I’m not one of those “I don’t own a TV and will now tell you about why” people. But after being a pretty major TV addict for most of my life (hell, I had a job selling cable TV throughout the summers I was in undergrad that I kicked ass at!), the Internet has all but replaced TV as the place where I waste my time.
I watch “The Daily Show”, some CFL and NHL games and maybe the odd other show but that’s really about it for my TV watching. I can’t think of the last hour-long episodic drama I’ve watched on a regular basis. But on the recommendation of a co-worker, I started watching “Breaking Bad” and I’ve got to say, I’m with the many critics who say this might be the best show on TV right now.
There are numerous reasons why this is the case – the acting, the writing, the cinematography, the many themes – but there’s also the unique story arc that has perhaps never been done on TV before – taking a character who is extremely sympathetic and incrementally turning him evil with no sign of redemption anywhere to be found.
[The show] is about a lot of things. The meth epidemic. The American Southwest. The trials of middle-class manhood. The failings of our health-care system. The various ways to shatter the windshield of a Pontiac Aztek. But at its core, it’s really about something more human, and more universal, than all that: the mysterious, all-too-common transformation…how people become dangerous.
Shea and I came to the show late but via the magic of Bit Torrent, were able to download the first three and a half seasons and watch them in fairly short order (one of the great ironies of the show is that it is as addictive as the crystal meth that underpins all of the show’s action and development.)
Pace on growing up: “First, you’re a baby then you’re a kid then you’re a human then you find a wife.”
Pace impresses with his vocabulary (but not his abilities as a human dictionary): “Ferocious means nice.”
Jason: “No, it means dangerous…like a ferocious tiger.”
Pace: “Oh, like this?” <jumps on my head>
When Shea and Pace picked me up today, I was greeted with “Hi dad, you stupie!” (He’s not allowed to say “stupid” so this is the stand-in word he’s made up.)
“Oh, hi. I brought you a cookie but since you said that, I think I’ll give it to your mom instead.”
“Uhm, I love you dad!”
I was out at a meeting tonight and after it finished, I called to let Shea know I’d be home soon. Pace was (as usual) resisting bedtime but when the phone rang, he apparently ran directly to his bedroom, calling over his shoulder “Don’t tell dad!” Shea picked up the phone, laughing and after telling me what had happened, said it was extra funny because she’d threatened to “call your dad” earlier in the night when he first got out of bed.
“Is this healthy?” – This has been a bit of a recurring mantra with everything we feed him lately. Our lectures about cookies, candy and McDonald’s have sunk in, I guess. For example, last night, Pace and I were playing Elmo (him) and Cookie Monster (me).
Pace: “Here Cookie Monster. Have some celery.”
Me: “I want cookie!”
Pace: “No, eat celery. It’s healthy.”
Me: (pretending to put the celery in a bowl). “I’ll just add some eggs and sugar and flour. Ummm, ummm, ummm. Celery cookies!”
Pace (mad): “Dad, there’s no such thing as celery cookies!”
And I know that the current advice is that you should correct your child’s mis-pronounced words but Pace has a few that I just love and can’t force myself to correct. I hope I’m not doing him irreparable harm! (I mean the kid breaks out the word “ferocious” without any problem so I’m not too worried!)
Ham-gerber = hamburger
Grill = girl
Plillow – pillow
Pewter – computer
Oh, and I think I made reference to this before (either on this blog or maybe on Facebook) but here’s photographic proof of Pace’s attempt to spike his hair…with toothpaste!
The leaves on the trees are turning, we’ve been out “leaf crunching” as Pace calls it and I agree with Shea that “if it wasn’t followed by winter, fall might just be my favourite season”. I don’t know if this Britpop one hit wonder has anything to do with the autumn but it’s called “October Swimmer” so I’m posting it here…
Kids, grafitti is wrong and you should never do it. But if you happen to have a Sharpie in your pocket when walking past an unadorned stop sign, it’s a truism of life that the obvious jokes can also be the funniest. 😉
This was accomplished by the researchers watching a bunch of YouTube videos and creating a database of which parts of their brain “lit up” while watching different images then having a computer match it against another library of video clips.
(It’s fitting they use Google’s YouTube service because, in many ways, their technique sounds not dissimilar to the process Google uses to match your search query against its massive-database of potential web sites you might be looking for.)
Here’s how it works directly from the linked article:
Three volunteers, all neuroscientists on the project, watched hours of video clips while inside an fMRI machine. Outside volunteers weren’t used because of the amount of time and effort involved, and because the neuroscientists were highly motivated to focus on the videos, ensuring better brain images.
Using the brain-imaging data, Gallant and his colleagues built a “dictionary” that linked brain activity patterns to individual video clips — much like their 2008 study did with pictures. This brain-movie translator was able to identify the movie that produced a given brain signal 95 percent of the time, plus or minus one second in the clip, when given 400 seconds of clips to choose from. Even when the computer model was given 1 million seconds of clips, it picked the right second more than 75 percent of the time.
With this accurate brain-to-movie-clip dictionary in hand, the researchers then introduced a new level of challenge. They gave the computer model 18 million seconds of new clips, all randomly downloaded from YouTube videos. None of the experiment participants had ever seen these clips.
The researchers then ran the participants’ brain activity through the model, commanding it to pick the clips most likely to trigger each second of activity. The result was a from-scratch reconstruction of the person’s visual experience of the movie. In other words, if the participants had seen a clip that showed Steve Martin sitting on the right side of the screen, the program could look at their brain activity and pick the YouTube clip that looked most like Martin sitting on the right side of the screen.
Here’s a video of what the translated video looks like:
Sometimes I think about the difference between my life and that of my grandparents and great-grandparents – the Internet, man on the moon, heart transplants, etc. Then I try to guess what life might be like for my grandchildren and great-grandchildren. And stuff like this starts to come *really* close!
R.E.M., an alternative favourite of the 1980’s who parlayed that early attention into being one of the most successful bands of the 1990’s (and then one of the most uneven bands of the 2000’s) announced their break-up today (given their politics – and the amicable nature of the break – perhaps fittingly on World Peace Day?)
R.E.M. is one of my favourite bands of all-time and when pressed, I’ll usually cite “Find the River” as my favourite song of all-time.
I’ll have more to say about R.E.M. in the list below but first, a warning. If you’re a hipster, you’ll probably want to stop reading right now as this list is not very original at all and my uncool is about to show.
1. The Beatles
We start off the unoriginality with the band widely considered the most popular, most influential, most covered, highest selling of all-time. But the trick is that it wasn’t always that way. When I was a kid, one of my best friends was a huge Beatles fan (mostly because his dad was.) I was a huge Elvis fan (mostly because my dad was.) And ironically, our dads had been best friends when they were younger too – still not sure how my dad went for Elvis and his dad went for the Beatles but there you go.
Anyhow, one day I woke up in dorms deadly sick (for real, not alcohol-induced.) I decided to skip classes but had enough energy to get on a local BBS (a pre-cursor of the web for you kids out there!) and I saw a post by someone who was wanting to sell their entire collection of Beatles CD’s (possibly to raise funds for their own alcohol-induced illness?) In a slightly fevered state, I sent a message saying I wanted the discs and the person even offered to deliver them. Later that day, a knock on the door, an exchange of money I couldn’t really afford (I still remember the total was $60. In the days when used CD’s went for $10 each, this was a steal for maybe 10-12 CD’s!) I popped in one of the discs and with the fever creating a “1960’s” state of mind, I finally *got* the Beatles. Wow. I lay in bed all day listening to one album after another through my hazy head and have been a huge fan ever since – not only reading but collecting books about them, watching movies & videos, reading interviews and so on.
2. The Tragically Hip
Although I’m not as big of a fan as I once was, there was a time in my life when The Hip pretty much defined my life. I was the guy who went to record stores at midnight on the day their new album was released, followed them around to nearby cities to catch various shows on their tours and was part of the tape trading community that sprung up around the band. There was and is so much I loved about the Hip – the poetic, obtuse lyrics, the riffs, the Canadiana, Gord Downie’s stage presence, the jam-band improvisions in music and lyrics, the shows that were never the same twice.
3. R.E.M.
I might have heard one of their earlier songs on MuchMusic but one of my first R.E.M. memories is being at Provincial Drama Finals and there was a dance for all the participating schools. I still remember that the song “Stand” came on and one school’s kids all got up and did the dance moves from the song together while I sat with my friends on the edge of the dance floor thinking “Wow, that *never* happens at our school!” “Out of Time” was released and was huge of course. It played a pretty major role in my life and skirting along the edge of “too much information” territory, I can state that, although it wasn’t the album playing when I lost my virginity, it played a big part of events earlier in the evening! (What’s the emoticon for the embarrassed face?) Not just for that reason, I became a big fan of the band and their music. But if “Out of Time” was their biggest album, “Automatic for the People” was their masterwork – an entire album about death, dying, mortality, love and loss which is still ultimately uplifting. So good.
4. Blue Rodeo
There are a few bands that could fill out this list in that I own all their albums, like most of their songs, have maybe seen them in concert – U2, Radiohead, Wilco, Weakerthans, Spirit of the West, Beautiful South, Blur, The Submarines who are a recent discovery – but I think I’ll give the nod to another Canadian band who I find consistently excellent in their albums, who add a bit of a countryish flare to this list and who are often called Canada’s Lennon/McCartney which, based on who is #1 on this list, gives them a big boost in the rankings!
5. Boo Radleys
I had to put at least one feeble attempt at showing my “hipster indie cred” on the list and the Boo Radleys are it. Perhaps best known for a cover of “There She Goes” on the “So I Married An Axe Murderer” soundtrack, they were a second-tier Britpop band when I was in England in 1995. But for whatever reason, they connected with me in a way that other popular bands of the day – Supergrass, Stereophonics, Suede, etc. – didn’t. And while other top-tier bands like Oasis and Blur battled to be the “new Beatles”, I think the Boo Radleys actually deserved that title by being most similar to the Beatles in their endless sonic innovations wrapped in delicious pop wrappers. Yum!
