The Best and the Worst of 2008

It’s that time!

CDs

5. Sarah McLachlan - Closer: The Best Of … I’ve always loved S.M. I used to joke with Sam that I have a “Sarah Sense” because I’d always seem to find her music on the radio. She has probably been the most consistently admired and loved singers since I was like 10.
4. Josh Martinez - World Famous Sex Buffet …I love a little hiphop
3. Mr. Scruff - Ninja Tuna
2. Bright Eyes - Cassadaga
1. Girl Talk - Feed The Animals …I read an article recently about “girl talk killing music” because he uses clips of essentially illegal bits to make his music…but gets around it because they’re all online samples and stuff. …His mixes are amazing.

That category is always the hardest, other bands who released beauties: Tokyo Police Club, cat power, tv on the radio, the walkmen, mates of state, british sea power, …and others. sigh.

Movies

5. The Dark Knight - I’m still having a hard time deciding if I like this movie because it was so entertaining and so like…comic book looking, or if its because Heath Ledger died so there was a huge hype around his acting. I’ll say this - he did a great job. But some people were saying he should be given an award for it…even though he’s dead. I don’t really think that’s necessary. Anyway, I think the movie was really good. It was dark, but it was also a lot like the Batman with poison Ivy in it - it had that cool comic book feel to it.
4. The Strangers - this movie was weird.  …I love Liv Tyler and it scared me to death.
3. Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian - i think CON are really cute stories. Despite the obvious religious undertones to them, I really really like them.
2. Sex and the City - much anticipated and not disappointed …although I don’t think I’ve ever cried so much in a theater as I did when I saw this movie. It may have been the fact that we were drinking wine in the front row, so we were a little tipsy, or it just could have been that it was so tragic to see the girls is such sad situations. Sigh.
1. Wall-E - not only was it mine and John’s first date movie…it has a great message about the environment and mocks our consumerism. Which I always like It was by far the best movie John and I could have seen on a first date. Robot love? Seriously, it doesn’t get any better.

Books

5. In Search of Time by Dan Falk
4. The Forever War by Dexter Filkins
3. A Madman Dreams Of Turing Machines by Janna Levin
2. Hurry Down Sunshine by Michael Greenberg
1. Factory Girls by Leslie T Chang

Gadgets:

5. Nokia N95 8 gb - My new phone! 8 GB worth of space, Wifi, 5 mp camera with carl zeiss optics, radio, mobile e-mail, vision tv/radio, a gorgeous screen with DVD like video capabilities, 35mm headphone jack, 8 gb internal memory, gps with preloaded maps… and best of all, it doesn’t have a full keyboard. I was so sick of the full keyboard, bulky shape and “smart phone” look of my blackberry. The Nokia looks like a normal phone, but totally does more. Its great.
4. HTC Diamond - my brothers phone… it’s sleeker and more easily customizable thank the iPhone. The only reason I didn’t get this over my phone is that it is a touch screen. They seem to be all the craze right now, but I just don’t like them.
3. Flip MinoHD - a tiny HD camcorder for only like $200… mostly because it only has 4gb worth of space…
2. The nikon D90 - *drools* an HD camera. …
1. Optoma Pico PK-101 - the MP3 player projector… I really need to get me one of these. Its the size of a regular iPod, plugs in and plays your movies on the wall. …awesome.

Games
I dont really do a whole lot of game playing…

5. Wii boxing…i played it once
4. Rock Band …I pretty much rock at everything except the drums. But…i’ll get to those in 2009
3. I started playing WoW a couple days ago, i’ve played twice
2.Sims!…one of the expansion packs came out this year, i dont remember which one. But thanks to john i have ALL the expansion packs and have WAY too many options. Its awesome.
1. Spore…. cooool

Hits of the financial crisis:

5. AIG’s credit fiasco
4. No more Fords and Chevys - the Detroit big three went belly up! the earth is happy, but hummer drivers are not.
3. Citibanks 75 000 job cuts
2. Greenspan - people are living in tents!
1. Iceland …is broke, needing to take billions of dollars from the IMF, Sweden, Germany, Denmark and Finland.

Sciencey Stories:

5. The Invisibility Cloak
4. Bigfoot is a rubber suit with dead animals inside of it
3. a squid with elbows
2. something tugging at the universe
1. The Large Hadron Collider

Absolutely Hilarious

5. The McCain green screen challenge - McCain did an interview in front of a green background, prompting Colbert to challenge his audience to come up with the best scenes to put McCain into
4. Letterman to McCain “You don’t show up for me, America doesn’t show up for you!”…after McCain stood up Letterman, and was shown at another interview instead, it was the core of Lettermans jokes for weeks.
3. The writers strike… so many late night talk show hosts were SO strapped for content. …hahahaha suckers.
2. is america ready for a woman president? - Samantha Bee as Carrie Bradshaw
1. Tina as Palin…and she didn’t change any words.

Personal Worsts:

5. Working in retail - even though I was the boss, i hated it. i hated bending over backwards for jerk ass customers and seeing people spend 800 dollars on clothes. I hated fitting plus women for bras in the summer when they smelled funny and I hated answering to my overly bitchy and micromanaging district manager. She treated me like a moron. I hated that job.
4. I miss a lot of people including Shaneka, Mark, Caitlin, Torrie, Ashley, Dan, Patrick, Karl and family
3. My currently housing situation - my roommates are annoying, they turn the heat up to over 30 (literally!) and leave messes in the kitchen all the time. My door doesn’t really lock and I’m an hour out of the city. I can’t walk around with no pants on and I have to pay to wash my clothes.
2. The York U strike…dont even get me started
1. My grandma died and it was the sadest of all sad.

Personal Bests:

5. Working at acculink where I met Christine and Stacey - two of the best women I’ve ever met in my life. Plus it made me value the 4/10hr shifts a week thing, and loved being on midnights.
4. Moving to Toronto in June. Although I had to shack up with Allen for quite sometime, I love living here and will be sad if I ever have to move out of the city.
3. Getting a job at CFI… my job is to advance science and secularism in society. How cool is that?
2. I’ve lost 20 lbs in the past 2 months! woo!! i love weight watchers…except now the skin on my belly feels really weird, like loose. its kinda gross.
1. June 24th - John and I had our first kiss and were a “couple” by the next day. awe, <3

I’ve been interested in the paranormal for a long time and have seen my fair share of shows where people go to a supposedly haunted locale with their EMF metres, infrared cameras and digital recorders and attempt to collect “evidence” of ghosts. I’m an advocate of investigating alot of weird stuff including phenomena known as ghosts but it’s hard to watch any of the programs without finding problems. Some of you may say “Well, the main problem is that there’s nothing to investigate” which is probably true most of the time. But I don’t think you can dismiss everything and that a well organized investigation could yield some evidence. First we have to eliminate the problems, as I see them.

Bringing ” Psychics” Along

Although I’m also interested in psychic phenomena it isn’t proven yet so bringing along someone who purportedly can sense the ghosts is just silly. It’s a great help in leading the other people involved in the investigation by making them interpret normal sounds as something paranormal because the psychic has told them he or she senses the presence of someone. Once you give people an impetus for thinking something is there it’s not too much of a stretch for them to begin seeing and hearing things and interpreting them as coming from an otherworldy source.

Having A Seance

Once again this suffers from the fact that these things aren’t proven to contact the dead and that there is even something to contact.

Electronic Voice Phenomena

Human brains have evolved to find patterns in nothing, just look at the clouds sometime and figure out what sorts of things you can see. We’re great at picking things out, especially when we expect to hear or see something so for the most part you have to discount all EVP unless you can correlate it with something or if all of a sudden you can make out a crystal clear conversation or something. Or if questions are asked and you receive clearly distinguishable answers, until then don’t bother.

What Should Be Done

Paranormal investigations seriously lack controls, mainly because you’d be hard pressed to find someone who’s had any experience with the scientific method in a team of investigators. I’d like to see someone sent in to the so called haunted locale who has not heard anything about what is supposed to go on there and have them take baseline readings using an EMF metre, copious readings if possible. I’m still not totally convinced that EMF is all that reliable and the fluctuations in the earths EM field are probably causing alot of the incidences where investigators think they are detecting ghosts. I’d also like to see investigations of houses that aren’t supposed to be haunted done with several different treatment groups:1) So called paranormal investigators given a story about the house being haunted and 2) not given a story 3) newbies( people who had enever done an investigation before) given a story about the house being haunted and 4) not given any information at all. I’d be interested to see what results were obtained, what people heard, what they thought they saw.

I’d love to see all this but whether it would actually happen is another story. I think to a certain extent these people are doing this because it seems fun and exciting to them and they think they’re exploring the unknown. Introducing rigourous controls and things like repeated sampling, all that fun scientific stuff, might destroy the buzz these people get. But until then you really can’t trust what these people find.

Let me know what you thought of this. Hopefully my writing style will suck less in future posts. Like it? Hate it? Suggestions for other stuff you’d like to hear about? Let me know.