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Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Ignorant Photo of The Week: 4 - Those People...

This is why 8:30 classes are so hard to attend. Its bad enough that you have to wake up at obscene hours of the day to prepare to go beforehand and walk to your lecture hall, but when you get there you realize that most of the other people there are half-sleeping like you. Except for the few like above. They are the ones who make our lives miserable by flaunting their 10:00 pm bedtimes, 8 hours of sleep and 10 hours of study a day so that they can ask the most ridiculously complex questions they derived from combining the first 10 terms they highlighted in chapter you haven't reached yet. The worst part is that their questions take up half the class so that all your prof can cover is the recap of last class. So for those keeping score at home thats: You - 4 hours of sleep, no new knowledge and a dreading mix of inadequacy/ jealousy; Them - 8 hours of sleep, deveopment of strange theories and the delusions of complete enlightenment. -_- .

Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Album Review: Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

As you should all now by  know Mr. West has created what he thinks is "THE BEST ALBUM OF ALL TIME". His first album since the auto-tune infused 808 & Heartbreaks in 2008 is truly a change of pace for both his career and the current hip hop scene dominated by instant internet hits and Lil Wayne's Young Money group. While Kanye was always known to heavily sample older songs in his amazing production, he has now expanded past funk and Motown sounds to include the likes of Black Sabbath and King Crimson. With his intense attention to detail Kanye's intricate production will delight his old fans and entice new ones. He has truly become the Hip Hop idol that can touch any part of pop culture and turn it into gold.

The album truly plays like a masterpiece that should be listened to in sequence, from the enthralling Dark Fantasy with Nicki Minaj's intro, to the crazed Gil Scott-Heron sampled outro on "Who Will survive in America". Highlights in between include the awesome flow of "Gorgeous" with GOOD Music star Kid Cudi and Wu Tang alum Raekwon as they rhyme over a creeping baseline. "All of the Lights" is a powering mosaic of diverse sounds - powerful horns, pounding drums and even a feature by the likes of Elton John. "Devil in a New Dress" is a wonderful mix with a Smokey Robinson sampled backtrack while Rick Ross comes on at the end of the track and actually manages to provide a good verse for once. Finally, "Blame Game" has John Legend and a magical piano melody while Mr. West diversifies his flow as the song proceeds, yet the Chris Rock feature seems somewhat tasteless and out of place. All in all, this album contains some of West's best lyrical content and definitely his most grandiose deliverance. If you want the winner of that Grammy for Best Album of the year, there are fewer more  complete albums in the running.

10 Swag Juice Bottles/10

Wikipedia
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Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Group Members That Annoy You

Hey guys, just finished two group projects involving presentations and I tell you that they can be awesome. You get to know cool people, collaborate and make something and look back and celebrate together once it's done. We all, however, have worked at least once with someone who annoys everyone else to the point that we wouldn't mind holding meeting in suburban Kandahar if it meant they couldn't make it. I find that amongst my last foes in the world of group projecting have contained the 5 following qualities:

1. Gauge. May seem like a strange word to pick, but I feel that the first thing these forsaken individuals do is gather each member together so that they can scoop out all of our sanity and privacy away by asking an insane amount of questions about ourselves. I mean way beyond basic contact info of cell number or email, I'm talkin average sleep duration and favourite meal time. They suggest they need it so we can plan meetings, but you know they have a much more sinister plan.

2. Annoy. While you may not have realized off the bat with some of these people, you have now seen that something is clearly wrong, Perhaps its from the number of times their parents dropped them on the head when they were young, but it definitely means that they are up your lower colon with non-stop questions every minute, on the minute. You get sequences of texts, repeated facebook messages and my favourite the "What was the answer on lecture 3, slide 5, table 1, line 4? And to make sure I know you got this text me back :)))))))))". -_-

3. Instigate. You are now a week in to your two week project and tempers are beginning to show. Your other group members know you went to high school with this crazy b*^%# and ask you for proper coping mechanisms as the criminal at large has dropped 50 angry emails to those unfortunates that came 1 minute late to a meeting and forgot to print off the last page...even though they already finished their part and had 3 midterms, 2 labs and 4 quizzes.

4. Lie. Ahhhh. My favourite, and as we begin to see what Dr. Phil Collins, citing Mrs. Lauper, and calls true colours of the perpetrator. You know about that time you told them you were going to spend you're entire Friday organizing the 50 odd references? No you remember stating that the group could meet up on the Friday to review the paper and complete the menial task before the group decides to cancel the meeting because editing can be done individually. So you sleep in on a Friday, wake up to 12 different texts from the liar questioning you're allegiance to the group, sign onto skype before putting on pants and still half asleep and quickly message them with you're deepest apologies over missing the meeting that didn't happen and how you are ready to take on anything they give you in penance. Of course, they have taken it upon them self to do the noble work of renumbering the embedded references and reply with the classic "Its a one person job, but you can read through and edit the entire thing before submitting it". Why did I even wake up?

5. Escape. You are finally done submitting the answers and presenting to the prof. Your group goes out for a celebratory lunch, even with individual responsible for the drama inducing atrocities. Everyone is happy, till you get the mark back and get deflated as its at least 5% lower than you thought, so you go leader mode and request a meeting to the prof and make it happen. Everyone meets up before the meetings and grieves together over missed chances but conclude that those guilty of the mark losses were right in feeling bad, but ultimately the group loses. There is no I in team, and we are all responsible for that mark. Sadly, the hell-spawn demon has taken it upon themselves to spread word that it is your fault for losing "a lot of marks"through the gossip wire. They have gotten their way and have escaped with only minimal hard feelings as all other group members are focused on the mark. Yet they still have the guts to smile with you all, before besmirching your effort and character to anyone that will listen because neither you nor the TA understood something you've never seen specific to an article.  UHHHHHHHHHH!!!

Well, there you have it in plain sight. These people are in lincoln park out there and they will find you, so proceed to hide your loved ones.

Tuesday, November 30, 2010

My Life Is Ignorant (MLII): Week 1

Greetings good people of the swag juice community,

As you are well aware, MK47, Jay C and myself always appreciate a little bit of ignorance in our lives... gives you something to shake your head at from time to time.

From personal observation, I have collaborated a sum of ignorant situations over the past several days which I thought would be ideal to share with you:

- Earlier last week, I went to a local Tim Horton's just to chill, do some studying, and perhaps pick off some doses of ignorance from fellow citizens ignorant of the fact that I was listening to them. Sure enough, the girl at the counter informs a customer she knows that she wants to quit working and go burn in hell. Apart from almost staining my study notes with coffee, I had to admire her sense of ignorance. MLII.

- This reminds me of a time a few years ago back at home when I experienced a middle aged man storm past those annoying, persistent Air Cadets outside of a Tim Hortons, proceed into the coffee shop, obnoxiously mutter " F****IN AIR CADETS!$)@!# " and then order a large coffee with 4 sugars. ...who orders 4 sugars in their coffee!??! MLII.

- I've been slacking for quite some time on modifying my resume... a critical tool required in exposing yourself to experiences in university that'll set you apart from the guy scoring A's and wearing a hole through his chair, locked in his residence room. To envoke guilt upon myself that I need to get on that resume, I've posted notes on my desktop saying "RESUME!!!!" ...thanks to the combination of uncontrolled laptop periods and Jay C, I've returned to my laptop lately to see "RESUME touching myself" in a number of places on my screen. ...Don't get any ideas. MLII.

- Sitting in the library earlier today, 4 bright-minded "future engineers" at the table next to me triggered a conversation for some strange reason about whether Legolas would be able to kill orcs without his bow. For some forsaken reason, one of the fellows imposed his knowledge that Legolas carries a 14" dagger with him, so would obviously be successful by using this in combat. Whenever something in inches is thrown into a conversation with university engineering students... you can probably figure out what that leads to. MLII.

- The Sabres beat the Leafs 3-1 last Friday. For some reason I find the success of my favourite hockey team's continuous beat down on the Leafs rather ignorant. MLII.

Peace guys! Get back to you soon with more explorations of the ignorant philosophy.

Feel free to throw some quick feedback back at this, or comment with your own ignorant doings because we're always interested to hear your opinions!