For reasons I don’t remember, the other day I was looking up the song “Book of Love” by The Magnetic Fields. While poking around YouTube, I found this delightful cover by one Nataly Dawn:
She’s got a whole fagile-voiced Regina Spektor-Feist thing going on that, given my taste for female singer-songwriters, appeals. She has an album out, and I gather she’s a bit of a YouTube star. You can learn more about her on her MySpace page.
I’m kind of fascinated by the split-screen, deconstructed style of the video. It’s a classic example of turning a constraint–no band or recording studio–into a virtue.
Heading down the Internet rabbit hole, I also discovered that Ms. Dawn is one half of Pomplamoose. They’ve got a bunch of tunes on YouTube, and they’re mostly videos shot and edited in this same style. It must be pretty time-consuming to cut together, say, this version of Beyonce’s “Single Ladies”:
Though I’m interested in the results, I usually don’t watch awards shows. I noticed, via Twitter’s trending topics, that the Golden Globes were on TV last night. I vaguely knew that the Globes were operated by a group called the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA). Who are these people, I wondered? Here’s what the Inteweb taught me:
THE HFPA only has 95 members. Compare that to the ‘Academy’ of the Academy Awards, which currently clocks in at about 6000 voting members.
The membership mostly comes from the West. There are, oddly, three members from Egypt and five from Japan.
Canada is represented by Noemia Young, Ray Arco and Dagmar Dunlevy. I’ll admit to never having heard of any of these people. They’re certainly not household names of Canadian entertainment journalism.
I gather the Globes are quite influential in the run-up to the Academy Awards, which in turn can have a huge impact on the long term prospects of a movie’s revenues. It’s striking that less than 100 people have that much economic power. They must get simply inundated by PR people for the months before the event. The whole thing feels vaguely like a racket.
Current HFPA members include real-estate agents, car salesmen, showbiz publicists, hairdressers and even a few journalists. All that is required to maintain membership is permanent residence in Southern California (so much for “foreign”) and a mere four published articles per year, often in obscure publications that aren’t freely disclosed.
The good (if a little opportunistic) folks at GeoEye sent me a really big satellite photo taken yesterday of Port-au-Prince, shot after the tragic earthquake there. At full size, it’s 11, 445 pixels by 15,403 pixels and 47 MB–surely the largest photo I’ve ever uploaded to this site. You can view or download the full-size photo here (or here–this one might load faster).
Otherwise, click the image below and it will pop in a light-box. If you’re on a slowish connection, it’ll take a while, so click at your own risk:
The photo was apparently taken by a satellite from 423 miles in space at 10:27 am EST on January 13 as it moved from north to south over the Caribbean at a speed of four miles per second. The ground resolution is a half-meter.
This is a little gross. If you don’t want to read about my sweat, you might want to skip this entry.
As I’ve mentioned previously, I’ve reluctantly taken up running. I run 5 km three or four times a week. When I get home from my run, I often have the oddest ammonia smell in my nose. It’s not like you can smell me across the room or anything, but I’m definitely aware of it.
After noticing this two or three times, I was all ‘what gives, body? Why do you smell like Windex?” So, I asked the Internet. This seemed to be the most cogent explanation:
The smell of ammonia in sweat is common among runners. Ammonia comes from the breakdown of amino acids (the building blocks of proteins) within the body. It is made up of nitrogen and hydrogen. The hydrogen atoms are converted to glucose and used as fuel. The nitrogen is a waste product that needs to be excreted by the body, and is processed in the kidneys to form urea that is excreted in urine. If there is too much nitrogen for your kidneys to deal with, it will be excreted as ammonia in your sweat.
The key to avoiding that ammonia smell is to ingest sufficient carbohydrates. If you eat an ample amount of carbohydrate with every meal, then you should have plenty to fuel your exercise activity. Even people who work out on an empty stomach should have some glucose in their bloodstream upon rising – unless they subscribe to the myth that cutting out carbohydrates before bed helps you lose fat. If you find that the ammonia smell persists (even when you consume carbohydrate with every meal), try having a low glycemic carbohydrate before you workout.
A little oatmeal, a small apple, or even a piece of sprouted grain bread can provide the fuel that your body needs. Remember, your body requires fuel to burn fat! So don’t think that providing some carbs before cardio is going to eliminate the fat burning process.
And here I thought the only side effects from exercise would be looser-fitting clothes and smugness.
The 2010 International Consumer Electronics show ended a couple of days ago. I didn’t pay much attention to all the coverage that CES received, but I did see one technology demo that was pretty cool.
Samsung has developed a 40% transparent OLED screen, not dissimilar to those touch screens Tom Cruise fondled in Minority Report:
Not a game-changer, but that’s still some pretty cool tech. I liked the suggestion that office cubicle walls could be made of these screens. They could permit more light into the cubicle, but you could simultaneously display data or documents on them.
This past Satuday I went to the Canucks game–my first game in a couple of years. North American sports arenas are, of course, obsessed with distracting you at every stoppage in play. One common tactic is to show people in the crowd on the Jumbotron (or whatever it’s called–the giant cube of screens in the middle of the arena).
Most people, when they recognize themselves on the Jumbotron, seem utterly delighted to be shown to 20,000 other people. I’d say that the ratio of delight to embarrassment was 90% to 10%.
I started wondering about why this was. Surely if you asked those delighted people to give, say, a three-minute speech in front of 50 people many of them would be terrified. And yet they’re pleased to dance, flash the devil horns or otherwise act zaney for 20,000. Why is this?
One side note on this: I’ve got a friend who fears that she won’t recognize herself should she be shown on the Jumbotron. She routinely makes a subtle, peculiar hand gesture as the camera pans the crowd in order to spot herself.
I’ve got a friend who works in the administrative department of a local arts organization. She took a call from a parent:
PARENT: Hi. My son’s class recently watched a performance at your theatre for a school project. However, my son was sick so he couldn’t attend. Would it be possible to organize a ticket for him for another performance instead?
FRIEND: Absolutely–let me just check our records. What school does he go to?
PARENT: Simon Fraser University.
I wish I’d made this up. What can I tell you? Every generation is more coddled than the last.
