25.09.07
   For the first time this year, they mowed the lawn at work. Alright, so it's not so much a lawn as a rolling series of hills on the edge of a cliff. In any event, there's a bench we like for breaks and until recently it was on the verge of a thicket of blackberries and vetch, a clambouring mass of tendrils with pink and white flowers and a built-in dessert course. The surrouding hills sprouted waist-high grass and thistles which hosted flocks of Goldfinches. Now when I say they mowed it, they mowed it to the ground. The change was jarring, but not unwelcome; the rains are due and all that organic matter would turn to sludge, additionally, the blackberries are invasive, in another season we'd have lost the bench in a sea of thorns. I was out there alone, quite exposed in a flat field of brown grass stumps under a grey and threatening sky, which added to the feeling of being rather like a a lighting rod. I was reading Bruce Mau's Massive Change since I missed the exhibit, and the book has interviews with visionaries in black text on a bright yellow page. This one bit of colour was all that was left in that once-vibrant landscape. Or so thought one bee, who kept landing on the page surely looking for one last bit of summer, but it's all gone.

   We had a tour come through at work. This is not in any way unusual, except that this group of people hold a fair bit of sway. We were warned months in advance of this tour, then reminded, and reminded again. We were told the exact times of when we were to be toured, and instructed to have all hands on deck firing on all cylinders (for those metaphorical internal combustion galleons). It wasn't a big deal for us, but it was interesting to see everyone make the effort to look presentable at the same time. Our IT guy spent the summer in t-shirts, board shorts, and flip flops, but he, like every other guy in sight (including me) was in a long-sleeve dress shirt. It reminded me of the day when we would take our class pictures in school. Say cheese.

22.09.07
   I was watching an interview, one of those where the interviewee has been prepped ahead of time and the interviewer knows which questions to ask. Journalistically it was maddening, as a thread dangling from a previous answer would be left unexplored in favour of asking the next boring agreed-upon question. One of the questions was "what is your favourite word?" followed of course by "what is your least favourite word?". The promptness of the interviewee's responses gave away the game, while I was left staring into space thinking of what my answers would be. Although we are dangerously close to "if you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?" territory, I finally came up with decent answers:
 
Contradiction
Definition
 
in that order.

21.09.07
    You heard about that surcharge they’re planning on adding to MP3 players? Something like $70 added to the initial cost of each unit. The motivation is from the recording companies who want some compensation for being ripped off through illegal music downloads. This proposal is based on assumptions, flawed logic, unfair application, and caters to the greed and laziness of the recording companies.
    The biggest flaw in this plan is that it assumes that all users are illegally downloading music. You could say that as a general trend, some people who actively obtain digital music files have at least some files about which the ownership is questionable. This is a long way off from saying anyone who buys an MP3 player should be financially punished. Where’s the onus of responsibility? If the recording companies can unquestionably prove that every single user of a portable digital music device is illegally downloading their music, then there might be a case for them, but I have yet to see anything close to that level of documentation.
    It’s the same as saying that if you drive a car, chances are you’ll speed sometime in your life. Therefore we should just issue you a few speeding tickets at the same time you buy the car. Let’s see how that goes over.
    This proposal also unfairly targets users of portable music devices. We could have two hypothetical people who both illegally download the same number of songs. Person A listens to them on their computer while Person B buys an MP3 player. Person B is therefore hit with the surcharge while Person A is not. Both are equally guilty of the supposed wrongdoing, yet only one is pays a price. Where’s the fairness in the already flawed idea?
    This is also a way for recording companies to penalize consumers for their own shortcomings. There are advantages to buying CDs over downloading music, and it’s not the consumer’s fault if the record company can’t figure that out. Two of my CDs (a small number, but a substantial fraction of my total collection) came with bonus DVD content that made the purchase of the set totally worthwhile. Interesting cover art or engaging content in the liner notes are also possible selling features. If artists and record companies do nothing to make the purchase of CDs different and better than downloading the music, then why should anyone bother.
    A similar surcharge was thrown out in court in 2004. Let’s hope reason wins out again.

15.09.07
    We’re spoiled. I was watching a DVD and all I could notice was when the actors’ faces were slightly out of focus. The focus is on his tie, pull it forward! I also have a few persistent imperfections in my monitor screen which are driving me nuts. My supervisor she can’t see any of her friends’ mounted photographs without finding pieces of dust trapped in the frame. We also spent an afternoon debating whether or not a program was malfunctioning when a slight increase in noise was noted at 300% magnification and another two days cleaning tiny spots off of one of the camera sensors. We know we have impossible standards, we know we’re insane and we’re going to keep doing this for at least another year. Imagine how ridiculous we’ll be then.

    Transit People Update:
    Green jacket guy is still there, though in the warmer weather he switched to olive green pants and an olive green golf shirt. He wears black too.
    Fur coat lady ditched the fur coat, but still keeps up her regular habits.
    Snakeskin bag girl switched to a robin’s egg blue and brown logo print handbag, which she once wore with matching logo print shoes. I think she was on the bus the other day with scary-high white leather heels and that brain-slug hairstyle.
    I don’t see any of the other regulars, but I’m sure they’re out there somewhere.

02.09.07
    I was a good little art historian and did my pilgrimage to the VAG to see the “Monet to Dali” show last week. I would have gone earlier, but for the duration of this show (and in a move that smacks of greed), the VAG voided my tourism pass which would otherwise have granted me admission. Additionally the VAG decided to raise admission for this show, since everybody knows you get more culture out of looking at a Picasso than just any old artist. Luckily, my aunt scored a couple invites through work (the perks of accounting) and she gave them to me. The invitations would have got us through the “express” entrance to the show, bus since we were with people who actually paid the inflated admission price, we chose to wait in the cattle holding pen that was the general entrance. We snaked back and forth in line, reading the bits of the introductory blurb on the wall that we could glimpse between other people’s heads. There were two other entrances to the exhibit where we could have walked right through, but then you disturb the chronological order. When the guard at the head of the line deemed that we had waited an appropriate length of time to truly appreciate the value of the show we were about to see, the nylon tape was withdrawn and we took a few reverent footsteps towards the first painting.
    The show itself was fine, if not particularly remarkable; the lesser-known works of “great” European artists from the collection of a lesser-known American museum. The Sunday afternoon crowd was also to be expected, but everyone was reasonably well behaved, and it was a particular treat to be within earshot of a young girl’s unselfconscious interpretation of surrealist art at the prompting of her mother. Of course, you did have to jostle your way to stand in front of the Van Gogh (but behind the grey rope barrier), and when the title cards switched from a nice high-contrast white on aubergine to white on light grey (to signal the break from impressionism to post-impressionism) all hope of reading from a distance was lost.
    At the end of the exhibit, in the far corner by the women’s washroom, there was text on a wall problematizing the construction of the art historical canon. They had quotes from such heavyweights as Griselda Pollock, and the star of many of my term-paper bibliographies, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. It was nice to be reminded that the canon of who we hold as “great” artists is an artificial construct created through chance, social connections, and self-perpetuation more than any intrinsic value in the work.
    Of course, after seeing this, you are forced to walk through the gift shop placed in the gallery, where you too can own a print on canvas of your favourite piece from the show, or for only 50 cents, you can have your own “Monet to Dali” button which would proudly advertise that you too have genuflected at the altar of art history and have been anointed with the snake oil of high culture.

01.09.07
    The dry lips are persisting post-medication. I’m out of lip balm, or more specifically, the stuff I bought liquefied in the heat of my backpack sitting in the sunlight and is now an amorphous petroleum-jelly-like blob. I was looking through a rack of options in the store and found one labeled specifically “for men”. It was in a flat black tube with a picture of a guy on the package and it cost more than the other options. It was fragrance, flavour, and colour free, but otherwise contained the same ingredients in a slightly different order than the generic stuff in a blue tube. There was also a “shimmer” option available in a shiny pink tube, but I digress.
    Now “men’s cosmetics” in my limited experience, tend to be the same stuff repackaged in colours like “gunmetal”, “army green”, “road kill red”, etc. They also tend to be more expensive than their non-gender stereotype shelf neighbours. You pay extra for a little bit of masculinity. It’s like the Airport Improvement Fee when you travel; you can’t see what it does, you suspect it’s a scam, but you pay it and somehow it keeps the building from falling down around your ears. Such is the fragility of the construct of masculinity.
    I bought the blue tube.

    In other tales of marketing, there was a tent set up in the mall promoting a new (presumably, who can tell) energy drink. The tent was staffed by two young and attractive women. No one was within twenty feet of it.
    It reminded me of my technology marketing days when we worked a big testosterone-fueled event with a lot of other vendors around. Over the course of a few days, we got friendly with the other people working around us. The people across from us were promoting an all-purpose car cleaning product. Their booth was staffed by one guy from the company and two disproportionately beautiful women. Whereas we were hired for some semblance of skill (and were thus primarily young techie guys), we found out they called a modeling agency and requested two women who they clad in company-branded short shorts and tight t-shirts.
    Beyond the similarity of the situation, the reason this particular memory was triggered was the name of the energy drink, which was appropriate, if nothing else: “Hype”.

    Holy crap, it's September. I'm still busy, I'm taking a break from making websites to ...edit this website. Sigh. Oh well, I've done two years of blogging as of last week.

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