In Grade 5 my classroom had a set of shelves at the back loaded with National Geographic Magazines, which, if you got your homework done early, we were allowed to browse through back at our desks. Mayan pyramids, man-eating sharks, mountain expeditions in far-flung locales. This kicked off a lifelong love of the magazine. I’ve been an on-and-off subscriber and for a long time would gladly pick up old issues at garage sales and library fundraisers.

The problem was I was moving around a lot in my 20s, and National Geographic have been making magazines for a long time – the size of my collection was becoming enormous and it was becoming increasingly impractical to heft the crates full of (heavy) yellow magazines everywhere I was going. Downsizing to a smaller apartment, I had to accept that there just wasn’t room for 10 feet of magazines on a 4 foot shelf. I let them go in the hopes that someday they’d be available online or something…

Enter the Complete National Geographic – a collection that takes up only the space on your hard drive, and gives you access to the entire history of the magazine, without gaps, dating back to the beginning. I picked mine up at Costco for a steal – $24. (It’s offered online for $50)

I think it’s a fantastic collection that have been digitized well, but I have some minor quibbles about the custom Adobe Air browser. More than a few times pages have mysteriously failed to load, without error messages or any indication if it’s doing something. While bookmarking is somewhat handy, some of the UI feels clunky and unintuitive, and there’s often no “cancel” button in case you change your mind.

I suspect that they did all of the scanning directly from the printed magazine, which is a shame since there’s probably a drawer (or a building) someplace packed with all the crisp, bright original photos. The ones in the collection are still beautiful, but show some age in the colour reproduction and screening technique.

The future came through for me on this one! It’s pretty rad that we can fit 1400+ magazines on a millimetre-thin disc! Now, where’s my flying car?

We’ve had an unusually warm and rainy March, leading to a few early surprises like these spring flowers pushing up out of the flower beds.

To be honest, I’m still not able to distinguish tulips from other bulb flowers like crocuses (crocii?) and irises at this early stage, although I vaguely remember tulips growing in this general region of our flower garden last year. So I’m going to go ahead and wager that these are, in fact, tulips.

(Pretty sure irises come up ‘wrapped’ in their outer leaves, and crocii are shorter and come up with thin narrow shoots next to the main plant)
(Update: An anonymous tipster suggests they may be daffodils! Time will tell!)

For breakfast this morning I had a still-warm Maple Bacon Doughnut in the parking lot of Suzi Q’s on Wellington. I’ve been hearing about this place all week from friends who are making doughnut pilgrimages out to the west end to try them, and it was totally worth the trip. They’ve got a bunch of wacky flavours: FrootLoops and Blue Vanilla, Toasted Coconut, Caramelized Potato Chips…

Delicious! And only like ten million calories!

Natasha and I spent the morning attending Seedy Saturday in Britannia Park, a yearly gardening nerd event where people get together to swap seeds and stories in preparation for the upcoming gardening season. (It roughly corresponds to the start of indoor seeding time)

The Seedy Saturday event is much bigger here than in Manitoba! Although we have fewer seed providers in Ottawa, there were a number of well-attended lectures by local growers and a really big market space with lots of interesting wares and info booths.

I was most excited for the course on maximizing your small garden yields presented by Jim Thompson from Our Little Farm (notes online) – he was a really great presenter and I picked up a bunch of clever tips from his experience running a full-sized farm.

Kate Green from USC also delivered an excellent presentation, with practical beginner tips for selecting and collecting seeds at the end of the growing season. There’s a lot of very neat genetic trait selection stuff going on there that she presented in a very layperson-friendly way, I would have loved an opportunity to pick her brain for an extra few hours.

A few really cool organizations got my attention while I was there, among them:

• Hidden Harvest Ottawa, a group with the brilliant idea to put together volunteer teams to harvest the fruit and nuts on local public trees to give to local food banks – super clever! They’re trying to generate enough interest to make this viable. Forward the link to your friends – it’d make an awesome fall activity.
• JustFood which is a conglomeration of a bunch of neat causes, had a large presence showing off their cool programs: A Food Film Festival, the handy Buy Local Food Guide, informative courses provided by the Community Gardening Network (I’d like to take one on canning later in the year if anyone’s interested in joining me) and the super neat Plant a Row program to set aside a bit of your garden space for charitable growing.
• The Ottawa Good Food Box program buys and distributes baskets full of fruit and vegetables wholesale (cheap!) to encourage people to eat healthy – very neat arrangement at the lowest price I’ve seen anywhere. Before I had the program entirely figured out I leaned in and whispered that their prices were kindof too low – to which they knowingly whispered that they’re a non-profit. Interesting!

The only bummer is that now, with an armload of cool heirloom seeds and a brain full of awesome new skills, I get home and my garden is covered in four feet of drifting snow. *sigh*

I had a gang over to watch Rio on my birthday, which takes place in Rio de Janeiero during Carnival – a huge street-parade party that looks like a lot of fun. Here’s another chance to get a sense of that Carnival spirit in a cute film shot through the “tilt-shift” + time-lapse technique to make everything in Rio look miniature. I’ve experimented with this technique on occasion and the results are usually corny looking, but I think the bright colours and sparkly outfits of carnival lend themselves to the saturated miniature look. I found this really captivating and amusing! Watch in particular for the velociraptors, and the shark attack float at 4:30 – amazing.

I think I might have to put Carnival on my bucket list!

The City of Samba from Jarbas Agnelli on Vimeo.

I watched a very interesting documentary online a few weeks ago, and have since been recommending it to people while I digest some of the thoughts the film put forward about art and culture and the internet. This backlash against the internet seems to be a prevailing theme in the content I’m consuming lately, and I think it’s really interesting to take a break from all the hype and really think about whether things are going where we want them to.

Press Pause Play brings together a number of notable speakers who pontificate on the “democratization of culture” that we’re witnessing while all the pillars of traditional media (newspapers, television, radio) come crashing down thanks to Youtube and podcasts and ever-lowering barriers to entry. It’s worth checking out!

The documentary is put together in a slightly uneven way – we take detours from interesting subjects so the editors can interject some pointless slow-mo concert-crowd shots and bits of found-footage experimental nonsense for aesthetics sake. We see planes. We see city skylines. We see flying triangle particles and blob meshes. There should be a drinking game based around every time the camera does a slow push in on the back of some headphone-wearing kid’s head.

Draaaaank!

There are definitely big changes happening – for better and for worse. And I agree that you can’t trust crowdsourcing to choose your culture for you. (Now sitting at 35 million views, Niki Minaj’s youtube record-setting “Stupid Hoe” video is a vapid, seizure-inducing heap of popular dreck.) But I don’t think that tearing down some of the establishment is a bad thing – decades of consolidation in radio by companies like Clear Channel have severely restricted local programming, choking out young fresh artists and local musicians in favour of endless loops of Aerosmith’s greatest hits. Thank goodness the internet came along when it did – probably 90% of the stuff I listen to is from obscure bands I only found thanks to pitchfork, iTunes, hypeMachine and people’s mashup blogs.

A few choice quotes:

“…  it’s a reality that many people don’t like, [...] most people don’t have talent. So for a serious young film-maker, these are very depressing times. When you leave everything to the crowd, when everything becomes democratized, where everything is determined by the number of clicks, you are by definition undermining the seriousness of the artistic endeavor.” – Andrew Keen

“If everyone’s a musician, and everybody is making mediocre music, eventually the world is just covered in mediocrity. And people start to become comfortable with mediocrity. And that to me is the danger.” – Moby

And of course, you can’t film a documentary without a bit of outrageous hyperbole:

“There’s no evidence that we’re on the verge of a great new cultural age, if there’s any evidence, [...] we may be on the verge of a new dark age in cultural terms. A new collapse of Constantinople. Where the creative world is destroyed. And where all we have is cacophany and self-opinion. Where we have a crisis of democratized culture.” – Andrew Keen

A bunch of things we’ve seen lately:

Woman in Black: Creepy! Harry Potter plays a grownup widower lawyer who has to go to a haunted house to sort through an old lady’s papers. The house is magnificently creepy and full of freaky victorian-era ephemera (a museum’s collection worth of wind-up monkeys, clowns and porcelain dolls). At first the director is patient enough to let the house and it’s creepy noises get under our skin, but then he resorts to the jumping-out-at-you-with-loud-noises cheap scares. Overall it was well put together, it’s got plenty of disturbing moments and creepy visuals, but I really felt the BOO! tactics were lazy and the film could have been much more menacing if handled in a subtler way. (I just discovered, incidentally, that this is a remake of a 1989 made-for-tv movie, which in turn was an adaptation of a stage play. Hollywood re-hash! *shakesfist*)

The Invention of Lying: Awful. I think the premise of this movie – that only one person in the world develops the capacity to lie, is super clever and amusing. Kindof the inverse of Liar Liar, where Jim Carrey can only tell the truth. But the execution is just terrible. I think Ricky Gervais (who wrote, directed, and starred) confused the notions of honesty and tact when they were putting this together. The opening act is a humiliating dinner where Jennifer Garner casually heaps insults on Ricky Gervais, followed up by his mother’s death, Jonah Hill’s suicide humor, and then his co-workers humiliate him, and he’s fired. HAHA! As far as comedies go, this one’s a stinker, and I regret not shutting it off halfway through.

Captain America: Fun! I had low expectations for Captain America, but actually really enjoyed the story about scrawny Steve Rogers juicing up on super-serum to fight the Red Skull and his uber-nazis. It takes a while before he comes out swinging, and when he finally gets going they gloss over his heroic exploits in a flashback montage. But when he finally gets to knocking heads onscreen towards the end of the film, the action scenes are pretty entertaining.

Despite some anxiety about running in the winter (I have like zero body fat and prefer winter activities where I can bundle up), I ended up participating with the gang in the Winterman relay marathon, running 2 out of 8 of the 5K legs. The weather ended up better than we could have hoped for, it must have been around -4C and we had bright warm sunshine bearing down on us all afternoon. I feel a bit like we cheated to get our shiny snowflake medals – I had expected a bitter, freezing torture-test.

Kudos to my whole team of runners, the “Unipegataurs”, but especially to Greg who set things in motion by organizing the event and taking the first 7.2km run. Go team!

I wasn’t expecting to feel sore afterwards, since I’ve been training for 10k+ runs, but I think the cold has a big impact on muscle performance. My ankles in particular were pretty tender later that afternoon, it took some effort to get up and down from the basement with our laundry. Time for some new shoes, maybe?

I just finished reading Jaron Lanier’s book “You Are Not A Gadget” which among other things (I’ll review it in a later post) brought up the subject of internet trolls, and the powerful temptation to slag people when you’re hiding, anonymous, behind your computer keyboard.

I’ve never understood the mindset of Youtube commenters. Maybe people are evil as an anonymous collective, or maybe Jaron is right and it’s something about the way the system is set up (why is there a thumbs down button at all?) that encourages the worst kind of unhelpful, baseless criticism of people’s work. Particularly in the case of young, talented performers, this kind of denigration is the kind of thing that destroys confidence and derails artistic achievement. Every comment that wrongly tears down a ten-year-old pianist or that stomps all over a kid pouring her heart out over her guitar is one more reason for them to give up.

So here’s my humble request: It’s time we pay back some time and effort by encouraging the strangers who entertain us. Take a few minutes every day that you normally spend checking out funny cat videos, and instead write up some valid, sincere encouragement on a young person’s youtube account. I’ve already started, and it’s easy once you get going, and makes you feel like a boss. These kinds of comments get noticed and have a hugely positive effect. I don’t know how many people I can recruit onto my bandwagon, but I know I just need to get normal, positive people over the passive habit of watching – we need to start contributing.

This is our future generation of entertainers, artists, poets, writers, thespians – are you going to let an angry mob bully the next Jimi Hendrix into quitting?

Something’s going on in the magazine racks that I haven’t puzzled out yet. It seems like any magazine I like is priced way out of whack from it’s neighbors. At first I thought maybe I like magazines serving a niche market, but I saw a copy of “Urban Farm: Chickens” on the rack for $4.99 and realized some other market force is at play here.

A study in contrasts:

Make Magazine: $22/issue (Inventions)
Edge Magazine: $24/issue (Computer games)
ImagineFX: $32/issue (Illustration)

Urban Farm: Chickens: $4.99 (Seriously?)
Rock and Gemstone Magazine: $2.30
Fine Woodworking: $3
Luxury Yachting: $3.60

What is going on here? Are video gamers and art nerds extra-willing to be fleeced? Moreso than people who own yachts!? Some of the computer magazines come with DVDs, but pressing discs in large quantities is cheap – witness the assortment of  junk game magazines that come with demo discs. And the paper quality isn’t significantly different between Modern Taxidermy and Computer Arts Magazine – so what accounts for the $35 price difference?