Head Tale

Saturday Snap – On The Road Again

I had agreed to work the Saturday of the long weekend for my boss, who is out of town for her son’s wedding this weekend, before Shea and I got an invite to a 40th wedding anniversary for her aunt and uncle.

I still would’ve helped my boss out, even if we knew about the anniversary – partly because my boss is great and I’d do anything for her and also because good karma for helping people out tends to come around in my experience.

So anyhow, that did affect our plans for getting to the anniversary – instead all of us heading out together last night after work, I came in to work this morning while Shea and the kids went to Weyburn via Greyhound. I’ll leave straight from work and hopefully not miss too much of the anniversary as Weyburn’s only an hour away (and I might do it a bit faster today!) 😉

Anyhow, here’s a pic Shea sent me from the road…looks like the kids are enjoying their first bus ride (Pace would correct me that he’s been on a school bus many times and even a “real” bus when the two kindergarten classes did a field trip to a local museum.)

¶ Posted 29 June 2013 § Family § Photo § SaturdaySnap § Work ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: holiday

Friday Fun Link – My 20 Favourite Movies of All-Time

I came across a movie ranking web site called FlickChart last night. The premise is very simple – it shows you posters of two movies side-by-side and you pick which movie you liked better (or you can get another choice if you haven’t seen one of the options presented.) Eventually, after you rank enough movies, you get a quantified list of your Top 10 (and 20 and 50 and 100 and so on) movies.

You can also add specific movies to your FlickChart and then it will do that same comparison test to rank the movies you pick – although these ones aren’t as random and it keeps comparing your newly added movie to the ones already on your list – do you like the new movie you added better than the one you ranked #80? #60? #40? #50? #45? #43? and so on until it slots in its proper place.

It’s fun but somewhat meaningless – how can you pick a “favourite” movie, especially when comparing different genres and even based on your own mood? (They suggest asking yourself “Which of these two movies would I rather watch right this minute?” or “Which of these two movies would I rather watch for the rest of my life if I had to choose?”)

I know for myself, once I got past my Top 20 (see below), I was more interested in using this as a compilation of movies I’ve seen with only some regard given to how I ranked things. And it’s a real toss-up – do I like “Reservoir Dogs” more than “Dead Poet’s Society” or does it just depend on the moment? (Both are movies I’ve watched probably a dozen times.)

I was also somewhat careless – did I see “Maltese Falcon” in a long ago film class? Or accidentally click that I hadn’t seen some films which I’m sure I have seen. So it’s not a perfect history of my movie watching life. (Oh, they also have a feature that shows how many hours of your life have been spent watching movies – I’m up to 31+ days and that’s not counting repeat viewings which would probably double this number easily!)

Anyhow, here’s where my Top 20 currently stands. I had an easy cheat as I have a collection of downloaded movies I call “Jason’s All-Time Favourites” so that pretty much made populating my Top 20 easy (although ranking them was, as I said, a lot harder!) Anything else interesting?

The release dates for my top three movies indicate that the age of 12-13 was pivotal for me in terms of movies that ended up meaning something to me – not a big surprise when you think about how important that age is to most people.)
I have a mix of movies with all the various MPAA ratings but go on a pretty good run of R-rated flicks from 12-19.
Favourite directors – Rob Reiner (2), John Hughes (2), Quentin Tarantino (2), Christopher Nolan (2)
Only a couple of my Top Ten are also in the Global Top 10 for the site – Star Wars, Empire Strikes Back, Pulp Fiction, Return of the Jedi
The lowest globally-ranked film to make my Top 20 is “Pump Up the Volume” at 1140 globally followed by Natural Born Killers (1054) and Love, Actually (1004)
Star Wars is the earliest released film (1977) and The Dark Knight (2008) is the most recent (has our movie watching dropped off significantly since we had kids? Maybe a bit but I think it’s more about a) not getting as involved in movies since we often watch at home, are interrupted, etc. and also b) I’m at a place in life where movies maybe don’t resonate with life-changing meaning anymore like a movie like “Stand By Me” or “The Breakfast Club” does when you’re young.

The site also has the “List of Shame” which compiles the highest rated movies on the site that you admit that you haven’t seen. I actually think I have seen some of these but as I said, undergrad film classes were a long time ago and when I couldn’t remember for sure, I tried to err by saying “no” rather than “yes” for accuracy’s sake.

One revelation that may hurt my geek cred – I didn’t watch “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy (or the multitudes of “Harry Potter” movies either) because I wanted to re-read the books before watching the movies and haven’t gotten around to it yet.

THE BEST MOVIES YOU HAVEN’T SEEN
— (AKA “YOUR LIST OF SHAME”)

Movie	Rank
The Godfather Part II	8
Casablanca	13
City Lights	24
The Third Man	29
Touch of Evil	54
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring	63
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King	81
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers	96
The Great Dictator	134
Lawrence of Arabia	145

¶ Posted 28 June 2013 § FridayFunLink § Internet § List § PopCulture ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: movies

Some of The Best Reddit Ask Me Anything (AMA) Chat Sessions of All-Time (And The Absolute Worst)

Reddit has a recurring feature where notable (and not-so-notable) people can show up for an AMA (Ask Me Anything) interactive chat session. [2013-08-26 – Update: This probably isn’t too surprising but there’s some strong evidence that many celebrity AMA’s – including the Ethan Hawke one listed below – are actually done by a PR person, at least to some degree but higher than 0% involvement and perhaps up to 100% PR person acting as the celebrity with the true answer somewhere between these two extremes.]

BuzzFeed has a list of what they think are the Top 15 AMA’s of all-time. Another quick way to see which AMA’s were the most popular is to sort the /IAMA sub-reddit by its most upvoted links. But there are many that fly under the radar because they’re not conducted with top-tier names like Barack Obama, Bill Gates or Arnold Schwartzenegger.

Here are a few that were well-received because of the thoughtful, insightful responses the subjects prepared to a wide variety of questions…

Stephen King
Ethan Hawke (which had various sites proclaiming this AMA as having “won the internet”
John Fogerty

As opposed to the best received AMA’s, you also have what is widely regarded as the worst celebrity AMA of all-time – Woody Harrelson who stopped by to promote his film “Rampart” but only responded briefly and obliquely while trying to get people to focus on questions about his new film instead of whether he screwed a Redditor’s friend after a high school prom over ten years ago!

Things quickly unravelled when one user asked if Harrelson remembered taking the virginity of his friend after their high school prom after party over 10 years ago.

Harrelson’s response was:’First of off, its not true, and second off, I don’t want to answer questions about that. Lets focus on the film people.’

Reddit users, who did not appreciate being told what they could ask questions on, reminded the star that the session was called ‘Ask me anything’ and not ‘Ask me anything about Rampart’.

¶ Posted 27 June 2013 § Humour § Internet § Meme § PopCulture § Wisdom ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: reddit

Last Day of Kindergarten

What’s that word for when you’re feeling an equal mix of happiness and sadness? That’s what I feel when I look at this photo of Pace waiting for the bus on his last day of kindergarten…

(Okay, mostly happy but a twinge of sad!)

¶ Posted 26 June 2013 § Family § MemoryLane § Pace § Photo § Sad ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: cute

How Facebook Changes Your Brain

An interesting article about the ways that Facebook affects our thinking…

We learn to see the present as a “future past” and focus on how we will document, and self-document, even as the events are transpiring around us. And what happens? It distracts us. In the process of tweeting, posting a Facebook status, choosing the right filter for Instagram, and creating a Vine, we have become third parties to the experiences that were meant to include us.

I’m not sure I agree with all of the article’s conclusions. For example, it implies all Facebook users are self-centered egotists while some research shows that most Facebook behaviour is fairly innocuous and really the only indicator of narcissism is people who have extreme numbers of friends. And I’d even dispute that – as someone closing in on 1000 Friends, I attribute that as much to having lived for extended periods in three different provinces in jobs/schools where I had contact with a large number of people – but maybe I’m just in denial about my own narcissism? 😉

Anyhow, in my experience, you get the full range of personality types on Facebook with as many generous, thoughtful people posting interesting, engaging content that may or may not be about themselves.

And of course what you see is also as much a reflection of who is in your Facebook friends list – I know I’m going to get a lot of political content, a lot about libraries – simply because of who I’ve chosen to be friends with on Facebook.

Timing and geography are factors too – because we used to live in Calgary I’ve seen (and appreciated) a lot of flood-related updates over the past few days but others might not see much about the flood if they are from Newfoundland and living in Ontario for example.)

Here’s a small experiment. Here are the last ten posts on my Facebook stream as I type this with an attempt to rate each post on a completely arbitrary “Ego” scale of 1-5 with 1 being very low ego content and 5 being completely self-centered…

Someone waiting for a family member’s grade eight grad to start (3)
Flood update info from Sisika First Nation in Alberta (1)
“Do do do do, do dee do do do do… dee dee dee do, do do, dee do do…” (4 – seems innocent but somebody’s bragging about being at the new Superman movie and I’m jealous so there!)
A politician linking to a Margaret Wente G&M article about why we shouldn’t legalize prostitution (1)
A library linking to a tribute to SF writer, Richard Matheson (1)
Someone posting a link to their business (4)
Link to a newspaper story about Saskatchewan people helping out in Alberta (2)
Link to an anti-uranium story (2)
Link to an Amnesty International story about their efforts in Mauritania. (4 – Amnesty is sort of bragging here I guess. Also, I’m not too embarrassed to admit I had to Google that country.)
Someone posts a few picture of their daughter’s lion costume for a dance recital. (4 – although honestly, I think these kinds of posts are often where the “Facebook is for egotists” charges come from. But really, it’s often as much a matter of volume as far as I’m concerned. If this person posted nothing but pictures of her kid every day, multiple times per day, that might be a bit much. But every once in awhile, who cares? It’s part of the fire hydrant streaming articles and photos and funny cat videos at me all hours of the day. Big deal.)

Now, where’s that selfie I took in the mirror this morning? Oh here it is…

The Facebook Version of You vs. The Realistic Version of You

¶ Posted 25 June 2013 § Internet § Technology § Wisdom ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: economics, facebook, language, philosophy

Music Monday – “I can see him right now knees all skinned up/With a magnifying glass trying to melt a Tonka truck/Won’t he be a sight with his football helmet on/That’ll be his first love/Til his first love comes along”

I would’ve sworn I posted this video around Pace’s first day of kindergarten but apparently, I only put it on Facebook.

So, instead of a rare re-post of a Music Monday song which I thought it would be, this video gets to be posted for the first time here to celebrate Pace’s kindergarten graduation today.

As I said yesterday, it’s hard to believe how fast this year’s gone. Shea pointed out that it’s only going to go faster and one of these days, we’ll be waking up to prepare him for his high school graduation. :-0

“Anything Like Me” – Brad Paisley

Anyhow, congrats Spaceman! We’re beyond proud of you!

¶ Posted 24 June 2013 § Family § MemoryLane § MusicMonday § Sad § Shea § Video ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: cute, saskatchewan

Discussing Pace’s First Day of Kindergarten

Hard to believe that tomorrow is Pace’s kindergarten graduation.

The past year has flown by in so many ways – when the year started, Pace was an only child; now he’s a big brother. When the year started, he was still working on learning his alphabet, now he’s regularly writing out complete sentences (phonetically – the spelling will come in grade one I’m sure!). When the year started, his teacher tells us he was quite shy and quiet, now he’s apparently come out of his shell and is a model student.

Here’s a short clip I recorded of Shea, Pace and I talking after he got home from his first day. (I recorded this while we were having supper so sorry for the incidental sounds of utensils clicking, people chewing, etc.)

The highlight of his first day (and focus of most of this clip) was a visit from the “Muffin Man”, a mysterious figure who snuck into their classroom and stole some muffins then led them on a clue-filled scavenger hunt around the school, introducing them to all the important places to know – the gym, the principal’s office and the library!

(Apparently this memory stays with the kids – a co-worker whose much older kids went to the same school many years ago asked if the kindergarten kids still got a visit from the Muffin Man!)

¶ Posted 23 June 2013 § Humour § Pace § Sad § Shea ‡ Comments (2) ° Tagged: cute, parents

Saturday Snap – Definitely Ready For Grade One!

Hard to believe Pace is done Kindergarten next week – this year has really flown!

He wrote this out without prompting the other day. Obviously, he’s got that alphabet-thing down – bring on spelling! 😉

¶ Posted 22 June 2013 § MemoryLane § Pace § Photo § Sad § SaturdaySnap ‡ Comments (1) ° Tagged: cute, language

Friday Fun Link – My Imaginary Well-Dressed Toddler Daughter

This Pinterest site takes photos of youngsters dressed in fashionable clothes and provides hilarious write-ups to narrate the life of Quinoa, the trendy perfect child of trendy perfect parents.

Funny stuff.