Weather Report: Weather Stops Sucking

This weekend and now today, the weather has actually been pretty nice! One no longer needs to put on a jacket to go downstairs in my house. I'm thinking I might go for a run tomorrow, if I'm feeling completely over my cold and I can find the time. It's only supposed to get nicer as the week progresses, too. I'm beginning to reconsider Vancouver.

Oh, and just a word for those of you who were concerned after my last post: my pants were just on the floor, it wasn't like I lost them or something.

Music: Pedro the Lion - Progress EP

Life lesson: don't party hard when you're sick

It's amazing that this late in fourth year, I can still say something like "that was the craziest night ever," but that's exactly what I'm doing. The evening was going swimmingly up until the point when I...er, up until a point, after which I can remember very little, except for not feeling well intermingled with moments of thinking I was going to die and being incredibly embarrassed for myself. Let's just say I think there might have been a little too much Jesus in the Purple Jesus, and there was definitely too much of another deity in one of the other things. I woke up this morning in my bed without any pants on, not remembering how I got there. Ah, the joys of being a student! I think there's some talk of going to the Brass for breakfast today. Maybe that'll be a good opportunity to find out what happened and apologize for it. Oh yeah, and I guess it goes without saying that Cassi once again absolutely thumped me in our informal drinking contest, only this time in quite a humiliating way...

Yuk Yuk indeed

So last night a bunch of us went out to the comedy club. Tracey and Andy made us sit right at the very front, where, of course, we got made fun of virtually non-stop throughout the night. Through a combination of my British birth, my Kingstonian upbringing and my dreadlocks, I got it the worst. But I didn't mind too much. Some things were said about my drug habits, my grandmother's drug habits, and the kind of things my dad says to my mom in the bedroom. Ugh. Tracey also got picked on (she likes the "military cock") as did birthday-girl Chantelle, as did Jimbo (drummer for the best and third-best bands at Queen's) and his Lithuanian date for the evening. It was a good time.

Tonight is the big party over at Mech House. Chantelle's friend Cassi is down for the weekend, and we're going to have our second annual Chantelle's Birthday drink-off. Last year the approximately 5'2", 120 lb. Carleton student whupped my ass, due to the fact that I'd been drinking all afternoon at Ritual and wasn't exactly feeling up to drinking large quantities of beer. I have a bad feeling she might clean my clock again this year, because I have a really bad cold. We shall see though.

Music: The Apples in Stereo - Fun Trick Noisemaker

Look Out!

I came across this image from an early 20th century poster while surfing the web, and I thought it was pretty hilarious.

I've also been updating my sidebar links, and I've noticed something: fan pages have all but disappeared from the WWW. Back in 1997--the good old days before AOL users had access to the web--you could look up any band you wanted on Yahoo! or Webcrawler (Google didn't exist in those days) and find hundreds of awesome fan pages. I'm not sure if my musical tastes have just grown more obscure, or if I'm really onto something, but it seems like it's now virtually impossible to find anything other than a band's official website and millions of reviews of their records.

Music: Ani DiFranco - Revelling

EDIT (8:22 PM)
Just for kicks, I used Google to search Blogger for "venereal disease" to see if my blog got turned up. No dice, but I did come across an interesting sponsored link:

Anyone who pays full price for an STD is a chump.

The Roman Empire

Just for a change, I'm not going to post about myself today. There's something I've been thinking about for a long time now, and this article inspired me to post about it.

It is a truism that the United States is the greatest (i.e. biggest, most powerful, not best) superpower the world has ever known. Okay? No disagreements there? Good.

Now backtrack 1700 years. The Roman Empire is in full swing. Diocletian is in the final year of his emperorship, soon to be replaced by Constantine. The Empire stretches from Germany to Britain in the North to the Sahara in the south, Portugal in the west to the Mesopotamia and the Caucasus in the east. Everything is peachy. Rome is the greatest superpower the world has ever known, at the time--and probably the second greatest superpower in history. There is little reason to expect that within 100 years, the empire would have virtually collapsed.

There have been hundreds of years of debate on why the decline and fall of the Roman Empire took place, but here's my take on the matter: there is one fundamental reason, and several smaller things merely served to set it off. The Roman Empire was based on colonial expansion. From the very earliest days of the Republic, the modus operandi of the Roman state was to conquer or otherwise take over other territories and exploit them economically. I'm not saying that's a bad thing: most of European culture can be attributed in some way to the Roman Empire, and joining the Empire was probably beneficial for most people in the long run. However, there was a problem with this model. The key to economic strength in the Empire was security, i.e. the military. And the key to having an effective military was having a strong economy. It's a circular process--the legions conquer a new province or maintain stability in an existing one, the province pays taxes to Rome, and those taxes pay for the legions.

The problem is not readily apparent, and if it weren't for the lessons of history, it might not be apparent at all. The system is entirely unstable, because it depends on the return on investment for military expenditures to always be positive. Eventually the empire got to the point where it was so huge, the people in the empire were used to such a high standard of living, and the barbarians outside the empire (not to mention the plebeians and disenfranchised provincials inside the empire) were so pissed off, that it didn't matter how much of your economic resources you put into the legions, you could never make it back. Before long, you couldn't even break even. The economy, and with it the empire, is a house of cards that has begun collapsing.

Now here's where my little story gets interesting. The parallels between the Roman Empire in the middle of the 4th century and the United States at the beginning of the 21st century are striking. The obvious difference is that the US's "colonies" aren't part of the American state, they are ostensibly independent countries like the Phillipines, Mexico, Thailand, Guatamala--almost every third-world country you can think of and more than a few first-world ones. Because the US claims they are independent, it is hard to make a clear-cut distinction about what is a colony and what isn't, but it is definitely a colonial system--you only need to observe US military involvement over the last 50 years to see that this independence is mostly a sham and any American colony that goes against US interests too strongly will suffer.

So the US has an empire. Like the Roman Empire, the empire is always expanding. But because the American empire is already global, it cannot expand geographically; instead, it expands by increasing its economic dominance over its colonies. This is sometimes done by direct military means, but is more often done by exerting economic influence, i.e. "If you don't do what we say, you will starve." Nonetheless, having a strong economy is essential to maintaining and expanding the empire, which is essential to having a strong economy.

The war in Iraq is one of the more overt displays of the US exerting its imperial power. However, like Emperor Valens' disastrous war with the Visigoths in 369-378 CE, it may spell the beginning of the end for the American empire. The house of cards is beginning to buckle.

The warning signs are already appearing. The US national debt is bigger than ever, and is growing faster than ever thanks to $580 billion annual military budget. Total US debt is a staggering $37 trillion--more than four times the GDP--and most of that is owed to foreign investors. All that needs to happen is one little disturbance--a natural disaster in one of the US's major creditor countries, for example, or a sudden jump in oil prices--could cause the US to suddenly lose a lot of its credit, causing the US dollar to freefall, interests rate to skyrocket, and causing millions to go bankrupt. Pretty soon America will realize that it doesn't have the capacity to produce what it consumes, and it doesn't have the money to buy it, and then Great Depression is going to look like a minor market correction. It might not happen for 50 years, or it might happen next week, but it will happen--I would guess in the next 5 to 10 years. You heard it here first.

So yeah, global economic collapse, that's gonna suck. I just hope it happens soon, so that interest rates have stabilized by the time I want to take out a mortgage.

Predicted Death: March 4 ± 3 days

I've just been looking at my calendar, marking due dates and such (this is the kind of thing I do to avoid working on my thesis--this or self-mutilation). I've realized that I'm just going to die the first week of March. On Wednesday the 1st I have three midterms! Then I have another midterm the next day. Then on Friday my thesis is due. The next week I have my COMM 244 project due on Tuesday the 7th. I'll probably have two or three random assignments due that week, too--not to mention we'll probably be working overtime on the pimped-out bicycle project by then. Oh Jebus, why have you forsaken me?

Music: The Apples in Stereo - Tone Soul Evolution

Musical Emergency

Last night Chantelle and I went to see the Joel Plaskett Emergency play at Elixir. It was a decent show, and Chantelle seemed to enjoy herself. I am slowly bending her musical tastes to my will; one day, once I have her complete trust, I'll convince her that Poison is actually the greatest band ever, and then get everyone to laugh at her. It was a very different show than the last time I saw Plaskett play, at the Wolfe Island Music Festival. There he played solo, as opposed to with the band. I think a lot of the character of his songs was lost with the band, and they usually devolved into self-indulgent guitar jams. The second encore was also a bit uncalled for, I thought.

The highlight of the show, though, was openers Cuff the Duke. The truth is, they were a large part of the reason I wanted to go in the first place. They only played six or seven songs, but the performance was really good. They played two of my three favorite songs--"The Trouble and the Truth" and "Ballad of a Lonely Construction Worker"--but not "Anti-Social."

Music: Elliott Smith - Live at the Terrace Club, 1997-04-12

Birthday Shoutouts: Chantelle! The big two-three.

More pictures of cute furry things

I realized that my ubercute photo of Brain had dropped off the main page, so if I wanted to fulfill my promise of more cute, furry content I was going to have to come up with some new material. Luckily, Brain came through for me, by discovering two ubercute new pastimes.

Here he is trying to "catch" my cursor. He's not the brightest cat in the world.

Here he is fighting with a roll of toilet paper. Believe me, the toilet paper came out on the losing end.

Music: Various Artists - Matador at Fifteen

HTML for English majors

Joel has been working like a madman on his blog for the last few days. The problem is--as is often the case with Joel--his vision goes way beyond his ability. His blog is quickly turning into a full-fledged website. The only problem is, until the other day he'd never written a single tag of HTML in his life. I've been teaching him the basics, everything from how tags work to how to use FTP to even such basic things as "what is a website?" as strange as that sounds. He's making a lot of progress though.

Chantelle's birthday is on Wednesday, and a big group of us went out to Atomica for dinner tonight to celebrate. Fun times. Craig went to the trouble of burning a complete set of Sex and the City DVDs for her, which was very well appreciated. We got her nice and juiced, too. The Chantelle birthday celebrations continue tomorrow night when we're going to see Joel Plaskett, then on Saturday with a kegger at Mech House.

Music: Wilco - Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

Weekendend? Or Weekbeginning?

Chris Collins now has a blog. This is getting ridiculous!

My really lame weekend has come to an end. Despite not having any fun, I managed to not get a lot of work done either. But at least I got my first assignment done. 1 down, n to go.

The weather forecast for this week is looking good. Tomorrow there's an expected high of a mild -7 Celsius, with only isolated flurries expected--unlike the last week, which has been characterized by occasional insane blizzards and temperatures in the mid-minus-thirty-fucking-millions. It's so cold that we're starting to get a lump of Bose-Einsten condensation forming in one corner of our kitchen.

Week of the blog!

Salvas has a blog now! What's the world coming to? Notice that all the posts are 80 jillion pages long? Typical Salvas.

HaXord!

Joel is still getting the hang of blogging, and he accidentally gave me permission to post on his blog. This is the result.

The streak ends

On Wednesday I had a dentist appointment. It was the usual thing: check-up, cleaning, fluoride treatment, and x-rays, because I haven't had x-rays in a long time. As always, no cavities. I've never had a cavity in my life, and it's a fact I'm proud of. Only then yesterday I got a message from the dentist saying I have to make an appointment to get a filling, because the x-rays turned up something. My 22 year perfect streak comes to an end! While I'm usually all about experiencing new things, getting a filling was one that I was hoping I'd never have to experience. Oh well...

Music: Miles Davis - The Complete Concert: 1964

Zugswang!

Joel is the next to get a blog! I don't know how much I like the idea of having another blogger in the house...I guess I'll just have to up the quality of the blogging to compete! That means more pictures of cute, furry animals.

Music: Bedouin Soundclash - Sounding a Mosaic

Wired!

I have my final lab ever to present in about 12 hours, and I only just finished the analysis. That is to say, now I know what I'm going to say, I just need to actually put together the presentation. It took me a lot longer than I'd expected. I'd like to say that I'm never going to leave it to the last minute again, but that would be pretty meaningless since it's my last one anyway. I'm super wired on caffeine right now. Caffeine is always great for keeping me awake, but I think this is the first time that I've had so much that it actually feels like a drug. I'm totally hyper, typing at a mile a minute. It's kind of cool! I can only imagine what it must be like to snort Ritalin. Trying to sleep tonight should be fun, if I get to that point ever.

New Book

Today I got a new book in the mail, and it's awesome: The Better World Handbook. I've only had it for three hours and I already think it's one of the best self-help type books I've ever seen. I strongly recomment it. In fact, I encourage you to borrow it from me!

It's been really cold the last couple of days. I can't wait to move to Vancouver. Today in Kingston, it was -24 Celsius. In Vancouver, it was +11. It was raining, but who cares?

Links:

• Build your own MP3 player for under $50 US. You have to be a big nerd to try this.

The $25,000 ring

Today all the eng phizzies got fitted for our iron rings. It turns out the most expensive piece of jewellery I will ever own will come in a size 7 (apparently I have big fingers--that's my pinky!). Yes, 25 grand in tuition and 4 years of my precious youth will get me nothing more than a piece of stainless steel crafted into a stylized piece of scrap metal.

Brain seems to have taken up virtually permanent residence in my room. I have a feeling the upholstery on my new desk chair isn't going to last super long, because it's turned into the little creature's favorite spot in the house. It's just a good thing he's white and my chair is black, or I might have sat on him several times by now. Even when I move him so I can sit down, he just curls up in my lap and falls asleep. It's too cute! But I should stop continually mentioning him, because as Joel put it yesterday, "I don't want to be one of those people who talks about what his cat is doing all the time."

Music: The Joel Plaskett Emergency - Down at the Khyber

What the #$*! was that?

Worst movie EVER! I could go on all night about how and why, but it would make us all dumber to do so.

Music: Belle & Sebastian - Dear Catastrophe Waitress

Cat!

So my weekend has been quite eventful. Let's review:

Friday: We all hung out at 301 drinking and playing Balderdash. Fun times. Donald also got a cat. Or rather, he finally brought his cat home who has so far lived its entire life at Marie's house. The cat's name is Brain (his brother Pinky still lives with Marie), and he looks like a miniature version of Anna's cat Harvey.

Saturday: First we rented a gym at the PEC and spent an hour playing basketball and soccer, two sports which everyone pretty much sucked at. It was fun, but a couple people on one of the teams didn't quite understand the non-competitive nature of it. Then we had a potluck at 301; Saturday potlucks might become a regular event this semester. Then We went out to the QP for a while. That was pretty lame though. Whenever I go out in Kingston these days, I just feel really old. I need to get out of this town.

Today: We're going out to see What the #$*! Do We Know? at the Screening Room. Finally, a movie that is (kind of) about physics! It could be good, it could be bad. I really should be doing more work today, but the work can wait and having fun with my friends can't, so...

Music: Magnolia Electric Co. - Trials and Errors

Bored blogging

Nothing really exciting to blog, but I just felt like it. I went to the Jack Kerouac Knapsack Band CD un-release party last night with a bunch of people, that was fun. The exterminator came again the other day, but he couldn't find any sign of rats, so he just told us to keep a trap set and hope we don't see any more. I had my first post-Christmas thesis meeting yesterday; while the rest of my courses this semester seem pretty bearable (especially with a liberal dose of computing-related courses), I'm positively dreading having to deal with my thesis. I've also been working a lot on my group design project for 450, which might actually not be too bad. Chantelle and I are going to see Joel Plaskett on the 25th. That's cool by itself, but it's even cooler because the opening act is Cuff the Duke. So yeah, that's my random assortment of mini news items. Hopefully something crazy will happen this weekend to report.

Music: Belle & Sebastian - Tigermilk

The world is Icy Death

The weather is crazy out. There's been freezing rain all day long. I literally just slid home from the lab; earlier in the day I saw a car driving along with its wheels only turning half the time. It's the kind of day when you realize to what extent the sidewalks are not level, and when you have to run across the street so you'll have enough kinetic energy to slide up the curb.

I totally reorganized my schedule today (pending a few profs' signatures). I picked up that algorithms course like I said. I also dropped robotics. I realized from the first two lectures that I wasn't going to be able to design anything that could help me take over the world in that class, unless I can devise a scheme to take over the world using giant immobile arms that only know how to assemble automobiles. I'm taking Signals & Systems II instead. Dr. Taylor said it shouldn't be too hard, which is exactly what I was hoping for--not that I'm afraid of hard courses, but if I'm taking an extra course anyway, I don't want to have lots of hard ones. The only thing I'm really afraid of is the week after reading week, when I'll probably have four midterms and my thesis will be due. That will be the week of death.

Music: Teenage Fanclub - Bandwagonesque

Extremist Rodent Insurgents!

Just like the U.S. in Iraq, thinking you've won the war doesn't mean you've won the war. I wasn't around, but last night there was another rat incident in the house. I just called the pest control company again.

I just got my controls mark back. Let's just say I passed with my lowest mark ever and leave it at that.

I'm thinking of picking up an extra course, as insane as that seems: CISC 365 - Algorithms I. It's a course I would have to take next year anyway probably, and it's taught by Robin Dawes, who is one of my favorite professors. The way it fits into my schedule basically just means I'll have fewer useless breaks between classes, and the best part is, there's no final exam and the entire evaluation consists just of five tests! It seems like a good idea.

Music: Rage Against the Machine - The Battle of Los Angeles

New music

Pedro the Lion: I can't believe how good this shit is! I only downloaded his album yesterday or something, but I'm already prepared to say that this ranks alongside Songs: Ohia, Apples in Stereo and My Morning Jacket as the best and most exciting music I've discovered in the last two years.

Music: Pedro the Lion - Control

Today I had lunch with my grade 11 crush

Picture this: It's 1998. I'm a nerdy kid in grade 11 with a buzz-cut in place of the beautiful dreadlocks you see today. The school year has just begun, and Loyalist is deluged with new grade nines. One in particular catches my eye. She's the most beautiful person I've ever seen. She also turns out to be pretty smart and a really nice person. For the next three years I proceed to never talk to her once and convince myself that she thinks I'm a loser. By the time I graduate, she's dating my lump of a neighbour.

Fast-forward to 2002. By now I'm a suave second year with a curly fro, so when I see this girl around campus, I think nothing of stopping to chat for five minutes. We fill each other in on what we're doing with our lives (she was in first year at Queen's) and go our separate ways. Perhaps she didn't think I'm was loser after all (or at least doesn't any more), but I had a girlfriend at the time, so what could I do?

Fast-forward to this afternoon. I'm going to grab a slice of za from the Sidewalk Cafe, and sure enough, the girl is sitting there at a table by herself. So I sit down and I strike up a conversation. Could this finally be my opportunity to ask out the girl I'd wanted to ask out nearly seven years earlier? No. I quickly discovered that she now shares an apartment with my neighbour from all those year ago, who is now an apprentice carpenter. She's a third year sociology major, struggling to get into honours--perhaps not the intellectual equal I had once imagined her to be. Nevertheless, I got to spend half an hour reminiscing about high school with a girl who is very charming and smoking hot. I can't really complain.

Oh yeah, and as an afterthought, today was my first day back. My courses all look like they're going to be okay, except for my thesis and design project. My COMM 244 prof turns out to be an old friend of my dad's from back in England. Small world, eh?

Music: Pedro the Lion's Achilles Heel

Marks are in

Marks are starting to get posted now. Other than Control Systems, I now know all my marks for my fall courses. They were all about what I'd expected--disappointing. The most disappointing thing was not my marks themselves, but the marks other people got relative to mine. I'm in the bottom half of the class for all three! (Though I'm still above the mean for all three--some people must have really bombed). I also got back my mark for my thesis presentation: 68%, which is exactly what I deserved. The examiner's comments included " there appear to be holes in your background knowledge." Also accurate. *Sigh* The worst part is that although my mark in the one course I actually liked--Artificial Intelligence--was good, it was still only an 85% in a course where 30% of students were over 90%. I did very little work in that course either, not because I didn't want to, but because I couldn't justify spending time on it with all my other hard courses. Of course, I didn't do work in those courses either, because I hated them. It's not logical, I know.

Of course, now that I'm doing an extra year, the worst part is that all these marks are going to be on my transcript when I apply to grad schools in a year's time. Damn. Why can't it all be over?

Music: The Beatles - A Hard Day's Night

Humans declare end of major combat operations in war with rats

So the exterminator finally came today. He had a look around and said "You don't seem to have rats any more." Perhaps he's right and the one I killed the other day was the only one, but I have my suspicions that there are more, even though he couldn't find any way they could have gotten into my room other than through the door. So today I'm doing a big cleanup of the whole house, and hopefully I'll never see the guy again. I have his number close to hand though, because I have a feeling that this isn't the last we've heard from the Rat King and his minions.

In other news, I've been doing grad school applications. Or rather, I haven't, because I've realized that most of the programs I'm actually interested in doing would require another year of undergraduate computer science courses. So unless I get into the intelligent systems program at McGill or one of a handful of other single profs scattered around the country thinks I'm qualified, I'm probably going to have another year before I start grad school. The question now is, should I stay at Queen's for a fifth year (the easy way out) or should I go somewhere else? I'd really like to go to UBC, but I'm not sure if it's worth it. On the one hand, Kingston is really cheap and I have lots of friends here, but on the other hand, I need to get out of this town and away from the hordes of conservative types at Queen's. I guess we'll see.

Music: Cuff the Duke - Life Stories for Minimum Wage

Top 10 Albums of 2003?

This is about the time of year that everyone is putting out their top 10 lists of stuff that happened in the previous year. As a big music fan, my list of choice is a top 10 albums list. But the thing is, it hardly seems fair for me to try and list the top 10 albums of 2004. I mean, what if something amazing came out in December that I haven't listened to? So I'm going to play it safe and list my top 10 albums of the year before. I've still probably missed some great ones, but it's at least a bit more accurate. Here goes:

Top 10 Albums of 2003

10. Ulrich Schnauss - A Strangely Isolated Place
Superbly crafted electronica. (edit: You might notice I originally had The Dears - No Cities Left as #10, but after looking again, I realized that it came out in 2004. This is probably a better album anyway.)

9. The Unicorns - Unicorns Are People Too
Just good indie pop. Period. End of sentence.

8. Metric - Old World Underground, Where Are You Now?
Math-punk? Damn right, and damn good too. The fact that the singer is an attractive Canadian girl is just icing. They're playing at the Elixir in a few weeks, too!

7. Radiohead - Hail to the Thief
So maybe it wasn't OK Computer. At least it wasn't Kid A. (Not that Kid A isn't also a cool album too in its own right.) This one shows that Radiohead can still do rock, and still do it as well as ever without repeating themselves.

6. The Stills - Logic Will Break Your Heart
There's nothing too exciting about these guys, except that they play really good rock and roll songs. Good Montreal boys.

5. M. Ward - Transfiguration of Vincent
Folk-rock Americana singer/songwriter concept albums at their best.

4. Holopaw - Holopaw
This album blew me away as soon as I heard it. Acoustic alt. country as carefully crafted as a fine beer.

3. Songs: Ohia - Magnolia Electric Co.
Jason Molina puts out another winner. Magnolia's rich arrangements are a sharp contrast to dark working-class ballads of 2002's Didn't It Rain. Too bad they butchered "The Old Black Hen" by letting Lawrence Peters sing it; check out the solo acoustic version on the bonus disc instead.

2. My Morning Jacket - It Still Moves
This album was a dramatic departure from their first two releases (which I also loved), but Jim James and Co. pulled it off. If you had told me back in 2002 that MMJ would get rid of their lo-fi alt. country sound in favour of overdubbing and loud guitars, I would have been worried (after I got over the whole "My Morning Who?" issue), but it's fantastic--maybe my favorite MMJ album.

1. Grandaddy - Sumday
I hate to give the #1 spot to a bunch of guys who write all their songs about robots and frolicking in the forest, but I have no choice. Simply put, every track on this album is great.

Year's Biggest Disappointment:
Zwan - Mary, Star of the Sea
Remember how over-produced the last Smashing Pumpkins album was? Well, multiply that by five and you'll see why this album wasn't that great. Then throw in a nine-minute song about Jesus and some fluorescent psychedelic-wannabe cover art and you get the picture. The songwriting is decent, but it's so poorly executed. And hey Billy Corgan, why didn't you stop being such a control freak and let David Pajo or Matt Sweeney do some of the songs? I mean, NEWS FLASH: they've both put out more good albums than you have in the last five years. No wonder this band didn't live to see 2004.

I always said I wanted pets, but this isn't what I had in mind

Last night I was sitting at my computer, and I heard some rustling behind my desk. I looked, and there was nothing there. I thought maybe I'd just disturbed some wires with my feet or something. Then about an hour later I heard it again; still nothing there. I thought I was going crazy. But about twenty minutes after that, I heard it again, and this time I looked, and there was a rat! I didn't get a good look at him, but he was black and he looked at me with his beady, ratty little black eyes as if he wished death on all humanity. So needless to say, I flipped out. It was one thing back in October when we had a rat in our kitchen and Comartin was around to take care of it, but it is another to be alone in the house with a rat in your bedroom, ready to nibble your eyes out as soon as you fall asleep. I set a trap for him, but the sneaky bastard managed to set it off in the night and escape unharmed. I guess I'll have to call the landlord...er, slumlord.

Speaking of slums, did you know that Kingston MPP and provincial Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing John Gerretsen was a ghetto landlord? Yes, his wife and son own no less than four houses in the Queen's ghetto (source). The deeds were conveniently transferred into his wife's name right before his cabinet appointment. Doesn't this strike anyone as a conflict of interest? Apparently not the Right Disonourable Coulter Osborne, Canada's "Integrity Minister."

Music: Ron Sexsmith - Retriever

Happy New Year!

Hello, and welcome to the year 2005. Now can anyone tell me where I can find the flying cars?

Joel and I rang in the new year in Nathan Phillips Square with Chris Collins and a crew of Toronto folks at Canada's largest (and possibly lamest) New Year's party. Performers included the sassy Keshia Chante, over-the-hill rockers Glass Tiger, and up-and-coming boredomsmith Matt Dusk. So maybe going downtown was a mistake, but the weekend was a lot of fun otherwise. I met a lot of cool people (including a really cute girl from McMaster--whom I'll probably never see again). I don't remember any of their names, of course, due to my genetic predisposition against remembering names that I inherited from my dad (he usually refers to my sister and me as simply "the girl" and "the boy").

New Year's resolutions? Oh, I have one, but I'm not telling. Something to do with the blog. Yeah, that's it. Good cover, Chris.