D to the O

Every once in a while, I have a dorkier weekend than usual.

(a) On such an occasion, I might forego even considering a night out with people at the bar in favour of a quiet night at a friend's house watching DVDs. This week, it was at Ted's, and it was time again for the one with a degree in film studies to show me something new. The first was Gatchaman, a decades old anime show he enjoyed as a kid back when my aunt was still babysitting him. After that, it was Woody Allen. We started it off with Sleeper, and ended it with Bananas. Good fun, especially when I haven't enjoyed good slapstick in quite a while.

(b) It's also inevitible that I'll stay up late anyway, reading Rolling Stone and playing Mariokart until 4:30 in the morning.

(c) I'll sleep in. But to any time you'd generally call sleeping in. Just until 9, then doze until 11.

(d) I'll lounge for a while, checking the internet and reading, until New Scandinavian Cooking is on. They don't seem to be showing it anymore. You missed out.

(e) Staying at home and catching up on work isn't dorky, but this weekend I went over to Michael's house and we baked cookies while playing Mariokart wirelessly. He shows me the harmony in his new cover of Radiohead's "Subterranean Homesick Alien" and I play right-handed chords on his guitar. He plays The Beatles' "Something" on his baritone ukelele. I drive him and Shani somewhere on my way home.

(f) Saturday night at last! Time to go out, right? Nope. I've got to work tomorrow morning, and I went out last weekend anyway. It's time to listen to Sonic Youth and try to convince people that they really are that awesome. Go buy Sonic Nurse, it's fantastic. Believe me this time.

(g) Sunday doesn't count. I just listen to more Sonic Youth and gossip about characters on Grey's Anatomy anyway.

Just kidding. I do this every week.

That's the sound a bird makes.

On Friday I got my hair cut, but in lieu of the "layered shag" I've gone with over the last five years, I decided to go for something different. Having watched almost the entire first season of Scrubs that week, I went for my own version of the Zach Braff feathery indie pompadour. The results? Terrifyingly awesome. The style? The poof? It's like a magnificent bird, taking flight. That's a simile you can quote me on.

The hair got road-tested on Friday night at Halo to little response, but that may be because not seeing my friend there, I bailed after less than half an hour. Tomorrow's the true field test, with 9 hours of work followed by a family dinner with visiting relatives and a Raveonettes show to top it all off. That's a long day for a new haircut, but I think we're up to it. Ladies, you have been warned. Sexily.

Pictures will come when I locate a camera. In their stead, enjoy a little hair-related conversation I had earlier:

James: but tomorrow, i shall sex up my new indie plumage, hit the show and enjoy some feedback. once i get some pictures taken I will show you my sexy new haircut. you can print it out, show it to all the ladies
Donell: haha
James: tell em there's a show that comes with all that plumage
Donell: i will put it on my door
James: ca-CAW

This never happens to me in real life

Last night I had a rather confusing dream. A friend of mine whom I have known since my first year of university was talking with me, and almost immediately it came out that she was interested in me. We started dating, and with that came the sex. The funny thing was, that despite her apparent (though entirely theoretical) satisfaction, I could never remember actually having sex. You'd think that would be something I would remember, but I didn't even have any knowledge of anything leading up to or immediately following it. The dream promptly sunk into a sitcom-esque subplot of a former girlfriend of mine coming to visit and having to hide her from the current relationship, but that's clearly unimportant, much like all the episodes of Happy Days it was based off. What is important that now I'm feeling awfully awkward about having to go to class with the girl today, because the dream was too damn vivid. Nothing will happen, but the question still begs:

Will it be as awkward as I'm imagining it to be?

How you can tell I made my own dinner tonight

- I ate at 10:30.
- In front of the television.
- It consisted of two cobs of corn, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and two Chunks Ahoy! cookies.
- I ate the cookies first.

Treachery!

Two of my most anticipated albums of the year were Paul McCartney's Chaos and Creation in the Backyard and My Morning Jacket's Z. However, when trying to upload them to my computer, I ran into a problem that thousands of music consumers are running into: copy protection. Now up until recently, I didn't have a problem with Copy Protection because the protection on CDs wasn't invasively done; I could still upload albums to iTunes and copy them normally to CDs for other family members. However, in recent months two of the four major label groups, EMI and Sony BMG, have begun to make their CDs compatible only with Windows Media Player in response to Apple refusing to license out FairPlay iPod compatible copy protection or raise prices of songs in iTunes. As a result, the albums are incompatible with iPods, the leading digital music player in the world.

What I find asinine about the debacle is that amidst a season of low CD sales, EMI and Sony BMG have decided to inconvenience potential customers in a way that many, like New Jersey banker Ryan Kuczynski, are deciding to cease being customers entirely. In this case, the labels are directly driving many consumers to download the album illegally or through iTunes. And without the support of Warner and Universal, the latter of which is the world's largest label and fundamentally disagrees with copy protection, EMI and Sony BMG don't have enough clout to force Apple to cave.

In this scenario, who am I to support: Apple, a company that may be legally inconveniencing other companies but has provided me with great and consistent products and service, or two major labels who are directly inconveniencing me?

I wonder.

made my day

Today in Abnormal Psychology, Dr. Wardell was lecturing on self-report measures of stress, specifically LCUs (Life Change Units.) Essentially, this is a system assigning numerical values ranging from 1 to 100 to stressful events. It is based around marriage at 50 LCUs and death of a loved one, which comes in at a whopping 100. A person looks at the list, marks down what stressors they have (in what numbers) and totals their score. Scores of 100 and 200 are serious enough; a person who climbs the stress ladder to a score of 300 indicates a 3 in 4 chance of suffering from a serious stress-related health issue in the near future. As Dr. Wardell put it, "to reach this point in the simplest way, a person would have to be married three times in one year and have all their spouses die. At that point they're looking at a serious prison sentence." He added with a smirk, gesturing at the chart, "Which, as you can see, is another 63 points."

Mathematical inconsistencies aside, that was spectacular.

My Big Damn Heroes

Back in 2002, a show came on the air that captured my interest and imagination as soon as I started watching it. Though it only ran for a short period of time before being cancelled, Firefly became and remains one of my favourite television shows of all time. The 'Verse of Whedon's creation was refreshing, intelligently thought out, and believable in its humanity; in short, everything that Star Wars and Star Trek weren't. Whedon showed viewers a future where people have expanded into the stars and found nothing besides themselves staring back. Without aliens, Whedon didn't have that failsafe that Roddenberry and similarly-minded science fiction auteurs relied on. His characters had to be people, and be believable in that role. This engaged me more than any other science fiction. As a space western, it was a success because the two halves fitted so well together. It avoided the one thing that always bothered me about other science fiction: sound effects in space. The more I watched, the more I fell in love.

So of course, I was crushed when it was cancelled. Like many other fans of the series, I resented Twentieth Century Fox for its marketing blunder and lack of confidence. As we turned our anger outwards, we found that we weren't alone, that thousands of others felt the same way we did. Many of us fought a guerilla marketing campaign, spearheaded by such fan groups as Fireflymovie.net. Gradually, we realized that as consumers, we still had influence. We bought the series DVDs and lent them out, and as we did this, something great happened. The people behind the show responded. They talked with us, shared our frustrations, and helped us fight. The cancelling of Firefly was in many ways a blessing, because it brought together thousands of us Browncoats in line behind our Big Damn Heroes. They went to cons halfway around the globe, where Firefly never aired, and found out DVDs were selling out; they found more of us. After much effort, we got finally got victory. We finally got more Firefly. We finally got our Big Damn Movie. Joss, like us, never gave up, and tonight we get our reward.

I'm seeing the movie tonight as soon as my shift at work is done, and I'm so excited I can barely sit still. Every time I see a trailer, I squeal uncontrollably. Tonight is a personal victory for me and Browncoats alike, evidence that there is room in Hollywood and multiplexes for us. Tonight, as we head to the cinemas for our victory lap, we can't help but think one thing:

We've done the impossible, and that makes us mighty.