friday favourites 24.05.13

image of the week

the internet is amazing. every week, there's something that i say [write] in public, something that becomes part of the eternal record of the internet that i could never have imagined myself saying. this week it was "can you pay for the penis cages and nazi coins in monster money?" i could try explaining, but really, the important thing is that that quote is now in some way associated with my name.

i can't wait to mention that in a press release. or on the back cover of a book, where most people put the quotes praising their writing.

but aside from monster money [which is a thing], it's been a hell of a week...

good news :: stuff i can't make up from around the internet

since we've been talking about colour analysis by seasons lately on more like space, why don't you have a gander at what the seasons look like when you take them in their totality.

in case you hadn't heard, montreal, the second largest french metropolis in the world, was under orders to boil water before consumption for a day and a half. it's like something out of another century. and apparently, so are our comedians.

we're all mad here...

an analysis of the case for saying canadian prime minister stephen harper is conducting a war against science. read it now while it's still legal to use your brain for something other than toil.

musical notes

compactor "multiple fractures", video by dom... perfect music to listen to when you need something to drown out the rage in your brain.



quote of the week

It is most unfortunate, very unfortunate, that colleagues and the great people of this city have been exposed to the fact that I have been judged by the media without any evidence.-toronto mayor rob ford, making a much-anticipated statement to the press

follow-up and shameless self-promotion

well i guess that quote [which makes less sense every time i read it] is kind of a spoiler: rob ford [finally] made a statement today to say that he doesn't use cocaine and he's still as serious as ever about keeping suburbanite taxes and taxpayer expectations low. there was a lot of pressure on him to make a statement, but now that he has, it's kind of anti-climactic. did anyone seriously expect ford, who was- sorta- removed from office by the courts for using taxpayer dollars to pay public servants to work for him as chauffeurs and gardeners- to just cop to smoking crack because someone says there's a video of him doing it?

gawker have done what any media of the digital age would have done: initiated a kickstarter project to raise $200k to buy the damn videotape. although there have been some complications, the project is zooming ahead and i encourage you to donate, because even if the owner of the tape doesn't resurface and the money goes to charity, there are a lot of people in toronto who need help because not-currently-crack-addicted rob ford has cut the services that they could have turned to.

i also wanted to thank those of you who responded to my "i am better than rob ford" declaration by buying my book, which saw a nice little rise in sales. if you enjoyed it, i have good news:

another is coming.

i can't commit to exact dates at the moment, but i can tell you a few things about it:

1. it is a short novel, not a collection of stories.

2. the overall tone is lighter than the stories in "interference", but also a bit more perverse.

3. it's called "tricky".

and apparently last week's image of the week has competition:

kitteh of the week

since we've had so many close-ups of eyes this week... here's julia!

thank you to all who have read this... your support, your interest and your feedback [public and private] mean more to me than i can possibly express.

here's the source for this week's image of the week, which is a picture of the moon, venus and jupiter. kind of incredible.

making faces :: something in my eye

if you thought that merely trying out a version of every option available to me in the sci/art colour categories was going to be sufficient to quell my desire to figure out where i might fit into the seasonal spectrum, you clearly haven't met me. [which is entirely possible, since i haven't met most of the people who come by these parts.] seeing as i'm not an expert, i wanted to push further to see what i could actually observe about my own colouring [and that of those around me, since i've been randomly draping things around dom and snapping pictures of different parts of his face as well as asking him to apply filters to said photos for me to review them.

one of the great things about modern computer technology is that it can allow you to do things like split an image into pixels so that you can view it not as a whole, but as the sum of its parts. so i thought that it might be an interesting idea to try actually pulling my face apart [not literally] to look at what it's really made of. that idea is key, by the way, to understanding how sci/art analysis works. the colours that harmonise with you are not accidental, they are colours that are already part of your skin, hair and eyes, it's just that you can't consciously perceive them. the world would be difficult to navigate if we could see everything broken into the entire range of light waves that comprises it. essentially, everything would be reduced to a meaningless mosaic. instead, our eyes have adapted to interpret wavelengths in a way that allows us to make sense of them. however, we are still aware of the different colours that make up everything we see, which is why some combinations will always strike us as harmonious. we're hard-wired that way.

as it turns out, analysing skin is of limited use, since you really can't see the kind of detail that you would need to properly judge undertone and because things can get screwed up by the presence of shadows or, say, if you have a random cat hair that you didn't notice that messes everything up and makes it look like you have a weird stripe of colour restricted to one part of your cheek. 

however, it is very interesting to look at pixelated images of eyes. because there are many colours in the iris that are more easily perceived when an image is divided to show them. even without applying a pixel filter, it's interesting just to look at a high resolution photo of your eye. you're likely to be surprised at what you find.

i'll give you a look at mine as a case in point.

from a normal viewing distance, my eyes are either blue or grey. i've always said that they were blue, but the fact is that they're pale enough that the colour is determined more by what's around them than anything else, which really means that they're grey. the one thing that most people can agree on is that they are completely cool in tone, as very light eyes tend to be. icy. like a lot of people with pale eyes, i have a darker ring at the outside of my iris. in my case, that ring is pronounced on the outer sides and a little softer on the inner sides, so it's not a perfect ring. again, that's not particularly uncommon- it's actually rarer to see someone who has a perfectly even ring around the iris.

if you look at a picture of my eye isolated, though, things get a little weird. first of all, there are a couple of noticeable golden brown spots. again, this isn't uncommon. lots of people have flecks of different colour in their eyes and some of them have quite remarkable spots that are visible even in passing. but what's more curious is that the overall "cool" effect of my eyes completely disappears. it's like a cool blue-grey eye that someone spilled their tea on. [i'm really trying to avoid thinking of the term "urine-stained" when i look at the close-up.] there's a definite yellowy cast to the entire iris, save for the pupil.

closer

closer still

with dom's help, i isolated a couple of sections of my iris, ones that i felt comprised all the colours found in the iris. if you'd like to try this yourself, just find a friend with photoshop. virtually any camera will take an adequate photo if you get it close enough and applying the pixel filter only takes a few seconds.



split up in this way, you can see more of a "map" of all the colours. you can get a better perspective on how a yellow tone permeates everything. there's no shade you'd really call blue, or at least nothing you'd call an unmixed blue and nothing that shows as a pure grey either. instead, you have a spectrum of muted aqua to sage green to mousy grey, all of which look like they're seen through a veil of smog. the other interesting thing is that it's not a particularly light grouping of colours. despite the fact that my eyes look pale, there aren't a lot of icy or pastel shades mixed in there at all. they're medium.

so what does this all mean? am i not blue or grey-eyed after all? well, yes and no. since my eyes look grey or blue to most people, of course that would be my correct eye colour description. however, when choosing what colours i put on and around my face, i'm going to want to consider the colours that are hiding beneath. because even if we can't claim to see them at a casual glance, we are aware of them and we do react to them.

in terms of finding my proper season, i'd say that this now categorically excludes the purely cool seasons of true winter and true summer. there is too much warmth going on in there for it to be an easy fit. [if you've been following this series of posts, you might remember that i didn't feel a true winter palette worked on me anyway, but true summer was actually the best of the three summers.] if we accept my judgment that i'm not exclusively warm toned, then we've effectively eliminated all of the "true" seasons. but is that cast over my iris more of a spring yellow or autumn gold? summer soft or winter bright? that, folks, is about as far as we can get just looking at eyes, but it's a good start.

please feel free to spend the next hour staring at photos of your eyes and come back to post comments about what surprising things you see!

the advent of lilacs

there is something about the sight and scent of these white and purple wonders that i find reassuring. and it doesn't hurt that they photograph beautifully against any backdrop. 

the triple-eek senate

you lose, old man. [source]

i like to laugh at american politics, because i'm kind of an asshole and because i like to reassure myself that we would never elect anyone who said anything as stupid as... gosh, take your pick. [planned parenthood has been more harmful to black people than the kkk?]

but i know that's not really true and the fact is that our guys are just as good at corrupt and evil [and probably just as good at dumb], they just don't get the same sort of attention because they aren't playing with the same amount of money and global power. but the money they're playing with is mine [at least partially], so i do tend to pay attention when they start doing things like spending it on bailing out friends who've had to pay back money they claimed illegally as a tax expense.

the idea of politicians deciding to stick the rest of us with $90k in bills to campaign for a party who are busy telling canadians that they have to stop relying on public funds for anything is pretty repulsive. at the same time, it wasn't that surprising. nor was it surprising that it wasn't an isolated case [i must repeat]. and no, "leaving the conservative caucus" doesn't mean either one of harper's hand puppets [don't get a mental image] has stopped sucking at the public teat. they're still senators, appointed for life, or at least until the age of 75, at which point they get to enjoy a retirement pension that is higher than the majority of canadians make in a year.

as the rush to fall on harper's sword [again, mental image] continues, it's worth considering that the man who defended pamela wallin's expenses as being about the same as any other politician [that's supposed to make me feel better???] was once a member of a party whose platform included a lot of talk about something called the "triple e senate".

the idea was that canada should have a senate a little more like the one in australia or, let's face it, the united states, where rather than just being a dumping ground for party hacks who rubber-stamped legislation passed by the lower house, men and women had to actually be elected and participate in the legislative process in order to justify their six figure salary.

the idea gained some favour in the west where, if you look into the history of canada, provinces were brought into the national fold basically as second-class citizens, exploited by the wealthier industrial provinces to the east for their considerable natural resources. the idea went over like a lead balloon in quebec, because of the "equal" part- meaning that every province would have the same number of senators [as opposed to the house of commons which, like the house of congress to the south, would be distributed by population]. it might sound reasonable to say that every province should have the same number of senators, but it would effectively end the idea that canada is a bilingual, bi-cultural country, because all of a sudden one of the "founding cultures" would be vastly outnumbered and would be placed on the same senatorial footing as a province that had 1% of the population. and a bunch of provinces that have been historically resistant to any attempts to define quebec as distinctive in any way.

aside from that, there are the obvious issues with the fact that the people who were already living here when the country was "found" would have no representation whatsoever in said senate unless they descended and took over a province. to say nothing of the complication that canada also has three territories in the north, which are not provinces, but who would probably like to have a voice at the national table and... all this to say that opening a discussion about any kind of constitutional change in canada is sort of like trying to show your friends how good you are at lighting your farts while standing next to a bucket of plutonium and tnt. in the end, no one will remember your blue angels.

whatever the issues with a "triple e senate", however, i find it really difficult to stomach tens of thousands of dollars in "expenses" being forked over to a bunch of people i didn't elect [and never liked when i had to put up with their self-satisfied mugs on my television set] by a party who came into being promising to reform said house of ill-repute.

then again, that was the same party that said that canada was being railroaded by the left-wing liberal media, including mike duffy and pamela wallin.

i'd like to be able to drown my sorrows at stephen harper's expense, but i have a feeling he'd find a way to make me pay for my drinks. and his.

friday favourites 17.05.13

this is going to be a bit of a free-form friday faves...

image of the week

i'm not sure if the internet is making me stupid or foolishly brave or dangerously curious. this morning, a friend on facebook posted something about naked pictures of toronto mayor rob ford. and although my initial reaction was indeed to pour a bottle of bleach into my computer [probably a good instinct], i still clicked the link [possibly as you just did, despite the fact that i made no attempt whatsoever to disguise what it was or mislead you as to the horrors which awaited]. what in the name of god would make me do that? 

all of this rob ford naked craziness started because dom posted an entertaining animated video on my facebook wall. actually, it started because my friend martin posted a story on facebook yesterday with a headline that said something like "toronto mayor rob ford on crack", which i interpreted to just be an expression, because i constantly refer to people as "on crack" or "high" as a metaphor for ridiculous behaviour, even in situations when i probably shouldn't. [in fact, i did so in a meeting this week, when we were reviewing some sales projections and my reaction was "i think they're high" and then everyone around the table agreed with me, saying that i was right and the the sales couldn't possibly be as high as projected and i was sort of stuck explaining that i hadn't been making a logical point at all, and that i'd meant that the people who submitted them were actually high, except that i didn't literally mean that, only that the projections were way off, which is what people thought i meant, except that i wasn't nearly as smart as they were giving me credit for being.] anyway, you should totally watch the video, which contains an animated version of rob ford that looks better than he does in real life.

and as long as we're on the subject of rob ford and things that made me feel good this week, while investigating the claims that toronto's right-wing, race-baiting, poor-people-hating mayor might have a bit of a casual crack habit [note to self :: do not google "rob ford crack"], i found out that dude is only a few years older than me. 

i am better than rob ford.

i have never felt this good about my appearance. 

or about not being on crack. 

i haven't been posting so much on politics lately, because most of what i see is a. the same and there comes a point where i just can't make it entertaining to read no matter what i do; and b. so depressing that i just can't make it funny, which is generally what i aim to do. if i were to treat what was happening around me seriously, i'd hang myself within a week. 

and i don't really want to hang myself. the ceilings in my home are high and i'd probably fall and injure myself in the effort and that would just be the most embarrassing thing to have to explain to emt's and the police. 

plus i'd feel all guilty that people would be working to save my life, because it would be one of many examples of me offloading shit i should be doing onto others. 

all this to say that i haven't been doing as many political posts lately, but it's really impossible to resist saying something when someone who embodies just about every political and human trait that you despise turns up in with a crack pipe in someone's home video. 

now that i've said that, of course, i do have a little something i want to say about some recent canadian political intrigue [that's really more retarded than intriguing], but that'll be in a post later this week. 

musical notes

i was listening to this earlier. that's my entire thought process, other than to say that this song is now one that i associate with when i first moved back to montreal, when i was doing occasional dj gigs at katacombes as part of "burning monday". i don't recall how often i actually played it [and am evidently too lazy to check the playlists i have archived on this very blog], but i know it was one that i kept wanting to return to. so now it's part of the theme music i'd choose for the biography of my life, which would inexplicably feature scenes of me dj'ing at a club in montreal, even if that doesn't turn out to be a major plot point. 

kitteh of the week

there's really nothing i can say that is going to make this any better than it already is. 

apologies if you already saw this from me on twitter, facebook or instagram. this makes me laugh more than rob ford on crack. 

[does this mean that marion barry will now be remembered as the nicer mayor on crack??]

ok, clearly i've got this whole crack story on the brain, but there is something just deliciously weird about it. or about the idea that there's some kind of elite drug squad who sell crack to toronto's movers and shakers. or the fact that there's some unknown mole carrying around a portable video player looking for a buyer. 

how is that not supposed to be one of my favourite things? 

i hope that you'll all enjoy a nice crack-free weekend and that you'll do me the honour of returning to this blog in the near future. thanks for taking the time to read this!