I’ve been reading McSweeney’s for the last hour. The best recent article by far is “Jim Jarmusch’s Notes for a Ghostbusters Sequel.” I’m not sure, but I think I’ve seen it before. Didn’t it star Johnny Depp in black and white?
Here are some lists, followed by their most entertaining items:
State Songs, If They All Suggested the Apathy of Idaho’s “Here We Have Idaho”
Hey, Is That Oregon? Oh, My Mistake, It’s Washington; I Was Only Born in Arizona, Then We Moved When I Was 2
Methods Other Than Song by Which One Can Be Killed Softly
Asphyxiation by cupcake
Totalitarian Institutions That Would Have Been More Fitting for George Orwell’s 1984, Considering How That Year Turned Out
The Ministry of the Beef, and Where It Currently Is
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I just passed some stoner frat-jocks on the way home from campus. They were discussing the possibility of purchasing sustenance in order to quell the various hungers within their respective corpuses. (As in, “Dude, I’m totally jonesin’ for some foooood right now, dude.”)
While I was walking past them, the foooood in particular that they were discussing was the Toronto/Kingston hipster raison d’être, Sushi.
They referred to it as “Sush’.”
Sook-Yin Lee must be turning over in her grave.
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Here are some of the best tidbits from “Professor’s letter draws fire” in the Journal. Let’s do a bit of deconstruction, shall we?
In her letter, AdŠle Mercier, a professor in the philosophy department, wrote that the scene she witnessed on Aberdeen Street on Saturday night “filled me with revulsion never felt before.” Mercier also wrote: “[I was disgusted] at the thought that I devote my life to teaching students who turn into numbskulls worthy of the Hitler youth at the drop of a beer keg.”
A wonderful way to start such a rational, intelligent letter. What more MAGIC does she have in store for us?
In an interview with the Journal, Mercier said she regrets that her statement caused offense, but does not intend to apologize. “It’s important not to interpret me as saying the events on Aberdeen Street are the same as the Holocaust,” Mercier said. “Who were the Hitler youth? They were just nice kids that stopped thinking, and it’s very dangerous to stop thinking because look at where it can lead.”
Apparently it can lead to blanket statements that grossly overestimate the horrors Queen’s students are capable of, or grossly understates the horrors of the holocaust. Whether or not she said it explicitly, she was drawing parallels where people sure shouldn’t be drawing parallels. Getting drunk and flipping a car is one thing; putting on a uniform and throwing up the zig heil is another.
“I was at the party for several hours, and I made a note of noting the ethnic variety of the kids at the party,” Mercier said. “I went there with the intent of noticing that and what the proportion of men to women was.” Mercier said she made the characterization in reference to the Toronto Star and Kingston Whig-Standard’s decision to put a photo of a black partier on their front pages.
So she went there for the purpose of condemning students and making racial/gender statements. She went there looking for an ethnic group to complain about. Well congratulations, AdŠle, you found one! And a special pat on the head for noticing that the kid in the photo was black! Even the Whig didn’t notice!
Mercier said she was moved to write the letter out of her commitment to students. “It’s not all and only Queen’s students who are like this,” she said. “You expect better of Queen’s students. I’m very dedicated to my students and I’ll be damned if I stand by … I consider myself first and foremost a teacher, and I consider it my duty to scold when I think scolding is appropriate. My students will attest—I think almost universally—I’m a very devoted teacher and there’s something parental about being a teacher and I was hoping my students would listen to me.”
Hey KIDS! You’re NAZIS! Now c’mere and hug Mama!
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So I woke up this morning to a wild storm. It sounded extremely flamboyant, and I was like, lol, I hope a tree doesn’t fly through my window like that time on Alf. My laptop might get wet.
So then I’m walking to school, and I see this police car blocking the road I’m crossing, and I’m like, lol, I hope a tree didn’t crash into someone’s house on that street.
And then I’m walking in behind Walter Light Hall and I happen to glance to my left, and there through the houses, by the street I was lololling about, is a tree lying smack dab on top of someone’s car. It’s got to be around 2 metres in circumference and there are live wires hanging about, and I’m like, holy fuck. I actually said that out loud, I said “holy fuck.” Fortunately, there were no professors or catholics around to be offended by my remark.
Anyhoo, then I wrote my Human-Computer Interaction test and it was pretty easy.
This week’s score
Nature: 1
Aberdeen: 1
Cars: 0
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http://homepage.mac.com/jjh/iblog/C631787142/E13874703/
I read his 4-item list of things he can’t do in firefox and then stopped reading, because I realized it was really long but mostly because all 4 are possible in Firefox. This man is an idiot.
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http://www.nature.com/news/2005/050926/pf/050926-5_pf.html
Brains are neat.
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There are two opinion articles in the Journal that I think everyone should read: “Aberdeen a protest against authority” by David Zarnett (which discusses just what the title indicates) and the Journal’s Letters to the editors (one of which is by a student concerned about misdirection of police funds and the other by a police officer, frustrated by the actions of folks at the party). They all make very good points, and you should read them all if you can. I’d like to discuss the first article, primarily, and the cause of all that hostility.
For everyone I spoke with on Aberdeen Saturday night, the subject of the day was the police. More specifically, why the police didn’t seem to like us very much. I had a conversation with a friend of EngSoc President Chris Zabaneh about under- representation and student voter apathy, and a bunch with other folks about the general panic and hype that higher-ups were making of the night to come. As it got to be around 11, we started seeing the results of that hype. We received glares and angry demands from the cops (to the point where I was afraid of being attacked just for standing on the sidewalk). A friend of mine told me that he’d seen a girl who had gotten her feet stomped on by a horse when police were trying to clear an intersection. The cops were apparently very unsympathetic, to the point of being rude to her.
In any normal situation, having a cop forcibly push you aside with a horse would be scandalous, but because it was Aberdeen, it was a-okay. Let me remind everyone that this complete lack of respect for our rights happened well before anyone rushed the street, let alone set a car on fire. At that point, we were just a little noisy. Most of us were sticking to the sidewalks.
Sure, the “drunken brawl” and “booze-fuelled riot” on Aberdeen was escalated by people who, for the most part, were drinking at the party. And yes, there is certainly no excuse for what they did. But when blame starts getting pointed, it shouldn’t be pointed solely in the direction of a few thousand people who happen to pay tuition to a specific university.
I think “protest” is too sophisticated a word for what happened on Saturday night, but it’s close. Look at me, for example. I showed up for two reasons: to see how badly we’d be treated by the cops, and to add an extra body to the party, to prove to them that they couldn’t keep us out. I don’t want to say “they started it,” but I’ll say that there was a lot of bad blood between the revellers and the KPF. The rowdiness that ensued (up until the flaming car, that is, which I repeat was completely stupid), was just our way of telling them that we’d had enough of their shit. We were sick of being pushed around.
I’ll be honest; I don’t have respect for the police in Kingston. I had all the respect in the world for the police force before I came to Kingston, but I lost it once they showed no respect for me. I’ve never shoplifted or started a fight or vandalized anything, but when I’m spoken to by a cop, I’m treated like a criminal. So it’s no wonder there was hostility between the students of Queen’s and the Kingston Police. Like one student said in the Talking Heads portion of the Journal: we’ve lost our trust in our authority figures. How are we supposed to appreciate their protection if they do nothing but persecute us?
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