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By Katie Kish, December 23, 2008 4:18 am

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

Comments (1)

By Katie Kish, August 28, 2008 5:29 pm

My dearest Allen is away in California. So this post is mostly for his amusement. … He likes food blogs, so there is a lot about food, and a lot about my life, so that he knows some of the things I’ve been doing. Here goes….

This is my first meal without you, Allen (well..the first one i actually cooked…) I took snow peas, green peppers, zucchini, cauliflower and green peppers and threw them into a pan to steam them. ( I didn’t find the steamer until later) …I also boiled some noodles. (click on all the pictures to see full sizes..)

I was going to put some beans in… but they were a little… expired….

While I was doing this…. Kushi’s water broke (make large and look at her bum!)

Despite a kitten birth catastrophe, my dinner ended up cooked and delicious. I put some italian salad dressing on top to give it a kick! and mmmmm it was goooood.

For dessert Fe Lee Pe had bought 2lbs of blueberries for $$4!!!! Holy moly!!! So me and the german enjoyed.

Also, John and I got into our first real fight so I got flowers. SO PRETTY! <3

That weekend I went home to Guelph. Where I did some productive things like fix my shoes.

One night I was very hungry and took advantage of being at my moms house, so i use all her food. I used pears, blue cheese, walnuts, cucumbers, lettuce and raspberry dressing to make the most delicious salad EVER. Soooo good. I love cheese. We should use it more often…. or just eat it with like a fork.

Then I had a bubble bath because my parents have this amazing bubble tub that makes it look like the movies… so cool

And this is my new work equipment for the radio show!! My desk is a fucking disaster, I know. But I love that stuff. I can’t wait to start recording like everything. So awesome.

SCHOOL STARTS SOOOOON!!! AAAAAAAAAAAH!

ALLEN! COME HOME TO ME!

Comments (1)

By Katie Kish, July 8, 2008 2:34 am

Some things, people just shouldn’t do:

• date their boss, especially if he’s weird… the quarkiness might be adorable at first, but seriously – it will totally become annoying and then you’re left dating… you’re weird boss.
• plan to elope – it totally defeats the purpose
• hang out with work people who like drama: all they do is gossip and hate you for no apparent reason and then spread horrible things about you around the office. i hate women. i could never be a lesbian.
• let the boy you’re seeing meet your extended family in the first month of dating: the more i think about doing this, the worse of an idea it becomes.
• dismiss other people’s pain and belittle it by saying you’ve had a “harder” life. i hate that.
• kill a spider by jabbing a pencil into the middle of it. it seems like a good idea at first, but then you see it twitch, have a mess on your desk and are out a pencil
• live in a basement, and don’t do your laundry -  so many centipedes!
• tell the lesbian in the office that has a crush on you that she looks “really great today” … super duper trooper bad idea
• get a surface piercing right below your eye. …it hurts, it bleeds, it makes it hard to smile and you can always see it out of the corner of your eye. no matter how awesome it looks, it’s almost not worth the pain and annoyance.

i need something real to write about. my brain is going to sleep.

Comments (1)

By Tyler E, June 17, 2008 6:34 pm

If you hadn’t heard recently a story broke on numerous websites that some researchers had found ” building blocks of life” in a meteorite. Numerous headlines stated that we were aliens and other such things to grab the attention of readers. I’ve never found science journalism to be particularly great at explaining things so I thought I might clarify things a little. Several researchers from around the world ( Imperial College London, Nasa Goddard Space Flight Centre, Radboud University Nijmegen etc.) extracted and analyzed a 15 g sample from the interior of the Murchison meteorite.

They crushed it and going through an extensive purification process eluted out any organic compounds they could find. Then using mass spectroscopy ( a way of determining what a compound is by ionizing it and firing it against a detector and determining it’s time of flight) they determined samples of both uracil and xanthine were present in the meteorite. This actually fairly cool since uracil is a component of RNA and xanthine is an intermediate in the biosynthetic pathway to guanine, another nucleobase found in both DNA and RNA.

It was determined through isotope analysis of these samples that significant proportions of the carbon atoms found in them were of carbon 13 indicating that the molecules likely formed extraterrestrially since carbon 13 is rarely found on earth.

A damn cool story but it’s not like they’ve found incontrovertible evidence that earth was seeded from the heavens by aliens. It just means that life on this planet may have been partially jump started by these biological precursors from the stars, which is still fairly cool I think.

Incidentally, xanthine is one of the intermediates in the pathway that leads to caffeine. Looks like it’s always had a role in getting things going

Reference:

Martins, Z. et al. 2008. Extraterrestrial nucleobases in the Murchison meteorite. Earth and Planetary Science Letters 270: 130-136

Comments (4)

By Tyler E, June 3, 2008 7:36 pm

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.