Well, since there's been so much outrage and hubbub about the lack of recent entries here, I guess I should just come clean with you guys. As you may have gathered from my lack of updates, I have decided to quit my job, move to a new city and finally fulfill my lifelong dream of becoming an Elizabethan doctor.

I've been taking night courses, and I can now recognize at sight nearly all the humourous imbalances: the melancholy, the sanguine, and the choleric. Alas, I have yet to learn the phlegmatic. When I have the certification, I shall don a big poofy wig, pack up my leeches and salves, and make haste to Yorkshire, where I shall call myself Doctor Hartworthy-Swopes, Master of the Physicks, and be known both for my brusque manner and my singleminded pursuit of pickled specimens of arcane insects and birds much prized by scientific men.

Anyway, you probably all saw that one coming. So don't expect any entries for a while.

You know you're employed when you're on your hands and knees in the breakroom trying to mop up the kimchee you spilled, crumpling paper towels in an effort to snatch as many noodles per towel as possible, and then the security guard walks in for his break and cracks wise about it. I had such high hopes for Mr. Noodles, but like most great loves it left my tongue numb and the floor kinda gross.

Also in that same break room, I've been reading a magazine that I own. I haven't been reading the copy I own, but rather another copy of the same issue. It's been really illuminating to discover the insights that could have been mine if I bothered to read the things I buy.

Let it never be said that I let three months go by without a blog!

I had a dream that I was on Mars. Everyone was wearing evening wear because they were so impressed to be on Mars. The only lifeform native to Mars was a red owl that looked as if it had been made of plasticene. We decided that ‘Close to You’ would be the theme song of Mars, so I sang it to one of the owls. The owl was extremely unimpressed. The owl’s look said “What are you talking about?” I sang 'Why do birds suddenly appear...' and I could go no further because the owl was so clearly nonplussed.

Like anyone with too much time and just the right bent of mind I have catalogued the movies I've seen on imdb. Since I'm a mad completionist, I've also catalogued the television series I've seen all of and all the video games I've seen through to completion. It's still a work in progress, not just because I'm still watching movies, but because I'm still remembering ones I saw some time ago. For example, last night I remembered that I've seen 'Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold', and I have a poster for that in my room.

But of course the fun of imdb isn't just listing the movies you've seen for no good reason, oh no. It's ranking those movies on a scale from one to ten. As I've elucidated elsewhere, I wouldn't take back really any movies I've seen, but that doesn't mean that I wouldn't in a heartbeat give a handful of them a rating of '1'. There's a problem with a one to ten scale, though. Not a huge problem, but let's get to that later.

The only real guidelines imdb provides for the rating system is that 1 is awful and 10 is excellent. Presumably, then, the other numbers are the spectrum between awful and excellent, so two is 'less awful' and nine is 'less excellent'. In my mind, three and seven then became 'significantly below average' and 'significantly above average', and four and six became 'below average' and 'above average'. Which of course logically leaves five as 'average', which I applied to movies that I thought were roughly as bad as they were good.

Here's the problem: five isn't at the middle of that scale. There isn't actually an 'average' score, numerically speaking. There's five 'above average' scores, from six to ten, but there's only four 'below average' scores from one to four. Obviously this isn't any kind of a huge problem, but since I assume that everybody thinks like me (are you saying they don't?), the imdb ratings system is slanted towards the good side of the spectrum. The only way to remedy that would be to consider five not as an average rating but as belonging to the lower ranks of the ratings, i.e. as representing a just-below-average movie.

But how could we possibly indicate that a movie was entirely mediocre? For example the 1964 feature 'Hey There, It's Yogi Bear'. Every good point about it was counteracted by a bad point, so I gave it a five. With these new facts in mind, though, I might have to be more careful about how I rate these movies and what those ratings might actually mean. I can just barely- just barely concieve of a future where a robot reads my imdb movies list, reaches a mathematical conclusion, and tries to engage me in talk about 'Mulholland Dr.' and why I thought it was somewhat below average. Since it's only humans so far, though, I think this whole issue is really just a meaningless little quirk.

An odd thing that I did notice, though, is that of the 16 video games I have listed, ten of then recieved a ten. Then I realized that that's because I don't list a game unless I've beaten it, and if you're willing to play these sprawling modern video games through to the conclusion, clearly you like them a lot. A similar thing applies to television series- I would not actually watch every last episode of Futurama unless I had some fondness for the series. And in all honesty, there was no way I couldn't give Kirby Superstar a ten. FLAWLESS. FLAWLESS.

The writer whose name escaped me sometime previous to the last entry was Chuck Klosterman, and he said it in "Killing Yourself to Live: 85% Of A True Story". I haven't read his book, but I read the quote in a review in the Onion AV Club, just so we're clear on how much I'm bluffing. The exact quote, in reference to him saying that the best male voice in rock belonged to Rod Stewart, is "Why would I want people to think that I like someone I do not actually like? What possible purpose would that serve?" In another book I haven't read, Nick Hornby's "Songbook", he makes a great case centered around Nelly Furtado's song "I'm Like A Bird". I read that essay in Book Warehouse.

For the incredibly insanely interested, I also misspelled 'Beotian' in the original version of that entry. There's no such word, it's either 'Boeotian' or 'Boetian'. Strangely, in both situations it's pronounced 'bee-oh-shun'. I corrected it but for reasons I can only describe as 'psychologically troubling', I'm telling you about it anyway.

Sometimes I go to SFU to do some menial labour. As far as menial labour goes, I think that stuffing envelopes, putting labels on them, sealing them, and stamping them is pretty light stuff. Perhaps they do make felons do it, but if they do, well, it's probably not something society should be really worried about, unlike breaking rocks in the hot sun because you fought the law and the law won. I've been feeling a little alienated from my iPod lately, because I just don't seem to have the patience to listen to whole albums anymore, and I don't ride the bus for as lengthy periods as I once did. You might recall my project to measure distances in terms of the songs you could listen to en route. (Distance to high school: 'London Calling' by the Clash. Distance to University: 'Paradise By the Dashboard Light' plus 'Every Breath You Take' and about half of 'To Live and Die in L.A.'.

So I find that I can only listen to full albums when I'm in one place performing one activity for some time: when I wrote my crazy Lord Byron essay a few weeks ago- the one where I cited The Book of Heroic Failures and implied that Byron faked his death and fled to La Paz- I made it through an entire David Bowie boxed set. Many's the troublesome essay that I've coaxed through with the help of, fortunately, Roxy Music's Early Years, and unfortunately, that Gwen Stefani album. Many's the dull paper that I've festooned with macaroni and glitter while in a hallucinatory trance thanks to the Greatest Hits of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. But these periods are good times to listen to new groups, new albums, trying them on for size, figuring out which songs are worth keeping on the old pod and which I don't really need to hear again.

The last time that I was doing the envelope-stuffing boogie it was to the tune of OutKast's Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, which is a pretty good double album. Indeed, I had that song about Valentine's Day- I believe the track is called 'Valentine's Day'- stuck in my head for quite some time afterwards. So this time I thought impulsively, why don't I try out something equally hardcore? And what happens when a geek such as myself tries to get hardcore? Why, they have a wikipedia page for it, my friends, and it's called Nerdcore.

My entry into the world of people rapping about computers and science fiction and throwing together disparate pop songs was pretty much the result of one artist. You could say that MF Doom and/or the Grey Album was my gateway drug, and before long, I was trying to find Doc Octagon vinyl in the garage, wondering vainly if the KLF really did destroy that many copies of that album that only politely be called '1987', and spending some quality time on the websites of mc chris and MC Frontalot. It seems that Nerdcore is a pretty nebulous thing- my mention of the KLF might seem a little odd, but to be honest, it's more that the attitude fits in rather than the stylistics. It's pretty rare to find a whole genre, and I'll probably get tired of it pretty soon, but nevertheless, it's what I was listening to as I was putting things into envelopes and then sealing those envelopes.

- - -

I like to think that's how this entry would have read before I read a certain other blog touching on the Irony Question. I like to call it that, because it seems as vague-and-ridiculously-unsolvable-yet-extremely-important as all those Victorian sitting-room conundrums that men with muttonchops discussed in between pipes whilst the women were off supervising the help. How much irony is too much irony? Looking over my notebook, for example, I see that I've noted that I 'absolutely love' the mash-up of songs that is 'American Edit'. I've noticed in recent years that my sarcasm, which approached Tourette's level at times, has been largely replaced by sarcasm's dark and alluring older sibling, irony. I gush about a lot of things: I've been known to pronounce things 'great', when really, they're not, at least in no objective sense of the word.

It's that objectivity that always trips me up. I know that most people wouldn't buy a comic book just because Richard Nixon is on the cover, and I know that if some ultimate power told me that I could only save a steamer-trunk of things from Earth, it'd be a while before I threw in my signed 'Goosebumps'. My life, though, revolves around culture. You can consider it popular culture, because, for instance, I have no patience for opera, but you can't really equate Virginia Woolf with Bela Lugosi just because I experienced both in the same afternoon. Culture might not be subjective, I don't know-usually the Aztec idea of recreation usually crops up about here in the discussion- but I do know that when it comes to what books you read or what movies you watch, knock yourself out. The perception that some things are worthwhile and others aren't is a universal perception, but the specifics of that are your perception.

I mean, have you read Aristophanes? It's Bugs Bunny meets Jay and Silent Bob for some blasphemy and racism over amphoras of wine and naked Boeotian girls. And Menander- well, let's not even get into Menander.

I guess what I'm saying is that I don't actually do things- read books, watch TV, listen to music, etc.- that I don't really want to. And furthermore, if I could take back any cultural experiences of my life, it'd be a pretty short list. To paraphrase a writer who's name escapes me, what would be the point of making you think I liked something that I secretly didn't? The fact is that things like movies have access to a spectrum of enjoyment; you can't discern the experience of reading one book with the cipher you developed for a different book. To some extent, the only way to do it is to start anew each time you take your seat, open a book or press play, find something to take out of it, and build around that.

As you may be able to tell, I've been thinking about this for quite some time. Apparently it's been percolating in my subconscious for a very long time. I just hope it's come out vaguely coherent, because all I'm really trying to say is that sometimes I get too intellectual about these things and start judging them all on the same level, which means that if I acknowledge 'Mrs. Dalloway' as a masterpiece and then take that over to Felix the Cat cartoons, you better hope I have irony. I've really got to stop doing that, because I sincerely love pretty much everything that's entertaining on any level. In fact, the only 'bad' things I actually can't stand are things that are pointless.

And, um, that's all.