One More While I Procrastinate

I swear to God that I'll post the second part of the previous post tonight. In the meantime, I can't really communicated how exciting this is.



Click here for more.

This Ought to Amuse Anyone...

... who's desperately waiting while I finish up last night's post (read: no one). It's from Top Gear, a British car show I became addicted to while on a three day stop-over in Ireland. In this clip, a Range Rover Sport competes against a Tank.

An Existential Reflection on What I Want to do with My Life, Part I

So I didn't get into McGill, where I had applied to do a PhD on "The Fragmentation of English Historical Writing, ca. 1640-1670".

That's not keeping me up at night. What's keeping me up is the fact that I'm kind of glad. And that's worrying.

See, ever since I was in highschool everyone just kind of assumed I'd end up in politics some day--myself included. Throughout University that was reflected in my grades (low) and in my Students' Council positions (high). I tried to learn from the odd mistake, and there were a few people that did their best to not let me forget. (Note: God bless Meg Timney.) Still, during my time in the USC it was taken for granted that I was a politician.

Note this letter to the editor taken from The Gazette:

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Sinal won't stir the pot
Re: "Politically Incorrect, Minus Bill Maher?" Nov. 8

To the Editor:

I attended the Politically Incorrect forum moderated by Michael Coren last Thursday, and before the forum started, Coren wanted to put his books up for sale.

However, he was strongly rebuked and told not to do this, and that if any book was sold, the University Police Department would be called. It was quite the debate before the debate.

I'm very interested in knowing why Coren was not allowed to sell his books. Is it common practice for guests not to sell their books or was it special to Coren? And anyways, what's wrong with biographies?

Oh, yeah, on a completely unrelated note – maybe [University Students' Council] Chris Sinal wasn't informed about the title of the discussion before it started, or maybe his skills as a politician are just too refined. Chris, you were the most politically correct, smooth and uncontroversial guy I've ever heard. Congratulations. I'm sure you'll find a great career in the Liberal party.

Joel Timmerman
Political Science II
King's College

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Only that's not what happened. I soured on politics. I decided that I'd had enough of the duplicity, of the careful consideration that had to go into everything I said, of the playing people against one another to get what I wanted "for the greater good". It was too much. It's not what I wanted to do with my life.

I wanted to be an academic. I wanted to invest my life to thought. To helping people and Canadian society. I can't really put into words just how much I wanted, and still want, to be a part of higher education in this country. In a 1975 letter to the General Secretary of the Czech Communist Party, Vaclav Havel described culture as "the main instrument of society's self-knowledge"; "It is culture," wrote Havel, "that enables a society to enlarge its liberty and to discover truth." I aspire to be a party of that creative process through the development of new ideas. Or something.

When this started in 2002, it was a new development. To those professors that knew me it came as no surprise, and they encouraged my efforts to get into grad school. That said, my time spent in early modern history was really kind of an accident. I fell into it.

That was never really a big deal, until two things caused me to question it; not getting into McGill, and the recent work with Ignatieff. Now, the siren song of politics is once again drawing me towards the rocks. Question is, are they any more dangerous than those of academia?

How have these two things conspired to bring about the titular crisis existential? That's for tomorrow, when I'm actually awake.

In the meantime, check out this interesting batch of statistics that I discovered in researching this post:

From the 2003 UWO Gazette Sex Issue:

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9. Do you have the Chris Sinal fantasy?

Yes No
HeteroFemales 7.5% 92.5%
BiFemales 9% 91%
Bi Males 25% 75%
HomoMales 33% 67%

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It's always nice to know that I'm a hit with the dudes.

Pulp Fiction in Typography

This is just brilliant. Beware young ears: they will be forever burned by the dulcet tones of Samuel L. Jackson screaming colourful nouns like "bitch" and "motherfucker" (admittedly, also a verb, adjective and adverb).

Why Battlestar Galactica, Lost, and most other serial dramas are really starting to suck

The first televison show I ever loved, and I mean adored, was Babylon 5. Despite its stupid haircuts and dialogue that sometimes threatened to offend kosher sensibilities with its hammyness, it was awesome. It used physics in space combat. Articial gravity didn't exist. The bad guys were vampires, or something.

And it was a serial drama. One of the first. The whole sucker was mapped out from the beginning to be five years, and that's all it was. It was a novel for film, with five discrete chapters, thematic arcs that could be traced throughout, and payoffs in season three that you could see--in detail--foreshadowed in the first season. Its sometimes rediculous costumes belied a narrative tightness that was beyond anything on television.

Other shows pretended to offer the same. X-Files promised a grand narrative that spanned years, but quickly devolved into a mass of killer bees, alien assassins, and plot machinations that rivaled a Cretan labyrinth in their complexity. Without a planned narrative arc, the showrunners were left to make up plot twists on the fly, struggling to fit them within the vaguest of plot threads dribbled along the way. The longer the show went on, the larger the twists needed to be, both in number and in dramatic punch. The premise of "an FBI agent struggles to discover the secrets behind the mystery of his sister's abduction" certainly seemed promising; I'm sure that in the writers room there was much excitement over how the conspiracy would unfold, and the shock the audience would experience when they discovered that at its root was the survival of the human race.

The fault, however, was in mistaking a premise and a conclusion for a complete narrative. It's true that the heart of a story lies not in its conclusion, but in its middl--in the development of characters and the unraveling of the plot. Television shows are about questions, not answers, after all. However, the development must be building towards something cohesive. If, at the show's end, the final revelation of the dramatic conflict requires a table drawn from a Tolstoy novel to make sense of it, it belies lazy writing rather than narrative conplexity.

Planning ahead allows the small answers dabbled througout the show to be genuinely earned, and worthwhile when viewed over ones shoulder at the end. A narrative plan should allow some viewers to actually predict the ending of the show with the evidence provided, and that number ought to increase as the show continues. This, I think, is the mark of a genius (and genus) of storytelling that has been absent for some time.

That is, until shows like Lost, Battlestar Galactica, and Heroes offered a glimpse of promise. A chance for a serial drama that held a grand arc, as well as the appetite of the North American viewer for such an idiom. Alas, the former two have each shown symptoms of falling to the same disease that plagued the X-Files: revealing the mystery of Jack's tatoos while ignoring innumerable untended plot threads concerning the shows greater mystery has long ailed Lost, and it may be reaching a terminal point. Battlestar Galactica, too, is showing signs of increasingly sloppy writing and a failure to show foresight that only undercut significant revelations when they finally occur.

Heroes is the best bet on television for what I'm looking for: a serial drama that puts effort into planning its stories in such a way that the viewer's payoff at show's end (of, failing that, season's end) is built on the foundation of the episodes that came before.

Rumor has it that Lost may limit its run to only five season, and plan the rest of the show with that in mind. One can only hope.

Back from the Dead

So it turns out that I have a blog. Who knew?

Sorry about the delay, but I've just forgotten/been too lazy to/having had anything to talk about that would cause me to update my blog in a while.

When last we spoke, I talked about a budget election. Oh jesus, I still hope I'm wrong. There's a variety of fun and exciting reasons for this, ranging from not wanting Elections Canada to spend a shitlocker of cash on the whole ordeal to me getting really, really angry at political rhetoric these days (I'll save that for another post). That, and I don't want to see a single add with "Stand up for Canada" on a Rent-a-Sign outside a community centre in a commerical. Ever. Again.

I'd like to help out in this election--the whole experience of being a riding co-ordinator in Edmonton-Strathcona was great, and Kendra would really, really like it if I gave more thought to a career in politics. (That, also, will be another post. Suffice it to say that there's a fair amount of cognitive dissonance between my desire to get involved and start working in the system and my general hatred of a lot of the mechanics OF that system. I never claimed I was unique in that respect.)

That said, it would be nice to help out in a riding where there's actually a contest. Edmonton-Strathcona? Not so much. Once I move to Richmond Hill in a few months, I could work there (also not much of a race) or anywhere in downtown Toronto, which would be all manner of brilliant.

Now, I won't be moving before the end of April, so the later an election is, the better. Plus, maybe there are fewer "Stand up for Canada" ads out East. All I know is that they played every EIGHT MINUTES in Edmonton.

So, as I mentioned there will be more posts in future. Besides the previously alluded to posts on why modern political rhetoric is destroying political culture--as opposed to reflecting it--and an existential reflection on What I Want to Do with My Life, expect rumination on: Why Battlestar Galactica, Lost, and most other serial dramas are really starting to suck; Why the rural/urban divide keeps my up at night; How the justice system risks being destroyed by people trying to save it; Is colonialism a bad thing? Does the fact that I have no idea make me a monster?; and Why smoke filled rooms are just about the best thing ever, as long as the smoke is from cigars and the rooms are wood-paneled.

Budget Election

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: there will be an election triggered by the budget. The Liberals have just said they won't support it, putting all the onus on the NDP. If you're Jack, you've got two options: wait for the Liberals under Dion craft a carefully managed, fully green campaign centered on the environment; or, force an election while you still have a chance to win seats as an NDP that stands for the environment and strong social policy. The longer Layton waits, the worse the retuns will be come election time as the Green Liberals (perception, at least... we'll see if it's true) eat NDP seats in all the urban centers. To say nothing of teh NDP not wanting to give the Green Party a chance to raise money.

Links are important, both for amusement and tying people down

I feel an obligatory need to apologize for all of the links that have been cropping up in the past few posts. There are many reasons: the overabundance of entertaining web content thanks to the Time Persons of the Year that are contributing to Web 2.0; my profound laziness; other things.

I'm sure people read blogs for insightful thoughts, fleeting glimpses into the souls of other human beings, and the odd bit of humour. Not me. I read them for the links. I try and post most of them on Facebook but every once in a while there's something so fantastic, so unbeleivably awesome, that it earns a place of honour in the blogosphere (whatever the hell THAT is).

I have a secret desire to dress up in old-timey clothes all the time--not just on special occasions. Really, I just want to live in Gattaca world, but without the social evil. Failing that, I'll settle for Victorian-era old-timeyness. I've recently been informed that there's some sort of movement called, I don't know, steamwhistly punk? Steamytime Punk? Anyway, they dress up like they're extras in The Time Machine (the shitty Guy Pearce version).

And this is where they shop.

There's your link-feast for the day. Also, I never did actually apologize for all the links. Oh well.

If you read nothing else in your life, read this (unless of course you don't read because you're illiterate. Or have no eyes.)

As a historian, or at least one who is training to become a professional teller of stories, I feel that I am fully qualified to write the following:

This is by far and without any qualification the greatest thing that has ever happened in the history of human existance, save perhaps for the invention of the printing press, and that short period of time after thongs became fasionable when you'd accidentally catch a peak of them, as opposed to shortly thereafter when showing off one's underwear became cool and all first-years became prostitutes.

And yes, this supersedes any movies I've talked about in previous posts, like the one directly underneath this one.

Wot's All This Then?

I've had quite enough of this growing up shit.

I'm a sheltered soul. I'm from North London: I grew up in a world sheltered from nearly everything. The hardest drug in my world was Labatt 50, and racism existed only in the world of irony. I lived with my parents until I left the city at the age of 26 to go to grad school.

Sure, Edmonton has its share of interesting experiences; meth addicts, hookers who look like the girls outside Jim Bob's, free money just for living here.

But today I submitted an app to McGill for a PhD and had a fight with the folks about--of all things--a goddamn wedding.

Why the hell would anyone in their right mind fight about a wedding? There's a level of juvenility to that--the distilation of all that one hates about the most basic social order that is highschool within the crucible of a putatively joyous family event--that never ceases to amaze. And piss off.

I've had quite enough of real life today.

Instead of continuing to read about my day, why don't you go download (or iTunes... is that a verb yet?) Flathead by The Fratellis. Either the song or the whole album--it doesn't matter. I'll wait here.

This Blog Is Not an Ex-Blog

Contrary to popular (read: Brett's) belief, this blog is not dead; It will soon re-launch as a chronicling of my general thoughts and feelings, assuming that my new-found status as Time's Person of the Year affords me readership.

In the meantime amuse yourself with this, which will either suck or rock so hard that it tears apart the fabric of reality.