johnrobe

When I was in university, it seemed like every woman had this poster of a hunky shirtless guy holding a baby on her wall.

The budding psychologist in me reasoned that it was popular because it combined two things that women loved…. hunky shirtless guys and babies.

(Oh yes, I am practically the reincarnation of Sigmund Freud).

So today when I was out for a walk at lunch, taking pictures of shaolin seafood, I walked past a dollar store selling t-shirts, and saw this thing hanging in the front window. It’s the same idea basically, except the type of guy sure has changed. I took a picture, pondering writing a blog entry sometime about whether hunky shirtless gangsta was more appealling than just hunky shirtless guy when it came to holding a baby. (Or maybe a post about the shoes the kid is wearing).

But then on the way home, I am standing there in the train, reading, and look up and see this, the poster for 50 Cent’s Get Rich or Die Tryin’. What the hell? Why am I suddenly surrounded by gangstas and babies?

Is this a resurgence of the shirtless guy holding a baby motif, or an evolution? Instead of combining “hunky guy” and “baby”, is the idea now to combine “dangerous guy” (another favourite of many women) and “baby”? Is this just something slightly different, or is it a step further along a spectrum? Or is it just a movie tie in and a spin off? Hmmmm.

John Photo Snarkiness

Because when you think of “fine of chinese seafood cuisine” you think of Kung Fu. And vice versa.

“Give up young one, your Crane Style is no match for my Lobster in Black Bean Sauce Style!”

What I want to know is, who would win in a fight between these guys, and the Canadian Samurai Ninja Dragon Academy?

John Photo Snarkiness

Some stories cannot be made up.

Like this one about the Toughest Gun video game battle that is coming soon to Pampano Beach. It features defending Q-Bert champ Doris Self, who is 80 years old (!) defending her title against upstart newcomer Kelly Tharp who hopes to unseat the champ and get his name in the Guinness Book of Records as the World Q-Bert champion.

All I can say is, I am REALLY mad I didn’t know this thing existed, or I would have been training! I love Q-Bert, but I wouldn’t have entered in the Q-Bert event because I wasn’t that good at it. But if they have Mr. Do! I totally would have been there, and history would have forever held a place for my name.

John The Weeb

It's been too long since I posted… so I thought I'd post something useful. And random.

(To be honest, I just love the picture).

For those of you who still buy your ketchup in bottles, here’s an article on how to pour it.

The interesting thing is, this isn’t the first time that someone has told me the “right” way to pour the stuff, and yet I still think I’m going to slap the bottom of the bottle. Why? Because even though the I believed my uncle Warren when he told me this was how to pour ketchup, and even though I believe this article, I still think that it’s impossible to pour ketchup this way without coming across as a nerdy know-it-all, and I walk a little too close to that line already.

Thank god someone invented the inverted squeeze bottle.

John General, Shameless Consumerism

Google - representative amalgam of the web, or mindless ad spitter-outter? Let’s find out!

Take for example, this bunch of Google ads found in an article about US attitudes toward atheism. The article basically says that in the study, which was a phone survey, atheists ranked below pretty much every other social group in terms of trust. People would rather have their kids marry anyone besides an atheist.

It was interesting, and as a social scientist type guy, I was wondering about the methodology, because the results were a little surprising to me.

And then I saw the Google ads.

The ads in this sober article about how America hates atheism?

Searching For Jesus?
We’ll Pay You $300 Right Now For A Quick Jesus Survey!

Meet Atheist Women & Men
A site devoted exclusively to Atheist/Agnostic Singles

Believe in Jesus?
We’ll pay you $75 right now to complete a simple survey!

Wear the Joy of Jesus
Finally, Jesus confirmed as joy. Pictures of Jesus on Christian gift

So what are we to learn from all this? If I were to extrapolate:

One quarter of the people out there are atheists, but just like the article says, they’re having trouble finding dates because all the non-atheist parents disapprove

One quarter love Jesus so much that they want this picture on their stuff.

The other half? They’re just not sure.

John Irony, The Weeb

One of the greatest science fiction writers of all time has died.

I don’t say that lightly, at all. I love science fiction, all kinds of it, and I have read enough to know that there is bad sci-fi, there is good sci-fi and there is great sci-fi that surpasses the genre and writes about things that change the way people think, like great philosophy. Stanislaw Lem was one of those great authors.

When you get right down to it, most science fiction is adventure writing in spaceships. Westerns set in the stars. Don’t take that in a bad way, adventurism and escapism are wonderful things. There are some people who can read nothing but super highbrow literature and philosophy all the time, but I am not one of those people. For every super complicated piece of literature I read, I need to read something fun and trashy to lighten up my brain. Lem was not one of those trashy novelists.

Even when Lem was being funny in what he wrote about, he was writing about things from a perspective that turned your head upside down, and the way that he did it, the things that he wrote about, made you realize how rare it was that science fiction really wrote about things that were truly strange and different.

Think about Star Wars and Star Trek, and think about the aliens. For every Jabba the Hutt, there’s 200 aliens that are essentially humans with bad makeup, and even Jabba had a lot in common with me … he had 2 eyes, 2 hands, a mouth and a crazy attraction to Princess Leia in a gold bikini (breow).

In Lem’s most famous novel, Solaris, there is only one alien, and it is a single organism covering an entire planet, like an ocean. The book is about how futile it is for humans to try and communicate with an alien so fundamentally different, and about what happens when the alien decides to communicate with them. I think the reality of space travel will be that whatever we find out there will be so different from us that communicating will be much more like the attempts in Solaristhan it will be like opening all hailing frequencies with a universal translator.

Solaris was made into a movie, twice. Once by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky and once by Stephen Soderbergh. The Russian film is truer to Lem’s book, by most accounts (I haven’t seen the American version), but I mention the movies because they are a good way for someone to experience the type of themes that Lem wrote about without having to wrestle with the text. The Russian movie is one of the coldest, slowest-paced movies I have ever seen. There is a scene with a car driving down a highway in Japan that goes on so long that many people stop watching the film. When asked about it the director said he made this sequence boring “so that the idiots leave before the actual movie starts”. Reading the novel is sort of like that. You need to invest in the book before it starts paying back, but once it does, it’s jaw-dropping.

One of the reasons that few people, even science fiction fans, know much about the works of Lem is that he did not write in English. Lem was Polish/Ukrainian (depending on what year you were drawing the borders — most people refer to him as Polish) and many of his books were not translated into English, and even those that were did not always have the easiest-to-read translations ever. With Solaris, the rights to translate from Polish to English were never negotiated, so the version that anyone has read in English is actually the English translation of the French translation of the Polish. And you thought the telephone game was bad when you were just passing on “I think Alice has a crush on Alex”! No wonder it made your head ache when you read it.

And so passes a legend in science fiction. For anyone out there who has never read any books by Stanislaw Lem, try and pick one up, he hasn’t written many bad ones, and be prepared for an experience unlike almost all science fiction you’ve ever read.

John Books

For the last couple of weeks, no lie, I have been meaning to blog about the birdhouse my brother gave me for Christmas.

I love birds, and the birdhouse at my parents’ house was always a joy to look at from the kitchen. When Graham gave me this birdhouse, I was quick to hang it by our backdoor, near the kitchen, and wait for the birds.

The problem was, no birds came.

The weird part was, there were LOTS of birds around our house. At any given moment, you can hear dozens of them. There are birdhouses on both sides of the house with happy sparrow families in them. There’s a lady cardinal and her beau who hang out by the back window, less than 10 feet from the bird feeder — yet there was never a bird to be found near the birdfeeder!

At first, I meant to take a picture of the birdhouse and ask people for advice, but for weeks I never quite got around to it. One day the camera would need a recharge, the next day it would be too cloudy, etc., etc.

Eventually, the frustration of it all got to the point that I actually started getting really kind of upset about it. What was wrong with my bird feeder? Was it because I bought the bird seed that was on sale? Is my house stinky?

Usually, I do my blogging at night… and any night that I had an urge to write something but had no good topic, I would think of the birdhouse. Then I would remember I had no photo. Then I would go upstairs. Then I would remember that cameras don’t take good photos in the dark. And then I would blog about Britney Spears statues giving birth, or something similarly weird and weak.

So today, Saturday, I was downstairs in the hermit hole, and remembered that on Saturdays, I am at home when the sun is shining, so I got up out of the couch groove, and started walking upstairs to take a picture of the lonely bird feeder. The camera was charged, and I was finally ready.

As I got halfway to the stairs, Timmi yells down from the kitchen, “Come to the kitchen! Hurry!” Believe it or not, I knew EXACTLY what she wanted me to see.

Yes, it was a bird at the bird feeder. The little bugger. Couldn’t she have waited like …. 10 minutes so I could have a decent story to blog about? Noooo…. what could have been a nice “Hey, feel sorry for me, I don’t have birds at my bird feeder” with great dramatic potential for a heartwarming “Look! I had a bird at my bird feeder!” update was wrecked.

So I took a picture of the bird (through the kitchen screen and window, which is why it’s so grainy) and after she flew away, I took a picture of the empty bird feeder for comparison, and then I stewed. Bitter. While I stewed, I couldn’t think with the sound of all the birds chirping as they ate at my bird feeder. Seriously. I had to refill the damn thing there was suddenly so much bird traffic.

But then I got to thinking. What if my conviction to finally blog about this rather trivial thing in my life was what actually made the birds finally come to my feeder? Was it the power of my mind, expressed through my blog, that made birds finally notice the birdseed?

www.johnrobe.com — feeding birds since 2006.

John The Weeb

Once again, I am violating my "don't just link to something unless you are adding value" rule … but Chelsea sent me this … and I have to share it so the world can see.

This is the first time I've ever actually felt sorry for Britney Spears.

Seriously… is this a joke??

Lactiferous?

John Irony, Rants

Here's what I want to know … when you read the title and saw the picture, did you think the title was referring to people getting busted, or the “big bust” on the woman in the photo?

Personally, I was so sure it was talking about the boobs, that I had to read the original article on Defamer about 3 times before it made any sense.

“But… but… there’s no mention of breasts in here at all!”

John Irony

I think I’ve had it with these shoes.

They’re nice enough looking, and pretty comfortable, but the shoelaces have finally driven me around the bend.

I’m a grown man. I’ve tied my shoes about 20,000 times in my life, conservatively speaking, (that was a fun little calculation). It’s not like it’s new to me. I know how to do it. Yet these shoes that I’m wearing today just won’t stay tied up!

I’m not a “double tie” man. I prefer to be able to take my shoes off in a hurry, in case I need to, you know, dive into a lake and save someone who is drowning. It’s a safety issue really.

Yet because of these shoes, I’m forced to either double tie, or tie my shoes every 100 feet that I walk. Coming back from lunch with Matej today I had to tie the same shoe 4 times. This has to stop, or someone is gonna die.

Okay, now I feel better. A little.

John Rants