and the whatnot of sorts

overview and lesson one

cute animation/story and also winner of the 2007 Oscar for best short subjects animation.  watch it here

just finished reading Burmese Days ( read it online for free here ).  It’s a good book.  Not necessarily a happy book at any point but good nonetheless…

last.fm isn’t picking it up, but I’m listening to a lot of Conor Oberst and Bon Iver.

A few hours ago I took a paragliding tour.  Since none of us tourist types actually knew how to fly, trained experts were attached with, I imagine, velcro and did absolutely everything for us while we dangled like apples from a swaying, flying, parachute-like tree.  This isn’t to say that it wasn’t a lot of fun.  In fact, it was, but all the swaying and especially the spiral landing made me a little disoriented and dizzy.  I’m still a little disoriented and dizzy at this point which gives rise to the feeling that my keyboard is frantically trying to escape my fingers as I type.  Anyways, this comes to mind from Douglas Adams:

“It’s rather unpleasantly like being drunk”

“What’s so unpleasant about being drunk?”

“Try asking a glass of water”

Some photos from my first few days in Vancouver--

Garfield translated to Chinese and back to English

example of two different takes on the same data