Tag: Culture

So the Victoria Day (Victoria and Aboriginal Day if the petition is successful) weekend is almost over. I have had a very quiet and relaxing few days, catching up with some old friends. I have also backed up my entire photo collection. Took me 3 hours! I ate a lot of bacon and eggs, great steak and fennel, roasted chicken and now I have brownies baking in the oven. It will be nice to work some of this off tomorrow at the gym. Yoga was awesome on Sunday, while I felt a little rusty since I haven’t gone in three weeks, it sure was nice to sweat!

Here is a great video of a miniaturized Tokyo. No Godzilla but cool techno funky beat here.

The new Dan Brown novel was released today and so I decided to pick it up. It felt rather comfortable, a similar story to the other stories by Dan Brown that I have read: The da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons. I haven’t read his other work but Inferno follows a similar template: noted Harvard professor Robert Langdon tracks down yet another medieval mystery whilst being chased by unknown bad guys. This time it is not la Jaconde or the Vatican, it is Florence, de Medici, and Dante’s masterpiece of the descent to Hell: Inferno! The recipe works, right? Well, I will liken it to the movies of M. Night Shyamalan. Shyamalan burst onto the scene with The Sixth Sense but by the time you get to Signs, you weren’t all that impressed anymore. Same narrative devices, same pacing, essentially the same story that you are familiar with but it seemed, well, lacking and unconvincing. So while Brown provides wonderful historical information of beautiful architecture and art in locales in Italy, it lacks the punch of da Vinci Code. I am sure, though, that tourism to Florence will increase.

Jaron Lanier has a new book out, Who Owns The Future arguing, among other things, that the internet killed the middle class. Salon has a great interview here.

Lanier is a deep thinker about the role of information technology, capital intensive labour, and the fate of democracy. Seeing integrated communications technology as a key driver in the alignment of social forces, Lanier’s thoughts normally make the tours through global history by connecting seemingly disparate forces such as the Facebook and increasing wealth inequality. His main argument throughout his work has been that society gives up much to satisfy efficiency.

So while there are no clean dishes left in my apartment, dinner with my friend RP was awesome! Here are some crappy drunken iPhone pictures that I took, I wanted to document the entire evening but it was too much work! I’m not sure if the steak or the fennel or the dessert was my favorite but I do know that a good time was had by all!

So this is the appetizers, note the goat cheese that was amazing!

And here is the cake preparation with the final results!

And this is where I got the recipe from: link

CERN, the high energy particle physics folks,have re-upped the first original webpage ever on the intertube here. The first line reads: “The WorldWideWeb (W3) is a wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents.”

Stay tuned! I think this internet, sorry, this wide-area hypermedia information retrieval initiative, is going to catch on.

An interesting bio video on the young Shepard Fairey and the early genesis of this street artist while he studied at the Rhode Island School of Design. Fairey’s work includes both the iconic Andre the Giant Obey sticker and the colourful Obama poster. Check it out at Vimeo here.

So the geniuses over at IBM have found a way to move specific atoms. So what did they do first?

Used atoms to create a Star Trek logo.

What’s better than awesome?

Open Culture is one of my favorite websites. Much better than this one. 🙂 This article is about how the CIA used abstract expressionism as a weapon in the Cold War and as you may have surmised from reading this blog, I continue to have a interest in the Cold War which is my main area of interest whilst studying in grad school. Blending my interest in the intrigue of the Cold War with images such as the paintings of Jackson Pollack and Mark Rothco definitely makes my reading list!

I really enjoyed my first steak on a BBQ of the 2013 season at my friend Matt’s place. Unfortunately, the Senators lost to Philadelphia, but Montreal did beat Toronto. It was a wash. But the steak was great!

And here is the Leica 25mm 1.4 handheld in the dark. Great lens.

Oh, and on the walk over to Matt’s I took this shot of some spring shoots! Nice to see and I can’t wait for the flowers to start blooming so I can take Macros with my 60mm! Can’t wait!