anybody seen this???

i was reading up on some construction going on in kingston and found this link to the new building out at the airport that will be the home to millenium biologix (they spell it that way...).

isn't that thing like a sylized boomerang - a metallic croissant??? or the head of a decepticon complete with visor? wild.

here's another angle...

it's weird that they would put something like this in kingston of all places. i'm very interested in seeing what they end up with. i could spend an hour checking out the designs this team has come up with... they're friggin amazing!

check out the franfurt skyscraper, or the senscity paradise thing... wild.

fewer uses of less

as anyone who knows me will attest, i am finicky with grammar. not that i'm perfect in that regard, far from it. but building on the experience of teaching english as a second language will make one's ears ache whenever they see something that flies in the face of what they have just taught.

it's like how i pronouce the word 'been'... i say it with a short i so that it comes out like a hurried 'bin'. however, when i was teaching students the correct way of saying the word i totally separated my interpretation from the lesson plan. i am | i was | i have BEEN - this is what i was instructing, not 'i have bin'... that's all fine and good but once i begin to navigate the teaching waters outside the boundaries of the instructional material i revert back to my clipped i and the synonym for garbage receptible.

of course i had no idea that i was doing this but my students sure picked up on the distinction. to top it off one of the other teachers, a woman from virginia, favoured another sound altogether so that her 'been' came out a relaxed 'ben'. one of my students soaked up these regional dialects like wine, swishing them around in his mouth and spitting them out to his liking. after a while (a very short while) i began to dread his raised hand and pointed questions about how i pronouced a particular word, or why i emphasized a word in exactly the way that i did. but it made me more carefully consider my own choice of words the distinct way that i would say them.

another lesson from my english teaching days involved the distinction between mass and count nouns. mass nouns are those nouns that cannot be separated into constituent parts. for example - flour (or water, or beer - count nouns for these would be bodies of water or bottles of beer). count nouns are easily numbered - 8 radios / cars / timepieces.

in doing comparisons involving mass nouns one can say that we have more or less of the noun, ie more wine today and less time to drink it.

count nouns can still use more, but substitute the word fewer for less - i have more bottles of wine in my store yet fewer customers making purchases.

finding a fewer in use today is seriously hard work. less has risen to prominence in popular and journalistic writing in the same way that gender has morphed to mean sex. both substitutions irk me, but i find the misplaced use of less when fewer is called for to be more awkward to read.

i'll see what kind of examples i can find in the next few days and list them for your perusal.

Alberta begone!

a link on fark got my attention today. apparently there are a number of canadians who make up the fark community and like to generously sprinkle canadian-themed stories amongst the links to boobies and stories about florida. take the story today, a misplaced bbc news story (actually a canoe.ca piece - the first time those two news orgs have been confused) from rambling sycophant 'link byfield' (i know, i thought his name was fake too!) about how it's about time alberta asserted it's god-given right to independence and jumped ship as the flood waters overtake canada's stern.

well the article is pretty tame and full of inane reasoning, but oddly attractive in its argumentation. heck, i could even see where he's going with this and might just be the first to wish him a fine farewell, don't let the door hit you on the ass when you leave. if this sophomorish windbag is representative of the typical albertan then more power to them.

with comments like these, who needs that stretch of treeless tar between the rockies and saskatchewan?

"We must now face the fact that the old Canada is gone forever and the new Canada is disgusting."

i happen to share the view of SDKaneda, a fark regular who comments, tongue-in-cheek of course,

"Welcome to Canada baby, where conservative fruit bats are an impotent minority!"

already the jesusland maps are being edited to reflect the sentiment, a blocky appendage, much like the takes-up-space appendix, plugged onto the fly-over states. Like an appendix as well, removing alberta would hurt, but generally we'd be better off without it and the constant irritation would finally be gone and we would be able to safely digest other problems.

not that i really want alberta to go, but i do think it's about time for an intervention. they seem smugly immune to issues like compassion, human rights and good music (save jann arden). apart from oil money they are a pit stop province, a fill-up point before hitting the mountains. apparently they are also a breeding ground for shrill, bug-eyed politicians who think they are the saviours of all that lands east of calgary. they wear funny hats and watch rodeos (and not from a kitsch standpoint).

i was only in alberta for a weekend - a little jaunt to calgary to use the airport and a stop to visit a transplanted friend. the lack of trees was shocking and the scattering of suburbs like seeds was somewhat disorienting. the city looks small from a plane, it's so spread out and underwhelming. downtown the city is nice, clean and lively albeit with enough covered crosswalks to spark images of that old mousetrap game.

i guess when it comes down to it mr. byfield's opinions are merely a nagging column or two in the sun media empire - a tabloid 'news'paper that has made a habit out of yelling at letters to the editor submissions with bold ink and a liberal use of exclamation points. the east needs, however, to witness some kind of moderate voice emerge from alberta. right now we're ingrained with the images of stockwell day, preston manning (who is now the most respected of the lot - wow!) and ralph klein, none of whom we would think of inviting to dinner let alone let on our property.

probing the depths of my knowledge

so i was sorting through a webpage today - not quite sure how i got there but i stumbled across this guy's results from a certain test he had taken (not sure if it was a guy really, but that's beside the point). so, being the intensely competitive person that i am i had to try the test out as well and luckily i wasn't at 'work' so i was able to maneuver around the pictures of rear ends with ease (a qualification - these are simply rear ends, no other appendages are shown, and neither are there glimpses of anything else that might tickle the fancy. given that you're not one hundred percent sure if these are men's or women's rear ends the opportunity to get excited is limited. that said it's most likely a nsfw site and you're thereby warned in advance).

ok... so basically the test involves looking at a bunch of butts and determining if they are male or female. any physical features (ahem) that might make the classification easier have been covered so the whole thing is pretty pg but that didn't stop me from checking over my shoulder from time to time to see if anyone was watching.

it is, quite simply, the ass identification quiz and let's just say that i am quite adept in that nether region as my score of 17 out of 19 would attest (the other guy/girl could only claim 14 right). this translates to a score that is 93% better that other people my sex and age range. pretty nifty i must say.

hey - did anyone notice the notice posted on the onion's website? apparently they are experiencing a writer's strike and therefore haven't posted anything new in a while. here is the notice at the top of the onion's front page...

"Due to the unprecedented, unwarranted, and ultimately unwise reporter strike, The Onion will be featuring highlights from past news coverage this week. Luckily for A.V. Club readers, entertainment journalists are not unionized."

i guess the thing that impresses me most is that the onion is actually making money. i also thought that the stories were cobbled together by a few college frat boys in a drunken spree of scrabble the night before the posts go live. there are, at best, 5 full stories each week with a smattering of headlines and vignettes consisting of a sentence or two. while they are undoubtedly funny - bush regales dinner guests with impromptu oratory on virgil's minor works (classic) is just one fine example - there is little substance and i'm assuming the biggest efforts come in prepping the articles for the web. anyway, we'll see how long this lasts - i will be preparing a portfolio however, just in case.