Personal reflections

Baltimora - Tarzan boy

1985

kekallday - Bane Star (He's a Big Guy For You)

2014

Savages - You're my chocolate

2008

Ben Folds Five - Army

1999 Cute fun little song. Lyrics deal with indecision of life after high school and is partly based on Ben Fold's life. I can relate to some of it. The album version's lyrics differ a bit. The original version:

A follow up to my last post on spelling. I'm a big advocate on reforming English spelling and grammar so that it makes more sense and follows pronunciation more. Fewer silly rules and exceptions. More universal rules.

The Letter "C"

Sometimes it makes an "s" sound (circus), other times it makes a "k" sound. Make up your mind! It should be mostly removed from English. The only time it should be used is with a combination of "ch".

Examples:

Old     --------------- My way

Circus.                  Sircus

Chronological       Kronological

Cupcake               Kupcake

Cheddar               Cheddar

Chronological makes even less sense than most words, since it has a "ch" which is pronounced like a "k". Pronounced as it's written it would be Chuh-ron-o-logical.

The Letter "Q"

I love the letter "Q". I really do. It's a really nice looking letter. So I'm more hesitant to replace this letter. However, it really does just make a "Kw" sound.

Quebec

Kwebek

Question

Kwestion

I don't know. I still rather like "Q".

But it looks wrong!"

I love Shep Smith. He's clearly the best thing about Fox News. This an older video, from January of this year. Before the State of the Union, reporters are invited to have an off the record dinner with the President. They are not allowed to discuss what was said. Instead Shep Smith goes into incredible detail over the food served. He's clearly just messing around, but he both confuses and annoys his co-hosts. He goes on about the lunch for over 12 minutes. Really funny.

A little girl poses with Russian soldiers in Crimea. Pretty cute.

I mean this really sums up the stance of the ethnic Russians in Crimea doesn't it? If there is a referendum and Crimea decides to join the Russian Federation then I'm really not sure if there's anything the world community can do about this. Would their referendum be completely "free and fair" while they are under occupation, and would it be seen as legitimate?  That is certainly the criticism the world community is going to raise.

The ethnic Russians certainly would favor joining Russia, and they make up 58%. The real fear is what will happen to the ethnic minorities who do not support joining Russia, such as the Crimean Tartars (12%) and ethnic Ukrainians (24%).

Writing about music is easy. Sometimes I just want to sit and listen to music and share it. Maybe I should create a separate music blog for that?

Berserk is a Japanese medieval dark fantasy comic series. It got an animated tv adaption in 1998. The tv show is okay, but you can kinda skip it. The score however is phenomenal. It's done by Susumu Hirasawa whom I'm a huge fan of. The temptation, given the subject matter of large scale medieval battles and action would be to make  a bombastic Hollywood-style score. Instead Hirasawa puts out something that has tracks that would not feel out of place in a yoga class or new age album. Yet somehow it works. Instead of highlighting the action elements, the score focuses and enhances the emotional and human element of the series.

Album highlights are the character themes. Track 1 "Behelit" serves as Griffith's theme. An optimistic flute piece. Track 3: "Guts" serves as the theme of Guts and Casca. A beautiful piano piece with a male and female voice, representing the two characters. Probably one of the most soothing tracks I've ever heard. Track 8, "Earth" is not a specific character theme, but is a track used for all the optimistic and uplifting moments. It makes heavy use of both synths, bagpipes and male/female voices saying things I can't understand.

While those tracks are uplifting or relaxing music, much of the incidental music is quite dark. "Ghosts", "Fear", "Murder" "Monster" are all gloomy dark tracks.

Last is "Forces", which is clearly Hirasawa's choice for the series' theme music. I've described it in the past as the kind of song you'd listen to while riding into battle on a horse. It's really hard not to want to sing along. This song has become synonymous with the series, despite not being used that much during the actual series. The reason is for some unknown reason, two terrible songs not done by Hirasawa were used for the OP and ED (opening and ending sequences respectively). These songs are pretty bad, and don't really fit the series. Worse, they're filled with cringe inducing Engrish lyrics (the singer actually says "grasses" instead of glasses).

Even if you don't like the series the score is still a must-listen.

1. "BEHELIT"  1:55

2. "Ghosts"   1:41

3. "Ball"  1:08

4. "Gats"    3:35

5. "Murder"    9:29

6. "Fear"    3:26

7. "Monster"    4:03

8. "EARTH"    4:23

9. "BERSERK ~Forces~ (TV Version)"    1:56

10. "TELL ME WHY (TV Version)"   PENPALS 1:15

Barkley Shut Up and Jam Gaiden is a delightfully absurd freeware game done in the style of older 80's and 90's Japanese console RPGs (eg. Final fantasy 6). It's plot concerns a ""post-cyberpocalyptic" future where Charles Barkley has performed a Chaos Dunk which was so powerful it killed everyone in attendance. Basketball players are outlawed and hunted down. Never played it but reading the Wikipedia article made me smile.

So I'm catching up with The Daily Show, since I hadn't watched it much this week. Jason Jones is sitting down with opposition activist Alexei Navalny.

What did I notice on the wall behind Jason?

Is that My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic behind him? Enhance!

Well it gosh darn is. That is strange. And here is the full image:

I have a confession to make: I hate UK and Canadian spelling rules. I much, much prefer Americanized spelling. I guess this makes me a rather unpatriotic Canadian. Here's some examples of what I mean:

-our (UK) vs. -or (USA)

 Example: Color.

-re (UK) vs. -er (USA)

Example: Center

-ise (UK) vs. -ize (USA)

Example: organize

-yse (UK) vs. -yze (USA)

Example: paralyze

In all of these examples I prefer the American spelling since it follows how the word actually sounds. Why should I say "Centre" in English? That pronunciation makes perfect sense in French, but not English. It's clearly "Cen-ter". Same thing with "Color", "organize" and so forth. Spelling should follow pronunciation. 

I'm reading up a bit on spelling reform as well. I would like to go much further. The letter "x" making both a "ck" and a "z" sound bothers me. It should only be a "ck" sound. So "Xylophone" should be spelled "Zylophone". I'm not sure how far I would go though. Since I'm not entirely comfortably with a purely phonetically spelled language. Technically "X" can be removed entirely. Yet I would not be in favor of that. But we should certainly try to reduce the confusing mess that is the English language. And remember, spelling and grammar (should it be spelled "grammer"?) are simply agreed upon conventions. There's no reason we can't propose new ones and have those adopted. There's no "tradition". It's not about "dumbing things down". The English language is a mess, and it should be reformed to be more rational.

I've also wondered if there could be some kind of Wiki-style site devoted to creating spelling and grammar standards. This would be an interesting idea. People from all over the world could discuss and debate how to spell words, and hopefully some kind of a consensus could be reached. Wiki-spelling.org perhaps? Just an idea. I have no idea if such a site would even work of if it would soon turn into a chaotic mess. Would be an interesting experiment. Hopefully a unified spelling, agreed upon by every English speaking country could then be found.

Further reading:

Cracked:  5 Reasons the English Language makes no sense

Wikipedia: American and British English spelling differences

Wikipedia: Canadian English