Arm Wrestle

Over the weekend I went to my good friend Duane’s stag in Banff. We were lounging around in a bar sometime after midnight. My friend Niall was sitting beside me in a little love seat, in front of us sat a coffee table and on the other side two ladies were chatting with us. Out of the blue, one of them challenged Niall.

She declared, “I’ll betcha $20 that my friend here can beat you at an arm wrestle.”

I looked at Niall and then back at the girl—she was very tiny. I thought wow, this girl must be tremendously strong or have some kind of trick, because there’s no way she’s going to beat Niall, she’s just too small. He’s not a particularly big guy, but big enough. He’s about my height and weight, which lead me to ponder what this girl was thinking.

We moved some empties out of the way, they set up, a small crowd had gathered. It was over almost as quickly as it started.

Niall kind of shrugged and picked up his cash. I suggested to him that maybe they figured he would buy them some drinks and therefore they wouldn’t really be out any cash. Niall’s response was priceless.

“Fuck that. They can buy their own drinks.”

Pearl Jam

I’m off to see Pearl Jam and others at the 2008 Virginfest in Calgary. I’m having the busiest summer in memory so posting will continue to be light for the next while.

Update: Here’s a photo of the crowd at the Pearl Jam concert. I’m right up there, second from the front.

Watching Pearl Jam at COP

Cocksure

Malcolm Gladwell’s new article, Cocksure, is about the psychology of overconfidence. In it he postulates that the brashness of experts caused the current financial crisis.

Since the beginning of the financial crisis, there have been two principal explanations for why so many banks made such disastrous decisions. The first is structural. Regulators did not regulate. Institutions failed to function as they should. Rules and guidelines were either inadequate or ignored. The second explanation is that Wall Street was incompetent, that the traders and investors didn’t know enough, that they made extravagant bets without understanding the consequences. But the first wave of postmortems on the crash suggests a third possibility: that the roots of Wall Street’s crisis were not structural or cognitive so much as they were psychological.

The Bad Review Revue

I Love You, Beth Cooper: “Wants to emulate a John Hughes film, in much the same way that a crack whore wearing a dime-store tiara wants to emulate Queen Elizabeth.” — Eric D. Snider, film.com

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen: “If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination.” — Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs: “if you want some jokes that aren’t prehistoric, you’re better off letting this Ice Age defrost.” — Jeffrey Lyles, Gazette (MD)

Bruno: “The new Sacha Baron Cohen movie, ‘Bruno,’ really isn’t a movie at all. Calling it one is sort of like calling mutton the new white meat.” —Christopher Smith, Bangor Daily News (Maine)

The Proposal: “It sounds like a faint recommendation, but trust me when I say that calling it ‘not terrible’ is high praise indeed.” — Marshall Fine, Hollywood & Fine

First Moon Landing 1969

Neil Armstrong was the first man to walk on the moon and he did it forty-years ago today. He spoke the now legenday words “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.”

Played backwards, “small step for man”, sounds like wait, I won’t ruin it for you, give it a try below:

Play forwards

Forward:’a small step for a man’

Play in Reverse

Reverse: ‘Man will spacewalk.’

Not that it means anything, I just thought someone might find that an interesting coincidence.

Nephews

My younger sister, Jackie, recently attended her 10 year high school reunion. I decided to take some time and visit with her and her kids in Medicine Hat and put together a few family clips of her boys putting in some serious effort at having a good time.

Continue reading “Nephews”