go, nukkah.

yeah, i said it. go. all oriental and shit. like chess, but way more intense. stellar, is any game during the play of which you can both stress and flex your mental while also having good conversation, laughs, beef stew, cheesecake, and 3 pots of tea. stel-lar. shit's even got me typing in syllables.


"It is commonly said that no game has ever been played twice. This may be true: On a 19×19 board, there are about 3³⁶¹×0.012 = 2.1×10¹⁷⁰ possible positions, most of which are the end result of about (120!)² = 4.5×10³⁹⁷ different (no-capture) games, for a total of about 9.3×10⁵⁶⁷ games. Allowing captures gives as many as possible games, all of which last for over 4.1×10⁴⁸ moves! (For two comparisons: the number of legal positions in chess is estimated to be between 10⁴³ and 10⁵⁰; and physicists estimate that there are not more than 10⁹⁰ protons in the entire visible universe.) " - Wikipedia



here's to $1500 go tables and plastic game sheets. 'sright, batch! we keeps it RAAAEL!

someone turn the heat back on.

it's freezing cold here. i've been back inside for an hour now and my fingers still aren't moving properly.

i was curious to see how many songs contain the line "the heater's broke", so i googled it, which was disappointing for two reasons.

first, i forgot that tibet is urging us to boycott google for its complicit action in applying communist-regime dictated censorship to its chinese-language version. i like tibet, if for no other reason than because the monks are so chill.

second, though perhaps more immediately disappointing, i got dozens of pages of shitty redneck-inspired song lyrics for a parody of what i assume is jingle bells. thanks, dorks.



on a different and coincidental note, wade davis's lecture last night at the university touched and very much moreso elaborated upon my most recent writing regarding other cultures. i wish i could have taped it for you all to hear, but since my yesterday-bought mp3 player came without a battery, it just wasn't possible. i'm sure he would have been choked anyhow. point being, if you have a chance to see this man talk, i urge you to do so. the photo-slideshow that accompanies the lecture is worth your time itself; the lecture of course, was worth my time regardless.

"man, fuck the real world" - g

i've been studying economics a lot recently, and something about the way we're being taught bothers me.

virtually everything in the textbook espouses the belief that the way we do things in north america is the way they ought to be done. when "developing" countries are referred to, it's in a manner that portrays them as being inferior to us. criticism of their lack of development is always centered around their having not yet adopted our developed-world suggestions as to how to build their economies. their quality of life is dismissed off-hand as being substandard, their people as uneducated, and their future as undeveloped, which reads more to the effect of "uncivilized". we're taught that they "need" to do certain things, or else they won't ever "develop" as a nation.

unfortunately, these economic "facts" lead me to more questions than anything. who are we to say that they need to develop? who are we to say that they're underdeveloped? why the hell are we so intent on everyone else in the world developing the same problems of society, humanity, health, environment and spirit that we've "developed"? who are we to say that we're any better off than they are? is it not possible that maybe they were far better off before the western world first started telling them what was best for them? what makes life in the western world so fantastic in the first place? do these nations not have a right to exist without "developed" nations breathing down their throats to "develop" and exploit their people and land to the same extent that we have and still are in the process of destroying that which is ours? what right do we have to take a well-functioning society and turn it upside down in americanizing it? how dare we tell these people that they "need" anything at all, when we fail to give ourselves and our own what we actually do need? have we completely failed to see that as a group of cultures they just might be more developed and mature than we are?

what makes us so goddamned smart in the first place?

if we should be doing anything at all for "developing" nations, maybe it ought to be undoing all of the "development" that we've forced down their throats and letting them make their decisions for themselves. thanks to us they have far less than they would have had we never trod upon their soil and cultures in the first place, and in many ways they're still happier than we are. is it not going to be enough until we've taken even that away from them and replaced it by whatever we've fooled ourselves into thinking is happiness and success?

"it's gotta be the shoes!"

anyone who has been passionate about something - be it sport, music, art, or something else - eventually becomes intimate with the tools of their trade. there's a lot to be said for that kind of intimacy. for me, it creates a level of understanding that only someone who loves what they do could hope to enjoy.

when i was serious about ski racing it was waxing and sharpening your skis before training and races. it was having a pair of training skis and a pair of race skis for each event. it was flying in skis from across the country for your first downhill race. having your downhill suit plumbed to certify that the f.i.s. had inspected it and approved it for international competition. duct taping everything in every which way to make it fit that litle bit better, which you hoped would make you ski that little bit faster.

when i was golfing, it was ordring a driver with a loft, shaft stiffness, and kick-point determined to match your individual swing. it was playing with a fresh sleeve of your favourite ball. the way a divot gets cut from the ground and flies through the air when you hit a perfect iron shot. walking away from a drive before it get past the ladies' tee and knowing that it's straighter and longer than your match play opponent could hope to hit. walking hundreds of miles in a season, wearing your golf shoes through until there's no toe left on your back foot, and feeling sad when you finally have to get new shoes. it's loving the new shoes even more than the last ones.

when i was skateboarding, it was putting fresh griptape on a new deck, screwing your trucks on, screwing your wheels on, tightening the kingpin just right, and stepping onto a brand new bit of heaven. it was throwing the same board at a wall in frustration five minutes later, and feeling guilty not about the wall, but about the board. it was waiting for a much-hyped video to be released, and watching it ten times a day for a month afterwards. buying ankle braces when your foot got so mangled that you couldn't walk, let alone skate, without one.

when i play music, it's knowing the guage and brand of strings i want on my guitar, so it sounds just right. it's taking apart a cross-fader to clean up the contacts and eliminate the fuzz at the click-point. it's setting up microphones so that your sound will be the best it can be, even when it ends up being not that good after all. it's cleaning the green mess from the inside of your trumpet and freshly oiling the valves. tightening your bow just so, that it warms your ears when the strings are played.


i got new spikes in the mail today, and in the absence of shortcake, it's been the best part of my day. i spent an hour trying them on, lacing them differently, spiking them, and admiring them. one pair will likely make my ankles hurt, and the other will soon smell like musty and dirty pit sand, but for the moment they're unadulterated and pure. like organic raspberry jam.

for the record, it doesn't get any better than that.

counter-culture

normal.

what is normal? is normal sharing a trait with the majority of the human population? is normal what the majority in a world/culture/country/age group says is acceptable and expected? is normal meant to imply natural? where do we we draw the line between normalcy and abnormality?

it seems to me that what we see as normal here in the western world is often neither natural nor acceptable. that's not to say that we don't have our strengths and merits, because in many ways we do. however, at the same time that we're eons ahead of other cultures in some respects, we're many-fold more eons behind in others. the list of problems i see with the north american culture and way of life is not only too long to write out here, it's growing constantly enough that it would be futile to try and definitively record anyhow. some examples will suffice (and many ahve been touched on before).

the north american work world. working for 8 (which is so painfully often the absolute minimum) hours per day, 5 days a week, with a paltry hour long lunch break is not my idea of how life was meant to be lived. working for companies that expect you to work overtime whenever they need it isn't my idea of a respecting and welcoming work environment. nor is sitting at a desk for the duration of your work day, save frequent trips to the swill-dispensing coffee machine, and subsequently more frequent trips to the washroom to relieve a diuretic-riddled body and to constantly check the mirror to make sure that your appearance fits the corporate mould and won't offend any of the other shirt and tie clad go-getters that fill the countless other cubicles in your industrial park bordering office building lit by fluorescent bulbs and permeated by the hum of thousands of pieces of office equipment and electronics. ever seen the movie 'office space'? it's hilarious. it truly is. and it's also scary. offices like that exist everywhere. i've worked in one. i've vowed never to do it again.

the way we treat our bodies. convenience and instant gratification are the names of the game. it's an amazing thing to consider just how much useless crap we consume on a daily basis here, and the scary thing is that the rate is only getting faster. fast- and overly processed food, coffee, tobacco, alcohol, over the counter drugs, prescription drugs, the "electric beach", car exhaust, smog, light pollution, noise pollution, beauty products, radiation; we can't seem to get enough of it. we're so immersed in it that it's now actually impossible to avoid, now matter how hard you try. go to the top of mount everest and you're still going to be bathed in radiation from communications systems run in this country, that one, the third one, and on and on until you're in outer space. and even there you're not clear of it. even our attempts at improving our health are so often unhealthy themselves. the atkins diet? do they seriously suggest cutting carbohydrates out of your diet? you have got to be fucking kidding me. any diet? just as ridiculous. here's an insane idea: eat properly all the time, and exercise regularly. of course it's easier said than done. it's hard to have the energy to get any exercise in at all, let alone cook one decent meal every day (i wouldn't dare suggest three of them) when we're expected to work 60 hour weeks. where is all of this money going, again? oh, right. our fantastic quality of life.

the way we treat each other. i can say that in many ways i'm glad and proud to be a canadian. hopefully with a new government that seems to love america as much as it does, my sentiment won't change. if canadians treated each other the way so many (though of course not all) americans do, or if we treated the rest of the world like they did, it would be embarrassment enough for me to leave. the scary thing is that even over the course of my own short life, i've seen us as a people change from being more canadian to something much more american. let's hope that the americans, and not us ourselves, are the ones who give a bad name to people with canadian flags on their travel bags.

the way we treat our home. the earth. our rivers, lakes, oceans, soil, air, flora, fauna, and ozone layer. we're near the bottom of the list of developed countries as far as environmental consciousness and frienliness goes. we think that we're soing fantastically here in canada, because our land is so incredibly beautiful. it never dawns on us that it appears that way because have too much to ruin all at once. i don't think that justifies our ruining it at all, though.

i wish i could say otherwise, but i'm as guilty as anyone else. i don't recycle everything i possibly can. i drive an suv. i still buy food that was grown with the use of pesticides, herbicides, genetic modification, antibotics, steroids, unnecessary preservatives, and a host of other chemicals, many of which i absolutely guarantee are going to be shown to be harmful to our health in the coming years. i don't treat everyone as my equal, and i'm not always nice to everyone i meet. i hold prejudices. i covet things. i don't always treat my body as the incredible gift that it is. i don't treat my mind as the even more incredible gift that it is. i still participate in the system, and i still play the game when i have to.

but i'm trying to move in the other direction. some different direction. a direction that i can feel good about, even if it's not perfect.

it's all that we can do: try. if i'm going to live a life that i'm to some day be proud of, it's what i have to do. i think that we're all responsible to do whatever we can, once we recognize that something needs to be done.

the hell with normal. i want to be healthy. i want to be happy. if i have to live my entire life counter-culture, then i guess that's what it'll come to. it's not the convenient, easy way to go about things, but my body, my mind, and my spirit are worth the effort.

"The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe."

"Great spirits have always encountered opposition from mediocre minds. The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly."

- Albert Einstein

(the man had his head on straight, so i think it's okay to quote him in consecutive writings.)

infomania

i had a sneaking suspicion. i also wondered when someone would start studying it scientifically. i guess i have some answers.

http://content.monster.ca/8899_en-CA_p1.asp
http://content.monster.ca/6775_en-CA_p1.asp


i agree for the most part. it's sort of alarming that i had barely even noticed how much it's become a part of our lives, our culture, and our expectations. maybe i'm of the lucky age that mine was one of the last years to have grown up without the internet affecting every part of my life. that didn't happen until junior high.

have you ever sent an e-mail or left a voice message and been frustrated when you weren't replied to immediately? i can't say that i haven't. recently. maybe we are turning ourselves into a world of people driven by instant gratification and accepted - hell, even expected - compulsion.

weird.

sitting with a pretty girl

the days really seem to fly by sometimes; it's startling how quickly time can pass.

einstein shattered our view of the universe, and existence in its most general sense, when he showed us that time truly is relative (as i've discussed here before), and that each of us have our own individual time that noone and nothing else in the universe shares. it's one of the things that makes each and every one of us unique. time passes for all of us, but each of our times pass at different rates, now and then, here and there.

once it's passed, it's impossible to gain it back as far as we know now, and in that sense time is incredibly precious.


i hope you spend yours in the best way possible, for you.


"A man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. He sits on a hot stove for a minute, it's longer than any hour. That is relativity." - Albert Einstein