Damn Arcade Fire

Arcade Fire's first album, Funeral, has been a critical hit. Pitchfork Media gave it a 9.7 rating and named it the album of the year. They were featured on the cover of the Canadian Time Magazine and "hailed as the band that put Canadian music on the world map". I just recently bought the album and am actually a big fan of it. However, it was such a hit that it eventually became its label, Merge Records', biggest selling album to date. The album it replaced? Neutral Milk Hotel's In an Aeroplane Over the Sea. Damn them indeed!

By the way, who knew that Canada had its own version of Time Magazine?

Born Into Brothels

I finally watched this movie (the Netflix DVD has been sitting on my coffee table for almost a month). Apparently the interpreter for the movie sent a letter to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences refuting the claim that the children in the movie's lives were improved. In fact, she stated that many of their lives have become worse after taking the photography class.

The movie won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature in 2005.

Psoriasis Eating Fish

A commercial came on about a psoriasis clinic. I was pretty sure I knew what psoriasis was (some sort of disorder where a person's skin grows too quickly in certain areas causing red splotches), but obviously had to verify this. I had the basic idea (sort of). After scrolling down a bit, I found the treatment options. There are various mainstream ways of treating psoriasis. One alternative method used in Turkey, however, is to have "Doctor Fish", which swim in the pools of spas, eat the psoriasis skin directly off of a person. That's gross....

Doctor fish are also called nibble fish, kangal fish, and...reddish log suckers...?

Bauhaus

I just saw the word Deutschehaus. Which made me think of Bauhaus. So I wikied it. Now it makes sense! Bauhaus is short for Staatliches Bauhaus, which is some famous art and architecture school in Germany. Bauhaus is also the name of a Halloween party that the architecture school at Washu puts on each year....

Wonder Years

Yesterday, while I was reading the Bill Simmons chat wrap, he took a question about the potential Wonder Years DVDs. Apparently the producers of the show didn't think back in the late 80's/early 90's to lock up the rights to the music on the show (how stupid), so they can't release the DVD's. I went to wiki to research this, but instead ended up reading about the show itself. I had never actually seen it before (I was 6 when it started). Anyway... because of the music rights thing (which I should actually look up), I probably won't ever get to watch the Wonder Years, but at least I read the series synopsis on wiki....

I always thought that Fred Savage was a bigger star than his brother, Ben. But wiki has a paragraph or two about Fred, and several sections for Ben.....

Paper Clips

I just dropped a bunch of paper clips. I don't know why, but I wondered who invented them. Kind of random, but whatever. Turns out its origins can be traced back to the Byzantines who made them from brass. They were expensive and usually only used for important documents.

...during WWII, the Norwegians, who were being occupied by the Nazis, wore paper clips on their lapels as a symbol of the resistance...

Ethnic Kazakhs

I jut read an article on the New York Times about the Borat movie and the Kazakh controversy. At one point in the article, they mentioned that Borat doesn't look like an ethnic Kazakh. So of course I had to do some research....

did you know that Kazakhstan accounts for almost 60% of the GDP of Central Asia?