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Food Porn at Its Best

Tastespotting. 

Posted 28 January 2010 § Main Page ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged:

Apple iPad Officially Announced

Apple's newest product wasn't a huge secret – the majority of observers predicted some form of tablet computer.  So the speculation mainly centered around what form their tablet computer would take: like an iTouch but “better”?  Some sort of iPhone/netbook hybrid?  Something revolutionary with technologies we've never seen before?  (Touch on both sides of the device?  Lasers to zap your enemies?) 

From the announcement today (and ignoring the patented Steve Jobs hyperbole), it sounds like an iTouch but bigger (with a healthy swirl of Kindlge thrown in too.) 

Here's a sample of the commentary:

Apple Unveils iPad Tablet (NYT)

Liveblogging Steve Jobs' Presentation (NYT)

Apple iPad: What We Still Don't Know (PCWorld)

The Young Curmudgeon's Club That is MetaFilter Weighs In (MetaFilter)

But after proclaiming the iPhone the greatest invention in the history of inventions in my year-end wrap-up last year, I'm pretty excited to get my hands on the iPad. 

Drool…

Posted 27 January 2010 § Internet § Main Page ‡ Comments (0) °

The Invention of Lying – Mini-Review

We watched Ricky Gervais' “The Invention of Lying” tonight and it's a fairly subversive comedy in a thematic area that doesn't get a lot of attention from Hollywood. 

The film's trailer made it look like a typical Hollywood gimmicky slug line = green light production. 

You can imagine the pitch:  “It's like Jim Carrey's “Liar Liar” except nobody can tell a lie, not just the main character.” 

Except instead of sticking with that easy out and resulting cheap comedy, Gervais takes it to a pretty dangerous place – in a world where no one can lie, religion doesn't exist because that's too big of a leap of faith to be possible in an otherwise completely honest, logical world.  But when one man discovers the ability to lie, this literally leads to the creation of religion since no one has the capacity to understand that the tale he spins of a “man in the sky” could be anything but true. 

(Now if Hollywood would just make a film version of one of my all-time favourite novels which also has “the Big Lie” as its main theme, we'd really see some subversive ideas on celluloid! )

Posted 27 January 2010 § Humour § Main Page § PopCulture ‡ Comments (0) °

Music Monday – "I'd have given anything/To have my own Pac-man game at home/I used to have to get a ride down to the arcade/Now I've got it on my phone."

I don't listen to as much country music as I did in my smalltown youth but this song caught my ear when I heard it. 

I love how the first couple verses are just typical “I remember this, I remember that” cuteness but then the tone changes slightly leading to that whopper of a last verse that seriously brought tears to my eyes the first time I heard it.  Fun video too! 

Posted 26 January 2010 § Main Page § MusicMonday § Video ‡ Comments (0) °

Saturday Snap – The Future of Nascar?

Logos on the drivers as well as the cars?

Posted 24 January 2010 § Humour § Main Page § Pace § Photo § SaturdaySnap ‡ Comments (0) °

Friday Fun Link – What's the Dumbest Thing You've Ever Heard Somebody Say? (January 22, 2010)

Another very entertaining Ask.Reddit thread.  I heard a good one myself recently – one woman was talking to another woman and said “We're not Catholic, we're Christians.”  

Posted 23 January 2010 § FridayFunLink § Humour § List § Main Page ‡ Comments (0) °

Friday Fun Link – "Why Don't You Read?" (January 22, 2010)

The Globe & Mail recently featured this catchy a capella cover of the song “Crazy” rewritten to discuss the woes of the print media world in the Internet age.  (H/T to Heather M.)

Posted 22 January 2010 § FridayFunLink § Main Page § Video ‡ Comments (0) °

20 Best Books of the Decade

Yay – finally a best books list where I've actually read most of them!

Posted 22 January 2010 § List § Main Page § PopCulture ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged:

The Seven Main Plots in All of Literature

An oldie but a goodie from libraryland's own Jessamyn West, here's a list of the seven core plots in literature I found via a recent Reddit post. 

I remember learning a version of this list in grade nine English that only had four items (which I've put in bold below) but always trying to prove what a genius I was, I came up with “Man vs. Time” as something that wasn't covered by the four on the teacher's list. 

The teacher said that was the same as “Time vs. Nature” but I argued that there was a difference between a character trying to do something before a time bomb went off and a character trying to escape a hurricane. 

According to this list, I wasn't right (or I've come up with the eighth plot – maybe I am a genius after all? ) but I was definitely on the right track in thinking that four wasn't enough to sum up all the permutations.  

1 - [wo]man vs. nature 

2 - [wo]man vs. man 

3 - [wo]man vs. the environment 

4 - [wo]man vs. machines/technology 

5 - [wo]man vs. the supernatural 

6 - [wo]man vs. self 

7 - [wo]man vs. god/religion
Posted 21 January 2010 § List § Main Page § PopCulture ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: ,

People in Order by Age

People In Order: 1. Age from James Price on Vimeo.

(via Reddit)

[Edit: this video is apparently part of a series commissioned by the BBC with the intention of arranging people by various criteria – income, length of partnership, stage of pregnancy – to humanize things we often think of only in statistical terms.] 

Posted 20 January 2010 § Main Page § Video ‡ Comments (0) °