Some Words

Do you think that it is advantageous to have a name that is generic enough to make Googling you hard? My first instinct is that unless you are trying to work in the arts it is. I started thinking about this because career services here at the school talks about sanitizing your online presence. There’s nothing on this site I’m particularly embarrassed by, though I suppose potential employers reading my short fiction could be embarrassing. But I’m also “protected” by the sheer number of Ian Macleods out there. We are legion. But what if both your first and last name were common English words. I knew a guy in high school who’s first and last names were both building materials. I imagine it’s almost impossible get Google information on him, or at least it takes a fair chunk of digging. Does he think that is a blessing or a curse?

Depending on a few factors, this could be a good thing or a bad thing in my life. Luckily, I don’t own an iPhone, or really a particularly fancy phone at all. I suspect that after a few days it’s just one more distraction. It does remind me of a classic xkcd comic though.

Anthems for a Seventeen Year Old Girl makes an excellent wink and nod appearance near the end of Scott Pilgrim. They use the original album version, which is sung, if I recall correctly, by Emily Haines, also of Metric. Now, barring some special appearances, she hasn’t toured with BSS since 2002. A rotating cast of women have taken up the song. If you see it in concert who is best? Well, it turns out that’s an interesting question.

Broken Social Scene has had numerous touring lineups. I’ve found four versions. If Feist has done this song live, I didn’t find it on youtube. [oops, I was wrong, but she isn't the sole vocalist in that performance]

The current female lead vocalist: Lisa Lobsinger

The long time lead: Amy Millan

The irregular fill in: Elizabeth Powell (regularly in the touring lineup, but I don’t know that she does this song often)

Best I could find on that, lots of semi-hilarious crowd “banter.”

The originator: Emily Haines

Impressive if only for the ear splitting screams from just inches from the camera. Also, I could do without the girl sort of sing chanting from the audience, but them’s the breaks on youtube.

And because I was wrong: Amy Millan, Leslie Feist, and Emily Haines all in one performance. (with bonus air guitar from Feist)

It seems that Amy Millan (who did not record the original) manages to get closest to the album version’s distortion of Haines’ vocals. Haines, understandably does an amazing version of it herself. I think hers edges out the others, just barely, for its strong clear vocals on what can otherwise be a mumbly song. Elizabeth Powell gets a couple of the lyrics wrong, but really seems to get the daydreaming nature of the song. Plus it’s fun to watch her get more confident and have more fun with the song as it goes on. Lisa Lobsinger’s version of the song is interestingly vulnerable at times, but I’m not a fan of the almost clipped crisp enunciation she uses for the “park that car” chant at the end. The song loses some of its dreamlike quality as a result. It may be better singing from a technical standpoint, but it doesn’t suit the song as well. She gets my sympathy though, as some of the commenters on for the clip complain that she isn’t as pretty or as good a singer as Emily Haines. Commenters, come on, the real answer is that all five of these women kick ass.

This review of Scott Pilgrim reviews from one of NPR’s reviews puts its finger on something I see all to often in the reviews I read. Reviewing the supposed audience rather than the work itself seems to happen more in music than in movies, but it is everywhere in modern criticism.

As for the movie, I liked it. I had the hardest time dealing with the idea that Scott as played by Cera was in any way successful with the ladies. If his awkward wooing really worked in real life, I’d have had a very different high school experience. That ridiculousness aside, it was a fun movie. I’m right in the core demographic though, bass playing half Canadian who loves video games and was in a band that couldn’t get gigs? How could I not like it?

Detour: An interesting entry among the reviews was Anthony Lane’s review for The New Yorker. In his attempt to pick up on cultural cues that simply don’t stick out to him, he conflates random bits of the movie and interprets them as character cues… or something to that effect. What he says is that the fact that Ramona dies her hair frequently is what puts her out of Scott’s league. Interesting interpretation. Not really what I think the director was going for, but… interesting. He also gets bonus points for being a New Yorker taking a dig at Toronto in a review of a film that makes jokes about New Yorkers being snotty and dismissive of Toronto.

I can’t set a time for emails to send through gmail. How the hell am I supposed to prevent review staffers from knowing I’m still up and working on stuff at two in the morning? If I leave it in the drafts folder then I’ll forget to send it entirely. Come on Gmail. What you want me to use Outlook or something? Not that I’m about to start using mail.app, but that would necessitate cron last I checked. More Google staffers should spend time catering to my whims, and bringing me grapes. Someone needs to dedicate their 20 percent time to making my life mirror Hedonism Bot’s.

I have, over the past couple of weeks, come to realize how much time I lose to “catching up” with where I think I should be. Something about the process of doing something you already think should be done (answering email, listening to those old podcasts, reading those articles you bookmarked) takes longer. I think that people already have a hard time estimating how long a task will take, but I would like to propose a new rule. I don’t have a set ratio yet, but catch up tasks seem to take something like 1.25 times the amount of time they would have taken if I’d just done them first things first. Maybe this is just me realizing all the wasted time I’ve left sitting on the side of the internet’s yellow brick road. But over the past couple of weeks I’ve caught up on a lot of things (alas still not up to date on emails, several people are now nodding their heads, should they happen to read this space). What has struck me is that things that were spiraling out of control, as soon as I caught up on them, seemed almost effortless to maintain. Now, I’m about to go into another semester, so who knows, but with an internship, the managing editor position, working at the computer lab, and looking over the job postings, it’s not like the summer has all been a romp through a field of wildflowers.

So, do it now in one hour, or do it later in an hour and a quarter. Your choice. Am I being too conservative with this? Does it sound crazy? Do you get stuff done faster when you wait until the last minute?

Because there are almost no three ingredient combos left, I suspect that this drink already has a name. Much like the last one I posted here, it’s just too easy to make, and Punt e Mes was part of a little mixing fad a year or two ago.

Unnamed or Bitter European Guy Cocktail
Again, someone has to have already named this.

1.5 oz gin
.5 oz Punt e Mes
.5 oz Creme de Cassis
4 solid dashes of grapefruit bitters

I have not yet determined if the bitters are of any real value. I was so surprised that it worked, I just mixed another and didn’t question their inclusion. I shall have to report back when I’ve had a chance to refine it.

It has a deep rich taste, and there isn’t so much of the Cassis that it’s too sweet. Almost a leathery character to the taste, or maybe unlit cigar would be a good comparison. The basic idea was to use two ingredients that I normally think overpower everything, and let them duke it out for supremacy. It benefits from gins with sharp enough flavor profiles to do a little cutting for you. Think Tangueray and it’s cousins in the gin world.

Since the last post was the 500th I’ve posted here, I find it fitting that it was one of the most banal that I’ve ever managed to pump out. Banality: just one of the many exciting new services we hope to provide you with here at Some Words.

Continuing on that front, I think I have been getting a lot more boring recently. At least, if my recent purchase history is to be believed. I have it on good authority that Americans are best defined by their recent purchase history. No one has ever failed to follow through after buying those running shoes.

That said, spending just above my comfort level has always been one of the ways that I motivate myself to actually get over the initial hurdle on some challenges. When I wanted to deal with my fear of heights? I bought climbing shoes. Shortly thereafter I was getting up on the rope. I still have overgrip problems, but I wasn’t looking to become a world class climber.

So what would you know from the recent purchases? And here’s where things really start to sound like a Jeanie Teasdale op-ed. I got a bunch of nice pens, and have been practicing my handwriting. Yes, I’m working on penmanship. Apparently I’m not happy with the cheapo pens that come in twelve packs anymore. I would have hated this in the past. Why bother, most of the stuff I do is typed. But like a time bomb, the heckling that my handwriting drew at one of my first post college jobs appears to have finally tipped my over the neurosis threshold into trying to do something about it. While I was working on edits for the past few weeks, I was also carefully working on my print letters. Now I’ve got a cheap fountain pen and have started on cursive.

I read somewhere, and I think I’ve used this quote on the blog before, that “people like to buy books because they think they are buying the time to read them.” I wonder if I like buying pens because I think I am buying the time to write my own projects with them.

Teenage Ian would have wanted to kick my ass for this. Fortunately for me, even if someone invents a time machine, teenage Ian wasn’t so big on climbing, biking, or generally staying healthy. I had more of a cola and video games lifestyle back then. I could probably take seventeen year old me in a fight.

While editing the the latest issue of the law review, I have grown a new appreciation for the work of editors everywhere. I don’t work with the grammar and the text, just the formatting. It is odd how this is all divided, but while I may notice errors of grammar and fix them, mine is to find the widows and orphans in the text. What I have come to realize is that pushing even one small thing around the page, shifting the spacing within a single line, entering a soft return to break an html link where I want it, will screw everything up. Suddenly, five or six orphans spring up on the next few pages. These things quickly cascade throughout the whole document. I don’t even really know why all these orphans appear, the change I made should not have shifted lower lines, it is often in a footnote, broken off on the next line… I look around, and I can hear Word 2007 laughing at me.

This, I think, has nothing to do with law. At the same time, it has a great deal of potential application to the law.

My perception of the quality of Microsoft products would be improved if, when forced by circumstance to use Word 2007, I could select text without it crashing every fourth time. Click and drag selecting is pretty basic, and while I know this is an outdated version of the software, I would have hoped they had that worked out by now. If I didn’t have a publishing company dictating the software, things would be going much faster right now.

What people don’t get to see when I’m not updating is the hilarious spam that I get to delete. It’s been what kept me logging in, intending to post, for so long. It’s like constantly generated low grade performance art. Does faintly gratifying people’s egos really get it through that many filters?

With the usual post finals apologies to friends I haven’t written. I’ll be hunkering down tomorrow before starting the summer job to write everyone an email. Maybe two. We’ll have to see. The summer has some exciting work ahead, and the weather here in Portland is finally nice. I look forward to climbing onto the bike every day.