Articles Tagged with “ruminations”

Well here we are, the end of an era. Battlestar Galactica is over, which has made a lot of people very angry for various reasons.

Spoilers ahead.

I'm too young to have seen the original Battlestar Galactica when it was on television, and I never watched the reruns. I'm not into it. The "reimagined" series ignited my interest, however, and I've watched the show since its miniseries became the backdoor pilot for a new television…

I do not like hard candy. I've been aware of this fact for a long time now, but it's at the forefront of my mind after consuming Ricola cough drops for the past few days to assauge my sore throat.

Hard candy's just not worth the effort. You have to tease the flavour out of it, sucking at it as the surface slowly melts away onto your tongue. And if you suck too vigorously, as…

For the second time this year, anti-gay group Westboro Baptist Church is planning to come to Canada to stage a protest, and people want to put a stop to it.

Every time this sort of controversy comes up in the news, I have to stop and consider it carefully. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (Section 2) guarantees us the following basic rights:

• freedom of conscience and religion;
• freedom of thought, belief, opinion
…

I shouldn't be up this late. I'm going to bed. Really, I am. However, there is one advantage to staying up this late: infomercials.

Think what you like about infomercials. I think they're annoying, sure. But open your mind for a moment and listen to those infomercial hosts--don't listen to what they're saying, but how they're saying it. As I write this, YTV has started to air the Magic Bullet infomercial with "Mick and Mimi."…

Let me begin by saying that I don't support age rating of books (i.e., saying "this is for ages 8-12, this is for young adults, this is for adults..."). However, when you look at how we rate our other content by age, it seems hypocritical, does it not?

Games and movies receive official ratings that state whether or not the content of those products is suitable for a certain audience. Sometimes, the law enforces these…

Every day I find myself becoming more of an autodidact whose primary goal is to propagate knowledge. Seems like a pretty worthy goal for a set of self-replicating DNA, no? After all, that's all we--everything in the universe--are: information, in one form or another.

My thirst for knowledge is perhaps my most consistent trait as far back as I can remember. I loved and continue to love to read. When I first got MSN…

Pretentious title, no? This is actually just something that occurred to me while having a bath (baths are great that way).

I don't know which particular set of neurons collided to produce this aspect of my personality, but I've never been one to concern myself with body image--mine or anyone else's. Physically I'm rather lucky in that I lead a sedentary lifestyle but have a high metabolism and a slim build. So I'm very tall…

If there were one thing I would change about myself, it is the fact that I lack the ability to inhabit the moment. I am constantly and consistently thinking only of the future--not necessarily the distant future, more usually the immediate, next-couple-of-hours-or-days future. And I find that this drains me more than is necessary.

Summer is supposed to be time off from school to relax, but present-day economics throws a wrench in that model. Students…

I woke up today to Lauren knocking on my door, telling me that her mom wanted me to go see a doctor about my eye. -_- So against my will I acquiesced, although I'll admit it's probably for the best anyway. I went to see an optometrist, Dr. Henry, who was very nice. He gave me free samples of eye drops and an ointment and said that if I needed a follow-up visit next week,…

You're scanning a room full of people. Suddenly, there it is. Your eyes have caught those of another person, maybe someone far across the room. For a moment, you stare at each other. You wonder: is he staring at me? Am I staring at her? Which one of us started this? Then, just as quickly, you lose focus. You resume your scanning. The moment you shared collapses in on itself, and the night goes on.

…

Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to

…

We all do it. A celebrity--actor, athlete, whoever--appears on our television screen and tells us to do something, to support some cause, to buy a product. Because, you know, they use the product or support that cause, so we should too.

When that happens, I just like to remind myself that these are the same types of people whom we vilify for leading immoral, hedonistic lifestyles of sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll. We condemn…

For a moment today, I was almost able to forget that it was Halloween. Not that I have anything against Halloween. In its present incarnation it's a charming way for kids to dress up, express their imagination, and of course, collect as much Canada as they can. And really, if you can't count on candy in a democratic society, then what is my government doing with all those tax dollars?

Somewhere between this year and…

Not in the literal sense (yet), but in a metaphysical, vaguely sort of philosophical manner of speaking. So many little things have intruded upon the scope of my life that I find myself adrift without a schedule, without priorities, attending to tasks as they pop up or as they flag me down with little urgent signs that threaten to bludgeon me if I don't take care of them.

We're moving into a new house across…

As I've said previously, I'm tired of the repetitive fearmongering being done in the name of our "global warming" crusade. It's another example of herd mentality exacerbating a crisis that it is supposed to be solving. Last century it was nuclear weapons, this century it's global warming.

Well wake up people, and stop being so selfish! After all, we are not the only planet in this universe. There are many other planets out there that…

School is not over yet; exams have yet to come, but tonight I went through the complicated tribulation of the graduation ceremony and emerged (although somewhat tired) unscathed. The ceremony was long, and at times dull, but it was an interesting experience nonetheless. I cried when our teachers sang, because not only did they sing well, but I thought about all they've done for us during our schooling. It's part of the reason I'm going…

Often you'll read one critic or intellectual or another say something along the lines of how Hollywood is destroying the movie industry, creating cheap flicks at the expense of "art" and "culture". And as much as I am sometimes tempted to agree with this cynical evaluation of our entertainment industry, I can't bring myself to jump on that bandwagon. I just can't.

I have observed that more movies are "packaged" these days. What are "packaged"…

For the past week we've been watching The Patriot in history class. The movie is moving in some parts. There are incredibly tender moments, like when Susan finally speaks to her father and breaks down just as he's leaving again. That part almost made me cry. Unfortunately, the latter part of the movie lacked that same emotional fervour, simply because I was too busy laughing.

And this is through no fault of the director. The…

If I look out my bedroom window, I can see spring arriving in the pond that used to be my backyard. The snow--which is actually now semi-frozen ice--and the ice proper beneath it is melting, flooding entire portions of my backyard. The end of a little ice age.

Bits of autumnal debris slowly raise themselves up from the muck: leaves and branches, planks of wood. Hey, look, a shovel. The meltwater flows around these objects,…

If you haven't seen it already, you need to watch Karl Fisch's Did You Know? presentation. My history teacher showed us the version by Scott McLeod (which removes the school-specific slides).

You can watch it on YouTube, and I encourage you to do so. It's quite impactful. At first glance they might seem just like statistics, but take a moment to just consider the ramifications of the statements. We have moved from a local…