the term when I worked at Nelvana.

Today, I am screwing the pooch.

I have a couple of really tedious tasks to do that I really feel unmotivated to start. I sort of tried to start one, but didn't find my database file where I thought it would be. So I took it as an excuse to go get more tea. This is #3 for the day. I am going to be SO wired when I try to go to bed, even though I got up to quiet down Jude at 6:45 this morning.

What? No pictures today? No. Screw off.

A couple of years ago, Jones Soda co. released their Holiday soda pack. With flavours like Turkey Dinner, Mashed Potatoes and Green Bean Casserole, who could resist? Kevin, Alan, OJ, Pat, Rebecca and I were able to procure the holiday pack from Sobey's and had a fantastic time doing shots of the stuff (with alcohol chasers). It was awful. We want to do it again.

Rebecca's friend in Rochester, Krista, has gotten her hands on this year's installment and will be carrying it over the border when they come to visit. This will be so much fun. FYI, this year's flavours are:
Dinner Roll
Sweet Potato

Turkey

Peas

Antacid

I'm looking forward to posting pics. Hopefully one or more of my sisters can be there; there's enough in each bottle for 7 shots. You don't want to drink more than one shot of any of these. Trust me. Share the pain.

If you do not know the tune with the serious funk groove that goes along with the title then just ... just ... whatever. Don't speak to me.

 

Back before that attention whore Elmo took over, before they introduced the Baby Bear character which intentionally speaks with a speech impediment (children are supposed to emulate this?) there were a pile of really good muppet characters in really funny skits. My favourites always involved Ernie & Bert - who aren't gay (not that there's anything wrong with that). I could probably come up with a mini-thesis about the dynamics between those two, but that might be a little too involved.

 

Anyways, for awhile now, I have been bemoaning the fact that those classic sketches have been unavailable, except for really low-quality clips on youtube. In searching for Sesame Street DVDs on the internet, I found many other people had the same complaint. I grew up with those Sesame Street episodes, and I like how I turned out, my argument goes. Finally, the good people at CTW came around. Rebecca yesterday found a link to the Old School Sesame Street dvd on Amazon. If anyone is looking for the perfect Christmas gift for Rebecca, that would be it.

People that I sort of only kind of know ask me, "so what do you do?". And I tell them how I'm a grad student. Well, naturally, they think that's wonderful, because, you know, you see it on saturday morning cartoons: Stay in school! But my family members know better. They were all down for a chaotic weekend at the end of October. And my cousin Mike was somewhat incredulous. And I think he may have a point. I've been in school since 1980. That's 26 years, with a period between May 1997 and May 1999 being my brief stint away from the academic life. That's alot of frickin' school. And I was hoping to finish off sometime in the next year, ideally by Christmas of next year.

If I do, then I'll be 1 semester ahead of the game, which would be swell, though I just now remember Dave Caan complaining about how that can work out not-so-well, as what the hell do you do with your PhD in the middle of the year? I suppose I might be able to swing a post-doc id-year. Hard to say.
In any case, finishing up in the next year seems like it's going to be a bit of a challenge, partly because of the new baby thing, but also because there's a helluvalot of crap that has to be done to complete a dissertation. There's a reason not everyone has a PhD. On top of this fMRI project I have going on with Marc and a host of other collaborators, I have some course work, and of course, designing and running and then writing up my dissertation. Thinking about it all is paralyzing. I find it difficult partititioning my time when I have tasks that can't be chunked into bite sized bits. Each of them could easily eat up months of time done serially. Doing them in parallel? I can't imagine going that long without the satisfaction or feedback of having actually completed anything.

Annoyance.

Oh well. To make myself feel better, here's some pictures of Pokey.

I updated my wish list, at Rebecca's request. Which is good, because this happens every year: I think of crap that might make a good gift because I don't want to be difficult to shop for. But invariably, I forget each idea almost as soon as it occurs to me, and as December 25th approaches, I draw a blank. Fortunately, my family is able to recover and get me good stuff anyways. One can usually at least count on my liking a fancy shirt or something like that, because, as Karen likes to say, I'm metrosexual.

 

Whence comes this metrosexuality? It's actually a fluke. For some reason a few years back at Psychonomics in Vancouver, I went shopping with Marc's girls, and bought some stylin' shirts. After that, it became a thing. And having nice shirts is silly unless one actually wears them, so I liked to use Fridays, when we have our brown bag lunches, as an excuse to wear something nice. After all, the presenter is usually dressed nicely, so it's nice to show some solidarity, I figure. I'm not sure whether the trend caught on, but whatever.

 

This year, I will not be at Psychonomics, which is in Houston in a couple of weeks. Partly because Ken, my advisor, is pleading poverty, and partly because we have a newborn in the house, and Rebecca isn't ready to be left to deal with it alone. Oh well. It's only Texas. I doubt I'll miss any of the 'culture', nor will I miss the 5 years that would be shaved off my life by the nature and quantity of food that gets served down there. Mind you, I do like my steaks.

 

Mmm. Steak....