What's Wang This Week: 300th post/Two down edition

300th post! w00t

As of today I am all done with classes for this year. Two down! As of now, I'm a 3rd year PhD student -- and that makes me one of the senior students. This is cool, but it would be cooler if I actually felt like I know more stuff than the first-year students.

The last couple of weeks have been spent mainly finishing up work/reading for my classes. To celebrate, I plan to do nothing for the next few days. Mind you, I haven't exactly been doing all that much work for the last week either since I finished the one final report I had to do. I've been watching Eva, reading Eva, and re-watching and re-reading Eva. I've also been needing a haircut.

I've noticed that depending on how busy I am and how stressed I am, I do or do not want to listen to new, challenging music. When things are busy and I need to get stuff done and am grappling with my feelings of inadequacy, that's when I pull out the old Wilco albums and the Ron Sexsmith. As of last week, since things have lightened considerably, I've decided to inject more insanity into my playlists, so I've been listening to the Pixies. I bought Come On Pilgrim and Surfer Rosa, and I find them highly entertaining. I'm not sure if I will ever fully get my head around their music, nor is it exactly the kind of music I sing in the shower, but there's something infinitely entertaining about Black Francis singing in Spanish and howling "I got a broken faaaaAAAACE!"

After my revelations of two days ago, I've now also decided that I want to try Zima. How bad can it really be, right? Right?

Right?

Now that I have a little time that I can waste guilt-free, I also plan to spend much more time reading crap on the internet. However Slashdot and Fark are leaving me wanting. My daily fix of comics keeps me going, but that's only, like, 10 minutes of reading. I've just realized that this happens to me all the time, and the only surefire way to ensure that I have things to read online is to produce it all myself. This might be a problem though as I simply cannot be bothered. At least I still have Dr. McNinja.

Or maybe YouTube will solve my problem. Shankar found someone on there that puts up movies, ten minutes at a time. After he passed his qualifying exams, he holed himself up in his office and watched "Braveheart" in 10-minute chunks and in the wrong aspect ratio. Well, I guess it was free(dom!).

I did some poking around yesterday and one of that day's hot keywords was "xtc". I clicked on it and lo and behold, amidst all of the videos of people hopped up on goofballs were some absolutely priceless videos of XTC, including some of their really crappy videos and this autobiographical puppet show. The real gems though were the clips of them playing live. Jebus, they were fucking awesome! Watching these clips, you'd never know he hated touring so much. Watching this clip of Andy Partridge having a nervous breakdown on stage, on live TV, though, makes it more obvious.

I've also booked my plane tickets for the summer holidays. I'll be in Ithaca at Cornell for a couple of weeks at the end of June and beginning of July; then it's off to Toronto for a few days, and home in time to pick up my sister and nephew at the airport. Things I intend to do in Toronto: 1) get on MOD; 2) see the Jays; 3) ...; 4) profit.

We'd been talking about it for a while, and Graham and I finally decided to put the songs we almost finished up on MySpace. Two hours of tweaking later, I am proud to say that you can find our band page here, and that MySpace is really really lame. I'm even prouder to say that unlike some people (that being, every band I've ever seen on the whole damned site), we don't blare our music at you as soon as you visit the page.

Current Music: Peter Adams - The Spiral Eyes