I managed to catch up on some podcasts today for the first time since Christmas break, which was nice. I listened to the second episode of the new Serial and was pleasantly surprised to find I have not one but two more episodes ready to go now.

I also listened to an older episode of Wil Wheaton’s Radio Free Burrito (which can be found here) wherein he reads an article about the disappearance of Elisa Lam (the article itself is here).

I hadn’t heard about this before, or, if I had, it was in passing and so long ago I don’t remember it. Hearing Wil read the article today however had me captivated for the entirety of my drive. I admit to looking up the video in question once I got home too and yeah, I can see how the internet got off on all sorts of tangents in this case.

The article nails it though, on how fascinating the case is, the urge to want to find out more, and then the feelings one has near the end of looking into everything. For me it does anyway, as always your mileage may vary, but it was pretty interesting all the same.

And in that light, Sara and I watched a few more episodes of Making a Murderer tonight. We’re on episode 4 next I believe and I think we’ll jump right back into it as soon as we’re both home tomorrow. I’m getting that same feeling watching it, of fascination, followed by deep interest, and I’m wondering if the end of the series will bring the same feeling as the above case.

Time will tell, and no spoilers please for those who’ve seen it all.

 

This will likely be a short post tonight as I’ve just come back from playing ball hockey. I’ll be passing out in short order but I poured myself a nice, tall glass of water so I’m going to write this while I finish it.

Last fall one of the guys I used to play with way back in the day got a bunch of us together to pitch in $5 a head and play at a local high school gym every Sunday. It’s a great idea, and I definitely need the exercise.

I’ve missed the last few weekends due to the flu/cold, and we didn’t play over the Christmas holidays, so the last time I played before tonight was in mid-December some time. It was nice to get back at it tonight, even though I’ll pay for it tomorrow.

The very first night I went up it was astonishing how bad of a shape I was in. Still am in, I suppose, though I’ve gotten a little better. The very first shift I ran up the length of the gym, and as I started to run back I was like “whoa.” I was winded and out of breath, and it didn’t get much better the rest of the night.

Thankfully the second and subsequent times I’ve been better, though after a few shifts I’m pretty much beat. We usually have a lot of people with which to shift, as we play three on three, and tonight my team had six of us besides the goalie which was awesome. Lots of shifts and tons of rest so it went really well. I’m still exhausted but that’s a good thing, as exercise (and fun) is kind of the whole point of the thing.

I’m wondering just how rubbery my legs will be tomorrow; after the first time it was pretty damn bad. Each time after that wasn’t as bad at all but since it’s been about a month since my last trip I’m hoping I haven’t regressed too far. We’ll see in the morning I suppose.

For now I’m off to finish my water and get some rest. Hope everyone else had a nice relaxing weekend and that Monday treats you well.

Today I figured I’d write about how I first got into rap music. The answer to that question is an odd one: it’s all thanks to the TV show Community.

Huh?

Well, first of all, Community is an awesome show that ended too soon and if you haven’t seen it yet I can’t recommend it highly enough. Seriously, why are you still reading this, go check it out right now. I’ll wait.

Its connection to rap may not be too apparent at first glance, but one of its actors, Donald Glover, who also wrote for 30 Rock (another amazing show, see above re: instructions to see watch it asap), is also a musician under the stage name Childish Gambino and performs, you guessed it, rap.

So at my peak of enjoying Community I gave his album named Camp a shot and I liked it. A lot, actually. It was my first foray into the genre, from an unlikely source, but I’m glad I tried it out.

In one of the songs on Camp (Hold You Down for your information) he sings about “aiming for the the throne / Jay and Ye said to watch that,” which I Googled and found out it was a reference to an album named Watch the Throne album by Jay Z and Kanye West. So I went and checked that out.

That, too, was pretty awesome in my humble opinion. It’s more of what you’d call luxury rap, i.e. rapping / bragging about wealth and material things, etc., but I got a kick out of it.

That in turn lead to me checking out individual albums by both Jay Z and Kanye – where there was also overlap as Kanye got his big break ghost producing on Jay Z’s Blueprint album, I discovered – and then things kinda grew from there.

I remember one time when my wife, who listened to hip hop long before I did, was telling me she had some Jay Z on and I was like “he’s awesome!” to which she said “name one song by him” and I couldn’t. Well, not anymore.

I didn’t always keep an open mind when it came to music, which could (and may!) be a longer post for another time, but I do try to do so nowadays and I’m really glad that I did. I know it’s not for everyone, and certainly not all rap is for me even, but I’m happy with the diversity of my musical interests.

I almost missed posting this thanks to getting wrapped up in 90’s at Nine on MuchMusic, whoops. Which lead to digging up things on YouTube and then following other things on YouTube, but thankfully I caught it just in time.

One of the things I looked up on YouTube was clips from The Trip and The Trip To Italy, thanks to the latter movie’s references to Alanis Morrisette and us seeing one of her videos on Much. Those movies are great, though I have to admit to not getting a fair number of the voices / references they make. The big ones, like Michael Caine, Sean Connery, Tom Hardy, sure, but not the more obscure (to me at least) British / European ones.

Still, very awesome movies and now I have a craving to watch one of them again. I think the first one’s on Netflix, not sure if the second one is or not, hmm. I think I’ll have to go check.

Sorry for the filler post yet again but will write something more substantive tomorrow hopefully!

I’m hoping to make an earlier than usual night of it tonight to continue reading The 5th Wave, which I’m about half way through. I received in from a book exchange I was in two years ago and never did read it until recently, when I found out it was being made into a movie.

I wasn’t aware that it was a Young Adult novel either, which I discovered when the protagonist met a similar aged person of the opposite sex and things got awkward. It clicked then, though thankfully that’s been a pretty small part of the book so far.

It’s told from several persons’ points of view which helps as well, and it makes it easier for me to break it up into different sections to read. I stopped last night after one person’s turn at narration, for example.

It’s pretty good, nothing really stands out about it yet unfortunately; it’s your typical post-apocalyptic scenario thus far, though it involves aliens instead of zombies or nuclear war so there’s still some secrets left to reveal and a lot of promise left.

The movie comes out on January 22nd and my cousin Terry and I have made tentative plans to see it. Likely not on opening night or anything, but perhaps that weekend or the one after that, so my goal is to have it all read before then. I should have no problem meeting that, provided I take a few nights to dig into it as well as an afternoon or two over the next few weekends. Yes, I’m a pretty slow reader, sadly.

In keeping with writing here on a daily basis, I’ll be sure to have a review of the movie here once I’ve seen it, and probably one of the book too once I’ve finished that as well.

I figured tonight I’d weigh in on the NHL All Star game “controversy” that’s been making the rounds lately. Namely, the fact that John Scott, known for being a goon and… well, that’s it, actually, has been voted by the fans to captain one of the teams.

Adding more fuel to the fire, today when the rest of the roster was announced it was discovered there’d be no Sidney Crosby in the game. Surprisingly (to me at least) Crosby has only played in one single All Star game during his whole career, owing to injuries and lockouts etc., but still, I wouldn’t have guessed that.

Anyway, the contention is in whether the NHL should ignore the fans voting in Scott or not. He’s certainly not an All Star by any other definition other than the one created by the league in allowing the fans to vote on anyone. Add to the fact Crosby isn’t going and, well, it looks pretty weird.

At the end of the day though, it’s the NHL’s own fault in my opinion. They let the fans have their say and, like it or lump it, they have. Last year they voted in a little known Buffalo Sabres forward, who at least had some skill at the game other than throwing punches. Likewise he wouldn’t have been an All Star either but he got in, and rightfully so, as the fans voted him in.

So as perplexing as it is going to be to see Scott in an All Star game, captaining one no less, if the NHL wants to change this then don’t let the fans vote next year, or limit who they can vote for or something. I may not like it but it’d be even worse if they just ignore their own rules midstream now.

But hey, then again, this is Gary Bettman’s NHL so who knows?

Let’s talk about bravery today.

Or, ok, I’ll write about bravery and if you’re here then you’re reading about what I write. Whatever.

But yes. Bravery. It comes to mind because of recent memes / pictures shared on social media about Caitlyn Jenner. They were pretty prevalent last year but I didn’t comment on them then, but seeing how I’m trying to blog more this year and I don’t want every day to be filler (like most of this has been so far, sorry) I figured why not address it now? Better late than never, I suppose.

If you have a social media account of any type you’ve likely seen some variation of this: usually a picture of an armed forces soldier or veteran with text along the lines of “this is what real bravery looks like.” The most recent version I saw was a picture of Terry Fox stating this is what Canadians call bravery along side a picture of Caitlyn Jenner saying this is what Americans call bravery.

Now, I am far from an expert when it comes to transgender issues, nor will I pretend to be. I have no idea what Caitlyn Jenner or any other trans person is going through. I also am not suggesting that she’s perfect or flawless (terms that make me grind my teeth a little but that’s another topic for another time), and in fact I’ve read about issues the trans community has had with how she’s discussed things as well. I do, however, believe what she did took a tremendous amount of courage.

The problem I have with the memes / pictures is this: when did we ever agree that there is one and only one type of bravery? Why is it not possible for both Caitlyn Jenner to be considered brave and for our soldiers and veterans, for who I am eternally grateful for their sacrifice and service, to be considered brave as well?

I’ve never seen anyone claim Caitlyn Jenner is braver (or just as brave) as them because it isn’t (and shouldn’t be) a competition. Soldiers, veterans, police officers, fire fighters, all of them can still be brave as well. People either don’t get that or, worse, are threatened that a trans person announcing their presence to the world somehow diminishes themselves or other people.

Or, well, there are worse reasons but I don’t want to linger on those.

Further, it’s such a fallacy that you can negate one type of bravery for another. To that end, compare the bravery of soldiers to that of, say, cancer patients fighting for their lives. Does one of those trump the other, erasing the others’ bravery? What about survivors of domestic abuse? Or child abuse? Of course not. It’d be ridiculous to compare those types of bravery to each other, so why would you do when it comes to Caitlyn Jenner?

The answer is simply, really. You don’t.

So tired tonight for some reason. Probably because I let my B12 prescription run out and only got it refilled today, whoops. I also didn’t sleep well last night and went to bed later than usual so hoping to make up for both of those things tonight.

Nothing much else to add tonight. This is one of those filler kind of nights I’m afraid, and I’m off to read myself to sleep. I’ll write more tomorrow, energy willing!

Today was a pretty lazy day, I’m not going to lie. It started off by sleeping in until 10:30am or so, followed by a little light reading – The 5th Wave, want to finish the book before the movie comes out later this month 0- before making a run to pick up groceries and get some lunch.

When I got home I finally decided to check out this anime I’ve heard about but never watched, called RWBY. The first two seasons are on Netflix, where they’re all set up to run together as one long show. I think the first one was about 90 minutes long and the second was over two hours or thereabouts. It was pretty good, actually, different than what I’m used to watching but I liked it.

I watched the last bit of the first season while on the elliptical, for about 20 minutes or so, and I made supper for the wife once she got home, so I guess it was still a decently productive day after all. Now I’m squeezing in a little bit of writing while listening to a few tunes before going to bed.

Not a bad day all in all, I ‘spose.

Currently standing in the concessions line at the movie theatre. My cousin, Terry, asked me to make an impromptu run into the city to see The Hateful Eight, and I might not get back before midnight, so making this post now just in case I don’t. More to follow later!

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Ok, back home not too long before midnight but glad I made the little entry above just in case.

The movie was pretty darn good, and pretty darn Tarantino-esque, both of which I expected. We heard some rumblings from others in the audience at the end that they didn’t like it or it was a waste of money, but my cousin and I enjoyed it. Great acting all around, especially by Jennifer Jason Leigh, I hope she gets some nominations for it.

Overall it was a pleasant surprise to get the call for a spur-of-the-moment trip to town, and I’m so glad I got to go. It’s always fun getting to hang out with my cousin, not only because we see some pretty good movies but just getting a chance to hang out and chat.

I saw an announcement that The 5th Wave comes out later this month, which I received in book form a few years ago and am only about 1/3 of the way though, so now I’m going to focus on finishing the book before the movie arrives. That’s my plan for the rest of the night, I think, it’ll be a nice way to cap off the evening, so that’s what I’m going to do.