Dancing about architecture

Last night we watched Playing By Heart (imdb | rotten tomatoes), something that I think was only on my Zip list for the novelty of seeing Jon Stewart act but that was sent to me anyway because I’m being quite stubborn in holding out for season 2 of Arrested Development. It had a few clever little moments, but was pretty formulaic. One notable thing: even when dressed and acting like a complete freak, even when sporting hair curlers and a dental appliance, Angelina Jolie is still just ridiculously hot.

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So I had another new experience today: the urine sample. That was fun. I had to get bloodwork done and I guess they threw in the pee for free. Once again my deep veins thwarted them, and they had to draw the blood from the back of my hand, which means next week my hand will look like a rotten orange. Hip hip.

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St. FX was ranked this year’s top Canadian “primarily undergraduate” university by Macleans, which is hilarious to anyone who’s ever spent time there or even passed through Antigonish. It’s also funny to Bruce MacKinnon, it would seem.

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The Canadiens managed to steal a point last night after being down 2, tying it up with less than 4 minutes to go before losing in the shootout. Say what you want about the shootout, but it’s friggin’ exciting. And I have to admit, seeing Sidney Crosby score the winning goal on the final shot against the team he loved growing up…it made me smile, even though it put my team in the L column.

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One of the nice things about working for a bank is that I get Remembrance Day off. Gonna try to get a whole bunch of errands and little nagging things taken care of before I leave Sunday morning. But it’s nice that the only responsibility I have today is to be quiet for a few minutes and think about how unbelievably lucky I am.

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Ugh. It might snow tonight. I *hate* the first snow sighting of the year.

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Canadiens won again Tuesday night. They play the Penguins tonight on TSN.

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Right now it feels like I have a long weekend, but really I don’t. I have to head up to the training centre on Sunday for a 10:00 start, so today feels like Friday and Saturday will feel like Sunday. Ptoo.

Fascinating and depressing at the same time

After years of crunching data, [two MIT PhD grads] have devised a computer program that listens to a song, then predicts how humans will react to it. As much as I don’t want it to be true, of course it is.

But is it becoming a self-perpetuating phenomenon? If record companies are releasing songs according to this software, and we all know that for the most part people will listen to what’s popular rather than what’s necessarily “good” (by which I mean it should show actual musical ability and hopefully some degree of innovation), so will customers react well to the MIT-predicted music simply because it was predicted (and therefore popularized)?

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In addition to the twisted ass* I appear to have a giant bruise on the back of each arm, a deep bruise on my chest and about a dozen little bruises & cuts on my forearms from where the hobbits** like to slap and poke.

Good thing basketball’s so fun.

Games like that, where it’s the big guys against the hobbits (or Team Asia vs. the world as they put it) usually follow a set pattern: the first few times I get group-slapped I don’t say anything; about half the time I can force it up and in and anyway. The next few times I’ll call fouls. But as the goes on I start to get frustrated and it kind of gets taken out on them. I won’t call fouls, I’ll just throw somebody out of the way. I figure if the reason they’re slapping at me is because I have 6 inches and 60 pounds on them then it’s only fair that I be allowed to put that to good use, right? Anyway, the first game like that ended with a flurry of swarming, slapping and grabbing, which led to me throwing a couple of guys out of the way to get my own rebound and stick it back for the win. We lost the second game like that, I think partly because they backed off and I played kinda loose & jovial; maybe I need to be half-pissed to play well.

*great name for a band, eh? “Tonight, live on stage: Twisted Ass!”
** anyone under 5’8″